Foucault

The Paradoxical Liberty of Bio-Power: Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault on Modern Politics

Frederick M. Dolan Department of Rhetoric #2670 University of California Berkeley, California 94720-2670 510-642-3041 fmdolan@socrates.berkeley.edu

ABSTRACT

For Hannah Arendt, spontaneous, “initiatory” human action and interaction are suppressed by the normalizing pressures of society once “life”– that is, sheer life – becomes the primary concern of politics, as it does, she finds, in the modern age. Arendt’s concept of the social is indebted to Martin Heidegger’s analysis of everyday Dasein in Being and Time, and contemporary political philosophers inspired by Heidegger, such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Giorgio Agamben, tend to reproduce her account of the withdrawalof the political in modernity. In this essay, I complicate Arendt’s theory by turning to Michel Foucault’s parallel but diverging understanding of the nature of power in modern society to show, surprisingly, that Foucault’s narrative of the emergence of modern power pictures a society that is more, not less, politicized.

KEY WORDS

Arendt, bio-power, Foucault, Lacoue-Labarthe, modernity,Nancy, pastoral power, the social, rulership.

1 The Paradoxical Liberty of Bio-Power: Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault on Modern Politics

Frederick M. Dolan Department of Rhetoric, University of California at Berkeley

1.

In the political thought of Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, modernity is the moment of a new, post-classical totalitarianism (totalitarianisme inedit). Itis best understood, they argue, as the effectuation, installation, and generalization of “the philosophical as the political.” This dream – deriving the political from a philosophical foundation, making of the political regime an expression of philosophical truth – is characteristic, they hold, of the Western tradition of political theory since Plato. The outcome is the simultaneous dominationof the political, and the latter’s “withdrawal” (retrait).1 By “domination of the political,” I understand Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe to mean the imperative that all human activities find their ultimate semantic coherence within the horizon of the political under its modern interpretation. By “withdrawal of the
1

Nancy & Lacoue-Labarthe, “Overture,” Rejouer le politique, 15. See also PhilippeLacoue-Labarthe, “Transcendence Ends in Politics,” Typography, 228ff.

2 political,” I understand them to mean that the modern interpretation of the political is an impoverished one. It is impoverished, in part, because it eschews deliberation, or what they (following Aristotle) call “the sharing of ethical and evaluative speech.” The modern interpretation of the political is furtherimpoverished in that it restricts the scope of the political to an exclusively technological, social, and economic framework. From this point of view, politics is the administration of the population, understood as a totality of “human resources” to be preserved, enhanced, and optimized.2 Modernity, then, is the effacement of deliberation on the character and significance of human association(l’étreensemble des hommes) by the “total immanence of common life” (l’immanence totale de la vie-en-commun). It is a regime in which expressions of differences in what it means to be human are flattened out and obscured by a triumphant, politically legitimated master vocabulary of security, organization, and efficiency. One source of Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe’s thesis is Martin Heidegger, who finds inmodernity the oblivion of being and the triumph of technicity. For Heidegger, the “closure of metaphysics” intensifies a previously concealed “technological thrust” in the Western philosophical tradition, so that questions of organization and administration come to predominate over all others.3 A more immediate source for their idea of postclassical totalitarianism, however, is Hannah Arendt’s...