Forms of Life: Aesthetics and Biopolitics in German Culture by Andreas Gailus (review)

During the last years of his life, Michel Foucault, the central figure to whom we are indebted in our approach to the question of life, moved away from the concept of biopolitics he had developed over the preceding decade and toward questions of the subject. Whereas his previous work had concerned the history of modernity, his lectures, devoted to the hermeneutics of the subject, to the care of the self, and finally to parrhesia, now focused on sources from Greek and Roman Antiquity. Andreas Gailus’s pathbreaking study of what the subtitle of his book calls “aesthetics and biopolitics in German culture” now offers the groundwork for an account of modernity that includes the dimension of the subject Foucault discovered at that point.

The grids of biopolitical conceptualizations from Foucault to Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito, Gailus claims in his preface and introduction, are not merely too abstract and deterministic but also too coarse. This comes at a considerable cost: through the marginalization of subjective life, the “violence of biopolitical determination” is elided, while “the intrinsic value and force” of life is precluded from coming into view (x). By contrast, the stake of Gailus’s book lies in the claim that the literary archive—and in its wake, other artistic “media that are perceptually and conceptually self-reflective” (11)—offers accounts of the intersection of the elements of biopolitical modernity—technology, knowledge, and power—with what the book emphatically calls an experiential or “existential” (xii) dimension of an irreducibly composite vitality. This dimension of inner experience is not an interiority preceding the social but a “network of dissonant forces . . . shaped by third-person narratives, impersonal scripts, practices, and technologies that regulate social life and structure the self’s relation to itself and to others” (9). Gailus’s argument follows Thomas Khurana’s and Christoph Menke’s exploration of concepts such as force and development. They define a form in which life is the subject and object of a process of formation that overcomes the separation of the cultural and the symbolic. In a last step, Gailus assimilates this constellation to what Wittgenstein in his Philosophic Investigations calls “form of life” (and alongside it “aspect seeing”). “Form of life” emphasizes how language games, a practice that cannot be clearly delimited and that accounts for the groundlessness and openness of meaning, is embedded in the pragmatic dimension of life. With Stanley Cavell, the book points to “the mutual absorption of the natural and the social” (52) as a constitutive part of the concept. Gailus’s book derives its main title, Forms of Life, from this concept, emphasizing the ineluctable plurality inherent in the mutual imbrication of life, form, and signification. In the epilogue, Gailus sketches a political philosophy merging from this plurality.

The book is divided into three parts. Each of them is devoted to two authors and focuses on a configuration of life. The first part describes “Life as Formation” (Kant, Goethe), the second “The Conflict of Forms” (Kleist, Nietzsche), and the third part “Life as Deformation” (Benn, Musil). The book begins in part one to develop the arc of its historical argument in a detailed reading of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment. In the vitalist tradition from Herder to Blumenbach, in which Kant’s third critique is embedded, Gailus finds a theoretical lineage capable of laying the historical groundwork for his study. Recent scholarship has amply demonstrated the crucial role Kant’s theory of organism in the second half of the critique has played in the life sciences in general and for the emergence of the idea of self-organization in particular. Yet, at the heart of the book’s juxtaposition of the aesthetic judgment—the “life of cognition”—with the teleological judgment on organic form—the “cognition of life”—lies the “undercutting of the boundary between organic and biological life” (78). The vitality of life and the need for its aesthetic vitalization...