Biopolitics
¶When does life become political? Is it when the question is asked: Who must live, who can be let die? Making live and letting die—this is the biopolitical question par excellence. But the politicization of life takes so many forms. Our lives are made of experiences, encounters, conversations, love, sex, thoughts, travels—those things make us live in the fullest sense of the term. Their absence pushes us dangerously closer to death in the form of a life which is no longer worth living.
¶The biological processes that characterize human beings as a living species have become, in the past few centuries, a crucial object for political decision-making. To a certain extent, that has always been the case. But today we are no longer primarily political subjects of law, endowed with rights and whose freedom stops where the others’ begins. We are living beings who form a global mass with a natality, a mortality, and a morbidity rate, whose individual rights depend on statistical trends and whose personal freedom stops where the risk for others’ health begins. Six feet: the new measure of our liberty.
¶The “population” must be defended, or so we are told. But not à tout prix, and not in its entirety. Biopolitical rationality does not protect biological life a priori. It makes the latter the object of a political and economic calculation whose changing results introduce differences in the biological continuum. We are not all equal in the face of death. Between life and death, the notion of risk now plays the role of God—only, it is not God who defines it, but a series of political and economic strategies that increase or decrease the exposure of different social groups to the risk of death.
¶Biopolitics is the government of human beings through their differential exposure to the risk of death. Its “conditions of acceptability” are multiple. Racism, Foucault suggests, has traditionally been a way of introducing a break in the biological continuum of the population to decide who must live and who can be let die. Class inequality, forced mobility, gender discrimination are other ways of obtaining the same result. To start questioning biopolitics’ legitimacy, one should perhaps begin by questioning the legitimacy of the reasons that render it acceptable.
Besides, the risk of death need not be interpreted literally. ¶Can a life of mere biological survival be considered as a human life? When its social, cultural, and political dimensions are stripped from it, is life even worth living—even worth be called life?
- Considerate se questo è un uomo…
- Considerate se questa è una donna…
¶Biopolitics is a fact of our political modernity. It establishes hierarchies in the value of lives, thus introducing vulnerabilities in order to make individuals more malleable and governable. To become “normal” and be accepted no questions asked, biopolitics constantly strives to make us forget the value of the question, so familiar to the Ancients: How ought I to live? Or better: How can I make sure that my life and the lives of my fellow human beings are meaningful? Bios, for an ancient Greek, is not just (biological) life. It is a life in relation to which the question can be asked: Is it good or bad? Is it happy or unhappy?
Crucial political question: ¶How do we preserve the possibility for our lives to be capacious enough to be qualified as good or bad, happy or unhappy? To be something more than mere survival in the service of political and economic interests that are beyond our control? A coordinated collective effort to transform biopolitics into biopoiesis and biopoetics—the immanent (re)creation of norms, meanings, and values for our own lives. And to make this transformation accessible to as much people as possible in our society.
