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  • Aesthetic NatureAgainst Biology
  • Christoph Menke (bio)

According to Michel Foucault’s definition of modernity, its threshold is biology: the thinking of life or of nature as living. This biological threshold of modernity is at the same time political—the threshold to a new form of power. While in his later History of Sexuality Foucault identifies this new form with the “biopolitical” regime of normalization, he had shown in his earlier Discipline and Punish that already the regime of disciplinary power was founded on a new concept of the human body, of its nature. The regime of discipline can only unfold its transformative power if the mechanical body, “the image of which had for so long haunted those who dreamt of disciplinary perfection” is replaced by “the natural body, the bearer of forces and the seat of duration” (Foucault, Discipline and Punish). The decisive determination of “this new object,” the living body, is established by Leibniz’ image of the monad. The monad lives because its changes are “actions,” which result not from an external impetus or push, but from an “internal principle,” the monad’s “active force”: “The action of the internal principle which brings about the change or the passing from one perception to another may be called appetition” that leads to “new perceptions.” (Leibniz, Monadology) The monad has appetites, it has forces, it is self-acting without being self-conscious: the monad can act in a “state of stupor.” Life is self-acting that is not bound to self-consciousness or self-knowledge, or rather, to live means to move, to change one’s states (by making new perceptions) or to [End Page 193] follow one’s appetites, without being guided by a concept or a rule.

The life of the natural body can only become the point of reference for power—be it the normalizing power of biopolitics or the individualizing power of the discipline—if its process, as the unfolding of its internal principle, has a teleological or functional structure. This is how biology, in criticizing the principles of Newtonian physics at the end of the 18th century began to re-conceptualize the traditional teleological account of the living in terms of functional relations. Blumenbach thus wrote that we find in the living body “a drive (or a tendency or a conatus, however one may wish to call it) […] that seems to be among the first causes of all generation, nutrition, and reproduction; and which I will here, to prevent all misinterpretation and to distinguish it from the other forces of nature, call the drive to formation (nisus formativus).” (Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, Über den Bildungstrieb [1780]) The biological “drive” or “force” conceives of the “internal principal” of the living movement as its purpose or as the possibility of its actuality; the internal principle is the drive or force that serves the reproduction of this form of life in each particular instance and specimen. Biologically conceived, then, to live means to realize those purposes that constitute the form or the species of the organism.

There is a second, different understanding of the new, modern image of the natural body as “the bearer of forces” (Foucault). This is the aesthetic understanding, the idea of “aesthetic nature.” Aesthetics is a theory (and practice) of nature as living. But it understands life as not teleological (or even anti- teleological), as not functional (or even dysfunctional). In a posthumous fragment, Nietzsche described the aesthetic “contemplation of the world” as the “adoration of the genius” and he described the genius—which is nothing else than the aesthetic nature of everybody—in a disparaging comparison: “The genius is like a blind sea crab that continuously probes in all directions and occasionally catches something; he probes, however, not in order to catch, but because his limbs must cavort about [weil seine Glieder sich tummeln müssen].” The aesthetic movements and alterations of the living body are the expression of an inner principle, a force, but they do not fulfill a function. They are not performed in order to realize a purpose, but unfold without a direction or purpose. The aesthetic nature of the living is play.

Biology understands the going-on of the...

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