The state and biopolitics: towards the origins of interrelation

Abstract

The subject of this research is the state as a biopolitical project founded on the principle of government intervention in life of the population. Leaning on the ideas and theoretical intentions of the “archeology of power”, economic and political anthropology, the author examines the genesis of the state from biopolitical perspective, proceeding from the hypothesis of the initial animalization of human presence pursuant to state power, which at breaking point, turns into biopolitical death machine, or thanatopolitics. In view of this, the author reveals the role of ancient state formations as the agents of forced “domestication” of the members of agricultural and cattle-raising societies based on the concentration of human resources and coercive labor as state-forming “technologies”, which allow producing surpluses appropriated by the power elites. The idea of pastoralist power, which emerged along with the first states, identifies subjects to a herd under wardship, treating them as a form of wealth similar to livestock. The main conclusion lies in explication of the biopolitical matrix of state administration, which identifies the subjects of the state with livestock, and the state territory with enclosed pasture. This leads to the parallels between cattle-raising and control over population, which paradigmatically determines the political modus operandi of state power that is implicit in the trajectory of its evolution up to the present day. At the threshold of “evolution” of such administrative paradigm emerge the modern radical topoi of the antihuman – the concentration camps (labor camps and death camps) organized by the model of cattle pens and slaughterhouses.