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1. Divisions of the Proper: Heidegger, Technology, and the Biopolitical
- University of Minnesota Press
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. 1 1 D I V I S I O N S O F T H E P R O P E R Heidegger, Technology, and the Biopolitical That this chapter should open with the thought of Martin Heidegger in a context of the thanatopolitical is perhaps surprising. Yes, it’s certainly true that Heidegger’s thought continues to generate enormous attention—one need only consider the titles that appear every year dedicated to him1 —but my impression is that few have attempted to set out the profound connections that join his thought to a larger drift of contemporary thought toward the thanatopolitical.2 In the following pages, I want to sketch the path of that drift by examining two terms that appear across Heidegger’s thought. The first is immediately recognizable, occupying, as it does, a central place in four texts— in the series of lectures Heidegger gave in 1942–43 that are collected in Parmenides, especially those sections dedicated to the (im)propriety of the hand: Heidegger’s reading of “Homecoming/To Kindred Ones” from 1942, published in Elucidations on Hölderlin’s Poetry; 1954’s “The Question Concerning Technology”; and finally, his “Letter on Humanism” from 1947. The term in question is technē and its derivative technology.3 The second term is nearly as familiar to contemporary readers, though it is rarely, if ever, named in connection with Heidegger’s thought. I’m speaking of biopolitics, the seemingly never-ending inscription of biology in politics as well as the reverse: of politics read in a biological key.4 As I consider the intersection of technology and biopolitics in Heidegger’s later thought, one of my principal arguments will be precisely that to the degree we speak about biopolitics today, lurking beneath is a conception of technology deeply indebted to Heidegger’s ontological elaboration of it. Moreover, this intersection provides the ground for the marked thanatopolitical inflection of biopolitics that characterizes so much of contemporary political philosophy. I will have much more to say about this in 2 . D I V I S I O N S O F T H E P R O P E R chapter 2, when I discuss the thought of Giorgio Agamben, especially his reflections on the function of dispositif in oikonomia. I also take it up in a somewhat different fashion in my reading of Roberto Esposito’s understanding of dispositif and personhood, while in the third chapter, dedicated to Peter Sloterdijk, the figure (or, depending on one’s point of view, the phantasm) of Heidegger dramatically reappears in Sloterdijk’s immunological walls, the technology of the household, and most forcefully, the distinction between humanizing and bestializing media. As I argue there as well, how Heidegger takes up the question of technology, in the distinction between proper and improper writing, allows an implicit thanatopolitics to become available for contemporary political thought. In these four texts, Heidegger elaborates a distinction between proper and improper writing that has ontological effects such that a division in life is constructed between one Art, or species of man, associated with proper writing and another with improper writing. One final observation on the theme of thanatopolitics, technology, and contemporary Italian thought. It’s true that the object of thanatopolitical reflection in Agamben’s work is chiefly Nazism. Indeed, Agamben refers in most cases to the presumed biological need (and practice) of making some live by killing others because the presence of these others can no longer be tolerated. This is how he will read modernity as populated entirely by homo sacer. Yet the ultimate premise for these readings can be found in the relation of technology to Being in Heidegger’s thought, that is, in an ontological tear brought on by the distinction between proper and improper forms of writing. That Agamben deploys the state of exception as the mechanism by which biopolitics is always already a thanatopolitics doesn’t alter, however, the fundamental authorization that Heidegger’s thought provides Agamben because proper and improper writing frequently appear to be the basis for his distinction between forms of life. Agamben himself suggests just such a reading in his “Notes on Politics” from Means without End, in which he extends proper and improper into a global critique of industrial democracy.5 In Agamben’s positing of a relation between technology and sacrifice that is embodied in the figure of the homo sacer, he implicitly gestures to a Heideggerian ontology that would have technology determining...