The Blind Spot in Biopolitics: Michel Foucault and the Power to Kill Life Itself

• In Event: Economies of Violence in Modern Statecraft

Abstract

In January of 1976 social theorist Michel Foucault declared “sovereignty and discipline” to be “two absolutely constitutive components of the general mechanisms of power in our society.” Just six months later, however, he issued his famous call to “cut off the king’s head,” complaining that “political theory has never ceased to be obsessed with the person of the sovereign” and arguing that “what we need, however, is a political philosophy that isn’t erected around the problem of sovereignty.” What changed? A standard answer might be to point to Foucault’s breakthrough formulation of ‘biopower’ and ‘biopolitics’ in March of that year—a new appreciation for the growing intersection between political power and the power to foster the biological health of human populations that sharply altered his understanding of how the ancient sovereign power to kill functioned in contemporary society. This essay argues that the appearance of ‘biopower’ represents only one piece of the puzzle, and that neither Foucault’s abrupt shift on the subject of sovereignty nor his influential theory of biopolitics can be entirely understood without taking into account another, until now overlooked preoccupation that turns out to be coextensive with his discussion of biopolitics: the appearance of what he called “the power to kill life itself.” The paper begins by arguing that Foucault’s views on sovereignty and sovereign violence altered the moment that he tried to apply his conception of ‘biopolitics’ to the contemporary present, discovering that the evolving relationship that it posited between the ancient sovereign power to take life and the emerging biopower to make life—which had done a compelling job of explaining both the rise of public health campaigns and the exterminationist madness of the Nazis—broke down in the face of contemporary nuclear and bio- technology. Speaking twenty years after Castle Bravo and one year after Asilomar, Foucault acknowledged that “the workings of contemporary political power are such that atomic power represents a paradox that is difficult, if not impossible, to get around. The power to manufacture and use the atom bomb represents the deployment of a sovereign power that kills, but it is also the power to kill life itself.” He saw that this self-canceling hypertrophy of sovereign power was complemented by a similar rupture in biopower, where breakthroughs in genetics had made it newly possible “to create living matter, to build the monster, and ultimately to build viruses that cannot be controlled and that are universally destructive.” Many scholars have traced an abrupt and enduring pivot in Foucault’s thinking to precisely this period. My paper argues that these changes—the end of his earlier fascination with using war as a ‘grid of intelligibility’ to makes sense of politics, the development of a sharp distinction between ‘power’ and ‘violence’, a turn towards questions of ethics, and an enduring repudiation of sovereignty—all deserve to be reconsidered in light of Foucault’s confrontation with the “power to kill life itself.” It demonstrates how Foucault’s engagement with omnicide appears to have convinced him that sovereign violence had undergone a paradoxical, self-canceling hypertrophy that rendered former theories of sovereignty obsolete in theory and inapplicable in practice. Drawing on several writings and interviews from this period, my paper shows how, even though he did not find a solution regarding what political sense to make of this new power to destroy all terrestrial life, Foucault’s brief engagement with the subject did yield several enduringly helpful concepts for those tackling the subject today. It focuses in particular on Foucault’s figure of what he called the “absolute savant” who, in contrast to the sovereign of yore, “has at his disposal powers that can either benefit or irrevocably destroy life.” The essay concludes by contending that the appearance of the power to kill life itself does indeed present the workings of contemporary political power with a paradox that is impossible to get around. It argues that contemporary discussions of ‘biopower’ and ‘biopolitics’ cannot afford to continue to disregard the ‘power to kill life itself,’ and that far more attention should be given to finding ways to resolve this dilemma in theory before it resolves itself catastrophically in practice.

Author

• Daniel Zimmer, Cornell University