The paper discusses the relation between the productive orientation of biopower and the power of exclusion and annihilation from a queer state-theoretical approach. I aim to prove that neoliberal statehood not only simultaneously operates through biopolitical as well as necropolitical strategies but that biopolitics are also a means of organizing consensus to the state’s necropolitics.
Referring to Foucault’s lectures on governmentality the point of departure for the paper is that the state cannot be grasped as a-historical given institution but rather as effect of social practices. Only if the state is called for and desired, the state is brought into existence, as Foucault writes. For inciting a desire to the state, biopolitics have always played a crucial role: Through disciplining, normalizing and producing subjectivities, bodies and sexualities not only a national population is constituted. At the same time, biopolitics incite a desire for the state and for belonging to a nation. Whereas prior to neoliberalism the desire for the state was built on strictly heteronormative biopolitics, neoliberal statehood is also based on homonormative and homonational biopolitics: Sexual politics that tolerate and include formerly criminalized and excluded sexual lifestyles and beings, have become a key element of neoliberal biopolitics and an important indicator for ‘modernity’, ‘democracy’ and ‘civilization’. As a hallmark, it functions as a technology that renders the neoliberal state desirable because that also means that one belongs to a tolerant, democratic and modern national community. Furthermore, neoliberal biopolitics establish a distinction between western, ‘modern’ and ‘civilized’ nations and non-western, in particular muslim nations and populations that are viewed as intolerant, homophobic and thus, not-yet modern.
However, the neoliberal state is not only a state of biopolitics but also of necropolitics: Neoliberal statehood is also built upon a rationality that is fundamentally authoritarian, anti-democratic and violent and produces groups of populations through neocolonial racialization that are excluded and exposed to premature deaths. Through its intrinsically violent social policy as well as its violent migration regimes, neoliberal statehood (re-)produces and activates necropolitics that produce subjects that are viewed as not worth protecting and living.
These two dimensions – biopolitics and necropolitics – not only need to be conceptualized as simultaneous elements of neoliberal statehood. Furthermore, I argue that the transformation of biopolitics in the name of sexual freedom and tolerance legitimates neoliberal statehood in its violent neocolonial necropolitical dimension and incites a desire to belong to such a state. Since the construction of homo-tolerance as a hallmark of Western modernity is based upon the othering of nation states and population groups considered not (or not-yet) modern, affirmations of the neoliberal state based on its sexual politics prolong the violent sexualized and racialized distinction between a center of modernity that is located in the West and a periphery that is still ‘behind’. Thus, neoliberal biopolitics create new forms of old power relations, which incite a desire to a violent state that puts populations and subjects in unequal positions through employing a racialized and neocolonial matrix in its necropolitics.
