1 THE TERRI SCHIAVO CASE: BIOPOLITICS AND BIOPOWER: AGAMBEN AND FOUCAULT John Protevi Department of French Studies Louisiana State University March 7, 2006 Presented at the 6th Annual Foucault Circle conference, University of Memphis. DRAFT: Please do not cite for publication w/o permission. INTRODUCTION The Terri Schiavo case offers the opportunity to establish some differences between Agamben and Foucault concerning biopower, biopolitics, sovereignty, law, and medical discipline. To understand these differences, we must distinguish biopower and biopolitics. For Foucault, biopower is modern and productive, "fostering life or letting die"; this affirmative productivity distinguishes it from sovereign power, with which it today co-exists, whose negativity is expressed in the formula "kill or let live." While Agamben acknowledges the Arendtian and Foucaultian thesis of the modernity of biopower, he will claim that sovereignty and biopolitics are equally ancient and essentially intertwined in the originary gesture of all politics; sovereignty is the power to decide the state of exception whereby bare life or zoe is exposed "underneath" political life or bios. Agamben then finds in the concentration camp the modern biopolitical paradigm, in which the state of exception has become the rule and we have all become [potentially] bearers of exposed bare life in that we are all subject to what I will call a "de-politicizing predication": to use the current American jargon, being named an "enemy combatant." The converse of that de-politicizing predication is a politicizing predication, often implicit or assumed, existing only by the grace of not being de-politicized: the retention of the rights of a citizen. Let's call this complex concept "(de-)politicizing predication." Finally, let us note that Agamben also sees the camp as a biopower experiment, producing the bare life of the Muselmann. We will interrogate the relation of biopolitics and biopower in Agamben's writing on the camp. We can also note a difference of method. Agamben reveals the political logic of the originary imbrication of sovereignty and biopower via a reading that is something like a Heideggerian gesture of locating an originary decision founding

下一页