From Here to Eternity: Vatter’s The Republic of the Living

An industry of scholarship has formed around Foucault’s concept of biopower – how it operates, where and through what mechanisms, how it relates sovereign power, capitalist accumulation, and neoliberal government, and what forms of political and ethical life appear within its horizons. In Foucault, biopower is the name for a condition in which the biological life of the species becomes a political object and technique. Put differently, and in the Greek terminology so important to this strand of scholarship, biopower refers to a political life, bios, that is wholly oriented to and absorbed by the demands of biological life, zoé. Foucault’s presentation of our bio-history links the government of life with the securitization of the state and the production of populations. He describes a regime more extensive than sovereignty, and more intensive than disciplinarity. The politics of life – life as an actuarial rather than an existential category, as an instrument and aim of government – appears to cancel the question of the good life, or whether (to paraphrase Adorno) wrong life can be lived rightly.

The Republic of the Living is a massive book and an extraordinary achievement, a sweeping reconstruction of the radical critique of biopower from Hegel to Foucault and an outline and defense of an “affirmative biopolitics” that goes by various names – revolutionary republicanism, commune-ism, eternal life. If Vatter never settles on an answer to the Adornian question, this is because he poses it differently. It is not a question of what remains of bios, or the good life, when bare life feels a privilege. It is a question of whether the politics of life is exhausted by the techniques of government, or whether biopower might also be the site for the construction of a genuine political alternative.

To address this question, The Republic of the Living maps the circulations and crossings of biopower along three dimensions: natality, normality, and normativity. Natality is that “universal element” that inheres in the biological needs of the species and “governs the sexual reproduction of life” in the household and “living labor” in the economy (3). Normality is that aspect of life bound to systems of law, to rules and norms and codes of conduct, an inescapable aspect of a revolutionary praxis that aims to outlive the revolution and endure in institutions and practices. On this basis, Vatter rejects what he describes as “antinomian formulations” of communism. (I wonder if it is also the basis for any revision to Vatter’s earlier argument about Machiavelli and the meaning of political freedom, elaborated in Between Form and Event. There, Vatter describes Machiavelli in terms of a radical break with classical tradition “in order to think of political life from the standpoint of political freedom as no-rule,” while The Republic of the Living could be said to pursue a new normality, a transfigured relationship to law and language.¹ The Machiavelli book pursues a revolutionary republicanism linked to an-archism; here, it’s commune-ism. Perhaps this shift in terminology matters.) And normativity – the most obscure of the three, so I will rely on Vatter’s own words – points to “that aspect of political life that is creative of novelty, in which the universal and the particular dimensions of life are indistinguishable because singularity is entirely a feature of the common . . . a philosophical or contemplative life, which the Greeks considered to be a form of life that partakes of eternity, an eternal life” (3). With this concept of eternal life, and assisted by Benjamin, Kierkegaard, Spinoza, and Pauline Christianity, Vatter recasts biopolitics as negative theology.

The sections of the book roughly correspond to these dimensions of biopower. Part One examines the biopolitics of the economy, through two chapters on Hegel and Marx, respectively. The first offers a reading of the young Hegel’s critique of natural law and an argument for the presence of life in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Surprisingly, Vatter says little about the treatment of civil society in the...