Nietzsche's Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics, and the Animality of the Human Being

Conclusion

Conclusion Biopolitics and the Question of Animal Life While it has been widely accepted that Foucault’s notions of sovereign and disciplinary power have their conceptual origin in Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals, the relation between Foucault’s notion of biopolitics and Nietzsche’s political thought has only recently entered the scholarly debate .1 In conclusion, I would like to make a few remarks about how biopolitics can be approached through Nietzsche’s treatment of the question of animal life.2 This question centers on whether (and, if so, how) the recovery of animality in Nietzsche’s philosophy contributes to an understanding of what Foucault calls the ‘‘biological threshold of modernity.’’3 In my view, Nietzsche provides a way to understand the relationship between animality and humanity, which can be given a new and productive interpretation by seeing it as developing an affirmative sense of biopolitics. Positive biopolitics sees in the continuity between human and animal life a source of resistance to the project of dominating and controlling lifeprocesses . Whereas the latter divides life into opposing forms of species life, the affirmative biopolitics I lay out subverts such a division and replaces it with the project of cultivating inherently singular, nontotalizable forms of animal life. In Foucault, the term ‘‘biopolitics’’ designates the historical discontinuity through which ‘‘for the first time in history, no doubt, biological existence was reflected in political existence; the fact of living was no longer an inaccessible substrate that only emerged from time to time, amid the randomness of death and its fatality; part of it passed into 152 knowledge’s field of control and power’s sphere of intervention.’’4 The Foucaultian idea that biological existence is ‘‘reflected’’ in political existence should not be confused with either the view that biopolitics means understanding the state as an organism, or with the view that biopolitics simply designates the entrance of issues concerning biological life into the sphere of political discussion and decision-making. Both views presuppose an external and hierarchical relationship between life and politics.5 In contrast , Foucault holds that biopolitics constitutes a transformation in the nature of political power itself: ‘‘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 in question.’’6 This definition of biopolitics is crucial in several respects. First, Foucault clearly adopts the view that ‘‘modern man is an animal.’’ Second, this animal’s politics concerns not only its ‘‘way of life’’ or bios, but also its biological life, what the Greeks call zoe.7 While, for Aristotle, the political existence of the human being both presupposes and transcends its animality, Foucault claims that, at least for modern men, the essential concern of political life lies in the status of their animality , of their biological existence: ‘‘Western man was gradually learning what it meant to be a living species in a living world.’’8 Foucault’s notion of biopolitics depends on understanding the animality of the human being in terms of ‘‘the life of the body and the life of the species.’’9 The transformation of the human being’s animal life into species life is the leitmotif of Foucault’s genealogy of modern political science’s emergence from the classical and especially Christian theme of ‘‘pastoral power.’’10 But Foucault also shows that this biopolitical regulation of life gives rise to resistance, to what he calls ‘‘contre-conduites,’’ which seeks to free the individual from being led (dominated) by others and instead to ‘‘search for ways to conduct one’s own life.’’11 This resistance to biopower does not transcend the horizon of ‘‘a living species in a living world’’12 but, rather, ‘‘life as a political object was in a sense taken at face value and turned back against the system that was bent on controlling it.’’13 Resistance counteracts the constitution of the subject in and through its transformation into a species by cultivating or caring for the self thus redefining the status of the human being’s animality. Foucault’s critique of biopolitics as a politics of domination over the human being’s animal life seeks to create a different relationship with the self, one that separates the self from the ‘‘herd’’ without isolating the self from others or from one’s own animal life. The formula for this other relationship with the self passes through culture...