Improper life : technology and biopolitics from Heidegger to Agamben

204 Pages·2011·1.07 MB·English

by  Campbell

improper life
CARY WOLFE, SERIES EDITOR
18 Improper Life: Technology and
Biopolitics from Heidegger to
Agamben
Timothy C. Campbell
17 Surface Encounters: Thinking
with Animals and Art
Ron Broglio
16 Against Ecological Sovereignty:
Ethics, Biopolitics, and Saving
the Natural World
Mick Smith
(continued on page 191)
IMPROPER LIFE
Technology and Biopolitics from
Heidegger to Agamben
timothy c. campbell
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
Copyright 2011 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Campbell, Timothy C.
Improper life : technology and biopolitics from Heidegger to Agamben / Timothy C.
Campbell.
p. cm. — (Posthumanities ; 18)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-7464-0 (hc : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8166-7465-7 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Biopolitics. 2. Death—Political aspects. 3. Technology—Philosophy. I. Title.
JA80.C36 2011
320.01—dc23
2011017140
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Preface(cid:2)(cid:2)vii
Bíos between Thanatos and Technē
1 Divisions of the Proper 1
Heidegger, Technology, and the Biopolitical
2 TheDispositifs of Thanatopolitics 31
Improper Writing and Life
3 Barely Breathing 83
Sloterdijk's Immunitary Biopolitics
4 Practicing Bíos 119
Attention and Play as Technē
Notes(cid:2) 157
Index(cid:2) 185
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PREFACE
Bíos between Thanatos and Technē
At a recent conference on politics and life, one of the foremost
American scholars of Foucault observed that the inflation surround-
ing the term biopolitics had reached truly pernicious proportions. There
was something so totalizing about the term, he argued, something so
unwieldy, that made it unfit as a paradigm for understanding the kinds
of resistances required of subjects today. Given the current context of
budget cuts and the elimination of humanities departments (fall 2010),
for this theorist (and he wasn’t alone in thinking so), biopolitics fails to
offer enough ballast, or any ballast at all, in navigating the struggles that
are upon us.
Such a judgment may appear inopportune as an opening for a book
whose principal focus lies on the merits of biopolitical reflection, espe-
cially when the topic under consideration is the continuing intersection
of technology in all its forms with life. Yet the questions raised about the
value added of biopolitical reflection need to be taken seriously. Is there
something about the nature of biopolitical thought today that makes it
impossible to deploy affirmatively? Or more gravely, does biopolitical
thought do the dirty, intellectual work of neoliberalism, offering little
opposition to local threats, while focusing exclusively on matters of life
and death at the level of species? If the answer is a murky no (or, for that
matter, a murky yes), then our current understanding of biopolitics may,
in fact, be too indebted to death—that we have less a biopolitics at our
disposal than a thanatopolitics, one we employ at our own peril.
Doubting the potential resistance provided by biopolitical reflec-
tion offers, in fact, a starting point for the following study on the rela-
tion between bíos and technology, between bíos and techne¯.1 One of the
arguments I will be making throughout these pages is that the reason
.
vii
contemporary biopolitics devolves into thanatopolitics so seamlessly
often has to do with an often unexplored relation between techne¯ and
thanatos that appears across the work of a number of the most important
philosophers writing today in a biopolitical key. Indeed, my impression is
that death gains the upper hand in biopolitical reflection precisely at the
moment when questions of technology grow in importance, which raises
a question: what is it about techne¯ that calls forth thanatos in a context of
life? Is there an aporia with regard to techne¯ that repeatedly shifts discus-
sions about biopolitics toward a horizon of death, regardless of the con-
text? If so, then locating the aporia would be essential since it might sug-
gest ways of recovering different perspectives on techne¯. Said differently,
if one could find the point at which bíos begins its drift to thanatos, one
could consider ways of reframing techne¯ or, for that matter, bíos as well.
Here I have been helped enormously by the readings that a num-
ber of Italian theorists of biopolitics have made of Martin Heidegger’s
thought, especially Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito. For Agam-
ben and, more recently, Esposito, a crucial reframing occurs when both
translate Heidegger’s eigentlich and uneigentlich not in the language of
(in)authenticity but in a different register of what is and is not consid-
ered (im)proper. Agamben did so early in Stanzas, when discussing the
improper features of metaphor (though clearly the distinction between
proper and improper also deeply informs many of his other works from
the 1990s, especially The Coming Community and Means without End).2
Esposito, too, draws on translations of proper andimproper in his read-
ing of the role of community in Heidegger’s thought in Communitas.3
For my part, I began to wonder if the proper–improper operator could
also be extended to those pages I knew best from Heidegger, namely,
Parmenides, as well as to those texts in which Heidegger puts forward
his questions and answers about technology more generally as a way
of unearthing a relation between life and techne¯.4 The reader will find
the results of that investigation in chapter 1, in which I read proper and
improper writing in a number of seminal works from Heidegger to show
how forms of writing quickly extend to or contaminate life. My conclu-
sion is that here in the improper and proper distinction, a productive way
can be found for locating the appearance of death in life, thanatos in bíos,
thanatopolitics in biopolitics.
If, in chapter 1, I describe a biopolitical Heidegger avant la lettre,
chapter 2 reads more as a chronicle of death foretold in contempo-
rary Italian thought, especially in the more recent writings of Agamben
.
viii PREFACE
and the recently translated works from Esposito. Without wanting to
rehearse too much my argument there, the principal problem underpin-
ning the chapter concerns the intensification of the thanatopolitical in
Agamben’s recent The Kingdom and the Glory, but equally in The Sacra-
ment of Language, and even more in the pamphlet What Is an Appara-
tus?5 Indeed, much of the chapter turns on the term apparatus (disposi-
tif) and Agamben’s willful conflation of that term with a Heideggerian
notion of improper writing. In the second part of the chapter, I turn to
Esposito’s reading of the biopolitical in Third Person and his collection of
essays, Terms of the Political, as well as an important text, “The Disposi-
tif of the Person.”6 On my read, Esposito attempts to think through an
impersonal possibility for life that would avoid the difficulties of follow-
ing Heidegger’s line of inquiry too closely (though, as I point out, other
problems of a different nature ensue). The third chapter centers on the
work of that other philosopher who, along with Agamben and Esposito, is
today mining the veins of thanatos in life. The thought of Peter Sloterdijk
forms the subject of the chapter, in particular, the recent translations of
two texts.7 Here, as was the case with Agamben and Esposito, the proper
and improper produce a deeply thanatopolitical reading of everything
from biotechnology to rage.
As important as these stops are in an itinerary of thanatopoliti-
cal thought today, the underlying objection of the conference scholar
remains unanswered. If the biopolitical is riven by technology’s inscrip-
tion in thanatos, then how useful can it actually be for writing “a critical
ontology of ourselves”?8 In the final chapter, I turn to this question when
imagining a practice of bíos, one that might be able to avoid techne¯’s
seemingly inevitable enmeshment in death. Beginning with Foucault’s
Security, Territory, Population, and then turning to his later Hermeneutics
of the Subject, I show how Foucault locates a possible genealogy of bio-
power in bíos’s capture by the self through the test.9 Using that as a foun-
dation, I sketch a practice of bíos through the categories of attention and
play as a way of responding to Foucault’s diagnosis of the self as deeply
responsible for biopower today. Drawing on Sigmund Freud’s writings
on the drives as well as negativity, along with the writings of Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, D.W. Winnicott, and
Walter Benjamin, I argue that a practice of bíos in terms of attention
and play would be better able to evade the problems of mastery that
characterize so many of the accounts of techne¯ under study here. I end
on a hopeful note by imagining a possibility for a practice of play that,
.
PREFACE ix