Bio-Sovereignty and the Emergence of Humanity

I. Introduction

From the moment life became accessible as an object of political power, its role has been ambiguous: conducive to freedom and oppression, security and danger. No one has shown the ambiguities of a power focused on life better than Foucault, who went so far as to describe the dream of modernity as genocide (Foucault 1978: 137).¹ The paradoxes of a modern power at once devoted to and contemptuous of life provides one explanation for the twentieth century’s attention to human rights. Emerging from fear rather than hope, the enunciation of rights which would once, as Arendt remarks, have been seen as an inviolable part of the human condition, results from the ways the most minimal conditions of being human are endangered by politics (Ignatieff 1997: 18; Arendt 1973: 297).

Since World War II, human rights have undergone an extraordinary expansion. We can now recognize an international rights regime formed by international rights declarations; regional and international courts; NGOs and other groups who monitor rights; and new norms of state behavior giving human rights greater weight. The proliferation of references to human rights in and of itself implies the presence of the bearer of such rights — the human being, or ‘man,’ (Douzinas 1996: 122). That referent, however, has become more than a discursive object. At least since the end of the Cold War, humanity has emerged as a material political group in the same manner that the “people” became a concrete group with the rise of the representative nation-state.²

What political power represents humanity is less apparent. The United Nations, as the closest thing to an international political organization, appears such a power. But the decisions of the U.N., as well as its capacity to act, remain wholly circumscribed by the nation-states composing the U.N. Global or world civil society is also often treated as the political voice of the human. Such groups do indeed wield political influence on the actions of states. But they lack the power to enforce human rights. That task falls ultimately to the existent sovereign powers. As those powers become increasingly involved with humanity, they can no longer be fully captured by the concept of a nation-state sovereignty committed to particular peoples. Given the novelty of this emerging form of sovereignty and of humanity, we have few tools for understanding the meaning of each term, or the relations between them.

Indeed, that such a relationship could exist between humanity and political power has long been doubted. Since the French Revolution, the sheer breadth and presumed anonymity of humanity has resulted in skepticism about its political effectiveness. Arendt, who had a profound investment in the possibility of universal rights, found herself compelled to acknowledge that whether or not humanity could guarantee the rights of individuals belonging to it “is by no means certain” (p. 298). Such hesitations have been less evident since the end of the Cold War. Nearly by default, the main explorers of the emerging international rights regimes have been Kantian inspired cosmpolitanists. Those scholars have been readily inclined to treat international human rights as a globalization of the rights and dignities accorded by liberal democracies and as a limitation of sovereign power. Yet how the globalization of rights which emerged out of the modern sovereign state should limit the very power they owe their existence to is far from obvious.

Standing against Kantian visions of a cosmopolitan humanity is the profound skepticism of Carl Schmitt. Expanding his scathing critique of liberalism to the international field, Schmitt insisted any political formation of humanity would prove impossible (1996: 55). For Schmitt, the characteristics of humanity would undermine the features defining politics: the role of the sovereign exception and the friend-enemy distinction. Schmitt was clearly wrong to insist humanity could constitute no political group. At the same time, he astutely foresaw such a world would risk turning life into an indifferent value.

The nature of this relationship between humanity and sovereignty has been the subject of the recent work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Agamben’s depiction of sovereign power and bare life can be...