Bare Death

I haven’t posted much of anything lately. I’ve taken a new job and there have been quite a lot of changes. Nevertheless, there will be more to come soon.

Background for a future post perhaps:

http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpagamben2.htm

A London review of books article by Malcolm Bull. Many on the left have adopted an Arendtian or Foucaultian line on biopolitics, namely that by making the body an object of politics, some sphere of freedom, or subjectivity, or something, has been lost. Maybe so. Biopolitics is further conceived as being inextricably linked to racial science and the inhumanity of modern projects. On this count, at least one line from Bull has a strange insight:

"It might be possible to interpret this development [the emergence of the biopolitical] in terms of the reduced importance of fixed social roles within the public sphere and the egalitarian reduction of politics to the life shared by all, irrespective of status, gender, or even species."

That is to say, biopolitics might be inextricably linked to egalitarianism, or at least a kind of egalitarianism. The demands for universal rights to healthcare, nourishment and shelter, are often overtly biopolitical. But how do we avoid the absurd merger of a biopolitics which reduces some to the musselman, and another which in taking bare life as its object, liberates subjects from bare life? How does one combat the grotesque blurring of distinction between an NHS Hospital and a Nazi Death Camp from a perspective that sees biopolitics condemned from the start? It is doubtful that Agamben would allow for this equivalency, but neither does he or others provide sufficient means for rejecting it.

On another note, Bull's statement does bring to mind that eccentric friend of animal(ized?) life, Jeremy Bentham. The same Bentham presented by Foucault as the exemplar of what we may call bourgeois biopolitics. The relationship highlighted by Bull is especially clear in Bentham quotes like these, concerning the plausibility of animal rights:

"It may come one day to be recognized, that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps, the faculty for discourse?...Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being?"

But what relationship could this have to an emancipatory biopolitics, I don't know. The answers seem to appear more in shadows, that is, in a negative form. An example of this would be John Maynard Keynes. In Keynes’ mind, whatever the historical Bentham believed in (Bentham was pro-business, writing a defense of usury) Benthamism was not the epitome of bourgeois humanism, but a kind of “worm” gnawing at its civilization through it elevation of “economic criterion” and threatening to reduce it to the level of the philistine economic calculation, Marxism was for Keynes “the final reductio ad absurdum of Benthamism” a symbol of his civilization’s self-destruction.

Yet Bentham’s self-chosen but fate as a stuffed-straw “auto-icon”, a most useful way of death, could point us in a promising direction to answer the dilemma raised earlier. Perhaps the problem with Agamben and the possibility of a totally absurd conflation between the biopolitics of human services and that of Nazism may lie in the fact that while we have a full terminology for a Zoë and Bios, for gradations of life, we entirely lack one for dealing with gradations of death. If indeed, there are any.

This, I admit, is a stab in the dark, but perhaps there are some conceptions of this in existence already. In some of Neve Gordon’s Foucault-inspired analyses, for example, the term “politics of death” (or ‘necropolitics’, we could say)is used and differentiated from a colonial “politics of life” by virtue of the fact that it seeks to reduce or deliberately destroy, rather than employ strategically, the means of life (infrastructure, crops, water resources). The aim is not to produce living ‘pliant bodies’ but externalized corpses.

In this respect the auto-icon, other than its possibly ironic intent of spoofing religious imagery by a militant atheist (there’s a “sacred man”, for you), is also an attempt to continue participation (actively, through a written will) in living society even after the process of decay has taken the body far beyond ‘bare life’.