Biopolitics: Context and text of philosophy

Abstract

The article focuses on the process of conceptualizing biopolitics within the framework of philosophy, which is developing in the context of modern biopolitics. The text of “biopolitical philosophy” becomes part of its own context — the real biopolitical situation, thereby changing it. In addition, it correlates with the general philosophical context of the Western philosophical tradition, namely, denying it, deconstructing, and overcoming it in different senses, which are far from being reduced to Hegel’s Aufhebung. In this manner, the text of biopolitical philosophy is integrated into the current post-metaphysics with its well-known “turns” (practical, linguistic, ethical, etc.). As a political philosophy, biopolitics is a radical rethinking of the political philosophy of modernity, caused by the collapse of the “project” of the Enlightenment and the crisis of bourgeois representative democracy. This relationship of biopolitics with philosophical classics is analyzed in the article on the example of the two most significant biopolitical concepts created by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. Agamben’s ambition is to complete what Foucault had begun; but the way he “develops” the ideas of his predecessor is at a fundamental departure from Foucault’s version of biopolitics. Despite the fact that both begin with criticism of traditional political philosophy, turning from the “essential” formulation of the question of power and government (the problem of the source of power, its legitimation and sovereignty) to the question of how power is exercised. In this context, the problem of dispositive arises. For Foucault it is a historically defined type of ruling rationality (gouvernementalité). Agamben understands dispositive as a universal structure, thanks to which the animal is “humanized” through the exclusion of “naked life”. A different understanding of dispositive gives rise to two different “archaeologies”. Foucault is wary of philosophical universalism, while Agamben is enthusiastic about immersion into “beginnings”, albeit conceivable “event-wise”.

Keywords:

biopolitics, sovereignty, dispositive, state of exclusion, life-form