Title: Three-part lecture series on Feminist Science Studies and Feminist Biopolitics: Lecture 1: Precarious Life? Judith Butler
1Three-part lecture series on Feminist Science
Studies and Feminist BiopoliticsLecture 1
Precarious Life?Judith Butlers Precarious Life
The Powers of Mourning and Violence
- Professor Charis Thompson
- UC Berkeley / Yonsei / Ewha Seminar The
Emergence of Life Politics in Neoliberal
Capitalism - Yonsei University, Seoul, June 2008
2Schedule of Classes
- Week 1 Wednesday lecture Precarious Life?
(feminist biopolitics and Judith Butlers
Precarious Life) - Discussion section Presentation and QA on
Making Parents - Week 2 Wednesday lecture Bare Life?
(biopolitical geographies and histories and
Giorgio Agambens Homo Sacer) - Discussion section Panel on Gender, Everyday
Life and Exceptional Life, with Professors Cho,
Kim, and Thompson - Week 3 Wednesday lecture Beyond Humanism?
(feminist technoscience studies and Donna
Haraways Cyborg and Companion Species
Manifestoes) - Discussion section student presentations with
feedback from Professors Cho, Kim, and Thompson
3What is biopolitics?
- Michel Foucault biopolitics relates closely to
his idea of biopower, which is characteristic of
the form of government (modern nation state /
capitalism), governmentality, that regulates
through interventions on populations (census,
reproduction, family, sexuality, etc), and is
power over life and death - Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri refer rather to
anti-capitalist insurrection where ones life and
body are mobilized as weapons, including 'in its
most tragic and revolting form', suicide
terrorism. Biopower for them is the hegemonic,
sovereign, political condition for the activation
of biopolitics. - The term also has a considerable legitimacy in
more everyday life meaning bioethics, life
science policy, all kinds of political activism
to do with living things, and the political and
cultural aspects of the rise of biotechnology and
the biomedicalization of society
4What is feminist biopolitics?
- Feminist biopolitics from humanities (e.g. Buter
we are discussing today Shiva, Braidotti) - Feminist biopolitics from social sciences (e.g.
bioethics, sociology and anthropology of life and
death) - Feminist science and technology studies (e.g.
Donna Haraway, myself, and many, many others) - Goals of each
- Spatialization and temporalization of each
- Agency in each
- Modes of analysis
- Styles of writing and arguing
5Feminist / Queer theoretical strands of Butler
- Importance of vulnerability and the potential to
be injured - Importance of mourning and loss
- Role of womens, ethno-national, racial
minorities, and sexual minorities experiences
politically, and during war - Legacy of AIDS hate crime legislation in US
- Appropriation of womens rights as a
justification of war
6Judith Butlers Precarious Life, by Chapters
- Explanation and Exoneration, or What We Can Hear
(or, why the role of the US in September 11,
2001, can and should be analysed, without
condoning the attack so as to grieve for all lost
lives) - Violence, Mourning, Politics (on the fundamental
aspect of precariousness to injury and mourning
in our current humanism, starting with Freud) - Indefinite Detention (on sovereignty and
governmentality overlap in Guantanamo, as
evidenced by the state of exception in war
prison) - The Charge of Anti-Semitism (why it is legitimate
to criticize Israel and Zionism, and to support
Palestinian statehood as an American Jew, despite
charges that this is tantamount to anti-semitism) - Precarious Life (starting as a meditation on the
role of the humanities in late capitalist
research universities, and after
post-structuralism, becomes an elaboration of the
Levinasian idea of giving face to all lives in
the recognition of the precariousness of that
face)
7What does this do to biopolitics?
- Are there populations, sovereigns, nation states?
Which ones? - What part does capitalism / markets play?
- Who is she talking about?
- What world does she fear she is living in and
what world does she advocate for? - What action should we take?
- What about thanato- / necropolitics?
8Three-part lecture series on Feminist Science
Studies and Feminist BiopoliticsLecture 2 Bare
LifeGiorgio Agambens Homo Sacer Sovereign
Power and Bare Life, Part III
- Professor Charis Thompson
- UC Berkeley / Yonsei / Ewha Seminar The
Emergence of Life Politics in Neoliberal
Capitalism - Yonsei University, Seoul, June 2008
9Homo Sacer, Part III
- Giorgio Agamben, Professor of Philosophy,
University of Verona, Italy. - Homo Sacer Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995
in English 1998) is in three parts we are
concerned today with Part III. - Part I The Logic of Sovereignty
- Part II Homo Sacer
- Part III The Camp as Biopolitical Paradigm of
the Modern
10Introduction
- Distinction between zoe and bios, from Greeks
- Zoe simple fact of living common to all living
beings - Bios way of living proper to an individual or
group - Inherits political theory tradition whereby polis
is separated from oikos (home) and the latter is
taken to be concerned with reproduction and
outside the polity (in feminist theory, the
personal is political reproductive
technologies, etc., undermine this distinction
Agamben does not take up any feminist
biopolitical work in Homo Sacer) - Sets up for bios as sacred life (can be killed,
not sacrificed), and zoe as bare life (can be
sacrificed doesnt amount to murder) as modes of
subjectification in modernity
11Agambens humanism
- The bios for the genus zoon of human, that which
distinguishes humans from all other animals for
Aristotle/ Agamben, is a supplement of
politicity tied to language, on a community not
simply of the pleasant and the painful but of the
good and the evil and of the just and the
unjust. - Ties this to definition of city (primordial
expression of the collective political life)
the end of the city is life according to the
good. The wolf-man is barred from the city in
modernity bare life is produced within the nation - (Compare to Butler, for whom precarious life is
a injurability that is both zoe and bios, and is
not derivative of / co-incident with the city,
measured by fear of/susceptibility to violence
toward oneself and mourning for the injured other)
121 The Politicization of Life
- Starts with Foucaults modern man is an animal
whose whose politics calls his existence as a
living being into question, with Hannah Arendts
focus on totalitarianism, total domination, and
concentration camps, claiming that she left out
biopolitics and he left out paying attention to
totalitarian states of C20th. - His idea of the politicization of life brings
together these two strands. - Unlike Foucault epistemes, Agamben sees the
river of biopolitics that gave homo sacer his
life runs its course in a hidden but continuous
fashion. Totalitarianism and mass democracy
drive it to its limit in the camp - The corpus of early modern period (habeas corpus)
becomes the body that can be killed, not
sacrificed
132 Biopolitics and the Rights of Man
- The importance of the refugee of the modern
nation state, who breaks the continuity between
man and citizen, nativity and nationality and
puts the originary fiction of modern sovereignty
in crisis. Rights of man designed to be
universally appealed to in times of bare life
but cannot be understood outside the nation state
conferring those rights. - The refugee must be considered for what he is,
nothing less than a limit concept that radically
calls into question the fundamental categories of
the nation-state, from the birth-nation to the
man-citizen link - Sees current separation between humanitarianim
and politics as another example (others might not
agree)
143 Life that Does not Deserve to Live
- After WWI, the move to extend the unpunishability
of the killing of life beyond suicide and state
of emergency to third party (without it being
homicide) - Development of definition and practice of life
that does not deserve to live - Not economic or eugenic efficiency to kill those
deemed unworthy its about establishing
biopolitics through one of its characteristics,
the blending of medicine and politics - Euthanasia signals the point at which
biopolitics necessarily turns into
thanatopolitics
154 Politics, of Giving Form to the Life of a
People
- The fight against internal and external enemies
of the State (politics) and the care and growth
of the national body / citizens (police) become
indistinguishable - Race as understood for the Jews in National
Socialism is thus not defined phenotypically but
uses a language of genetics and heredity to bind
it to eugenics and euthanasia, bringing these two
together
165 VP
- VPs, or Versuchspersonen, human guinea pigs, is
one of the most terrifying aspects of Nazi
biopolitics - Physician and scientist move into sovereigns
territory, deciding on life and death, and what
is a nationally worthwhile sacrifice (prisoners
lives for soldiers lives, for example) - Importance of idea that science under National
Socialism is not bad science but is good
science in the sense of being well organized and
based on scientifically sound method this flies
in the face of many common assumptions about
science and medicine and about Nazi medicine in
particular
176 Politicizing Death
- The coma depasse (over-coma) and the beginnings
of brain death, where life support keeps body
functioning to become a source of organs and body
parts for the triaged sick - The words life and death become unscientific
words the state is able, through law and
medicine, to take over defining death and the
limits of life
187 The Camp as the Nomos of the Modern
- Agamben argues that it is not the city but
rather the camp that is the fundamental
biopolitical paradigm of the West the
political space of modernity itself - Sets up the camp as an idea that can be applied
(however dubiously) in many situations the camp
consists in the materialization of the state of
exceptionwe find ourselves virtually in the
preesnce of a camp every time such a structure is
created.. - And in a different yet analgous way, todays
democratico-capitalist project of eliminating the
poor classes through development not only
reproduces within itelf the people that is (sic)
excluded but also transforms the entire
population of the Third World into bare life.
19Appeal of book
- The intuitive sense that can be made of the ideas
of some people being not just more or less valued
but that some are valued and some are both
invisible and objects of violence /
disproportionately subject to violence (different
registers though mutually constitutive) - The proposition that the concentration camp can
be model for other similar situations which
encourages others to use it as a model for other
Others to the political order, without empirical
constraint - The actual examples beyond the camp are not as
compelling in that they lose the intuitive appeal
above - e.g. the brain dead patient is a very
different kind of zoe from the concentration camp
prisoner, as is the resident of the Third World,
or the racialized domestic citizen
20Where does Agamben leave us?
- Sovereign and camp as the twin extremes of
modernity, states of exception, where zoe and
bios collapse, as it were in opposite directions
(sovereign is so pure bios that even his zoe is
performatively bios Muselmann in concentration
camp is so pure zoe that his inanimate lack of
reaction to torture is bios) - Wants us, at the end of part III, to return to
some kind of equilibrium on this spectrum where
zoe and bios are distinguishable, and a classic
ontologically autonomous political sphere,
distinguishable from bare life, is reinstated
wants to save the political / human
21Problems with this
- STS posits that zoe / bios are always connected,
and tries empirically to show how in different
times and places, especially new biologies which
are rapidly remaking both zoe and bios, as well
as their connections through technical and
material means - E.g. my notion of selective pronatalism which
is situated in what I call a biotech mode of
reproduction, and my newer work on genomics
22Neoliberalism? Capitalism?
- Considering we are to using capitalism,
neoliberalism, and all the kinds of affect that
go with the market to explain things from
biomedicalization to celebrity fetishism, it is
very interesting that neither Bulter nor Agamben
have anything whatsoever to say about capital,
markets free trade. Consumerism, or bio-economies - Counter publics to neoliberalism are expressions
of agency of bios
23Relationship with God Creativity Resistance
Humanity in Abjection
- Also doesnt consider traditions of thought that
consider suffering to be key to bios, such as
being productive of a relationship with God, or a
spur to creativity - that it is a kind of
trivial/self-centered subjectivity if not earned
through experience - Resistance of all forms (candlelight protest??)
- Meaning and subject-hood among those who suffer,
in one anothers eyes, even if homo sacer, bare
life, in the gaze of the nation state (e.g. even
in accounts of the camp, people engaged in
extraordinary acts of humanity such as a mother
giving insufficient rations to a child) in other
words there is both great humanity and
inter-subjectivity in abjection