When did biopolitics begin? Actuality and potentiality in historical events

Sergei Prozorov

doi:10.1177/13684310221077198

Abstract

The article addresses the ongoing debate about the origins of biopolitics. While Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics approached it as a modern rationality of government, Agamben’s Homo Sacer series presented biopolitics as having a longer provenance, dating back to the antiquity. These polar positions are not mutually exclusive but coexist in these and other theories of biopolitics, which approach its object as both modern and ancient, having its chronological origin in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries yet also possessing a prehistory of precursors. The article interprets this dual origin in terms of Paolo Virno’s theory of historical temporality, which distinguishes between the chronological past of historical events and their potential past, which accompanies and is negated in them. Coexisting with its own unrealized potential, every historical event remains incomplete and extends itself both backwards and forwards, positing its precursors and prefiguring its future outcomes. While modern in the chronological sense, biopolitics is retrospectively inscribed in a longer historical lineage, its antecedents easily identifiable in the history of political thought. Finally, we apply this approach to Virno’s own account of the history of biopolitics, questioning his identification of past potential with labour-power.

Highlights

One of the most persistent debates in the studies of biopolitics concerns the question of its origin
The proponents of modernity of biopolitics are rather more likely to argue that this modern invention is soon to be obsolete, to be replaced by something new and postmodern (e.g. ‘psychopolitics’; see Han, 2017, Stiegler, 2008) than the proponents of the ancient origin of biopolitics, whose views of what could possibly lie beyond biopolitics tend to be as radical as they are vague (Agamben, 2016, pp. 263–279)
The debate on the origins of biopolitics that we discussed at the beginning of the article may be reconstructed in terms of the dual temporality of historical events

Summary

Introduction

One of the most persistent debates in the studies of biopolitics concerns the question of its origin. While these precursors refer to real historical figures or events, their function is not to provide an alternative chronological starting point for biopolitics, but to embody the potential that remains unrealized in the historical moment These antecedents, be they Aristotle, Hobbes, Spinoza or Hegel, do not in a strict sense contradict Foucault’s original dating of biopolitics, since they only emerge by virtue of this dating itself as embodiments of the potential that the act of dating opened up and could not fully realize. In Virno’s account, biopolitics is dated chronologically in much the same way as Foucault dated it: the rise of industrial capitalism in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century The twist in his reading is that this was the period, in which the past potential that usually accompanies the present actuality in an oblique manner itself entered the historical moment. The ‘entry of life into history’ (ibid.) as its negated potential was not a consequence of the capitalist organization of labour-power but the condition that made possible both this organization and the ‘aura of unresolved virtuality’ that continues to animate resistance to it

Conclusion

Author biography