On Reconciling Biopolitics and Critical Theory

Abstract

This article examines attempts to reconcile biopolitics and Critical Theory, by drawing on Miguel Vatter’s The Republic of the Living (2014). Vatter contends that modern neoliberal government has become biopolitical by incorporating biological life into the calculations of political rationality. To counteract its “normalising” impacts, he recommends an “affirmative politics” of the living, one that escapes the techniques envisaged to administer and govern life. Only a dual approach, he suggests, that fuses both democratic and critical political and economic arguments, can contest neoliberalism. Vatter asserts that the basis of such a critique was first established by the Critical Theory tradition. However, for a biopolitical critique to become effective today, it is crucial to enhance the descriptive and normative understanding of the concept of Zoë or species life within the critical theoretical discourse. This shift in emphasis, however, raises several interpretative tensions with the fundamental perspectives and values of Critical Theory that are not fully acknowledged in Vatter’s proposed reconciliation of biopolitics and Critical Theory.

Keywords:

• Biopolitics
• Agamben
• Hegel
• Marx
• Arendt
• Vatter

Notes

1. Foucault, “What is Critique?” 50; hereafter page references are cited in the text.

2. Vatter, Republic of the Living, 4; hereafter page references are cited in the text.

3. Hyppolite, “Life and Consciousness,” 15.

4. Ibid., 15, 13.

5. Tucker, ed., The Marx/Engels Reader, 109.

6. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 11.

7. Fehér, “Redemptive and Democratic Paradigms,” 61–76.

8. Heller and Fehér, Biopolitics. Fehér and Heller’s treatment of biopolitics was incidental but also completely characteristic. These quintessential European intellectuals had only recently moved from Melbourne to New York in the mid-1980s. As scholars of the “dictatorship over needs,” even they could have hardly imagined that the decline of “really existing socialism” would be as rapid and definitive as it turned out to be. And one of the key themes in their political analyses at this time was to caution the Western political Left against the peace movement’s vehement anti-Americanism. For them, it was still a grave mistake to underestimate the danger of totalitarianism to the dynamics of modernity. The move to New York brought Heller and Fehér to the epicentre of the 1980s’ ferment engulfing American academic life around the issues of feminism, abortion, race and ecology. Debates on these issues within the American academy had taken on especially combative forms with the emergence of positive discrimination for Afro-American students in regard to admission, the rapid development of Women Studies and Gender Studies as academic disciplines and continuing struggles for women’s right on campus. These subjects form the core debates that are taken up in their Biopolitics. However, they bring a distinctively Eastern-European slant to their analyses, which proves to be decisive in a number of respects. First, politics becomes “total” under the “dictatorship over needs,” of which they had plenty of experience. Secondly, while they were aware that the slogan “the personal is political” of second-wave feminism had breached the protective limits modern liberalism had placed around the individual, and affirmed that this was the second greatest moral revolution in human history, they remained wary of the impact of total politics on individual freedom in the modern world.