Improper Life: Technology and Biopolitics from Heidegger to Agamben by Timothy C. Campbell (review)

When Improper Life appeared in 2011, its author, Timothy Campbell, had already established himself as an important spokesman for recent developments in the theorization of biopolitics and sovereignty, especially those that have emerged over the last twenty or so years from Italian philosophers Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito. Improper Life, which is part of the University of Minnesota Press's Posthumanities series edited by Cary Wolfe, offers a nuanced though concise overview of the most important theorizations of biopolitics sinceMartin Heidegger. Erudite and engaged, it traces a dense thread of ideas with vast and real implications across decades and languages. The book is remarkable for the attention it gives to issues of writing and communication, and for its attempt to sketch out a possible "affirmative" biopolitics for the future. Campbell's principal argument is that biopolitics, as it has been conceived to date, invariably "drifts" toward the "thanatopolitical," which is to say that it depends not so much on life as on a more or less dissimulated instrumentalization of death to understand how the body politic is organized and controlled.

In his genealogy of the biopolitical, Campbell concentrates on five main theorists: Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Agamben, Peter Sloterdijk, and Esposito. This narrative is complicated by the tension between two not entirely compatible arguments: on the one hand, he traces the notion of the human back to Heidegger's conception, in writings from the 1930s and '40s, of a Dasein defined by its unique relation to Being—a relation that Heidegger saw as threatened by the impersonal mediation of technology; and on the other, Campbell grounds the notion of the "biopolitical"—so termed—in Foucault's writings of the late 1970s and early '80s, which describes a shift in the relations between rulers and their subjects that occurred toward the beginning of the nineteenth century. In this shift, sovereign power changed from the right to impose death to the ability to master the individual lives that made up populations. These two currents are brought together somewhat uneasily by Agamben in his concept of "bare life," where Heidegger's distinction between proper and improper versions of the human is redeployed in the distinction between proper and improper forms of life. This difference is, in turn, enforced through a ubiquitous and seemingly infinite series of "dispositifs," which expand the meaning of technology far beyond what Heidegger had envisioned.

In a move toward a potential redemption of technology within the biopolitical, Sloterdijk embraces the proposition that we could further humanize, or perfect, our biological beings through genetic modification. Campbell draws out the profoundly disturbing implications of such a program, arguing that it would inevitably involve a winnowing out, or killing, of inferior individuals. Campbell most clearly articulates the overall goal of the book in its final, provocative chapter: he is attempting to conceptualize an "affirmative biopolitics" (p. 133) through the ideas of attention and play. Drawing on Jacques Derrida and D.W. Winnicott, Campbell convincingly argues that play is good, although it is less clear how one gets to a "politics" of play, or a "ludopolitics." I think that Campbell could have made that final move through recourse to Winnicott's observations about the importance of communication and interaction in play, especially since the idea of communication is so important to Campbell's overall analysis.

There is one general problem with Campbell's argument about the thanatopolitical drift: it is not clear what he means by "death." For instance, is the revolutionary rage that Sloterdijk describes thanatopolical because it involves animal demise (the "murder of the bourgeoisie" [p. 108], which becomes "implied homicide" [p. 116]) or because it homogenizes individuals into an indistinct mass by submitting populations to a "law of standardization" (p. 109)? Or is death something still more metaphorical and somewhat nostalgic: "the death of the community" (pp. 111, 117)? It is not certain that the different meanings that Campbell attributes to the term are...