Abstract
This chapter traces Foucauldian technologies of power in the James Bond universe and characterises the Bond franchise’s biopolitics in the cultural environment of the 1960s and 1970s, when 007 became a mass phenomenon. The majority of the chapter is dedicated to a case study of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Ian Fleming’s tenth Bond novel (1963) and the sixth film in the EON series (1969). The chapter highlights the intersection between reproduction and fertility on the one hand and the infliction of death and mass genocide on the other, and it examines how James Bond juxtaposes the disciplinary means that are directed against the body (as an organism) on the one hand, and the state-powered regulation of biological processes that control the population on the other. The two versions of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service amount to the franchise’s most straightforward foray into the realm of biopolitics and would pave the way for the franchise’s subsequent biopolitical and eugenic moments, like when the figure of the genocidal villain gets to articulate the franchise’s own subliminal agenda regarding population control and the future of the (British) species.
Highlights
Biopolitics is and always has been a rather ambivalent term, for it encapsulates the facilitation and management of life and health on the one hand, and the inhumane and racist politics of exclusion, eugenics, and sterilization on the other (Lemke 2007, p. 9)
In a series of lectures at the Collège de France in March of 1976, Michel Foucault historicized the political functionalisation of ideas of life and death and the 19th-century’s development of “what might be called power’s hold over life,” as well as the process of “[how] the biological came under State control” (Foucault [1975] 2004, p. 239)
10), it has become clear that the two are firmly linked and cannot be conceptualised without each other in the world of James Bond, where traditional biopolitics are always supplemented by thanatopolitics
Summary
Biopolitics is and always has been a rather ambivalent term, for it encapsulates the facilitation and management of life and health on the one hand, and the inhumane and racist politics of exclusion, eugenics, and sterilization on the other (Lemke 2007, p. 9). Foucault probably meant no conscious reference to the world of James Bond here, though the big-screen adaptation of Ian Fleming’s second Bond novel, Live and Let Die (1954), was still quite fresh Foucault sees this starting with late modernity, whereas for Agamben, late modernity is only about the state making its “bio-political orientation” explicit: “the state has ceased to veil its essentially biopolitical orientation [ . I will discuss how this evolves into the formulation of a biopolitical and eugenic programme; one that rather perversely uses the figure of the genocidal villain to articulate the series’ own subliminal agenda regarding population control and the future of the (British) species This agenda largely consists in a surface renunciation of mad eugenics (as embodied by the Bond villains and their world-domination schemes), paired with a clandestine articulation of sympathy for this kind of eugenic policy. This constellation makes the Bond films rife with contradictions, and it may have contributed to their ambiguous reputation: they are clearly very contemporary films that are utterly appropriate to the post-war spirit of sexual libertinage, but at the same time, they remain committed to 19th-century notions of imperialism, hegemonic whiteness, and eugenics
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