Biopolitics between Contingency and Constitution
In this paper I compare Foucault's reflections on biopolitics in his Collège de France lectures of 1978-1979 to conceptions of biopolitics, which we find in texts by Girogio Agamben and Hannah Arendt. The aim of this comparison is to suggest alternative readings of Foucault's concept of biopolitics.
Agamben claims that Arendt develops no concept of biopolitics as she does not articulate the theoretical relationship between the politics of biological life in The Human Condition and the problems of absolute power in The Origins of Totalitarianism. There, he says, a 'biopolitical perspective is altogether lacking.'
However, even if Arendt does not have such an encompassing theory, her writings develop separate themes, which we could think of as biopolitical in Foucault's sense: 'social engineering' (The Human Condition) and the loss of identity in concentration camps (The Origin of Totalitarianism) are the most prominent. Both of these political phenomena involve in her analysis what we could call 'life management procedures'.
In the The Human condition the application of sociological and economic models to social policy, known widely as 'social engineering', is interpreted by Arendt as rooted in a particular anthropological choice. It isolates utilitarian, life preserving activities from any other kinds of activity or aspiration. Citizens lives are managed with a view to maximise aggregate material goods to the detriment of other goods and ends.
The eradication of personal identity, which she analyses as the outcome of concentration camps, entails a different kind of management, driven by a negative utility maximising mechanism: the physical murder of prisoners is preceded by a complete annihilation of their symbolic and personal identity so that their only remaining property is that of being alive, as quantifiable entities.
Arendt sees these procedures of life management as historical processes, which have their own immanent logic, but which are, as historical processes, fundamentally contingent.
Since she sees them as historically contingent, she also does not analyse them from the perspective of state legitimacy. Agamben is therefore right in saying that Arendt's analyses of life management do not correspond to what he calls biopolitics, since his method consists in analysing the constitutional (and metaphysical) grounds of sovereign state power.
Now, I will argue that a difference between contingency and constitutionalism, which we can derive from the contrast between the two, can provide us also with a map of different possible readings of Foucault and of his lectures on biopolitics. I will conclude by discussing how Foucault's comparison between laissez faire liberalism in the eighteenth century and German ordoliberalism, at the time of the post-war constitution of West Germany, can be interpreted from both of these epistemological points of view. Through the comparison with Arendt the talk thus aims to highlight an ambivalence in Foucault's reflections on biopolitics.
