Resisting the Present: Biopolitics in the Face of the Event

In its hegemonic definition, biopolitical governmentality is characterised by a seemingly infinite capacity of expansion, susceptible to colonise the landscape and timescape of the living present in the name of capitalistic productivity. Indeed, the main trait of biopower is its normative, legal and political plasticity, allowing it to reappropriate critiques and resistances by appealing to bioethical efficacy and biological accuracy. Under these circumstances, how can we invent rebellious forms-of-life and alternative temporalities escaping biopolitical normativity? In this paper, I interrogate the theoretical presuppositions of biopolitical rationality. I provide a deconstruction of the conceptual and temporal structures upholding the notion of biopolitics, in view of laying the ground for new forms of resistance. The articulation between life and power has a long philosophical history, which has been largely ignored by social theorists and political thinkers using biopolitics as an interpretative model. I wish to re-inscribe this model within the tradition of critical materialism, by articulating Foucault’s ‘critical ontology’ to Marx & Engels’s conception of ‘real life’ and to recent philosophical works on biological plasticity (Malabou). In all these discourses, the logic of biopower depends on a representation of life – ‘the living’ – as living present. Biopower is thus anchored in the authority of the present, that is to say, of being-as-presence (ontology); it sustains presentist definitions of life and materiality, be it under the form of a ‘plastic’ ontology. By drawing on Derrida’s notions such as ‘spectrality’ and ‘life-death’, I wish to deconstruct these discourses on life and materiality, and to dissociate them from their ontological grounding, in order to suggest new paths of resistance to biopower. This exit from the authority of the present is the condition for imagining a politics of the event, hospitable to otherly life forms – life-beyond-life – and anachronistic timescapes. In order to substantiate my argument, I follow the tracks of "the monster" in the works of Marx, Foucault, Derrida and Malabou. Foucault tells us that the monster is a singular figure, parasitic and subversive, beckoning a life beyond life, at once organic and non-organic, located at the limit between the normal and the exceptional, and exceeding the scope of biopolitical normativity in both theoretical and practical terms. It exists at the intersection of what Foucault names "the symbolics of blood" and "the analytics of sex". As such, it materialises a self-transformative dimension of the living which remains, I argue, inadequate to Malabou's representation of plasticity. The monstrous is a self-deconstructive motif calling for another biopolitical rationality, before or beyond any ontological reductions.