Toward a Non-humanist Humanism by Spanos William V

Author:Spanos, William V. [Spanos, William V.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438465975
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2017-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

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It would be possible to extend this genealogy of bare life to include, in an indissolubly related way, such prominent contemporary post-poststructuralist theorists as Judith Butler, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and Jacques Rancière. But, for the sake of brevity, I will limit reference to that aspect of their thought that addresses the biopolitical means/end logic of democratic capitalist modernity that it has always disavowed, but which, as we have seen, the arrival at the limits of its operations has dis-closed. I mean the political figure at the other end of the continuum of being, who, like the ontological nothing (das Nichts) that this binarist logic “will have nothing to do with,”15 yet absolutely relies on, is captured in a system of exclusion/inclusion that reduces “it,” in some degree or other, to a non-being that at the same time serves the dominant culture, that is to say, to “disposable reserve” (Heidegger), “useful and docile body” (Foucault) and, ultimately to a “superfluous” entity (Arendt) or “bare life” (Agamben): life, to reiterate, that can be killed, as the Nazis killed the Jews, with impunity.

Thus, for example, Judith Butler, in a gesture remarkably reminiscent of Heidegger’s analysis of that technological mode of comportment toward being he calls Enframing (Ge-stell), interprets late modernity, particularly the fulfillment of the logic of belonging of the nation-state, as a “frame of war,” that is, a permanent state of exception, that determines those who, in one way or another, do not adhere to the imperatives of the frame, as “ungrievable,” which is to say, as expendable (bare life):

The shared condition of precariousness implies that the body is constitutively social and interdependent. … Yet, precisely because each body finds itself potentially threatened by others who are, by definition precarious as well, forms of domination follow. This standard Hegelian point takes on specific meanings under contemporary conditions of war: the shared condition of precariousness leads not to reciprocal recognition, but to a specific exploitation of targeted populations, of lives that are not quite lives, cast as “destructible” and “ungrievable.” Such populations are “lose-able,” or can be forfeited, precisely because they are framed as being already lost or forfeited; they are cast as threats to human life as we know it, rather than living populations in need of protection from illegitimate state violence, famine, or pandemics. Consequently, when such lives are lost they are not grievable, since, in the twisted logic that rationalizes their death, the loss of such populations is deemed necessary to protect the lives of “the living.”16

In the case of Badiou, the “others” of the nation-state in its modern, parliamentary capitalist mode are those “who don’t count” in a quantitative truth system in which “what counts” is determined by those who own the means of production.17 But it is, above all, in his book on the Arab Spring, The Rebirth of History (2012), so reminiscent of Agamben’s analysis of Tiananmen Square,18 that Badiou most clearly specifies his sense of these “non-existents” and their affiliation with the non-beings of the other theorists I have invoked.

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