Transgenic Life: Controlling Mutation

Abstract

Transgenic Life: Controlling Mutation Melinda Cooper (bio) Foucault’s seminars on biopower form something of an interrupted sequence in his corpus. The term was first introduced in a conference on socialized medicine given in 1974, where Foucault noted that modern capitalism implied an administration of bodies, their forces and time extending beyond the sphere of economic production.[1] The most sustained development on the question can be found in the 1976 seminar of the Collège de France, Il faut défendre la société, which has recently been published in France (1997). Foucault pursued the theme of biopower in all of his seminars up until 1980, although he was turning his attention here to the conditions of its emergence, rather than attempting a precise formulation — he was interested, in particular, in the rise of population as a political category in the eighteenth century and the invention of a liberal discourse of government, two factors he considered essential to the understanding of biopower.[2] But apart from the last chapter of the History of Sexuality, Volume 1, Foucault never returned to the rapid notes of these seminars, as he often did, to formulate a book-length study on the question. It is these seminars, however, that seem increasingly to exercise a certain fascination on political philosophers who have, in some sense or another, encountered the urgency of the bio-political question. Deleuze’s monographical study, where he casts the whole of Foucault’s corpus in the light of the equation between life and resistance, is perhaps the first to accord a preeminent place to the question of biopower (1988). Giorgio Agamben, in a somewhat paradoxical manoeuvre, reconsiders biopower as an ever-present threat internal to the sovereign exercise of power, a state of exception that becomes the rule in totalitarian racial politics (1998). Closer to Deleuze, theorists of “immaterial production” such as Toni Negri and Maurizio Lazzarato, have drawn on a certain reading of Marx to reinvent “biopower” as the paradigmatic figure of post-fordist production (Hardt and Negri 2000), (Lazzarato 1997 and 2000).[3] In the seminar of 1976, Il faut défendre la société, Foucault introduced the notion of biopower in the context of a methodological interrogation of the relations between power, freedom, right and “life”. If the definition of “life” itself remains difficult to pin-point in this work, it is because Foucault is interested in investigating the variable production of specific forms of life within different exercises of power, and in particular in the “how” of power that has governed the administration of life since the eighteenth century. The emergence of biopower, which he identified as a historical transition coincident with the rise of modern capitalism, was at the same time the lever that allowed him to problematize the juridical theory of sovereign power and the historical-materialist dialectic of labor and capital. Within the term biopower, Foucault identified a power-of-life irreducible to the power of life and death that characterizes the sovereign in juridical accounts of political right. Taking Hobbes’ Leviathan as exemplary of the modern theory of sovereign power, he points out that although such an account of political constitution is founded on the postulate of a kind of unmediated or absolute life, it nevertheless accords no positivity to the notion of life. Within the foundational fiction of the state-of-nature, each “man” exercises an absolute freedom involving the drive to overcome all obstacles to self-preservation, but this also translates as an absolute power to take the life of any other man. The flip side of absolute power is absolute powerlessness, since the unmediated freedom of self-preservation is inseparable from a state of total exposure to violence. It is such a postulate that justifies the intervention of political representation, involving a transferal of absolute freedom from the individual’s natural “right” to self-preservation to the sovereign. Hence, the exercise of mediated freedom or right requires a separation of life from the juridical sphere as such, whereby life is at once excluded and protected beneath the category of the subject. In this sense, the protection of the life of the subject involves not so much a positive exercise...