Introduction to the Meaning of "Life"

The Ghosts of "Life's" Present Meaning

If the recent turn towards the meaning of "life" in the humanities were analyzed, perhaps we would find a threat of death motivating it. My genealogical approach to this problem does not determine a stable semantic reference across all usages of a term; rather, it exposes the lines of historical force that alter a word, concept, and value over time.¹ Writing "meaning," rather than "meaning" indicates the differential shifts disclosed by genealogies. The Nietzschean genealogies that I and others attempt to imitate subject "life" to a transvaluation by historicizing its pervious semantics and opening space for the word to be used in the creation of a new concept and value.²

The current period in the history of the humanities might be defined as starting with the "end of theory" in the mid-1990s and coming to fruition with the current death threats against university humanities departments.³ In era when "zombie capitalism," an economic system that has outlasted its vital, productive phase, caused necrosis in the university, we should not be surprised to find intensified theoretical attempts to elaborate a concept of "life" as something that includes survival but reaches far beyond it to the creation of new values.⁴ The contemporary inquiry into the meaning of life, however, has its own, longer, periodicity.

In the mid-1960s, near the peak of capitalist expansion, publications by Michel Foucault and Georges Canguilhem on life brought the modern inquiry into word, concept, and value into focus. In 1965's "Le concept de la vie" ("The Concept of Life" published in the revised edition of La connaissance de la vie [Knowledge of Life] [1952]), Canguilhem gives an account of the concept from Aristotle's time to the discovery of DNA. In 1966's Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things) Foucault argues that the concept of life as such originates along with two other "quasi transcendentals" at the end of the classical age in the eighteenth century.⁵ Foucault shows that life detaches itself from the "living being" in a conceptual break that makes possible the shift from natural history to biology. The difference between life and the living being produces new values as well as changes in the use of words and concepts. Foucault narrates a shift from the living being based on the paradigm that understands plants as life understood according to the paradigm of the animal. He invokes the Marquis de Sade to contend that after this transition "life can no longer be separated from murder, nature can no longer be good. Desires can no longer be separated from anti-nature."⁶

Canguilhem argues that the discovery of the double helix and the emergence of molecular biology redefine life as information and that contemporaneous accounts of mutation as the failure in the transmission of genetic information suggest that life should produce a new concept of life as that which "by error produces a living thing capable of error."⁷ That formulation revises the value conventionally attributed to error as well, rendering the value of life highly problematic. Both writers took a genealogical approach to the question of life. They each track usages of the term historically, denaturalizing it and opening it to contestation.

Over the course of Foucault's career, his interest in life led to the development of the concepts of biopower and biopolitics. Foucault came to believe that modern states regulated the lives of subjects instead of governing through the power to kill. Foucault's later work names the relations between life and state power: "biopower." He articulated these ideas in lecture courses in the mid-1970s, and they first appeared in print in 1976's Histoire de la sexualité (History of Sexuality). Foucault characterized biopower as the way states exercise power over "man in so far as he is a living being." Starting at the end of the eighteenth century, for example, the government attempts to control disease and birthrates.⁸ According to Foucault, states exercise biopower over populations rather than individuals and use statistical methods of calculation to do so. These shifts...