Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

JULIAN REID
ject which in order to live well must struggle to destroy that element within
itself that errs. For Nietzsche the life which errs, and which therefore must
be destroyed, was not that life which threatens the constitution of truth
within the subject but that movement of life within the subject that
constitutes the desire to secure its truths. Thus it was the relation between
life and error that, following Nietzsche, had to be conceptualized in terms of
conflict. Error is the enemy in a conflict against which life is called to struggle.
For life to affirm itself it must kill that which conceals it. The skin which
conceals the flesh. In contrast with the position developed by Esposito we
cannot affirm the life of the subject by insisting that it remain in a state of
continual openness to its errors. That cannot be the condition for an
affirmative biopolitics. Error is that capacity of the subject against which life
must struggle in order to affirm itself.
For many, Esposito’s attempt to follow Foucault and affirm in absolute
terms the capacity of life for error will seem an attractive argument through
which to stake out an alternative way of theorizing the contingency of
relations between life and violence. It will inspire those who think that they
can combat the liberal way of war without providing an alternative way of
rationalizing war; and which is why, on the same basis, it is my view that it
cannot be considered a sufficient ground on which to found a politics of
resistance to liberal biopolitics. It is not possible to constitute an affirmative
biopolitics, which does not in some sense rely on the constitutive capacity of
life for war. Firstly because we can only think about life as error in the terms
that Esposito urges upon us so long as we remain within an ethical dimension
of thought. Esposito may claim that his philosophy of life as error is
not an ethics and that we need to understand “friendship with the enemy
not in an ethical sense, nor in an anthropological sense, but in a radically
ontological sense,” 22 and that there is nothing altruistic in his account of
error as destiny and the highest capacity of the human construed as a living
entity. Error, he may argue, ought not to be considered an obligation which,
in our humanity, we are required to meet if we are to “live well,” but something
which life does in spite of how else we might think we understand the
nature of our status as living entities—or, even, how we may want to live, or
think it necessary to live in order to do justice to life. But the following
questions remain. How can we practice such a politics? Who is the political
subject of life understood in terms of capacity for error? How does that
subject differ from the political subject of life understood in terms of capa-
22 Esposito, Bios, 107.
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