Life Death

Abstract

Deconstruction occupies an “eccentric” place in the varied field of biopolitics, as it radicalizes the indissoluble knot that binds life to power. On the basis of Foucauldian analysis, Derrida reflects on the “deviation” of biopolitics, which turns into bio-thanato-politics, that is to say, politics over life (bios) and death (thanatos). Life and death are not opposite, rather, they are inseparable, as one has inscribed the other within itself. Derrida’s bio-thanato-politics, as a deconstruction of the concept of life and its relationship with the power, which is always the power of life and death, is not a different declination of biopolitics, but its radicalization. Beyond the biopolitical alternative between a power over life and a power of life, Derrida thinks a bio-thanato-politics, namely, a politics of the survival. Surviving well together, indeed, is the essential character of his democracy to-come.

Keywords:

• Derrida
• biopolitics
• life
• death
• power

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For a general overview of the broad spectrum of authors and perspectives associated with the field of biopolitics, see the important work by Bazzicalupo.

2 See the séance of 17 March 1976, concluding the Course held by Foucault at the Collège de France that year: “Society Must be Defended.” For an analysis of the issues addressed by Foucault in this course, whose dominant theme was war and the genealogy of racism, cf. Groulx.

3 The distinction between the sovereign power to kill, to make die, and the biopolitical power to make live appears in the concluding pages of La volonté de savoir: “One might say that the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (Foucault, History of Sexuality 138).

4 Cf. Regazzoni.

5 For a concise exposition of the issues at stake, see Vitale, Johnson, Di Martino and Geraci. More directly related to the life–power connection is Lembo.

6 The séances of the seminar dedicated to Freud were extrapolated and published in To Speculate – On “Freud.”

7 For the meanings that Bemächtigungstrieb assumes in the context of Freud’s work, see Laplanche and Pontalis.

8 Freud asserts:

If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons – becomes inorganic once again – then we shall be compelled to say that “the aim of all life is death” and, looking backwards, that “inanimate things existed before living ones.” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 38)

9 Derrida on more than one occasion insisted on the dynamic thrusting force of the drive. Trieb must be conceived as “a force, an urge, a driving power” (To Speculate – On “Freud” 354); as “a movement, a process, a tendency, a force rather than a thing”; indeed, it is not even “a force in the substantial, subjective, or objective sense of the word,” but rather “a forcing, a forcement, an enforcing” (Beast and the Sovereign II: 102).

10 For the meaning of this term, see especially Derrida and Stiegler 111.

11 As Freud observes, “Thus these guardians of life, too, were originally the myrmidons of death” (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 39).

12 On the drive of the proper in relation to the drive for power, allow me to refer to Resta.

13 “The death drive, originary though it may be, is not a principle, as are the pleasure and reality principles” (Derrida, Archive Fever 10); this is why Derrida defines it as “anarchic” and “anarchontic.”

14 For the juxtaposition between ipseity, mastery and sovereignty Derrida frequently refers to the analyses of Benveniste (“Hospitality” 61–73).

15 On the paradoxical logic of (auto)immunity, see Di Martino and Marchente. More in general on the immune system, cf. Esposito.

16 Cf. Bensussan.