In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Beyond the Death Principle
  • Jan Mieszkowski (bio)

Heidegger’s doctrine [of Being-toward-death] becomes an exegesis of the futile joke: Only death is free and that costs you your life.

—Theodor W. Adorno

More than three decades after his death, Michel Foucault’s theory of biopower continues to enjoy prodigious authority. Presented in a series of lectures he delivered at the Collège de France in the mid-1970s and in the contemporaneous first volume of The History of Sexuality, his account of the way in which “the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy” has shaped debates across the humanities and social sciences (1). The notion that mortality may be a—if not the—foundational political concept has been particularly significant for reflections on state hegemony and resistance to state violence.1 In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben claims to be extending Foucault’s project by showing the full ramifications of the entry of zoē into the polis, going so far as to name “the politicization of bare life as such” as “the decisive event of modernity” (4). In Multitude, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri draw on Foucault and Agamben to argue that sovereign power perpetuates itself not simply by exercising its authority to kill or spare the lives of its subjects but by actively producing and sustaining life. Even wars, they maintain, “must not only bring death”; “more important than the negative technologies of annihilation and torture …is the constructive character of biopower” (20). In these terms, sovereignty is predicated on the engineering of a populace’s well-being. Power “over” life is the capacity to prolong it as much as it is the ability to end it.

Despite the abiding popularity of these and related arguments, they have not been without their detractors. Prominent among them is Jacques Derrida, who offers a number of critiques of the understandings [End Page 151] of sovereignty, power, and violence propounded by Foucault and his inheritors. In a late seminar recently published as The Beast and the Sovereign, Derrida challenges the historical schema undergirding Foucault and Agamben’s claims about the defining events of modernity, questions their interpretation of the Greek conception of nomos, and expresses skepticism that Aristotle and his contemporaries ever articulate a stable distinction between bios and zoē. Derrida also highlights the ways in which Agamben avoids engaging with Heidegger at key junctures, suggesting that the Foucauldian discourse on biopolitics repeats rather than critiques many of the metaphysical gestures that Heidegger diagnoses in traditional theories of law and politics.

Much as Agamben proposes to extend Foucault’s project, Marc Crépon’s The Thought of Death and the Memory of War continues Derrida’s efforts to elaborate an alternative to a Foucauldian politics of mortality, focusing on death’s enduring place in the philosophical canon as both a driving force of thought and a profound threat to it. In an exemplary excursion into the Phaedo, Crépon argues that in Plato the mind aims to transcend the body, to liberate itself from any preoccupation with the sensible realm in order to grasp the intelligible. As a result, “thought is never closer to apprehending itself than when, freed from its dread and apprehension, it thinks about death” (131). In these terms, reflection on death is the quintessential self-reflexive praxis, the most genuinely thoughtful mode of thought. Even for Plato, however, death is never simply an opportunity for “pure” contemplation. The discourse on death invariably betrays a self-negating impulse, the prospect of thought’s abnegation of its own duties and processes. The thought of death is potentially as much an act of self-disappropriation as self-appropriation; it is the moment at which thought comes into its own by exposing itself to its own limits, if not to its own imminent demise.

While the finitude of thought preoccupies Crépon throughout his book, his goal is not to elaborate an ahistorical argument about the nuances of speculative logic. He suggests that the question of death is a timely concern because today’s media consumers have unparalleled access to still and moving images of dead and dying human beings. Omnipresent, the graphic...

pdf

Share