Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

BIOPOLITICAL LIFE
given environment insofar as it is the morphological and functional
solution found by life as a response to the demands of the environment.
Even if it is relatively rare, this living being is normal in terms of every
other from which it diverges, because in terms of those other forms it is
normative, that is, it devalues them before eliminating them. 30
Thus, life is inherently normative, in the sense that it aims at the restoration
of functional or “normal” relations between an individual organism and its
environment. And as this suggests, health is a “normal” situation, insofar as
it indicates that the organism is normatively attuned to its environment and is
able to meet the demands of it. Conversely, pathology or disease is the incapacity
to meet those demands; but “the pathological is not the absence of a
biological norm: it is another norm but one which is, comparatively speaking,
pushed aside by life.” 31 Norms are not only internally specific to the organism
but vary across the conditions of its existence, when a normal condition is
either disrupted by physiological changes or by changes in the demands that
an environment places upon an organism such that it can no longer meet
those demands. This means that the normal is never attained once and for all,
since norms themselves are always subject to revision and regeneration.
This correction to emphasise the relationship between the organism and
its environment may seem like a relatively minor interpretive point; but I
want to suggest that it actually has important implications, two of which I
will mention here. The first point goes to the fact that the environment that
human beings are located in is necessarily social, and as such, cross-cut with
the force of social norms. As Canguilhem suggests, human norms are
“determined as an organism’s possibilities for action in a social situation
rather than as an organism’s functions envisaged as a mechanism coupled
with the physical environment. The form and functions of the human body
are the expression not only of conditions imposed upon life by the environment
but also of socially adopted modes of living in the environment.” 32
This locatedness means that the “normal” is always an effect of a complex
co-mingling and expression of vital norms in the midst of socially defined
ways of living. Human life is never simply biological; and nor, for that
matter, is it ever simply social or political. That Esposito leaves aside the
necessary embeddedness of an organism in its environment means that he
also risks obfuscating the ways that social norms cut across the vital norms
30 Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, 144.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid, 269.
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