Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

CATHERINE MILLS
tive, since even at the simplest level “living means preference and
exclusion.” 28 Living necessarily involves polarities of valuation, such that an
organism cannot be understood as indifferent to the environment in which
it finds itself. Esposito goes on to emphasise that this means that disease and
health are both normative states in that both indicate new forms of life for
the organism, and moreover, reveal the normal functioning of the body.
Conditions of disease or biological abnormality are not simply deviations
from a fixed prototype of the normal: they are instead normative forms of a
qualitatively different order. Similarly, to be “normal” is not to coincide
with a pre-established norm, but rather, to be able to harness and maintain
one’s own normative power: to be normal is to be able to create new norms.
In view of this radicalised immanence of life and norm, Esposito writes that
“If Nazism stripped away every form of life, nailing it to its nude material
existence, Canguilhem reconsigns every life to its form, making of it something
unique and unrepeatable.” 29
There is much in this account of the productive power of Canguilhem’s
thinking around vital norms that I agree with. His analysis of the immanence
of norms in life may well help to undermine the separation and mutual
presupposition of the facticity of life and normative transcendentalism.
Moreover, this analysis rejects an objectivist approach to life and emphasises
instead the vital potential in life, in terms of the capacity to generate
norms. However, it is exactly this productive power of the immanent
normativity of life that points the way toward identifying several shortcomings
with Esposito’s approach. For this normative capacity, the power
to create norms that inheres in life, is itself conditioned by the environment
or milieu in which an organism finds itself. Thus, one point, which Canguilhem
is wholly committed to, that Esposito tends to skip over is that an
organism by itself is never normal—er, what can be considered “normal” is
wholly dependent on the relationship between the organism and its
environment. Canguilhem writes:
Taken separately, the living being and his environment are not normal:
it is their relationship that makes them such. For any given form of life
the environment is normal to the extent that it allows it fertility and a
corresponding variety of forms such that, should changes in the
environment occur, life will be able to find the solution to the problem
of adaptation… in one of these forms. A living being is normal in any
28 Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, 136.
29 Esposito, Bios, 189.
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