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Abstract
Foucault's analysis of biopolitics has been appraised by Didier Fassin as successfully recognizing an essential trait of contemporary society: the attribution of an absolute value to abstract life and the emergence of political governmentalities managing life. Yet, claims Fassin, Foucault overlooked the need for paying close analytical attention to the everyday detail of lives differentially rendered worth living. Giving a focus to anthropologist Veena Das's work on sexual violence, this paper considers the surprising use by a number of contemporary post-Foucauldian theorists of the resources made available by philosopher Stanley Cavell's reading of Wittgenstein as an alternative for the analysis of everyday violence. Having discussed a further tenor of criticism of Foucault – suggestions that the articulation of biopolitics and its forms of indirect murder as a general phenomenon fail to describe the prior or framing conditions under which certain human lives are more vulnerable than others to becoming disposable life – the paper reconstructs a new lexicon of terms devised by Das which would be more adequate to such analysis. In fact, the paper argues that Foucault is just as available for such reconfiguration as other theorists to whom Das responds differently.
Notes
1 Sandra Laugier, “Care as a Politics of the Ordinary,” talk delivered at Northwestern University, Gender and Vulnerabilities Workshop, April 16–17, 2015.
2 Michel Foucault, “La philosophie analytique de la politique” (1978), in Dits et écrits 1954–1988, Vol. 3, ed. D. Defert and F. Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 540–1.
3 As when Discipline and Punish begins with Foucault's account of the spectacular aspects of the execution of Damiens. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 3–9.
4 Describing this development, Foucault notes this curious (in)visibility in which the quotidian questions concerning the circumstances in which our life will end, the circumstances in which we find ourselves when we are “adrift” in medical or penal systems, and the various protocols with which our mental states are evaluated may appear more decisive for our futures than questions such as for whom we vote, or what position we take in relation to large-scale, state-based, institutional struggles. Foucault, “La philosophie analytique de la politique,” 542–3.
5 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction, trans. R. Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978), 137.
6 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 137.
7 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 137–8.
8 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, ed. M. Bertani and A. Fontana, trans. D. Macey (London: Picador, 2003a), 256.
9 This is not to deny that some instantiations of the latter may be covert and require exposure, but, as in the tradition of prisoners governed by a principle of habeas corpus, the supposition is that they can and ought to be visible.
10 Ranjana Khanna, “Disposability,” differences 20.1 (2009): 188.
11 In “La philosophie analytique de la politique,” he speaks of resisting and refusing the games of power concerned with madness, health, medicine and penality, rather than engaging in forms of contestation only within the terms set by such frames (543).
12 Khanna, “Disposability,” 188.
13 One could refer, among a number of definitions, to his reference to genealogy as a practice “that attempts to restore the conditions for the appearance of a singularity born out of multiple determining elements of which it is not the product, but rather the effect.” Michel Foucault, “What is Critique?,” in Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, trans. L. and C. Porter (Los Angeles: Semiotexte, 2007a), 64.
14 Michel Foucault, “The Birth of Social Medicine,” in Power (The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Vol. 3), ed. J. D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000a), 152.
15 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 254.
16 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 261.
17 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 258; cited and discussed in Alex Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 58–9.
18 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 62.
19 See, for example, the response from Ewa Ziarek: “we need to reconsider … the way bare life is implicated in the gendered, sexist, colonial, and racist configurations of the political and, because of this implication, how it suffers different forms of violence.” Ewa Ziarek, “Bare Life on Strike: Notes on the Biopolitics of Race and Gender,” South Atlantic Quarterly 107 (2008): 89.
20 Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Who Sings the Nation State? Language, Politics, Belonging (London, New York and Calcutta: Seagull Press, 2007), 42. Also see Foucault, History of Sexuality, 93–5, 98.
21 Thomas Lemke, Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction, trans. E. Trump (New York: NYU Press), 58–60.
22 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 6–7.
23 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 35.
24 Ziarek, “Bare Life on Strike,” 93.
25 Ziarek, “Bare Life on Strike,” 93.
26 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso, 2004), 61–2.
27 Butler and Spivak, Who Sings, 41–2. See also Fassin: “this theory of the political as exception, grounding the social contract on the confusion of the bios and the zoe, does not account for the other side of this confusion, that is, the inequalities of lives, both qualitatively and quantitatively.” Didier Fassin, “The Parallel Lives of Philosophy and Anthropology,” in The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy, ed. V. Das et al. (Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 59.
28 Fassin, “Parallel Lives,” 56.
29 Fassin, “Parallel Lives,” 59.
30 Fassin, “Parallel Lives,” 58.
31 With what he admits is a “somewhat uncharitable” quotation, Fassin refers to a number of research proposals from social science graduate applicants, whose otherwise interesting intentions (e.g. to deal with the homicides of sex-workers, drug addicts and street children in the applicant's country) may be obscured as follows: “Here are the first lines of [one applicant's] abstract: ‘The thanatopolitical function of power operates in a biopolitical era in which the problem of sovereignty appears inadequate to explain how biopolitics anonymizes death through diffused and decentralized networks. My hypothesis is that the production of bare life does not belong exclusively to sovereignty and is completely compatible with the modern technology of power that intends to optimize and control life.’” This is characterized by Fassin as follows: “One will have recognized the lexicon of Foucault (biopolitics, power, technology) and Agamben (thanatopolitical, sovereignty, bare life), or perhaps more exactly of Agamben reading Foucault. The condensation of these philosophical keywords renders the project, though apparently interesting in its intention, almost unreadable. This excerpt … is just one example among several proposals … using this philosophical jargon. Their faithful but mimetic use of this vocabulary led them to what seemed to be a scientific impasse in which words, rather than concepts, were imposed on the ethnographical material, thus ossifying it. I chose this easy prey – a student's project that no-one will identify – but consider it a sign of broader trends in the anthropological production, even if it often takes more subtle forms.” Fassin, “Parallel Lives,” 53. A critical response from Fassin to Foucault as having “systematically eluded the confrontation with what had been one of his most remarkable intuitions: the place occupied by life in contemporary societies” (“Parallel Lives,” 56) and to Agamben's paradigmatic and generalizing accounts of bare life, lead him to describe some alternatives to be found in anthropology's “recent contribution … to the understanding of the politics of life,” with, among these, a “shifting the focus from the extraordinary to the ordinary,” associated by Fassin with the work of Veena Das (“Parallel Lives,” 59). See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
32 Stanley Cavell, “The Availability of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy,” Philosophical Review 71.1 (1962); reprinted in Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 52. Cited in Fassin, “Parallel Lives,” 69.
33 Sharon Holland, The Erotic Life of Slavery (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).
34 Holland, Erotic Life, 14.
35 Holland, Erotic Life, 14.
36 While repudiating this suggestion that there might be a climate of somewhat greater “cosiness” in the pages of Cavell when compared to those of Erotic Life of Slavery or Life and Words, Das does not disagree about the significance of the difference in detail of the everyday violence and contexts described by Cavell, Holland and herself. Those differences notwithstanding, Das returns us to the point that Cavell certainly is not arguing for an everyday understood in terms of cosiness – on the contrary. She reminds us of passages in his work which refer to political differences that would be poorly characterized as such. Instead he describes these as “complete breaks,” with some words revealing that “we are not of the same flesh.” Rather than speaking of a simple context of agreement, even the “on the whole we do” remains for Cavell a means of characterizing experiences of insult, dismissal and hurt. Similarly, what interests Das is the extent to which he might relate (as in his Preface to Das's Life and Words) “small deaths” (the “everyday slights”) to the standing fault lines of society, or might refer (as in Claim of Reason) to the violence of which human beings are capable, well beyond what we might have considered their nature. To whatever extent Cavell does offer this tenor of characterizations of the everyday, this is where Das would prefer to concentrate our reading. (Exchange between author and Das, personal communication, September 15, 2015.) Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
37 Fassin, “Parallel Lives,” 69. Fassin is describing the compromise offered by a philosophy of forms of life on this point.
38 Cavell, “The Availability of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy,” 52.
39 “In other words,” he adds, “that life is possible.” Fassin, “Parallel Lives,” 69.
40 Achille Mbembe, Critique de la raison nègre (Paris: La Découvert, 2013), 10.
41 For example, in Fassin's references to Das in “Parallel Lives.”
42 Das, Life and Words, 21, see also 25, 161.
43 Das, Life and Words, 16.
44 Veena Das, “The Limits of the Human,” paper delivered at Northwestern University, Gender and Vulnerabilities Workshop, April 16–17, 2015, 2.
45 Das, “The Boundaries of the ‘We’,” 171.
46 Das, “The Boundaries of the ‘We’,” 171.
47 See also Das, Life and Words, 89.
48 Das discusses this distinction in Cavell's work a number of times. Where the horizontal dimension would refer to the various forms, habits, possibilities, traditions and cultural differences of human eating, the vertical dimension (that difference between pecking and eating) tests, as Das reiterates, the limits of human life. Das, Life and Words, 89.
49 Das, Life and Words, 16.
50 Das, “The Boundaries of the ‘We’,” 170.
51 Das, “The Boundaries of the ‘We’,” 170.
52 Das, “The Boundaries of the ‘We’,” 170.
53 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (London: Blackwell, 2001), 192e. Cited in Das, “The Boundaries of the ‘We’,” 170.
54 Das, Life and Words, 89–90.
55 Das, “The Boundaries of the ‘We’,” 171; and see Das, Life and Words, 16.
56 Das, Life and Words, 46.
57 Das, Life and Words, 15–16.
58 Das, Life and Words, 16.
59 Das, Life and Words, 90.
60 Das, “The Boundaries of the ‘We’,” 169.
61 Das, “The Boundaries of the ‘We’,” 171.
62 Das, Life and Words, 20, 18.
63 Das, Life and Words, 18–19. Das describes the state's use of reporting of “numbers and magnitudes to attribute all kinds of ‘passions’ such as panic, incredulity, or barbarity to the populace when faced with a crisis such as an epidemic or a riot — thus constructing the state as a rational guarantor of order” (19). This is associated with her rereading of the social contract as a masculine nation which secures the sexual contract by promising reinforcement of a husband or father's authority and the return of daughters, wives and sexual orders.
64 Fassin, “Parallel Lives,” 53.
65 Das, Life and Words, 142.
66 Das, Life and Words, 148–9.
67 Das, Life and Words, 197.
68 Das, Life and Words, 196.
69 Das, Life and Words, 196.
70 Das, Life and Words, 196.
71 Thinking for example of anthropologist Joãu Biehl's discussion of the alternatives of the (Deleuzian) cartographic and the archaeological understood as prompting analyses overdetermined by an attention to regimes of power and knowledge. Joãu Biehl, “Ethnography in the Way of Theory,” in The Ground Between: Anthropologists Engage Philosophy, ed. V. Das et al. (Raleigh, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 95.
72 Das, Life and Words, 78.
73 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 30, cited in Das, Life and Words, 78.
74 Das, Life and Words, 78.
75 Das, Life and Words, 78.
76 See, for example, his comment that it is “no doubt, not very fruitful to look for a relation of anteriority or dependence between the two terms of, on the one hand, a private ‘liberal’ medicine that was subject to the mechanisms of individual initiative and to the laws of the market, and, on the other, a medical politics drawing support from structures of power and concerning itself with the health of a collectivity,” and the alternatives he goes on to offer. Michel Foucault, “The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century,” in Power (Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984. Vol. 3), ed. J. D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000b), 90.
77 “There is not the legal age, the disciplinary age, and then the age of security. Mechanisms of security do not replace disciplinary mechanisms, which would have replaced juridico-legal mechanisms. In reality you have a series of complex edifices in which, of course, the techniques themselves change and are perfected, or anyway become more complicated, but in which what above all changes is the dominant characteristic, or more exactly, the system of correlation between juridico-legal mechanisms, disciplinary mechanisms, and mechanisms of security.” Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, ed. M. Sennelart, trans. G. Burchell (London: Picador, 2007b), 8.
78 See, for example, the different configurations of disciplinary apparatuses discussed in Psychiatric Power and elsewhere, which one could certainly interpret as taking a retrospective perspective on their various different possible modes, dating back to the Middle Ages, but one could also consider from the perspective of a more lateral analysis of their reconfiguring elements and the differential possibilities for their coalescing in a number of given “presents.” Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the College de France 1973–74, trans. G. Burchell (New York: Picador, 2003b), 71.
79 Life and Words, 78. Das speaks of the alternative ways in which we could think of the connection of inside and outside, outward criteria and inner states, legislation and transgression, through a modelling which she opposes to the imprisoning metaphors she attributes to Foucault.
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Penelope Deutscher
Penelope Deutscher is Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University in the United States. She works in the areas of twentieth-century and contemporary French philosophy, gender and sexuality studies. She is the author of Yielding Gender: Feminism, Deconstruction and the History of Philosophy (Routledge, 1997); A Politics of Impossible Difference: The Later Work of Luce Irigaray (Cornell University Press, 2002); How to Read Derrida (Granta/Norton, 2006); and The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Ambiguity, Conversion, Resistance (Cambridge University Press, 2008).