Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

CATHERINE MILLS
an occasion, if not permission, to rethink or rectify fundamental philosophical
concepts, such as that of life? 22
Of course, then, mere reference to a biologist does not in itself prevent
fanciful philosophical biology: behind the complex discussions in
Agamben’s later book The Open, for instance, lies the radical theoretical
biology of Jakob von Uexküll, whose account of the being in the world of
animals provides a touchstone for Heidegger in Fundamental Concepts of
Metaphysics. 23 Nor should the biological sciences simply be used to shore up
a certain discursive authority that cannot be achieved solely through the
humanities. The objectivist conception of life that focuses on genes and
production of proteins and so on that dominates in the biological sciences
today may well have a certain authoritative hold on contemporary
ontologies of life, but it is insufficient as a way of thinking through the
complication of life and politics. Indeed, as Roberto Esposito and others
indicate, there is good reason to think that this approach to life has
contributed to the mobilisation of the biosciences in biopolitics. 24
The social and the vital: Esposito
In fact, of the various contemporary theorists of biopolitics, Esposito’s
increasingly influential work probably comes closest to providing a
biologically refined understanding of life. In Bios, he shows that the German
Nazi regime relied upon the expertise of biomedicine to justify and carry
out its murderous plans in the camps and institutions such as T-4. The Nazi
operations, he argues, were effectively a “biocracy,” in which the legitimacy
of the biomedical sciences gave strength to the political powers, and in
return, the regime provided the bodies required for biomedical experimentation.
From this characterisation of the negative biopolitical core of
22 Georges Canguilhem, “Aspects of Vitalism,” in Knowledge of Life, eds. Paola Marrati
and Todd Meyers (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 59.
23 There is an interesting theoretical genealogy here, for Uexküll’s understanding of the
animal within its world (summed up in the concept of Umwelt) is also significant for the
functional biology of Canguilhem, as well as the neuropsychologist Kurt Goldstein,
whom Canguilhem often references. Uexküll’s work has also been rehabilitated in recent
and emerging theoretical biology on biosemiotics. See, for example, Jesper Hoffmeyer,
Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs, trans. Jesper
Hoffmeyer and Donald Favareau (Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2008).
24 Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
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