Biology without Biopolitics?

sherief

Generic Human
So I've been reading alot of 'thinkers of the biopolitical', for lack of a less ugly term: Foucault, Agamben, Hardt&Negri. The biopolitical argument is a potent one, historically and theoretically it would seem. I think there is little doubt that the power of sovereignty, capital, empire, whatever is increasingly focusing on the body and the figure of human 'bare life.' The lines of division are increasingly drawn, and now even genetics redraws with sharper accuracy many of the same pseudoscientific epistemological gaffes of 19th century Anthropology.

However, I'm not here to praise biopolitics, but to bury it. The question I have is, assuming there is escape or emancipation from this vast biopolitical paradigm, what Agamben gloomily calls the "nomos of the camps," how do we save medicine? How do we do organ transplants without reducing the overcomatose patient to their bare life? The lines of cutting are arbitrary and cruel, but is the alternative simply reverting to herbs and draconian mysticism? I recognize how a great deal of the emphasis on modern medicine has been the extension of life, very much in service of the biopolitical regime, but is that really all it is? Can we concieve of a practice of medicine, of healing, divested from the political project of biopolitics? Badiou, in the beginning of the Ethics wants to say that for the doctor there is no 'ethical' situation, there is only the clinical situation, which must be carried out without hesitation. Badiou is no dupe, and no stranger to the biopolitical arguments. I see in this idea of the clinical situation a particular figure which offers some hope, but I'm not quite sure how to contextualize this alternative subject. Any takers?
 

mike

Mild Horses
sherief said:
I recognize how a great deal of the emphasis on modern medicine has been the extension of life, very much in service of the biopolitical regime, but is that really all it is? Can we concieve of a practice of medicine, of healing, divested from the political project of biopolitics?

I understand how the preservation of life is a priority for both hospitals and the State alike, but I can’t see how a medical procedure that requires artificially induced sedation necessarily reduces a patient to ‘bare life’ in the same manner as the Sovereignty that flexes its power under the suspension of the rule of law. Doesn't access to such treatment further require a certain degree of recognition of the individual’s basic human rights? In order to illustrate how the goals of medicalization have served as an extension of the States bio-power you could perhaps use the example of the hunger-strikers in Guantanamo who were fed against their will via feeding tubes as an argument, and the medical attention generally given to inmates and even torture victims of zero legal status, but that would require a reconsideration of the two very different, but often codependent concepts of legal death and biological death as articulated by Agamben and Zizkek, and the respective contexts of these two types of death within the techniques of medicine and state power.

As I have understood it (reading Agamben and Foucault), to the Sovereign power capable of conceiving of a life that is no longer valid and thus subject to being denied the protection of the law, the ultimate consequence is not death, but a perpetual state of perdition suffered in the absence of the rights granted by law. The subject stripped of legal status is preserved, which in effect promotes the power of law itself. Though this may at times require the use of medical attention, as seen in the case of the hunger strikers, the purpose for maintaining the subjects life under such circumstances is certainly to further preserve the state of exception rather than saving the individual a priori. But what contemporary western science and medicine has often maintained is that the ultimate consequence of its own practice, or the denial of it, is ultimately either the life or death of the individual. In other words, concerning medical treatment, death is avoided to maintain the subjects biological life, whereas under the state of exception it is avoided to preserve the subjects legal death.

This might make the biopolitical implications of hospitalization far less ontologically taught then those executed by the state under the suspension of the rule of law, certainly less sadistic. In order to better contextualize Badiou’s thesis of the clinical situation as you describe it (I have yet to read myself) perhaps considering the distinction between the two (or more) reasons for avoiding death could help, but again I have yet to read Ethics, so i cannot yet supply you with an entirely relevant solution, just my vague interpretation of the problem.

Im just now realizing how confused this all reads...ill try and clarify it at some other time. your question actually set off a number of concerns I have been struggling with since reading Agamben, Butler, Foucault and others...very tough question, ill try to clarify my point once I catch up with my reading, and am feeling less puzzled!
 

sherief

Generic Human
I appreciate the thorough response. I see what you mean, but I think Agamben especially is much more pessimistic:

And yet since life and death are now merely biopolitical concepts, as we have seen, Karen Quinlan's [the overcomatose patient on life support] body--which wavers between life and death according ot the progress of medicine and the changes in legal decisions--is a legal being as much as it is a biological being. A law that seeks to decide on life is embodied in a life that coincides with death

This life is "maintained only by means of life-support technology and by virtue of a legal decision," and though it serves the opposite purpose of force-feeding the hunger striker, isn't this what Agamben might call the other pole of the double-exception between bare life and determined life? The maintainence of biological life here exists only by the power of the exception, creating the 'death in motion' of a physiological body with no 'life' of its own. I don't know if this contradicts what you said or corroborates it, but I don't think that we can appeal to human rights here, because it's explicitly cited as being a construct bound up in this same biopolitical logic. Thus my hesitating supposition that Agamben really does not think we can practice medicine without activating the state of exception and separating the biological from the determined life. The overcomatose, brain-dead patient can be killed (their life support removed) but not sacrificed (it is not homicide to kill them, they lose their legal rights). This person exists only under the exception, and I think Agamben is trying to say that once there is one such apparatus, it entails all others. The situation isn't sadistic, but its just one side of the same 'nomos of the camps.' Then, perhaps I/We can rephrase the question- How does one protect/save life without separating bios from zoe? Can we perform medical procedures without the political procedure of exception?
 
One way of looking at this would be to draw an analogy between the Agambenian critique of biopolitics and the Heideggerean critique of technology. Heidegger isn't simply calling for some sort of neo-paganistic outright rejection of technology (though unfortunately he is often read in this way); he is simply pointing out that we run into some serious problems when one particular mode of technological revealing (enframing) is taken as the only mode of such revealing. Do you think we could adopt a similar position regarding Agamben, arguing that his critique is not an attack on medicine as such but rather on its mode of functioning in late modernity as the distinction between zoe and bios begins to break down?



How does one protect/save life without separating bios from zoe?

This, I think, is a very useful reformulation of the question. I'd argue however that it probably needs a singularising qualifier: don't ask how we can save the abstract "life" but rather how one could save "a life." As Agamben argues in his Form-of-Life essay, we can only escape the metaphysics of bare life if we begin to think life in terms of its infinite singularity. There is no "life," only this life (and this one, and this one).
 

sherief

Generic Human
I agree with your reformulation, and I've been more and more noticing Agamben's Heideggerian tendencies. The one thing I haven't been able to do is understand his messianism. It's painfully obtuse to me
 
That's the Benjamin. I agree that it's difficult, and it's something I've been trying to get my head around for the past few months. The prologue to Benjamin's Origin of German Tragic Drama is an important source here, though it's not exactly a walk in the fucking park itself. His Task of the Translator is pretty illuminating, if you haven't read it already.

It's important, I think, not to fall into the trap of going too far with that shrill Agambenian pessimism. It's definitely present in books like Homo Sacer and Remnants, but reading those texts without reading his earlier, more affirmative works alongside means missing out on something important. Have you read The Coming Community? It's a beautiful book, and it makes all those theses about the camp as Nomos seem less crushing.

What's incredible about Agamben is the extent to which all his disparate little books actually work together to form an almost-unified whole. I wouldn't call it a system, as such, but I think you could argue that they all have the same central obsession. In that way it's an extremely rigorous body of thought.
 

sherief

Generic Human
Yea, I read the Comming Community and The Time that Remains just recently. The problem is that I don't see how his idea of detachment, or the internal division that brings the Law to its fulfillment, or whatever (literally) connects with any figure of a subject. ON this note, it even seems like the only subject present in Agamben (by the time we reach the transition to modernity) is the homo sacer himself. The Heidiggerian opening up into being, or the Benjaminian messianism even both seem impossible to find grounding, if not impossibly obtuse in themselves.
 
Right, okay, sorry.

I think you may be right to say that the only subject in Agamben is homo sacer, but this is precisely why he wants to break out of the model. For Agamben this involves a final escape from fatefulness, destiny and every figure of the subject understood in terms of the appropriation of historical tasks. Instead of the fated subject we get the figure of the post-historical human who exists in a new sort of blessedness (which is very different to sacredness). You're probably right to say the idea is obtuse (The Time That Remains, for instance, raises more questions than it answers) but I'd argue that the groundwork is there in Agamben for a coherent theory of the messianic. It wouldn't take too much to bring the threads together (though admittedly you might end up with a very strange looking knot after doing so).

In his essay on Deleuze, Agamben writes that 'Alain Badiou, who is certainly one of the most interesting philosophers of the generation immediately following Foucault and Deleuze, still conceives of the subject on the basis of a contingent encounter with truth, leaving aside the living being as the 'animal of the human species,' as a mere support for this encounter.' For Agamben Badiou is still stuck in the conceptual trap of the inclusive exclusion of biological life. Badiou's division along the lines of immortal subject and the mere human, for instance, is a pretty prime (indeed perhaps too easy) candidate for this sort of critique. The problem is that when you exclude the biological you actually do not; that bare life has an uncanny knack for coming back to haunt the spaces from which it is removed.

I'd say that Agamben is happy to admit a certain essential banality into his image of the human. Badiou, on the other hand, wants us to transcend this banality, and would probably sniff in this more of the pathos of finitude that he despises so much.

Here there are a bunch of questions, including at least the following: do we need a figure of the subject for politics to be possible? Or just for politics as we know it to be possible?
 
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