Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

BIOPOLITICAL LIFE
recognises beatitude—blessedness or happiness—as the “movement of
absolute immanence.” 12 Arguably, it is toward such a conception of life that
Agamben’s own philosophy aims: in proposing a typology of modern philosophy
in terms of the thinking of transcendence (Kant, Husserl, Levinas and
Derrida via Heidegger) and immanence (Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze and
Foucault via Heidegger), Agamben evidently positions himself as the
philosophical heir of Deleuze and Foucault.
This is confirmed in his interpretation of Deleuze’s notion of an absolutely
immanent non-individuated life, which is the focus of Agamben’s
interest in “Absolute Immanence.” Deleuze develops this idea through
reference to Charles Dickens’ story, “Our Mutual Friend,” in which Riderhood
wavers on the point of living and dying and compels unprecedented
fascination and sympathy in witnesses to his predicament. Deleuze uses this
story to develop a conception of a non-subjective or “impersonal” life,
which is composed of “virtualities, events, singularities.” 13 and which may
be manifest in but is not reducible to an individual. Commenting further on
the Dickens story, Agamben emphasises the way that this “separable” life
exists in the indeterminacy between states of being such as life and death,
which he describes as a “happy netherworld” that is neither in this world
nor in the next, but between the two. 14 He goes on to cast the Deleuzian
notion of a life of absolute immanence within the conceptual framework of
biopolitics proposed in Homo Sacer, suggesting that impersonal life risks
coinciding with the “bare biological life” of biopolitics. In Agamben’s
interpretation, Deleuze escapes this apparent declension by virtue of two
related factors: first, the insistence on the “absolute immanence” of
impersonal life, such that “a life… …is pure potentiality that preserves
without acting,” 15 and second, the connection between potentiality and
beatitude, whereby the former is immediately blessed in lacking nothing. This
means, “[b]eatitudo is the movement of absolute immanence.” 16 The value,
then, of reading Foucault and Deleuze’s essays together is that it complicates
both, such that “the element that marks subjection to biopower” must be
discerned “in the very paradigm of possible beatitude.” 17
12 Ibid, 238.
13 Deleuze, “Immanence: A Life,” 31.
14 Agamben, “Absolute Immanence,” 229. For further discussion of Agamben’s interpretation
of Deleuze's essay, see Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben (Stocksfield:
Acumen, 2008).
15 Agamben, “Absolute Immanence,” 234.
16 Ibid, 238.
17 Ibid.
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