The Futures of Biopolitics: The Syllabus

Jairus Grove

Office: Saunders 608

POLS 635B-International Relations & War

Global War and The Futures of Biopolitics

In a series of public lectures at the College de France during the years 1975-1979 Michel Foucault attempted to sketch out what he saw as a new episteme of political rationality for which ‘life’ was its organizing object. For Foucault the sovereign right to kill was increasingly displaced by the administrative compulsion to make live. That is to say the sovereign subtraction of lives from the body politic mutated into the regulation and distribution of forms-of-life. Rather than an end to violence or killing what Foucault called biopolitics redistributed the lethal conflict of external war through out the population turning Clausewitz observation about politics and war inside-out. For Foucault, politics was now war by other means. The final lecture in the series now known as the Birth of Biopolitics turned from the liberal governmentality and security dispositif that has made Foucault famous amongst social scientists towards a careful intellectual history of free market economics rise to prominence (a return to classical liberalism) and the subsequent tactical withdrawals of the state from the oikos of local and national life. The lectures follow the mutational life of power up to the early 1970s increasing neoliberal turn in government leaving the future as yet unthought. Despite Foucault’s nearly obsessional commitment to difference or rupture driven historicism the concept of biopolitics has settled into a tired diagram of power congealing as a kind of structure that is copy and pasted into everything from the analysis of development aid to the overarching rationality of the War on Terrorism.

This class starts from the presumption that biopolitics has obtained a following of necrophilic intellectuals unwilling to take seriously Paul Rabinow’s demand that to follow Foucault is to ask “what difference does today make with respect to yesterday—and to tomorrow.” The intervening 30 years of global events since Foucault’s lectures have witnessed the near death of the welfare state Foucault took as a given in his account of governmentality and the globalization of extra-judicial and automated assassinations at times more reminiscent of the juridical era Foucault believed had long since been replaced by disciplinary politics. However the question remains open whether biopolitics should be abandoned or modified. It appears to me that biopolitics is likely to follow the same fate as modernity, neoliberalism, postmodernism, the West, Post-Cold War era, The Post-911 era. As a concept biopolitics is becoming a perfunctory modifier so drained of meaning as to contribute little more than a nod to what intellectual pack you run with. However this does not mean the history that Foucault began is meaningless. Quite the opposite. Foucault’s insight that the microphysics of power finds itself constantly at the behest of the shifting antinomies life and death, war and politics, could not have been more prescient for our contemporary moment.

Therefore this class will begin by taking up Foucault’s concept, delving into what purchase it had on the first 2/3rds of the 20th century and then investigate what directions life, war, and politics have taken that would frustrate or otherwise complicate what Foucault had in mind for the art of governing and the power over life. In particular we will take up the claim by many that the increasing deterritorialization of war and politics foretold by Foucault has resulted in a global civil war as well as a new condition of possibility for global insurrection. The hope is that our own empirical research projects can be brought to bare on these at times abstract theoretical questions. In a time when protest seems to have a nearly instantaneous global resonance these questions seem, to me, at the heart of the matter. I invite all who are interested on this adventure in global political thought.

Requirements and Assignment:

Full participation is expected and all participants will be expected to give a critical presentation on one of the texts during the course. There are two ways to satisfy the final project for the course.

Option 1: Write a 5,000 word review of one or more of the texts for submission to a journal for publication. The review will be turned in week 6. It will be given back to you Week 7 with substantial suggestions for revision. The second reworked draft will be turned in at the end of the semester. The subsequent draft will then be submitted to a journal after consultation over the appropriate venue.

Option 2: Write 20 to 25 page paper using the themes and texts from the course.

Suggested Reading For Class:

Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, University of Chicago Press.

Walter Benjamin, “The Critique of Violence,” in Illuminations, Schocken.

Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Princeton University Press.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “Treatise on Nomadology; The War Machine,” in A Thousand Plateaus, University of Minnesota Press.

Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, Stanford University Press.

Slavoj Zizek, Violence, Picador.

William McNeill, The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000, University of Chicago Press.

Required Reading:

Week 1: What is Biopower/Biopolitics?

Foucault-Will to Truth, Part 5

Foucault-Society Must Be Defended [Selections]

Foucault-Security, Territory, Population [Selections]

Foucault-Birth of Biopolitics [Selections]

Suggested Reading:
Maurizio Lazzarato-From Biopower to Biopolitics
First use of the term Bio-politics, G.W. Harris, 1911

Week 2 Foucault’s Legacy and the Precipice of a Deleuzian Century

Gilles Deleuze, ”What is an Apparatus?”, in Two Regimes of Madness

Gilles Deleuze “Postscript on Societies of Control” and “Becoming and Control” in Negotiations