Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

CATHERINE MILLS
of the living human being. In doing so, his analysis runs close to the
arguments of liberal eugenicists and transhumanists, who valorise the possible
plurality of bodily norms that technologies of enhancement are supposed
to engender, without consideration of the ways in which those possibilities
are delimited in advance by social norms that are lived in often less
than conscious ways. 33 In this, then, Esposito risks a version of the liberal
fantasy of escape from the founding conditions of human existence.
The second point to make derives from this, for while the existence of
human beings is fundamentally conditioned by social norms, it cannot be
assumed that vital and social norms are conceptually equivalent. Rather,
what needs to be taken into account is the disjuncture between vital and
social norms, and consequently, what requires explanation is the means by
which they intermingle. In other words, vital and social norms may well be
empirically inseparable, but they are nevertheless analytically distinguishable.
In the postscript to The Normal and the Pathological, Canguilhem
argues that while physiological norms are immanent to the organism,
social norms have no equivalent immanence. In a living organism, norms
are “presented without being represented, acting without deliberation or
calculation,” such that there is “no divergence, no delay between rule and
regulation.” In contrast, rules in a social organization must be “represented,
learned, remembered, applied.” 34 Further, while biological norms are geared
toward a functional end, social norms are not— speaking of the “health” of
a society is metaphoric in a way that speaking of the health of a living body
is not. The point of this is that forms of social organisation cannot be
understood as analogous to organisms; nor, then, can social norms be
simply derived from organic norms.
The point that social organisations are not analogous to organisms is
significant for Canguilhem, because it allows him to avoid both the kind of
socio-biology that derives social norms from biological norms, as well as a
functional psycho-sociological version of adaptation that casts deviation
from a social norm as abnormality. In light of this insistence on the
exteriority of social norms, we would do well to qualify Esposito’s thesis on
the “vitalisation of the norm.” While it is true that Canguilhem’s work
points the way to a new philosophy of life that emphasises the productive
power of the living in terms of the capacity to create norms, he also resists a
33 For further discussion, see Catherine Mills, Futures of Reproduction: Bioethics and
Biopolitics (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), especially Chapter 2, “Normal Life: Liberal
Eugenics, Value Pluralism and Normalisation.”
34 Ibid, 250.
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