Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

TOWARDS AN AFFIRMATIVE BIOPOLITICS
city for conflict? What kind of political subject can possibly bear such an
affirmation not just of its errors, but also of its enemies? These are fundamental
questions that Esposito still needs to unpack if he is to succeed in
producing an affirmative biopolitics outside of, and beyond, the Nietzschean
grounding of life in war and conflict.
In actuality we can only practice such a politics so long as we think about
the problematic of the relation between life and war, not just within an
ethical register, but an ethical register that is occupied by a sovereign form
of life. For this is a problematic articulated from precisely that centered
position of philosophical repose which only a sovereign form of life can
occupy: a life which in recognizing the contingency of its hostilities, is able
to decide to indemnify, and make a friend of its enemy. Imagining a life
which grants a capacity for a mode of friendship with an enemy that develops
from within its own body, Esposito is dedicated to conceptualizing the
judgment of what is to be done with the error as that operation which is
most normal of what we might call the “body normal.” A body which, in
order to be true to itself, must grant the error the status of what is most
normal about it, so that thereby the production of error becomes understood
as an expression of its capacity for life, rather than as a lack or remainder.
So, identifying something vital in life’s positing of an erroneous
otherness, even though it’s an otherness that threatens the “body normal,”
rather than something that at most might be tolerated in its difference from
the norm. Therefore, it is a slightly more ambitious ethics than that posited
by Habermasian theories of normativity, but nevertheless still an ethics articulated
from the perspective of a “body normal.” Ultimately, what is most
problematic is Esposito’s conceptualization of error as a product of the
“body normal” rather than as that, which struggles against the violence of
the body normal to find expression. At no point does Esposito venture to
think the error from the perspective of the life named as erroneous. But for
the erroneous the body normal is not that power which, in its decision not to
destroy, gives life, but that which must be destroyed in order that it may live.
For the error to constitute itself in accordance with its own powers of enunciation
as something without any relation of subjection to the body normal, it
must kill that body which names it error. Otherwise it remains subject to the
discourse on which its erstwhile definition as erroneous depended.
Esposito’s approach works only so long as we believe in the possibility
and desirability of transforming political struggles between body normals
and their errors into ethical ones by construing the problem of errancy
purely from the perspective of the body normal. A body which in its posses-
101