Biopolitics by Catherine Mills

Author:Catherine Mills
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Conclusion

To conclude, in this chapter I have considered efforts to develop an affirmative or positive approach to biopolitics, that shifts away from the wholly negative, thanatopolitical conception proffered by Agamben. In the first section, I outlined the account of Empire and the transformative power of the multitude provided by Hardt and Negri. Their account of an affirmative biopolitics relies upon the immanent potentiality of the multitude, which is simultaneously constitutive of Empire and capable of overcoming it through producing alternative forms of living. In the second section, I outlined the recent work of Esposito, who attempts to integrate the negative and positive aspects of biopolitics in his conception of the immunitary paradigm. Esposito’s work is complex, but the general argument is that modern biopolitics is characterized by an immunitary logic in which self-defence is precipitated by the controlled incorporation of a threat. In Bios, this is cast more specifically as the incorporation of death in life in order to protect life. And within this frame, Nazism appears as the most extreme manifestation of the entwining of life and death in biopolitics. However, Nazism also becomes a privileged site of intervention, insofar as it may also provide the point for the resolution of the biopolitical integration of life and death. For Esposito, an affirmative biopolitics must be sought through the maximum torsion of the three key dispositifs of Nazism. He urges a reappropriation of the biopolitical terms of body, birth and life, and their radical deconstruction to yield an affirmative biopolitics that breaks the immunitary logics of modernity.

This summary of recent conceptions of affirmative biopolitics completes the first part of this book. In the second part, I will address the theories outlined here from more specific angles to both give shape to the ways in which certain problems or questions have been addressed in the debate so far, and to show the failures of the principal contributors to address other questions or problems. Thus, I discuss a broad range of literature to bring into focus several key points of contention as well as some significant lacunae within the contemporary field of biopolitical studies.

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