Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

JULIAN REID
accounts of subjectivity which, as the modern age progressed, had become
the sources of life sanctioned forms of war and violence against life.
In posing the question, what could be said of the life of the political
subject, once it is divested of its grounding in ontologies of war and peace?
Foucault had little guidance to give. Of course that may very well have been
the point and on such basis this would make Foucault’s political philosophy
of life ultimately more Nietzschean than even Nietzsche himself. For once
the conception of war as the constitutive condition for life was exposed for
the metaphysical prop that it was—a truth of life which functions like all
truths said of life to be its dispositif, and running thereby counter to
Nietzsche’s belief in the necessity to refuse all attempts to give life its truth
—, so it befell the Nietzschean in Foucault to refuse the injunction to say of
life anything at all.
But Foucault could not resist pursuing another different answer to this
problem. Inspired by his teacher Canguilhem, and in writing the introduction
to the latter’s The Normal and the Pathological, Foucault ventured
another beguilingly different but, also equally problematic definition of life.
“In the extreme” and “at its most basic level” life is “what is capable of
error” he stated. 11 And with the human, he argues, life produces its greatest
error. And in being its greatest error its greatest work. For what is the
human other than a “living being dedicated to ‘error’ and destined, in the
end, to ‘error.’” 12 It is error not war, he ventured, that “is at the root of what
makes human thought and its history.” 13
Taking in consideration the breadth of Foucault’s works, this is only a
very minor essay from which I have quoted. But still, I would like to ask
what follows when we attempt to think error itself as the constitutive
capacity of life, in contrast to war. What follows for humanity and its
politics when the human is conceptualized as that peculiar being dedicated
to and destined for error? Does the conceptualization of error as the font of
the life of the human provide us with a means to think and practice a
politics of life without recourse to having to do violence to humankind and
other forms of life? And does it therefore provide for more secure conditions
on which to produce an affirmative biopolitics? Is a life that must err
from itself in order to be itself more politically emancipatory than a life that
must enter into conflict with itself in order to establish its own truth? How
11 Foucault, “Introduction,” in Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological,
trans. Carolyn R. Fawcett (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 22.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
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