Law and antrhropotechnics in the ultra-history of biopower. 1.1 The panel I am introducing here today has a double purpose. On the one hand, we

Transcription

1 1 Law and antrhropotechnics in the ultra-history of biopower By Fabián LUDUEÑA ROMANDINI (CONICET / UBA). 1.1 The panel I am introducing here today has a double purpose. On the one hand, we question ourselves about the limits and problems in Giorgio Agamben s work, as one of the most interesting contemporary models in the study of biopolitics. And on the other hand, we continue exploring some issues that are left open from the Italian philosopher s research. Due to time constraints, I apologize for analyzing only one of the points proposed in the abstract. My paper will be therefore centered in the criticism of Giorgio Agamben s utilization of ancient philosophy for the elaboration of his book Homo Sacer I. In this sense, we will place special emphasis on the presence of Aristotle in the Agambenian corpus but also on the significant and essential absence of Plato. One of the most disturbing questions in Western political history is placed by Plato in the mouth of the foreign Eleatic, in which many critics have defined with very little sensitivity to the untimely as a mere practical exercise of dialectics for the candidates to philosophers in the Athenian Academy: but tell me, between the character of a big house (megáles schêma oikéseos) and the volume of a small city (smikrâs póleos ogkos), is there any difference concerning their government? (Pl., Plt., 259b). None (oudén) Socrates answers. Plato thus clearly implies that the science of the government of man is only one even though it might be sometimes called royal (Basilikèn), political (politikèn) or economical (oikonomikén). Undoubtedly, it is against this platonic passage that Aristotle built the supposed antagonism between politics and economy. In

2 2 fact, Aristotle pointed out, there are those who think [in clear reference to Plato], in effect, that lordship (despoteía) is a science (epistéme) and ruling of the house (oikonomía), of the lord (despoteía), of the town (politikè) and of the king (basiliké) are the same thing (ARISTOTELES, Pl., 1253b). However, politics has paid a high price when ignoring such key statement by Plato who, to be clearer, subsequently makes explicit the very object of all sovereign power: Since it is given that the regal science (tês basilikês epistémes) does not govern (epistatoûn) lifeless things (apsúchon) as it is the case of architecture-, its role is nobler since it is among the living (zóois) that it rules and over whom it exerts its power since always (dúnamin) [Pl., Plt., 261b] All sovereign power is, originally, power over life, and every exercise of such power necessarily coincides with the administration of the living. Such is the thesis defended by Plato with a taxonomic terminology which demolishes, even before it was to be established, all possible difference between the so called public and private spheres. Political science, Plato says, is no other thing but a subclass of the production and raising of living beings (tén tôn zóon génesin kaì trophén) : the anthropotechnological program assumed by the West when under Plato s sign- the production of the biopolitical body of the city of men is placed in the hands of a sovereign power essentially eugenic, could not be enunciated more clearly. 1.2 Over the last few years, philosophy has once again placed its look over the Politics of Aristotle, as one of the foundational texts of Western politics. For that, emphasis has been placed on the distinction between the concepts of zoé and bíos supposedly present in the Greek texts, in an attempt to demonstrate that according to them bíos was

3 3 something like a qualified life and, therefore, the very subject of politics, while zoé was, so to say, a mere natural life originally excluded from the city sphere. For now, this undoubtedly partial reading does not take the previously considered platonic corpus into account. It was only by excluding this last one of the real origins of politics that it was possible to conclude that there exists something like a so strict opposition between zoé and bíos. We have already seen how, for Plato, there is no sovereignty that is not constituted, precisely, over the zoé, being this the object of all politics. Aristotle could also be considered as someone who has opposed point by point his master s thought with respect to the very subject of politics, and the antithesis between zoé and bíos could confirm this perspective if there really existed one. But, is there really such opposition in the Aristotelian thought? If some fundamental passages are reconsidered, vacillation and questioning to this supposed certainty immediately arise. In effect, Aristotle recalls at the beginning of Politics that the community (koinonía) naturally constituted (katá phýsin) for the fulfillment of daily needs (sunestekuía) is the house (oikós), then, the first community constituted by various houses in sight of non- daily needs is the village (kóme) and, finally, in a decisive passage, Aristotle states that The perfect community of many villages is the city (pólis), which embodies, so as to say, the completion of utter self-sufficiency, and that emerged because of the needs of life, but exists now for living finely (gignoméne mèn oûn toû zên héneken, oûsa dè toû eû zên) (Politics, 1252b). From this first ascertainment, it could be deduced that the city is one of the natural

4 4 things, and that men is by nature a political animal (zôon politikòn). For that, a being who does not need to live in a city will be either a beast (hé theríon) or a god (hé theós). Giorgio Agamben has proposed an interpretation of this passage according to which bare life [understood here as zoè] bears the single privilege of being that over whose exclusion the city of men is founded. Thus, the zoè would step into Western politics to be immediately excluded and transformed into bíos through an inclusive exclusion mechanism, of exceptio. According to this perspective, only the exclusion of this prime zoè would allow for the establishment of a possible political field. To support this, Agamben evokes another fundamental passage in the Politics: Nature, as we usually say, does nothing in vain, the man is the only animal that possesses language (lógon dè mónon ánthropos échei tôn zóon). Voice is a sign of pain and pleasure, and for that the other animals (zóois) have it as well, since their nature allows them to feel pain and pleasure and to transmit it to the others. But language is used to express what is convenient and what is harmful, what is fair and unfair, and it is exclusive of men, with difference to the other animals, the fact of having the sense of right and wrong (agathoû kaì kakoû), of the fair and unfair (dikaíou kaí adíkou) and of the rest of the things of the same kind. And it is the community of these things which constitutes the house and the city (hé dè toúton koinonía poieî oikían kaì pólin). [Politics, 1253] Even though for Aristotle the city is, of course, ontologically previous to the house, it is necessary to point out that the house and the city both imply the capability to distinguish between fair and unfair, expressed by men through language. It is only because of the ontological preeminence of the city over the house, of the group over the

5 5 individual, that justice can only reach its perfection in the polis. This ascertainment affects the way in which the zôon politikòn syntagm must be perceived, since the grammatical structure itself seems to deny the opposition between zoè and bíos so firmly defended by Agamben. Conscious about this, the Italian philosopher made the attempt to overcome this problem by writing that in this expression political is not an attribute of the living as such, but a specific difference which determines the zoon kind [Homo sacer I, Madrid, 1999, p. 17]. However, this strict distinction between zoè and bíos stemming from the differentiation between an attribute and a specific difference is inconsistent, or better still, it does not exist as such in the text and is nothing but a clever rhetorical strategy by Agamben to introduce in the Aristotelian text the supposed (novel) identification of an a-political sphere of the zoè opposed to the qualified life of the politics bíos. Nonetheless, if there is no chance to distinguish here between an attribute and a specific difference, how can this Aristotelian definition be interpreted? Precisely, what Aristotle wants to signify with the zôon politikòn syntagm is that men s substance itself in so far as different from the animal consists of having its biological existence essentially politicized. That is, when an animal politicizes its own life, immediately a man emerges. It is not possible then, to isolate such thing as a double dimension of life since politics is not a supplement of life now called bíos- which would be added a posteriori to a substrate constituted by a primary zoè, as Agamben states. On the contrary, the Aristotelian statement is much more disturbing and loaded with consequences: if there is no real categorical distinction between zoè and bíos, then politics is in Aristotle, since its very beginnings, a politics of life. There is no such thing as a politics which transcends the biological life of the species. Man is simply called political because he is the only animal who is consciously in charge of his own zoè

6 6 according to the fair and unfair criteria. But the substrate over which politics applies is nothing but the original zoè. This bears a paramount consequence: in strict terms, zoopolitics should be used instead of bio-politics to designate the fundamental substance of human politics. In this point, as we can appreciate, Plato and Aristotle fully coincide: man is nothing but an animal who has decided to exert a sort of regulating action over his biological life, and this action is called polítical. From this perspective, Plato and Aristotle are the real thinkers of a zoopolitics which does not seek for creating the illusions of a kind of chimaeric world (the supposed bíos) separated from the ecosystemic biodiversity, a world which many philosophers identify with a sphere of the strictly human action. In his attempt to award originality and preeminence to his readings of Aristotle, Agamben has strategically omitted any reference to the interpretation of the same passage made by one of his main masters. In fact, and just to mention one famous example, Martin Heidegger in his Letter on humanism had noted regarding Aristotle, that In the same way, the term animal, zôon, already implies an interpretation of life which is necessarily supported by (beruht) a conception of the being (auf einer Auslegung des Seienden) as zoê and phýsis in whose interiors appears the living (das Lebendige). But, besides, and before any other thing, it is necessary to wonder whether man s essence (das Wesen des Menschen), from an original point of view and which decides before anything, lies over the dimension of the animalitas [...] but it must be well understood that by this way man is definitely pushed into the essential dominion of the animalitas, even if, far from identifying it with the animal,

7 7 a specific difference is granted to him (spezifische Differenz) [...] Metaphysics conceives man from the animalitas, it does not think of it in direction to its humanitas. [HEIDEGGER, Martin, Brief über den Humanismus in Wegmarken, Frankfurt, 1976, p. 323] Heidegger here interprets Aristotle in a completely reverse sense to that of Agamben s, but certainly much closer to our perspective which is, however, non- heideggerian in its purposes and method. Nonetheless, as can be seen, Heidegger is the first philosopher of the 20th century to acknowledge with absolute clarity the fundamental zoopolitical dimension which signs the beginning of the city of men and durably determines the subsequent development of metaphysics. In this point, Heidegger perfectly understands, in his own way, the sense of the Aristotelian expression: politics is the science of the government of his animal life, which man has provided himself. It is not necessary to wait for Foucault to acknowledge the priority of the politics of life as a crucial philosophical issue. Agamben is not the first either to point out that bio-politics (that we prefer to call zoo-politics) is one of the most ancient truths of Western politics. All this can be already found in the fundamental lines of the heideggerian texts even if, Heidegger, like Foucault and Agamben, starts his political history with Aristotle, forgetting the essential role of Plato. But according to Agamben, although biopolitics is antique and immemorial starting from the distinction that we have already seen cannot be held between zoè and bíos, it is, at the same time, a novelty of Modernity in so far as [...] the exception becomes the rule, the space of the bare life which was originally situated apart from the legal order, progressively coincides with

8 8 the political space, so that exclusion and inclusion, external and internal, bíos and zoé, right and fact, enter into an area of irreducible undifferentiation. [Homo sacer I, op. cit. p. 19]. This text by Agamben reveals its author s already known Benjaminian affiliation through the reference to the eighth thesis on Philosophy of History. However, what the interpreters miss to point out is that the category of the bare life is also a Benjaminian category but not for that an aristotelic one. Used by Benjamin in his Zur Kritik der Gewalt in 1921, the notion of bloss Leben, bare life, mysteriously and with no justification, erected by Agamben in juridical-political category, is later attributed to Aristotle and the ancient juridical thought without any argumentation or inventory solution. Nonetheless, if our interpretation of the zoopolitical issue is correct, Agamben s diagnosis over a supposed modern undifferenciation between zoè and bíos is utterly inadequate, simply because such basic difference in the terms proposed by the Italian thinker has never existed in the ancient thought. The idea that ancient politics is nothing but a zoopolitics is, as mentioned before, something that the own Heidegger had already sensed and timely developed in his courses in Freiburg. In a certain way, this conception reaches a highly eloquent point when the German philosopher himself recalls another of the ancient philosophers forgotten by the contemporary scholars of biopolitics, that is, Xenophon, who had already established that man is nothing but the zôon béltiston, the best set up animal. From this point of view, the logical figure which corresponds to the relationship between animal and man in Western metaphysics is not the inclusive exclusion, as Agamben thought, but better the conjunction. There is no such thing as an exclusion of

9 9 the zoè which allows for the appearance of a bíos; instead, metaphysics works in the way of an addition. In fact, as we have seen before, Aristotle adds the language to the zoè as a condition for man s existence. But language supposes neither the exclusion of the phoné as voice nor of life as zoè. On the contrary, the relationship is of addition and complementarity, of articulation and of conjunction but not of annulment of an element for the emergence of another. Man presupposes a zoè that, besides, turns his voice into an articulated language. The problem of metaphysics, in any case, is that of acting by juxtaposition of (quite heterogeneous) elements which attempt to take part of a game of complementarities that can never be fully assembled, and for that, they always generate an inassimilable surplus. It must be therefore understood in Aristotle the relationship between the pròs tò zên and the expression tò eû zên, that is, as the difference that exists, not between two kinds of ontologically distinct lives, but between the living common to every animal and the living also animal in its origin- but now entirely directed by the being who masters language (i.e. man) by means of a conscious administration of his biological substrate. Man is that animal who explicitly takes control of the direction of his life towards the sphere of happiness. But this télos is nothing but the result of the politization of man s constituent animality. It shall be well understood that happiness in the best set up life does not mean the access to a bíos, a qualified life; instead, the original grounds of the zoè are the same, only now this latter is governed by man according to the principles dictated by the logos. On the other hand, it is nothing but what Aristotle wants to explicitly signify as Xenophon had already done when he states that the perfect man [the one who masters language and lives in a community] is the best of all animals (béltiston tôn zóon ánthropós estin) [Politics, 1253 b 31-32].

10 10 This point is extremely important for the usually misunderstood difference between the oikonomia and politics in Aristotle. It would be a mistake to apply the false dichotomy analyzed above to conclude that the oikonomia is the dominion where reproduction and maintenance of the zoè take place and politics, instead, is the sublime dimension of a qualified bíos which constitutes the base of the human community. This false division became an aporia within Agamben s archaeological work, giving rise to different assumptions in the origins of modern biopolitics, a juridical-political axis supported by the sacredness of life (Homo sacer I) as foundational excision of the ancient city and a theological-liturgical whose point of departure is the domestic life of the oikos (The Kingdom and the Glory). On the contrary, even though this was already clear since Plato, the distinction between what we could call the substrate of power and power itself should not be either disregarded in the Aristotelian work. If that is taken into account, it will be understood that the matter which constitutes both the oikos and the city is the same: the zoè as animal life of the human kind. It is for this reason that Aristotle is forced to start his political treatise stating that once we have manifested the parts that constitute the city, we have to talk, in the first place, of domestic administration, since every city is made up with houses (pâsa gàr súgketai pólis ex oikiôn) [Politics, 1253 b 3]. That is, in every case it is eventually about the administration of the zoè, and Aristotle s politician is called to govern it as it is one of his faculties. Therefore, the difference is not in what we could name the substrate or the objective of power it is always the biological life even if in very different grouping patterns depending on whether it is a city of free men or a house with slaves but in the nature of the power exerted over life. Thus, for Aristotle, power (arché) is divided in two according to the way in which it will be applied to its substrate: domestic government (hé oikonomikè) is a monarchy

11 11 (since every house is governed by one only, monarcheîtai gàr pâs oîkos), while political government (hé politikè) is of free and equal men (eleuthéron kaì íson) [Politics, 1255 b 19-20]. In the same way, in the first book of the Oeconomica whose authorship most philologists attribute nowadays to Aristotle it is established that politics is the art of government by many people (ek pollôn archónton estín), and economy of the administration by only one (monarchía) [Oeconomica, 1343 a]. The nature of the power exerted over life is what distinguishes economy from politics and not its object. And in spite of all the apparent precautions Aristotle seems to take, the difference between the Stageiran and his master Plato in this point is not as sharp and definite as the interpreters have intended to make believe. However, a decisive point that is in many occasions ignored by the interpreters is that economy itself, under the way of the chrematistics, concerns the administrator (ho oikonomikós) as well as the politician (ho politikós), in spite of Aristotle s search for a distinction between a natural chrematistics and a censurable one, for being constituted at the expense of others (où gàr katà phúsin all ap allélon estín) usury must be therefore controlled (he obolostatikè). Despite all this reticence, Aristotle declares that chrematistic knowledge, finally, is useful for politicians also, since many cities are in so much need of resources and of negotiating to get them as a house, or even more. This is why many rulers are only interested in these things [Politics 1258 b 1-2]. In spite of the big complexities of the Aristotelian discourse, the desperate struggle for placing a sort of containment circle to the economic nucleus underlying every polis is visible. But the essential fact is unconcealable: the polis is consubstantial with the emergence of a chrematistic center and in every agora there underlies an oikonomía which is co-original to it.

12 As you know, the difference between zoè and bíos is the fundamental opposition that Agamben uses for the explanation of the Western political history. This history is that of the supposedly slow but inexorable rise of the zoè as bare life to the center of the contemporary political practices that find in the concentration camp an erected zoè in supreme impolitic value par excellence. From here stems the double-character of Agambenian biopolitics: archaic and modern at the same time, immemorial and up-todate. However, this history is built over a supposed inflexible opposition between zoè and bíos which would be present in the Aristotelian corpus. According to our perspective, such founding opposition does not exist in the Stageiran s thought and, in consequence, this motivates an entire revision of the Agambenian theory that has made of the concentration camp the nomos of Modernity as well as of the sense of the supposed undifferenciation between democracy and totalitarianism which has been built at the light of this zoè of Aristotelian origin. We cannot do that here today; however, we would like to conclude our intervention by simply proposing a possible way of analysis starting from the consideration of the philosopher who has been singularly forgotten by Agamben: Plato. In fact, when the Nazi had to elaborate a theory to justify their exterminating action, they explicitly resorted to ancient philosophy and not to Aristotle the Agambenian theoretical emblem but to Plato. In fact, Hans Günther wrote in 1922 his Rassenkunde des deutschen Volkes [racial study of the German people], a work which lay the foundations of Nazi racism. En 1927, Günther wrote a second part of his best-seller, this time destined prove at continental scale the racial superiority of the Nordic type (nordische Rasse) over the bases of Gobineau s theory, the Homo europaeus of Lapouge [defended in his work Les Sélections sociales] and the biological theories of Francis Galton. Günther rapidly

13 13 became one of the pillars of Nazi racism within the German philosophical field. In this sense, one of Günther s most important and interesting works is, suggestively, Platon als Hüter des Lebens and is entirely devoted to eugenics and racial selection in Plato. I cannot stop here to analyze this work, but I would like to strongly emphasize that the purpose of the Hellenist is not to merely perform a philological study of the eugenics problem in Plato but, above all and mainly, to extract from such study a program for the contemporary world: A wise geneticist and anthropologist must limit himself to the wish that the honorable fervor and educational virtues of the [Rousseau] from today and from tomorrow reach an agreement with biology. In his Biologische Grundlagen der Erziehung [Biological principles of education], Fritz Lenz has drawn an analogous conduct line. Efforts have to be directed towards a formation which is concerned about hereditary differences and that contributes to the distinction between worthy and unworthy men. Exactly as the educational program that Plato had predicted. Instructed by biology, as Plato we search for a formation that will allow us to obtain a higher number of genetically superior children in all social classes and a reduced number of genetically inferior children in the same classes. It is a fortunate fact that such a spirit as Plato s has preceded us; it stimulates us in our search for a culture where selection could perform a man s elevation. 1 1 GÜNTHER, Hans, Platon als Hüter des Lebens, Münich, 1928, p. 77.

14 14 Similar purposes can be found in the work of Günther s close friend Richard Walther Darré ( ), the eugenicist who defended the «Blut-und-Boden-Theorie». However, studies on this problem adopt a highly insufficient perspective insofar as its objective consists of only showing the way in which Nazism appropriated the history of philosophy, from Plato to Nietzsche, to re-write it according to a racialist pattern. In consequence, it is not decisive to say either that Nazism took hold of Platonism (in a proper or spurious) or that Platonism is essentially totalitarian. The fact of pointing out the originally anthropo-technical nature of Western politics is what really matters. This genealogical research is the objective of my book which will be launched next year and that I cannot expound here, as I said, for time reasons. But I would like to remark, as the final query and epilogue, that the ultimate objective of my research consists of trying to provide some kind of answer to one of the questions that, at least from the times of ancient Greece, has haunted Western man: that is, is it really possible to think of a non-economical type of human community? In other words, is there any truly political destiny for man?