Multitudes 1 on Biopolitics

* Special Issue: Multitude #1 on Biopolitics

Article 1: Agamben on the state of exception

Agamben states that power has two aspects:

   - 1) the ability to improve norms for regular society, but crucially, this rests on its
   - 2) ability as sovereign power to decide about the ife and death of its subjects, which is demonstrated through states of exception, such as the camps, which  are thus non contrary abberations but rather the heart of power

This more naked show of power is related to the post 9/11 situation where such extra-legal norms become permanent (Guantanomo Bay and other anti-terrorist laws). What does it mean if Empire when it chooses such a path ?

Quote:

“C’est seulement dans la mesure que le pouvoir maintient la possibilité de manifester à nouveau sa puissance fondatrice, qu’il va être à même d’imposer la normalisation qui procède de lui.”

For Agamben, what happened with the Nazi holocaust is happening again: a generalisation of the state of exception, away from the state of normality. Nazi Germany was the first biopolitical state!! This means that for Agamben, anti-semitism was not the central feature of Nazism, but rather it was was its total biopolitical vision which necessitated the elimination of all which threatened the production of a pure race. Agamben affirms that the old Greek (Aristotelian) distinction between "zoe" and "bios", the political life in the city, is no longer operational. Today, life is the very stuff of politics.

Articlel 2: Foucault and power

Power is the ability to steer the conduct of others, and for Foucault, it starts from below, from the multiple relations between bodies, which institutions only later cristalizes. Where the former are 'relations of power', where individuals are in principle free to change them, the latter are 'states of domination', which exclude freedom. The third concept is the art of government which stands in between and is is the locus where the former can be promoted over the latter. This includes self-government, and forms of subjectivation which create the new.

Biopower is when capitalist governments, in the XVIII cy, start governing life itself, in its detailed aspects. Biopolitics is a post-Foucauldian refinement which is the free production and government of new forms of life. Note that Foucault is against the concepts of contracts and sovereignity, and for an 'ethics of subjectivation'.

Article 3: Sloterdijk interview

Sloterdijk has developed a 'metaparadigm',a Theory of Spheres based on the metaphor of life as a successful immune system.