Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

JULIAN REID
much further than Foucault by arguing that Nietzsche’s insistence on the
necessity of grounding life in war results not simply from his relation to the
historico-political discourses exposed in “Society Must Be Defended,” but is
a product of an internal contradiction within his philosophical logic, and
that as such, it befalls theorists of biopolitics, thinking with and beyond
Nietzsche, to correct it. 17 “The open question,” as he asserts, is “how to
reconstruct the internal logic that pushes Nietzschean biopolitics into the
shelter of its thanatopolitical contrary.” 18 How to rid the Nietzschean subject
of its erroneous belief that overcoming the killing and oppression of life,
undertaken in the name of the preservation of its species being, requires
making an error of the species, and inverting the war which has otherwise
been conducted to eliminate humanity’s errors, so that one might kill on
behalf, and in promotion, of the life erstwhile said to have erred. Thinking
life beyond Nietzsche must mean developing an account of a life, which, in
the errors it makes, does not simply make new distinctions between the
elements within itself that, on the one hand, strengthen it and those, on the
other, which weaken it, nor a life which chooses to align itself with forces
which err from, rather than supplement, what is already said to be true of it,
but one which disavows itself of the rationalities upon which distinctions
between truth and error are made, with a view to thinking life in terms that
lead us beyond the discriminatory game of setting life against life.
But immediately we hit upon a problem with Esposito’s construction of
Nietzsche’s biophilosophical logic. For the concept of error was by no
means missing from the process through which Nietzsche assembled that
logic. Indeed it was fundamental to the logic upon which Nietzsche constructed
his own account of the relations between life and its capacity for
war. One cannot simply counterpose error as an alternative foundation for
the ontology of life to that of Nietzsche’s concept of war, when error and
war were mutually implicated within Nietzsche’s philosophy of life to begin
with. In this regard, Foucault was quite wrong to suggest that in giving
primacy to error as a constitutive capacity of life, he was distinguishing his
own position from Nietzsche’s. 19 Defining life in terms of a capacity for
error does not by any means initiate a break from Nietzsche’s own understanding
of life. Consider, for example, aphorism 307 from The Gay Science:
17 Ibid, 93-101.
18 Ibid, 98-99.
19 Foucault, “Introduction,” 22.
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