Biopolitics: The Uses of a Concept During a Pandemic
Léo Tersou October 2022
A book is made to be used for purposes not defined by the person who wrote it. The more new, possible, unforeseen uses there are, the happier I will be!
Michel Foucault, 1975
… I quote Foucault one last time…
Bernard-Henri Lévy, 2020 [1]
The COVID-19 epidemic has given rise, among other things, to numerous public and media viewpoints. It is regrettable that these views were rarely equal to the crisis, when they did not simply give in to covid-denialism. Usually, the theoretical influences (more or less well digested) that feed such proclamations are not absolutely explicit, but they can be glimpsed: for example, when Alain Damasio compares the virus to foreigners — “migrants (…), the not-like-us”, etc. [2] — and enjoins us to accept the otherness of the living being that it constitutes, we can detect his appetite for a certain Deleuzian vitalism, or for the more recent work of Bruno Latour.[3] But should we throw the baby out with the bathwater, making Deleuze responsible for the nauseating metaphors that he indirectly ‘inspired’? In the end, this question alone is probably not very relevant, but it may be interesting to dwell on the concrete ways in which a conceptual heritage can be mobilized, as well as misused, to serve inconsistent and dangerous political positions.
And since, among the theoreticians invoked by the discourse on the pandemic, Michel Foucault seems to be one of the most prized (and, of course, this is not surprising), I would like to look into his case, and in particular the concept of biopolitics — following a double approach: disqualifying its misuses first, and then trying to determine if it can, if better used, actually prove useful in our considerations on the phenomenon of the pandemic.
Role-Playing Foucault?
We should first, therefore, address the way in which reference to Foucault has infused recent discourses on COVID and its consequences. The public interventions of the philosopher Giorgio Agamben over the last two years seem to be a good starting point, insofar as, while mentioning Foucault directly only on rare occasions, he has been developing for several decades a theoretical approach that intends to continue the Foucauldian enterprise, notably through his own particular conception of biopolitics.
The first of his interventions was a short article initially published in Il Manifesto under the title The State of Exception Provoked by an Unjustified Emergency on February 26, 2020, (later reproduced in his Quodlibet ‘blog’, with the more direct and adversarial title: The Invention of an Epidemic).[4] The purpose of his essay was to minimize the seriousness of the pandemic, brandishing numbers that would assimilate it to a common flu, or even to deny its reality: “terrorism being exhausted as a cause of exceptional measures, the invention of an epidemic [offers] the ideal pretext to extend such measures beyond all limits”. This specific emphasis on the “state of exception” seemed obvious to an Agamben who has made it one of his central concepts, notably through the figure of homo sacer. For him, such a situation was paradigmatically at work in the Nazi extermination camps, whose logic (“biopolitics”) presided over contemporary forms of sovereignty. He has continued down this path of comparison, going so far as to declare that “the laws concerning the so-called ‘no-vax’’ [are] ten times more restrictive than the 1938 Fascist laws were on non-Aryans”. [5] So, for Agamben, the non-vaccinated person becomes — par excellence — the person excluded from any right, and on whom any attack is legitimized. this is what has not failed to please conspiracy networks such as RéinfoCovid or FranceSoir.[6]
But how does all this bring us back to Foucault? In fact, beyond the intellectual filiation proven in Agamben’s case, it appears that both thinkers are caught up in a bundle of discourses claimed to be ‘radical’, ‘resistant’ or even ‘revolutionary’, but whose deleterious ramification are worth considering. And, if certain established media figures have been able to invoke Foucault as a sound reference (like BHL, in his 2020 book, The Virus in The Age of Madness), it is indeed within the ‘extreme left’, broadly speaking, that this reference warrants critical reflection.
A series of publications by Olivier Cheval on the site Lundimatin, a hub of red-brown confusionism if ever there was one,[7] seems to provide a good example. His second part [8] relies on Agamben to castigate the epidemic ‘biopolitics’, then the third part proposes to “think what is happening to us with Michel Foucault”. However, the author ends up declaring that, if “Foucauldians have often been very reserved towards the way Giorgio Agamben has invested the critical field of biopolitics”, the crisis “confers justification (…) to Agamben”.
The absent, and thus the dead, are always wrong… Not that I wish to ‘absolve’ Foucault here, but this is undoubtedly symptomatic of the way his work has been reread, from a perspective that often has more to do with the conspiratorial affinities and contexts of, for example, Giorgio Agamben. And whether these affinities and contexts are consubstantial with Agamben’s theoretical directions, or a recent deviation in his intellectual trajectory, is not the point.[9]
Let us pause, however. Since Cheval summons Foucault, let us look at what he retains of him. He makes some references to the courses and works that elaborate the notion of biopolitics, but I will deal with that below. The article, more notably, begins and ends with a reminder of Foucault’s remarks on the plague of the 17th century, evoked in Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975, and then in the oft-quoted pages of Discipline and Punish. In these texts, two ‘models of control” are examined: the exclusion of the leprous and the gridding of the plague-ridden city, insofar as the first would be the model of a negative exercise of power, the second of a positive one, suitable for the establishment of disciplinary societies. “The leper is caught up in a practice of rejection, of exile and closure; he is allowed to lose himself in it as in a mass that it is of little importance to differentiate; the plague victims are caught up in a meticulous tactical grid in which individual differentiations are the constraining effects of a power that multiplies, articulates and subdivides itself. Great containment on the one hand; good training on the other”.[10]
At first glance, this seems to lend itself well to guiding our analyses of the pandemic, but let us note two things. First, let us recall once again that the frequent capture of these references by the anti-vax movement and their allies reduces these considerations precisely to the notion of exclusion (the unvaccinated, the unmasked, as self-proclaimed victims of a political exclusion), tending to confuse the two models and to bring ‘the leper’ back to the middle of the plague-ridden city. Then, it is necessary to insist on the fact that these are models. Foucault speaks of them as a “political dream”. These models function, above all, on the side of the exercise of power, as an imaginary and as a technical referent: “the plague-ridden city (…) is the utopia of the perfectly governed city”.[11]
It is certainly ridiculous not to take into account the ways in which, in concrete terms, the pandemic was the occasion for various reinforcements of surveillance and control procedures, but it is undoubtedly wrong to see it as a rupture, rather than as a highlighting of a logic that was already at work in ‘normal’ times — for example, the differentiated targeting of certain populations identified as “undisciplined”[12] found new ways of deploying itself with the epidemic. Foucault insists: “the plague (at least the one that remains in the state of prediction) is the test during which one can ideally define the exercise of disciplinary power. In order to make rights and laws function according to pure theory, jurists imagined themselves in the state of nature; in order to see perfect disciplines function, rulers dreamed of the state of plague”.[13]
Thus, this ideal functioning could not be fully realized in an actual epidemic situation, and which we have seen also implied, significantly, a striking institutional disorganization. On the other hand, in these same pages, Foucault intends to show that these models of control find their most concrete application within the places of confinement (prisons, asylums, schools, etc) of disciplinary societies (and it is there, in fact, that the exclusion of the leper and the sectioning of the plague-stricken really become confused): “the psychiatric asylum, the penitentiary, the reformatory, the institution of supervised education, and to a certain extent the hospitals, in a general way all the instances of individual control function in a double mode; that of binary sharing and marking; and that of coercive assignment, of differential distribution”.[14]
Perhaps, rather than refusing masks and caution, for fear of realizing the political dream of our leaders, Foucault’s raucous readers could have been interested in the catastrophic situation of prisoners in the midst of an epidemic.[15] Let us not forget that these comments on the plague, in Discipline and Punish, open the chapter on the Panopticon, another political ‘dream’, and let us not allow the evocative force of the utopias of power to divert our eyes from its real places of accomplishment.
Biopolitics
The pages just mentioned appeared almost two years before Foucault elaborated what is undoubtedly the favorite word of his pandemic readers. It is therefore time to spend a moment with this notion and, in order to identify first the kind of discourse and political horizon that the reference to biopolitics often serves, I would like to evoke a book that offers a rather typical expression. It is the Manifeste conspirationniste (Conspiracy Manifesto), published anonymously (although Julien Coupat and the Invisible Committee is generally recognized as the author) this year.[16]
Such a text, because of its formal construction, and unsubstantiated yet over-referential ideological approach, is difficult to unravel for the purposes of critique — in commenting on it, Pierre Tenne rightly notes that “confusion is a stylistic procedure before becoming political”.[17]
Let us, nevertheless, try to characterize the use of the concept of biopolitics in Manifeste conspirationniste. Given that biopolitics would designate the constitution by power of life as one of its objects (or even as its objet par excellence), the authors read the pandemic period precisely as its triumph finally arrived. For them, biopolitics seems to mean in sum: “the State takes care of my health, and therefore wants to regulate my life”. Thus, by a kind of elevation to the rank of political resistance of the contrarian temperament, any participation in health prevention, risk reduction, epidemic solidarity, etc., would be reducible to submission to the biopolitical watchword and, therefore, would be a despicable renunciation.
As assumed by the title of the book, this reading takes an openly conspiratorial path in its formulations, judging that the “deceitfulness [of biopolitics] is commensurate with the pretension that inhabits it”[18] — it is not a question, therefore, of uncovering a certain rationality of the exercise of power in the ‘biological’ domain and of constructing a critique of it, but of supposing simple underhanded intentions. I will not dwell here on the way in which such an approach, which proclaims itself subversive, actually functions in concert with governmental and dominant action; others have already done so.[19]
We can also see to what extent this is accompanied by a ‘health supremacism’,[20] which opposes the control of health to the fantasized strength of ‘naturally’ healthy and resistant bodies: illness is not serious, so there is no need to sacrifice our ‘freedoms’ (which consigns, if we read between the lines, an immediate and severe fate to those whose bodies are more fragile or more exposed). “Biopolitics is the tyranny of weakness”,[21] we are explicitly told by the Manifeste conspirationniste.
Two versions of ‘life’ are then contrasted: one, the object of lies, which only serves as a pretext for despotism; the other, a natural power, which does not need to be artificially preserved — “this State, therefore, thanks to the propagation of a virus that is barely three times more lethal than seasonal flu, discovers ‘life’ as a sacred value. So sacred that it has no value. So let all costs be allowed”.[22] In wanting to lift the veil of hypocrisy and in passing quickly over this notion of “cost”, the authors miss precisely, it seems to me, the possible relevance of the concept of biopolitics.
We must, then, endeavor to trace a more consistent reading of ‘biopolitics’. The task is, however, difficult: ‘biopolitics’ carries with it a long and sinuous semantic history,[23] and the fact is that the term proves to be relatively loose in Foucault’s work. It is tempting, therefore, to simply refer to the definition given in the summary of his course, the Birth of Biopolitics, namely: “the way in which one has tried, since the eighteenth century, to rationalize the problems posed to governmental practice by the phenomena proper to a group of living beings constituted as a population: health, hygiene, natality, longevity, races…”.[24]
If the authors of the Manifeste conspirationniste and their counterparts were to adopt a Foucauldian definition of the concept, it would undoubtedly be this one. However, this same course quickly abandons the notion to launch into a long ‘history’ of (neo)liberal governmentality, on the grounds that “the analysis of biopolitics can only be done when one has understood the general regime of this governmental reason of which I am speaking, this general regime that can be called the question of truth, (…) and consequently if one understands well what this regime, which is liberalism, is about.[25] Thus, biopolitics seems to be a kind of gateway to certain objects of study, but its own analysis is regularly postponed by Foucault (the situation is similar in the previous year’s course, Security, Territory and Population). This is consistent with the assumption, supported in particular by Frieder Vogelmann, that ‘biopolitics’ must always be understood first as a critical concept.
To be convinced of this, we can look at its first (published) use by Foucault, in the last part of The History of Sexuality (‘Right to Death and Power over Life’): the fact that this concept is first forged to counter the regime of truth instituted by the discourses on ‘sexuality’, tends to pose biopolitics as a tool for the emergence of new practices and new discourses, of ‘counter-truths’, to be deployed in opposition to the dominant framework. To speak of ‘biopolitics’ is above all to make a diagnosis of our present and its history, the aim of which is not really descriptive but properly combative. But Foucault then changes his use of the term: “rather than a critical concept designating the untruths that result from Foucault’s diagnosis of the present, ‘biopolitics’ is now a descriptive concept designating the object analyzed”.[26] In fact, given its dissemination (in Agamben, Hardt & Negri, Lemke, etc.), the concept will always run the risk of becoming fixed in various descriptive ‘images’ of society, thus losing its instrumental character and “consequently, ‘biopolitical analysis’ must produce a new counter-knowledge, or proceed according to a new model of critique.”[27] Let us try, precisely, to propose a critique of the pandemic situation; directly via the biopolitical concept, at first, and then by appealing to it in a more roundabout way.
Let us begin with the first conception elaborated in parallel by Foucault in his 1976 lecture, Society Must be Defended, and in the first volume of The History of Sexuality. What is at stake in these texts is the identification of a new ‘technology’ of power following the elaboration of disciplinary procedures and, as a consequence, biopolitics takes shape as the exercise of a ‘bio-power’, which Foucault characterizes as a reversal:
“And I think that one of the greatest transformations political right underwent in the 19th century was precisely that, I wouldn’t say exactly that sovereignty’s old right — to take life or to let live — was replaced, but it came to be complemented by a new right which does not erase the old right but which does penetrate it, permeate it. This is the right, or rather precisely the opposite right. It is the power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die. The right of sovereignty was the right to take life or let live. And then this new right is established: the right to make live and to let die” (Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, Picador 2003, p.241).
Together with this reversal, the object (conceptual and practical) of biopolitics distinguishes it from discipline: where the latter is exercised on the particular body, biopolitics is concerned with the level of the ‘man as species’: “So, after a first seizure of power over the body in an individualizing mode, we have a second seizure of power that is not individualizing but, if you like, massifying, that is directed not at man-as-body but at man-as-species” (Idem., p243).
This shows that the concepts of discipline and biopolitics, while they may refer to two successive historical periodizations, can also be seen as complementary devices of power. Now, this perspective seems to apply well to the pandemic situation we are experiencing, but it is then clear that our ‘conspiracy theorists’ and co. have picked from the biopolitical formula only the ‘to make live’ — refusing then what is received as an unbearable heteronomy — and totally forgetting the ‘to let die’. Indeed, if the epidemic of COVID-19 has given us any kind of spectacle, it is that of the political organization of an acceptance: the death of millions of people. While Sunday philosophers came to claim on TV shows that our societies were now struggling to accept human death, it is on the contrary a huge mass of ‘acceptable’ deaths that was being built before our eyes (not to mention the lives weakened by the disease). It is then a question of bringing into play the second characteristic of biopolitics that we mentioned: its populationist aspect.
What we see with the pandemic is that the population is posited as a political subject, but as a subject that is divisible. The population of the species is rationalized as composed of national populations, within them expendable and indispensable populations, useful and useless populations, and so on. The elderly, the poor, the immigrants, the immune-compromised, the disabled, all ‘populations’ are not subject to the same evaluation: it is not ‘life’, a muddled hypostasis, that becomes ‘the supreme value’, but certain lives that are evaluated in relation to others. And this is why the notion of cost is also important, and why Foucault inscribes his developments in a history of liberal governmentality; because human lives, aggregated as populations, are, among other things, variables that can be adjusted. The market, he tells us, is an instance of veridiction[28]: it sanctions a relationship between costs and benefits. When schools were kept open, when it was argued that it was necessary to ‘keep the economy going’, it was within this framework that an action that could be called ‘biopolitical’ was deployed. The concept, thus, can be considered as a tool for the critique of the capitalist mode of production — a tool that is probably not indispensable, but may be practical — and of the forms of State that it presupposes, insofar as, for example, the various segments of the proletariat are constituted as ‘working’ populations. Power, in times of pandemic, ‘gives life’, but what matters is to know who, for what, and, even more, to know who is left to die.
In this regard, I will conclude by mentioning a concept that is adjacent to that of biopolitics and that also seems to be relevant to the pandemic moment. The authors of the Manifeste conspirationniste are at liberty to quote Foucault, who notes “the coexistence, within political structures, of enormous machines of destruction and institutions devoted to individual protection”, and suggests that “thanatopolitics is thus the reverse of biopolitics”.[29] They seem, again and again, to make it an expression of biopolitical hypocrisy and deceit, but this ‘flip side’ is worth digging into. This is precisely what Achille Mbembe[30] has attempted to do, by speaking of ‘necropolitics’, and others have followed him. In the case of the pandemic, Jack Bratich has demonstrated that necropolitics has emerged as a significant factor, and he reveals this particularly through the study of covid-denialist movements of the extreme right. He then poses the figure of the “homi-suicidal state”,[31] that is to say, political institutions which, through the management of their populations, show themselves inclined to massive ‘sacrifice’ (whether this is completely assumed in the case of a country like Brazil, where President Bolsonaro denies the reality of the virus, and to a certain extent in the United States, or whether it is related to a ‘reasoned management’ of the problem in a country like France). But, he adds, focusing on states in isolation does not allow us to understand everything and, via a detour through Deleuze and Guattari, he focuses on the necropolitical action of society, on “microfascist culture [which] develops a networked body (individualized and collectivized) capable of killing and being killed”, which he describes as a “homi-suicidal aesthetics” (see fn31). The ‘body politic’ thus participates itself, sometimes willingly, in its constitution as a ‘population’, in its establishment as a bio- and necro-political object — it makes itself live and lets itself die.
In short, I do not believe that I have demonstrated here the essential nature of the concept of biopolitics, which might enable us to ‘think what is happening to us’ (which would be pretentious, by the way), but I believe on the other hand that it can be used in a way that is more stimulating and less sinister than how is served up to us by the gravediggers on all sides.
Appendix: The Wonder and Giddiness of the Toolbox
In the foregoing I have tried to emphasize the ‘instrumentality’ of the term biopolitics, to underline its critical function. Instruments are tools, and tools are for use. Foucault declared: “I would like my books to be a kind of tool-box in which others can rummage around in to find a tool with which they can do what they want, in their own field (…). I do not write for an audience, I write for users, not for readers”.[32] Of course, this is cause for rejoicing: he who intended to question the supremacy of the author over his work, in the preface to The History of Madness and, of course, in his lecture What is an Author?, confirms here that his function as an intellectual is not to dictate what should be said and thought, but to provide (modest) means for action and reflection. Already at the beginning of his writing career, he almost published this: “it will happen to me that I am asked to speak about my own books as if, closer to them than anybody else, I am almost alone in knowing their secrets (…). But this will undoubtedly be nothing more than an appearance”.[33]
However, the question then arises (especially when we have seen the damaging readings that have been made of Foucault’s work): if the author cannot be the verifier of subsequent interpretations of their work then how might complete interpretative disorder be avoided? Maybe Foucault himself answers this question: “I hope that the truth of my books is in the future”. Here, Foucault does not simply say that whatever is made of his books will have the value of truth; this statement follows the account of readings of Discipline and Punish by prisoners before they revolted, which constituted for him a vivid manifestation of what he seeks to do. So, the figure of the tool manufacturer is replaced by that of the ‘artificer’ [artillery technician], and, indeed, Foucault affirmed that he wanted to “write book-bombs”. In this case, the users should not be just anyone, but those who are caught in the apparatus that his books study. The insane, the prisoners, the homosexuals, etc., should be the bombers.
But, a simple fact remains, that there are right and wrong ways to use a tool and right and wrong places to place explosives. “For the one who has a hammer, all problems are nails”, and for the one who is given a concept… they should think about the problems first. Foucault’s posture is therefore commendable, but it calls for caution. So much so that he himself, on occasion, has not failed to ‘correct’ certain ways of using his concepts. So, following the shift of his theoretical interests to personal ethics, “Foucault gives up some of the reserve or casualness of the craftsman in favor of the vigilance of those masters of the martial arts who know that effective uses require the training of users who are up to the task. Books are no longer ready-to-use tools but propose critical exercises of self-transformation. The experience does not replace the uses, it makes possible new and fruitful uses of analyses and concepts”.[34] If we are going to insist on reading to draw out things to use in our battles, we should try, first of all, to be readers who measure up.
Léo Tersou
Biopolitiques: usages d’un concept en temps de pandémie, October 2022
Author approved translation by Mickey Moosenhauer
[1] In a short series of “Chronicles of the Coronavirus” Bernard-Henri Lévy portrayed Foucault as the prophet of the increasing ‘medical tyranny’ that was apparently made explicit by the lockdowns and other measures during the early stages of the pandemic:
https://laregledujeu.org/2020/04/03/35862/les-dangers-du-pouvoir-medical-chronique-du-coronavirus-2/
[2] Alain Damasio, “Immunity Everywhere, Humanity Nowhere: What if we fought capitalism on the terrain of desire?”, in Revue du Crieur n°20, 2022. Damasio considers the defensive responses (lockdowns, masks, vaccinations, etc) to the virus as being contiguous with an exclusionary ethic that finds certain things ‘unacceptable’: “as are unacceptable the exiles of Afghanistan, the miraculous canoeists on the Mediterranean, the refugees of Syria or our neighbors of the Maghreb, wild boars in our fields, cockroaches in an apartment, mice in the metro, Islam, black people, kebabs, burkinis, cobwebs, weeds in my garden, bees on my pot of honey, women’s rap, my daughter’s queer girlfriend or the anti-racist who points to your quiet colonialism.” So, apparently, we should welcome the virus and live/die with it… In this conception helping refugees and wearing a mask would, one must presume, be considered contradictory, or cognitively dissonant, actions.
Damasio is a successful science fiction writer, whose first novel (1999) concerned a futuristic ‘society of control’ inspired by the work of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.
[3] Cf. B. Latour, ‘Où suis-je?’, La Découverte, 2021.
[4] “…a supposed epidemic…”, Giorgio Agamben, L’invenzione di un’epidemia — Quodlibet
[5] Giorgio Agamben — Commission Du.Pre — 29 01 2022 — YouTube
[6] [Translator’s note: FranceSoir has been pushing various conspiracy theories since 2019. RéinfoCovid is a ‘covid-denialist’ group that appears to share a ‘back-to-nature’ perspective, or the desire to create rural communes, with Alain Damasio.]
[7] [Translator’s note: In his 2021 book, The Great Confusion: How the Far-Right is Winning the Battle of Ideas, Philippe Corcuff, examines the ‘fog’ of confusionnisme, by which certain figures, intentionally or not, ‘blur’ the differences between the values and objectives of the extreme-left and extreme-right. He defines confusionism as “the current name for a relative disintegration of political landmarks previously stabilized around the left-right divide and the development of discursive bridges between far right, right, moderate left and radical left”. Le Monde wrote, the book is “a meticulous analytical work in which it dissects the failings, inconsistencies and mistakes of the left, from which the right and even more so the extreme right make their honey”. See, also, this article in Libération.]
[8] L’immunité, l’exception, la mort [2/4] (lundi.am)
[9] Agamben takes one aspect or notion of ‘biopolitics’ and develops an approach that diverges notably from Foucault’s. His use does not really aim at studying certain forms of modern and contemporary governmentality, but aims to describe what might be, in Agamben’s conception, the original logic of political power. Further, it is based on a problematic conception of life (life is caught between zoè and bios, that is, ‘natural’ life or ‘political’ life). For Agamben, the nodal point of the exercise of power — life — is also, by a kind of metaphysical return, the means to resist power. Cf. K. Genel, ‘Le biopouvoir chez Foucault et Agamben’, Methodos n°4, 2004.
[10] M. Foucault, Surveiller et punir, Gallimard, 1975, p.200.
[11] M. Foucault, Idem.
[12] See this article, among others. Here, according to a more general process highlighted, for example, by D. Fassin (2011) or M. Rigouste (2012), the concentration of police action on such-and-such a zone and such-and-such a part of the population seems to be justified retroactively by the evidence of ‘overcriminality’ — while it is this excess action that ‘produces’ this statistical surplus.
[13] M.Foucault, op.cit., p.200.
[14] M.Foucault, Ibid., p.201.
[15] Cf. D. Fassin, ‘À l’épreuve de la pandémie.’ (Postface), in Punir: Une passion contemporaine, Seuil, 2020. [Translators note: Di Cesare made a similar point, asking why Agamben consistently ignored, and ignores, the plight of contemporary refugees: “I would have expected, from the philosopher who made us reflect on ‘bare life,’ an appeal for the migrants who are brutalized, rejected, and left to die at the European borders”.]
[16] [Translator’s note: There may be small differences between Tiqqun and The Invisible Committee, and Julien Coupat, but they are of no real consequence. This early (1999) analysis of Tiqqun and its appeal to “the eccentric reality of bullshitting college kids” is useful for identifying from where Tiqqun originate ideologically.]
[17] See here.
[18] Manifeste conspirationniste, Seuil, 2022, p.220.
[19] Cf. Collectif Cabrioles, ‘Face à la pandémie, le camp des luttes doit sortir du déni’, 2022.
[20] Cf. M. Steenhagen, ‘Loathe fascism? Then don’t be a health supremacist’, 2022. [Translator’s note: it is also interesting and/or amusing to remember that, famously, Giorgio Agamben recommended to his friend Jean-Luc Nancy not to have heart surgery, and that Ludwig Wittgenstein once worked as a hospital porter dispensing prescriptions, but he advised patients not to take them.]
[21] Manifeste conspirationniste, op.cit., p.217.
[22] Ibid., p.197.
[23] Cf. T. Lemke, ‘Une analytique de la biopolitique : considérations sur l’histoire et l’actualité d’un concept controversé’ (unpublished translation by Cristophe Lucchese). See also, Thomas Lemke, Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction, 2011]. The term ‘biopolitics’ also has a long history on the far-right, before Foucault’s use of it, see, for example, this piece from the Collectif Cabrioles (right-click on the text and scroll down to ‘translate to English’).
[24] M. Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique — Cours au Collège de France (1978–1979), Gallimard/Seuil, 2004, p.323.
[25] M. Foucault, Ibid., p.44.
[26] F. Vogelmann, ‘Biopolitics as a Critical Diagnosis’, in The Sage Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, Sage Publications, 2018, p.1429. [Translator’s note: From Vogelmann’s abstract: “Foucault’s concept of ‘biopolitics’ has sparked a lively debate within critical theory, although Foucault himself rarely used it after The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. In this chapter I argue that the reasons both for the way ‘biopolitics’ stirred Foucault’s readers and for his subsequent abandonment are to be found in the relation between Foucault’s model of critique and the role ‘biopolitics’ plays in it: it names the counter-truths derived from Foucault’s critical diagnosis of the dispositif of sexuality. Since ‘biopolitics’ was introduced as a notion with a specific critical function closely tied to Foucault’s model of critique, I first explicate this model of critique as a diagnostic practice of prefigurative emancipation before re-reading Le Volonté de Savoir from this methodological perspective. After Le Volonté Savoir, Foucault tried turning ‘biopolitics’ into a descriptive term, no longer naming the critical diagnosis but the object to be criticized. Yet within Foucault’s model of critique, this required him to produce a new critical diagnosis which he never did. The implication for contemporary usages of ‘biopolitics’ in critical theory is that it either needs to develop its own counter-truths from a critical analysis of biopolitics or use a different model of critique.”]
[27] F. Vogelmann, Idem.
[28] [Translator’s note: This word is worth knowing: See how Agamben uses it:
“[Jesus said:] ‘for this I have come into the world: to testify of the truth.’ In fact, there is no experience of truth without testimony: true is that word for which we cannot but commit ourselves to bear personal witness. Here, the difference between a scientific and a philosophical truth emerges. In fact, while a scientific truth is (or at least should be) independent from the subject who enunciates it, the truth we are talking about is such only if the subject who pronounces it is wholly at stake in it. Indeed, it is a veridiction and not a theorem. Faced with a non-truth imposed by law, we can and must testify of the truth.” (Agamben, G., Where is Science Going?, 17 February 2021)
The word ‘veridiction,’ here, references Foucault’s use of the word in The Birth of Biopolitics. Veridiction is a kind of ‘truth’ dependent upon the worldview of the individual or subject that states it, or the social system that observes and ‘uses’ it for their own purposes. It is not an objective truth. Foucault uses the example of the ‘truth’ of ‘the market’ as the grounds upon which modern government is founded, rather than on notions of justice or being ‘just.’ ‘Truth,’ therefore, for government, becomes more overtly and explicitly related to the motions of the economy than to the (usually deceitful) ideal of social justice. Agamben uses this conceptualization to affirm that truth is one’s own individual ‘truth,’ and that it is only verifiably ‘true’ when one ‘testifies’ it.
This mix of ‘fact’ and ‘truth’ — or ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’ — that affirms that one’s own version of the truth is as valid as anyone else’s is the basis of Donald Trump’s belief that ‘truth’ can be generated with a ‘positive’ attitude (see The Power of Positive Thinking, by Norman Vincent Peale), and led to Rudy Giuliani arguing on television in 2018 that it was pointless for Trump to attend the Mueller inquiry because it would just be a competition between different viewpoints. When the interviewer wondered what the problem with attending the inquiry could be and stated that, after all, “Truth is truth,” Giuliani famously replied: “No, it isn’t truth. Truth isn’t truth.”
Giorgio Agamben, in similar vein, ends his February interview with: “We can only, in an unjust and false society, attest to the presence of the right and the true. We can only, in the middle of hell, testify of heaven.” (M. Moosenhauer, Nihil Evadere, 2022, p113–4)]
[29] M. Foucault, ‘La technologie politique des individus’ (1974), in Dits et écrits II, Gallimard, 2001, no 364, pp.1634 & 1645.
[30] Cf. A. Mbembe, ‘Nécropolitique’, in Raisons politiques vol. no 21, no. 1, 2006.
[31] J. Bratich, “Give me liberty or give me Covid!”: Anti-Lockdown Protests as Necropopulist Downsurgency, 2021, translation at Collectif Cabrioles. Bratich’s term ‘homi-suicidal’ (homicidal-suicidal)refers to the ‘microfascist’ phenomenon that results in, for example, the “dynamics of mass shooters, who kill while often being indifferent to their own life.” Bratich suggests that the populist leader, Donald Trump, supported as he is/was by extreme-right elements, was “the CEO of a homi-suicidal state” when he was President.
[32] M. Foucault, ‘Prisons et asiles dans les mécanismes du pouvoir’ (1982), in Dits et écrits I, Gallimard, 2001, no 136, p.1391.
[33] M. Foucault, ‘Foucault étudie la raison d’État’ (1980), in Dits et écrits II, Gallimard, 2001, no 280, p.860.
[34] T. Bénatouïl, Chapitre 2: ‘J’écris pour des utilisateurs’, in Usages de Foucault, PUF, 2014, p.42.
