Foucault, Politics, and Violence

5. Political Life

80 5 Political Life A. S. Byatt’s intriguing novella Morpho Eugenia tells the story of a young Victorian naturalist, William Adamson, whose objects of study are social insects and their highly specialized behavior patterns. The story follows his inner turmoil as he observes the ferocious violence of ant life and the disconcerting parallels between their stratified society and his own Victorian class society. Yet, when he is questioned on what we might learn from a comparison between human societies and those of social insects, he is quick to insist that analogy is a slippery tool: “Men are not ants.” Nevertheless, the story raises haunting questions fundamental to Western political thought: Why are men not like ants? Why is human political violence not just another deterministic struggle for survival in which individuals carry out their biologically predestined functions for the survival of the species, their individual lives dispensable and endlessly replaced? The classical philosophical answer has been to insist on the specificity of the political. Ants might be social insects, but only man is a political animal. Whereas human bodily existence and biological life are inextricably tied to the violent struggle for survival and the cycle of birth and death, the defining feature of the Western tradition of political thought has been the separation of the political from the biological. Aristotle famously connects the specificity of human politics to our ability to speak, arguing in the first book of Politics that human society is distinguished from that of “bees or other gregarious animals” in that it is founded on a political community that is capable of speech. Through language it is possible to express not simply what is pleasant and painful, but what is good and evil as well as just and unjust: “it is the peculiarity of man, in comparison with other animals, that he alone possesses a perception of good and evil, of the just and the unjust, and other similar qualities; and it is association in these things which makes a family and a city” (Aristotle 1995, 11). Thus, according to the ancient conception, politics is not about the pure preservation and enhancement of natural life, but it makes it possible to live a life according to moral values and political principles. Politics is the means of separating and placing in opposition human society to other animals, but also to its own biological existence. 81 P O L I T I C A L L I F E An influential strand of contemporary political thought claims that what characterizes modernity is the disappearance of the boundary that separates a political community from its biological existence. Foucault famously presents biopolitical power, or biopower, as the overturning of the ancient categories of biological and political existence that have organized Western political thought: “For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being into question” (HS1 143). His claim is that modern politics does not exclude life, but takes it as its primary object: politics has become biopolitics. My aim in this chapter is to follow Foucault and argue that understanding the relationship between violence and the political in modernity means rethinking the ontological distinction between biological and political life that has fundamentally ordered the Western tradition of political thought. I will begin with a brief discussion of Hannah Arendt ’s and Giorgio Agamben’s positions, but my focus is on Foucault’s understanding of biopolitics. I will show that whereas Arendt, Agamben, and Foucault all see the merging of the categories of life and politics as the key problem of modernity, they understand this problem in crucially different terms and suggest different solutions. This results in different understandings of the relationship between violence and the political. In conclusion I argue that it is vital to fully understand the governmental rationality of modern biopolitical societies in order to develop effective strategies against their specific forms of political violence. Arendt and Instrumental Violence Hannah Arendt’s contested notion of “the social” has been understood in varying ways by her commentators and critics alike.1 On the one hand, she describes its rise in terms of de facto historical development connected to the birth of the modern bureaucratic state and consumerist mass society.2 The rise of the social was made possible by the birth of the nation-state in which it found its political form: politics became...