Marco Piasentier

Toda investigación sobre biopolítica plantea de forma ineludible preguntas sobre la vida biológica y la política, la naturaleza y el lenguaje. Michel Foucault consideró esencial definir estos conceptos y las relaciones entre ellos. Partiendo de la exhortación de Foucault a pensar filológica y biológicamente, este artículo aborda la división entre naturaleza y lenguaje en el ámbito de los estudios biopolíticos. La investigación abarca diversos modelos filosóficos, desde el giro lingüístico heideggeriano hasta el naturalis-mo posdarwiniano. Para poder entablar un diálogo entre estas tradiciones, el texto pone en tela de juicio dos vestigios de una cosmovisión «humana, demasiado humana». El artículo intenta demostrar que el comando del lenguaje (command of language) y la fina-lidad de la naturaleza (ends of nature) son dos formas de antropomorfismo que excluyen la posibilidad de pensar filológica y biológicamente acerca de la biopolítica

The prevailing assumption holds that the process of disenchantment driven by the life sciences culminates in a worldview devoid of ultimate ends. This assumption, however, overlooks the possibility that scientific naturalism itself may harbor problematic forms of enchantment. I argue that the most prevalent forms of naturalism do not necessarily yield a fully disenchanted worldview. More specifically, I examine a philosophy of nature developed by prominent thinkers such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, who are commonly regarded as proponents of disenchantment. I seek to demonstrate that this philosophical framework nevertheless incorporates a conception of an ultimate end that governs the existence of all living beings, including humanity.

A fracture appears to run through the relationship between critical theory and naturalism. Despite their shared rejection of metaphysical forms of knowledge, the two traditions clash over the model of philosophy yet to come. Nature and history, the scientific worldview and mechanisms of power are among the concepts that delineate the space of this tension. Biopolitical theory—namely, the field devoted to investigating the relationship between politics and life sciences—is not merely an expression of this ongoing conflict, but also a site for thinking new articulations between the two traditions. The present volume moves in this latter direction and, through an approach attentive to the specificity of each philosophical grammar, examines several significant moments within both traditions, from contemporary developments in Darwinian theory to the relationship between knowledge and power in Foucault.

The article delves into Friedrich Hayek’s theory of cultural evolution as a framework for understanding his “restatement” of liberalism. Beginning in the 1950s, Hayek increasingly embraced a naturalistic perspective, leading to a conceptualization of the market in evolutionary terms. His definition of the market sharply contrasts with the one proper to laissez-faire liberalism of the nineteenth century. Unlike classical liberalism, Hayek claims that the market is “unnatural,” as it has culturally evolved in opposition to innate human traits. The article will argue that Hayek’s concept of “evolutionary rationalism” establishes a new political rationality aimed at cultivating conditions that promote the flourishing of the market order and protect it from innate human instincts. According to this political rationality, the cultural reproduction of the market order maximizes the evolutionary “progress” of the human species and must be upheld to prevent the purported decline of modern civilization attributed to political rationalities based on “primitive” behavioral traits such as “solidarity” and the pursuit of “common goals.”

We shall attempt to elucidate the concept of ‘civil person’, as developed by Hobbes in both On the Citizen and Leviathan. This is where the idea of political subjectification takes its first steps in modern political theory. Such a process of political subjectification is meant by Hobbes as a process of construction of the ‘artificial person’ of the State. The fact that Hobbes defines the persona ficta of the State as ‘artificial’ sometimes leads scholars to forget that he sees the State as a ‘person’ and that the novelty of his theory is as much to be found in the formula auctoritas, non veritas, facit legem as in his investigation into the type of personality or subjectivity that the modern State embodies. Hobbes’s essays are worth revisiting today, when the question of political subjectification seems to have become challenging again. In the final section of this paper we shall consider a recent reading of Hobbes’s theory proposed by Giorgio Agamben. With the aim of calling into question the very idea and possibility of political subjectification, Agamben critically addresses Hobbes’s notion of ‘civil person’. We will argue that, instead of promoting a rejection of modern political theory in the name of messianic politics, as Agamben does, it is more advisable to look into the differences between monarchy and aristocracy, on the one side, and democracy, on the other, as Hobbes did.

In this article, I shall outline a thought experiment aimed at reversing the relationship between bíos and zoē established by the anthropological machine. Giorgio Agamben resorts to the notion of “anthropological machine” to define the mechanism that produces the qualified life of human beings (bíos), through the inclusive exclusion of their biological life (zoē). My experiment does not render the exclusionary logic of the anthropological machine inoperative, but reverses the hierarchy it establishes between bíos and zoē. The result is what I shall call the machine of biologism, or simply the biological machine. If the anthropological machine establishes its perimeters of exclusion/inclusion on the grounds of bíos, the biological machine resorts to zoē. Thus, the biological machine does not operate according to the anthropological difference, which deems the human being as essentially not an animal, but according to what I shall define as the biological difference.

In this thesis, I propose a theoretical framework to understand the process of secularization produced by the revolutions of language and life. Thanks to the linguistic turn it has discovered that knowledge is kept within language. As Agamben explains, the Copernican revolution of language has made us “the first human beings who have become completely conscious of language. For the first time, what preceding generations called God, Being, spirit, unconscious appear to us as what they are: names for language. This is why for us, any philosophy, any religion, or any knowledge that has not become conscious of this turn belongs irrevocably to the past”(Agamben, 2005a: 45). Thanks to the vitalist turn, modern thought has found out that human beings are natural beings and, in spite of the peculiarity of their characteristics, their origin is the result of the natural process of evolution. I will maintain that this process of secularization leads to a new theological way of thinking definable as secularized theology. The peculiarity of secularized theology lies in the fact that it finds its ownmost reason of existence in the demonstration of the “death of God” but, the absence of revelation becomes the true revelation. The absence of the theological God reveals a secularized form of God – the God of those who believe of being without God. The name of this new divinity comes from Nietzsche who wrote that he would believe only in a God able to dance: The Dancing God. In La vita. Un’invezione recente, the Italian philosopher Davide Tarizzo argues that before modernity human beings did not exist “in the sense that the question of the humanity of man was not being asked, nor was there any ‘analysis of finitude’ in which ‘man’s being is always maintained, in relation to man himself, in a remoteness and a distance that constitute him”(Tarizzo, 2011: 53). Modernity becomes the process of secularization whereby the human being no longer measures himself against God, but becomes the measure of himself. The human being himself is the subject and the object of his own inquiry. The linguistic and the vitalist turns are, first and foremost, a reaction to theology. If in theology human being measures himself with respect to God, the disappearance of God makes human being size of himself. What distinguishes and opposes them is the definition of the human being, the unit of measure used to establish the humanity of man. On the one hand, the essence of the human being becomes language, on the other, the nature of the human being starts being biological life. Modernity is the epoch of the Dancing God and language and life are the two opposing doctrines fighting for the orthodoxy. The ultimate reason for this conflict is the definition of the essence or nature of the human being. In order to let emerge the fracture between the linguistic and the vitalist turns, I will address the question of the philosophy of biopolitics. Biopolitics is the discipline aimed at envisioning a politics able to give voice to the nature of the human being. Before proposing a biopolitical account it is therefore necessary to answer the philosophical question concerning the definition of the human being. I will claim that the fracture between the linguistic and the vitalist turn in defining what it means to be human is the source of modern monotheism. Thinking beyond secularized theology ultimately means to challenge the Copernican revolution of language and the Darwinian revolution of life in order to envision a new ontology grounded on a different understating of the human being. In the present work – which represents the pars dentures of this theoretical project – I will demonstrate that the revolution of language and life has to be understood as a form of revelation, more precisely, as the revelation of the lack of revelation. I will enquiry the linguistic and vitalist approach to the philosophy of biopolitics through the analysis of the work of three contemporary Italian philosophers: Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Davide Tarizzo. The decision to focus on Italian biopolitical theory is determined by the conviction that this philosophical approach offers one of the clearest and best-articulated insights into the fracture between life and language.

The aim of this paper is to show that Foucault’s genealogy of liberal governmentality necessitates reconsideration in light of the history of biology and its societal implications. In his lectures at the Collège de France in the late 1970s, Foucault argued that the natural growth of the market is what ultimately verifies or falsifies the excellence of liberal governmentality. Liberal governmentality recognizes the intimate correlation between the physical and social dimensions in order to adapt its political action to the natural processes of the market. It follows that liberal governmentality rests upon a certain kind of naturalism and the knowledge that defines this form of naturalism is political economy, which explicates both the foundations and the limits of governmental action in the name of the nature of the market. Foucault thus accords significant importance to the concept of nature in liberal governmentality. However, his genealogy is confined to an inquiry into the naturalism of classical political economy, without considering the economicism of the emerging biological sciences. To expand upon Foucault’s genealogy, the present paper focuses on the influence of political economy in the development of the theory of evolution by natural selection. The locution “economy of nature” is introduced to denote the discursive formation that brings together the naturalism of classical political economy and the economism of early evolutionary biology. This study contends that this construct played a critical role in shaping liberal governmentality.

Foucault and Sellars are representatives of conflicting philosophical traditions: whereas Foucault famously insisted that “power is everywhere,” Sellars proposed the well-known scientia mensura dictum. The tension between the two perspectives seems to be so strong that each of them ends up reducing the other to an epiphenomenal illusion. In this article, I shall attempt to show that the works of Sellars and Foucault are not necessarily irreconcilable. The common ground for this dialogue is what I shall define as a historico-practical conception of science. I will build this concept by tracing a connection between the Foucauldian notion of “conditions of possibility” of science and Sellars’s thesis about the “indispensability” of the manifest image. Finally, I will argue that this conception of science problematizes the clash between the scientific and manifest images of the world, paving the way for a different relationship between naturalism and critical theory.

In On Biopolitics, Marco Piasentier discusses one of the most persistent questions in biopolitical theory: the divide between nature and language. He attempts to redraw the conceptual map which has traditionally defined the permissible paths to address this question. Taking his cue from Foucault’s exhortation to think philologically and biologically, Piasentier traverses the main theoretical and methodological frameworks which have informed the biopolitical debate on nature and language, biology and politics. Biopolitical theory becomes the center of gravity for an investigation encompassing diverse philosophical models, from the Heideggerian linguistic turn to post-Darwinian naturalism. The divide between traditions is not proof of an impossible encounter, but constitutes the site for a new conceptual topography. Working in this interdisciplinary space, Piasentier puts into question the command of language and the ends of nature: two vestiges of a ‘human, all too human’ worldview that preclude the possibility of thinking philologically and biologically about biopolitics. On Biopolitics: An Inquiry into Nature and Language is essential reading for humanities and social sciences scholars with an interest in moving beyond debates about nature and language.

In this thesis, I propose a theoretical framework to understand the process of secularization produced by the revolutions of language and life. Thanks to the linguistic turn it has discovered that knowledge is kept within language. As Agamben explains, the Copernican revolution of language has made us “the first human beings who have become completely conscious of language. For the first time, what preceding generations called God, Being, spirit, unconscious appear to us as what they are: names for language. This is why for us, any philosophy, any religion, or any knowledge that has not become conscious of this turn belongs irrevocably to the past”(Agamben, 2005a: 45). Thanks to the vitalist turn, modern thought has found out that human beings are natural beings and, in spite of the peculiarity of their characteristics, their origin is the result of the natural process of evolution. I will maintain that this process of secularization leads to a new theological way of thinking definable as secularized theology. The peculiarity of secularized theology lies in the fact that it finds its ownmost reason of existence in the demonstration of the “death of God” but, the absence of revelation becomes the true revelation. The absence of the theological God reveals a secularized form of God – the God of those who believe of being without God. The name of this new divinity comes from Nietzsche who wrote that he would believe only in a God able to dance: The Dancing God. In La vita. Un’invezione recente, the Italian philosopher Davide Tarizzo argues that before modernity human beings did not exist “in the sense that the question of the humanity of man was not being asked, nor was there any ‘analysis of finitude’ in which ‘man’s being is always maintained, in relation to man himself, in a remoteness and a distance that constitute him”(Tarizzo, 2011: 53). Modernity becomes the process of secularization whereby the human being no longer measures himself against God, but becomes the measure of himself. The human being himself is the subject and the object of his own inquiry. The linguistic and the vitalist turns are, first and foremost, a reaction to theology. If in theology human being measures himself with respect to God, the disappearance of God makes human being size of himself. What distinguishes and opposes them is the definition of the human being, the unit of measure used to establish the humanity of man. On the one hand, the essence of the human being becomes language, on the other, the nature of the human being starts being biological life. Modernity is the epoch of the Dancing God and language and life are the two opposing doctrines fighting for the orthodoxy. The ultimate reason for this conflict is the definition of the essence or nature of the human being. In order to let emerge the fracture between the linguistic and the vitalist turns, I will address the question of the philosophy of biopolitics. Biopolitics is the discipline aimed at envisioning a politics able to give voice to the nature of the human being. Before proposing a biopolitical account it is therefore necessary to answer the philosophical question concerning the definition of the human being. I will claim that the fracture between the linguistic and the vitalist turn in defining what it means to be human is the source of modern monotheism. Thinking beyond secularized theology ultimately means to challenge the Copernican revolution of language and the Darwinian revolution of life in order to envision a new ontology grounded on a different understating of the human being. In the present work – which represents the pars dentures of this theoretical project – I will demonstrate that the revolution of language and life has to be understood as a form of revelation, more precisely, as the revelation of the lack of revelation. I will enquiry the linguistic and vitalist approach to the philosophy of biopolitics through the analysis of the work of three contemporary Italian philosophers: Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Davide Tarizzo. The decision to focus on Italian biopolitical theory is determined by the conviction that this philosophical approach offers one of the clearest and best-articulated insights into the fracture between life and language.

What is biopolitics? What kind of relationship does biopolitics establish between politics and biology? Although the etymology of the term ‘biopoli- tics’ seems to suggest a straightforward meaning resulting from the relation- ship between biological life and politics, the current literature is characterised by a wide variety of definitions. As the social theorist Thomas Lemke notes in his thoughtful introduction to this field of research, ‘[p]lural and divergent meanings are undoubtedly evoked when people refer to biopolitics’ (Lemke 2011, 2). Lemke is not the only scholar to acknowledge the difficulty in estab- lishing a satisfying definition of this term; the scale of the problem is well exemplified by the decision of the philosopher Roberto Esposito to begin his major work on the topic with a chapter entitled ‘The Enigma of Biopolitics’. In the first chapter of Bios: Philosophy and Biopolitics, Esposito traces the enigmatic character of biopolitics back to the thinker who introduced it into the Continental debate—Michel Foucault—and maintains that the proble- maticity encountered by the French philosopher concerns ‘the same logical and semantic configuration’ (Esposito 2006, 43) of biopolitics. According to Esposito, the impasse characterising this field of research depends on the fact that ‘notwithstanding the theorization of their reciprocal implication . . . politics and life remain indefinite in profile and in qualification’ (Esposito 2006, 43–44). In this chapter I focus on the work of Foucault, with the aim of explain- ing the impasse in defining the notion of biopolitics. Following Esposito, I claim that it is the lack of a correct articulation of the relationship between politics and life that lies at the core of the ‘enigma of biopolitics’. However, the enigma does not concern the lack of inquiry into the two terms compris- ing this concept; at stake is a deeper and more complicated issue. I argue that when politics and biological life meet to constitute the notion of biopolitics, their function becomes that of representing two opposing theories of the human being. In turn, these two ways of defining the human determine two mutually exclusive approaches to biopolitics: the discursive and the vitalist. The ‘enigma of biopolitics’ is the name of this fracture. The two definitions of the human being that I take into consideration in this chapter contribute, from opposite sides, to challenging his ultra- mundane origin. The reason for their conflict is the definition of the world to which the human being is returned after his fall. On the one hand, the notion of the human being of the discursive approach to biopolitics can be summed up, paraphrasing a famous Foucauldian passage, with the sentence: the human being is ‘a thing of this world’. The original Foucauldian passage reads as follows: Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint and it introduces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth—that is, the type of discourse it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances that enable one dis- tinguish true and false statements. (Foucault 2000a, 131) Paraphrasing this quotation and affirming that the human being is ‘a thing of this world’ means that every society has a general politics of the human being—that is, the mechanisms and instances that enable every society to distinguish between normal and abnormal. Assuming this mundane definition of man means affirming that there is no human being prior to the ‘dispositifs’ or historical ‘machinations’—to use a Heideggerian term—so the human being has always already been thrown into the processes of subjectification and desubjectification. Reaching a point where it is possible to say what the human being is remains structurally impossible. On the other hand, the definition of the human being proper to the vitalist approach to biopolitics entails a form of animalisation of the human being where his essence is found in the natural world of life. This definition of man can be expressed in Foucauldian terms, paraphrasing another passage on truth. The ultramundane notion of truth is no longer returned to the mecha- nisms of discourse and power but to the horizon of biological life: ‘The true\ false dichotomy and the value accorded to truth constitute the most singular way of living that has been invented by a life that, from the depths of its ori- gin, bore the potential for error within itself’ (Foucault 2000b, 477). In this case the human being is not the product of social practices but is the result of the natural evolution of life. The human being becomes an animal among other animals. Social practices and their true or false value are nothing more than an invention of a life which seems to be animated by a force aimed at its own survival and reproduction. The opposition between these two notions of man determines two approaches to biopolitics. They can be distinguished from one another pre- cisely because of the hierarchy they impose on the two terms comprising the word ‘biopolitics’: biological life and politics. Whereas the discursive approach implies the politicisation of biology, with the consequent reduc- tion of every biological definition of the human being to an epiphenomenon of political struggle, the vitalist approach involves the biologisation of politics with the consequent reduction of politics to an epiphenomenon of biological life. The failure to articulate a nonreductionist relationship between life and politics implies a teleology which inevitably informs both Foucauldian approaches to biopolitics. Beyond the antithesis between the discursive and the vitalist human being, it is, therefore, possible to find a common ground characterised by an unwanted teleological drift. This teleology is a force intended as the site of permanent openness and resignificability, an excess always overflowing its forms, which expresses a constant activity aimed at a work of contestation and metamorphosis set against fossilisation in a fixed identity. This teleology—which prescribes to be like wanderers who never belong to a place but belong to travel itself—can be defined in Foucauldian terms as an ‘impatience for liberty’ (Foucault 2000a, 319), in the case of the discursive approach and, paraphrasing Foucault, as an impatience for life, in the vitalist approach. In this chapter, I show how these two definitions of the human being and consequent approaches to biopolitics coexist in the work of Foucault. It is precisely because of this conflict secretly operating in Foucauldian thought that his definition of biopolitics remains enigmatic. This vagueness should not be interpreted as a weakness but instead as a clear sign of Foucault’s great capacity for grasping and describing the complexity of the theories involved in biopolitics. In the following pages, I do not propose a totalis- ing explanation of Foucauldian thought, but I try to reveal how his work has become the anchoring point in defining two perspectives that play a hegemonic role in the contemporary understating of the relation between biological life and politics. The fracture between these two approaches undermines the possibility offered by biopolitics to sit astride the wall that today divides naturalism and critical theory, biology and politics. The pur- pose of this chapter is not to offer a hasty alternative but rather to explore the extent of this fracture in order to lay an adequate foundation for a new biopolitical inquiry.

This article tries to establish a possible dialogue between the way in which two influential contemporary theories, Roberto Esposito's biopolitical theory and Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis, approach racism and the constitution of Otherness. After summing up key concepts in Esposito's theory, the article lays out the very deadlock in his work, represented by his assumption of racial difference or Otherness as inscribed in the bio-logical content of human life. However, by interpreting Jewishness under Nazism in terms of ‘undead’ ‘flesh without body’, Esposito himself crosses paths with the psychoanalytic approach, in so far as Lacan defined the Freudian death drive using the same term. The second part of the article is thus dedicated to the articulation of the relations between primal repression, trauma and jouissance, out of which can be derived an alternative conception of biopolitics, based on the discursive constitution of Otherness, rather than on the assumption that it is a biological fact.

In On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche sets up an opposition between the ‘naïveté of English biologists’ in their research on the evolution of life and a methodology that records the singularity and the contingency of natural events without introducing any finality: genealogy. Nietzsche shares with these scientists the need to trace the explanation of living beings back to a naturalistic framework liberated from theology, but he questions their linear and progressive conception of the evolution of life. This article explores these two competing biological accounts of life. The first is informed by the adaptationist paradigm, namely the theoretical framework of contemporary ‘English biologists’; the second is elaborated by combining the theories of the palaeontologist Stephen J. Gould with the work of Nietzsche, Foucault and Esposito on life and genealogy. If the former account introduces a positive normative ground— rendering biology a synonym for destiny—the latter runs the risk of being secretly inhabited by a negative normative ground, which prescribes an infinite demand for liberation and transformation.