Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

CATHERINE MILLS
“Absolute Immanence”: Agamben
Giorgio Agamben’s work has done a great deal to focus attention on the
notion of biopolitics, and has also contributed much to contemporary
reflection on the concept of life. Agamben himself suggests a number of
different formulations for thinking about life, most notably the category of
“bare life,” which he sees as the principal subject of biopolitics, and its
opposite, the post-biopolitical, even post-subjective, notion of “happy life.”
This latter notion can be seen as Agamben’s most positive contribution
toward current philosophy of life, and for this reason, I focus on it here.
In the essay “Absolute Immanence,” Agamben notes that both Michel
Foucault and Gilles Deleuze turn toward a discussion of “life” in the last of
their publications during their lifetimes—entitled “Life: Experience and
Science” 8 and “Immanence: A Life…” 9 respectively. This coincidence, he
suggests, bequeaths to future philosophy the concept of life as a central
subject, inquiries into which must start from the conjunction of Foucault
and Deleuze’s essays. While Foucault’s essay—which is on the philosophy of
life developed by his mentor, Georges Canguilhem—aims at “a different
way of approaching the notion of life,” Deleuze seeks “a life that does not
consist only in its confrontation with death and an immanence that does
not once again produce transcendence.” 10 Insofar as these essays provide a
“corrective and a stumbling block” for each other, they clear the ground for
a genealogy that will, according to Agamben, “demonstrate that ‘life’ is not a
medical and scientific notion but a philosophical, political and theological
concept.” 11 Such an inquiry would reveal the archaism and irrelevance of the
various qualifications of life: animal life and organic life, biological life and
contemplative life etc., and give way to a new conception of life that
8 Michel Foucault, “Life: Experience and Science,” in Aesthetics, Method and
Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Vol 2, ed. James Faubion (London:
Allen Lane, 1998). This essay was initially published in 1978 as the introduction of the
English translation of Georges Canguilhem, Le normal et le pathologique (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1966), reprinted in Canguilhem, The Normal and the
Pathological, trans. Carolyn Fawcett (New York: Zone Books, 1991). Another version of
it was published in Revue de métaphysique et le morale, appearing in 1985, shortly after
Foucault’s death.
9 Gilles Deleuze, “L’immanence: Une Vie...,” in Philosophie, 47, No. 1 (September 1995).
Republished as “Immanence: A Life,” in Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, ed. John
Rajchman (New York: Urzone, 2001).
10 Giorgio Agamben, “Absolute Immanence,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in
Philosophy, ed. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 238.
11 Ibid, 239.
76