Rereading The History of Sexuality, Volume 1
Four figures emerged [se dessinent] from this preoccupation with sex, which mounted throughout the nineteenth century—four privileged objects of knowledge, which were also targets and anchorage points for the ventures of knowledge [les entreprises du savoir]: the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple, and the perverse adult. Each of them corresponded to one of these strategies which, each in its own way, passed through [a traversé] and made use of the sex of women, children, and men.
—Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, volume 1
Perhaps we will never have done exploring all the analytic potential compressed in that familiar, tiny, and exploratory volume, The History of Sexuality, volume 1? Here is a strangely unfamiliar point that ought not be novel, nor controversial: the administration of reproduction (in particular of “birthrate,” but also maternities and parenting) was included by Foucault under the modern biopolitical concerns discussed in HS I and elsewhere.1 Moreover, this provokes a question: does this inclusion mean that something is missing from Foucault’s account?
For, as we have seen, Foucault also argued that powers of death accompany the biopolitical as its counterpart or underside: the byproduct of its pursuits of life. So shouldn’t Foucault’s elaboration of this complex relationship between biopolitical powers of life and death have included some kind of discussion of the reproductive variants of the latter? We could ask the question this way: if reproduction becomes (as Foucault indicates) biopolitical, then (given his own understanding of the latter) does this mean, as some have suggested, that reproduction also becomes thanato- or necropolitical?2 And in what way? Certainly, one could turn to a number of theorists for accounts of reproduction rendered economically or politically significant to nationalism, race hierarchy, colonialism, slavery, and genocide.3 As such it has been the grounds (and means) for exposure to forms of control, various legal regimes and force, incitement to harm, states of chaos, anxiety, and death.
I will focus on the point that it also produces female subjects understood as having the capacity to propagate death (to futures, races, peoples, and nations) through reproductive transmission, a possibility presupposing the legibility of procreation both as conduct and also as the conduct of a conduct Foucault called governmentality. We can see the articulation of this possibility as one of the suspended capacities of Foucault’s work. This chapter discusses a number of preconditions for setting it in play, concluding with an eightfold definition of thanatopolitics, the eighth prong of which is the thanatopolitical constitution of figures of impediment to putative biopolitical and futural interest.
In the previous chapter we saw a conjunction identified (albeit fleetingly) by Edelman: the perverse male and the aborting woman as figures of impediment associated with the refusal of “life” (NF 31).4 In this chapter we’ll see related figures (those considered to be sexually perverse, and those considered to impede reproduction through the use of “deadly secrets”), aligned in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century concerns about population degeneracy discussed by Foucault. If we depart now from Edelman’s discussion and return to the first volume of The History of Sexuality, we can locate its conjunction of bodies individualized by power relations stimulating interest in, and extorting truth from, the forms of sexuality deemed perverse, but also from “the child’s body, à propos of women’s sex, in connection with practices restricting births and so on” (HS I 97).Foucault makes special mention of the masturbating child, the hysterical woman, associated personages such as “the nervous woman, the frigid wife, the indifferent mother—or the mother beset by murderous obsessions” (HS I 110, translation modified)—and the dissipated men or socially conscientious Malthusian couples who impede or control reproduction. Foucault presents these as “strategic ensembles [ensembles] forming specific dispositifs of knowledge and power centering on sex” (HS I 103, trans. mod.). But insofar as they become hermeneutic figures of intense scrutiny, his account depicts these as unities centering (also) on heightened possibilities of death. The masturbating child jeopardizes its own childhood and adult vitality as well as that of the nation. The psychically and physiologically disordered women associated with hysteria are nervous, neurotic, or harmful child rearers.5 Birth control practices are said to have a pathogenic value “for the individual and for the species” (HS I 105), as in the widespread view, vividly depicted in Zola’s Fécondité, of interrupted coition as destroying human vitality, just as do women’s interruptions of their pregnancies.6 Edelman describes one type of “crusade for the children,” and Foucault described another,7 in which concern for a child’s individual well-being becomes coextensive with concern for their collective health and that of population.
The perverse male, masturbating child, and hysterical women discussed by Foucault are, as he famously argues, not best understood as the objects of repression. Instead, they are intensifying figures of interest, interpretation, identity, identification, self-identification, and problematization.8 For the human sciences of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, they could also be the manifestation of degenerate “types.” Signs of degeneracy might be seen in perverse pleasures or sexual dissipation or fecundity control. Such signs come to be linked with the associated logics of truth, secrecy, identification, and disclosure. With its proliferating figures of impediment to the “healthy futures” of individuals and peoples, this typology serves as a reminder of the contingency of its forms of life, death, and responsibility.
BODIES AND POPULATIONS
To return to the surprises HS I continues to hold: at one point in Terrorist Assemblages Jasbir Puar hinges together an initially implausible characterization of intersectionality with the following characterization of Foucault’s account of sexuality: “Foucault’s own provocations include the claim that sexuality is an intersection, rather than an interpellative identity, of the body and the population.… Unlike intersectional theorizing which foregrounds the separate analytics of identity that perform the holistic subject’s inseparableness, the entities that intersect are the body (not the subject, let us remember) and population.”9 Of course, it’s counterintuitive to claim, as Puar does, that “intersectional models cannot account for the simultaneous or multifarious presences of both or many.”10 The founding impulse of intersectionality has been to do exactly that, particularly by means of seeing race and sex as always inflecting each other.11 While Puar recognizes this, her argument is that the study of intersectional identities is prone, nonetheless, to betray that founding impulse: “taking imbricated identities apart one by one to see how they influence each other.”12
In HS I Foucault describes the formation of a sexuality that becomes associated with soul, back history, case, explanatory principles, identity claims, depth models of the self and of desire. However much he denaturalizes these by describing their conditions of formation, perhaps such an analysis breaks insufficiently with their parameters, Puar speculates.13 She agrees with the Foucauldian point that the complex and unstable forces at work in such formations are not to be understood as “power” working on “identities,” for the latter emerge only through the former. But, just as (she might argue) an intersectionality theorist who refutes the separability of imbricated identities may betray this impulse by separating them so as to show their imbrication, the Foucauldian who does not mean to see “sexualities” as worked on by “power” may, nonetheless, do so, “presum[ing] the automatic primacy and singularity of the disciplinary subject and its identitarian interpellation.”14
Working in the wake of Foucault, one would not assume the interests, concerns, or organizing principles of “homosexuality,” the “child at risk,” or the “bad mother,” nor take them to preexist the forms of power seeming to target them. Instead, the aim would be to ask how identities generate, unstably, in the intersections of bodies and populations.
Now consider a proposal from Rey Chow, for whom this Foucauldian thinking of body-population intersections gives a further result: “seen in the light of biopower, sexuality is no longer clearly distinguishable from the entire problematic of the reproduction of human life that is, in modern times, always racially and ethnically inflected.”15 A complex intervention into a body of literatures is being effected here. First, Chow follows Ann Stoler’s watershed intervention into the occluded role of colonialism, colonial sexuality, race, and ethnicity in HS I.16 Second, she joins a number of theorists in noting an odd phenomenon that has arisen in the wake of its publication: a bifurcation of the secondary literature concerned with the status of sex in the work and the secondary literature engaging its biopolitics.
Asking if these concerns really disconnect so easily, Chow returns us to Foucault’s claim that the formations of race and ethnicity as internal forces against which a society “must be defended” amplify the murderous aspect of biopolitical formations (SMBD 256). In consequence, a genealogy of biopolitics, and of the control and “entry of [‘biopoliticized’] life into history,”17 is, at the same time, a genealogy of the ascendancy of whiteness.18 This should not be neglected by sexuality studies, for Foucault’s “analyses of the various institutional practices devised in European society since the Enlightenment for handling human sexuality lead him finally to the conclusion that such practices are part of a biopolitics: a systematic management of biological life and its reproduction.”19 A reading disconnecting the “sex” from the “biopolitics” would, in neglecting their intersection, occlude what Chow and some others have claimed is the reproduction of race and race hierarchy forming at that intersection, in the aspirations of colonialism, nationalism, security, “peoples.” Also, Foucault’s genealogy suggests that many of the classifications of sexuality in nineteenth-century sexology emerged in tandem with the preoccupation with race-hierarchical theories of degeneracy and its transmission (by sexual disease, reproductive transmission, contact, or social influence). Stoler has argued that these similarly overlap with a period in colonialism in which sex and reproduction become thresholds of individual, population, and racial harm.20 It does seem, then, that the aspects of HS I speaking to this connection will be lost by secondary literatures separating the account of “sex” from the account of “biopolitics.”
In response, Puar certainly agrees that this separation is curious and infelicitous. Yet she has had misgivings about Chow’s means of considering the racism of biopolitical formations described by Foucault. Of course the integration of a Foucauldian analysis of the making of sex with that of race hierarchy is welcome. But the interest in this overlap can also bring the focus back to preoccupations HS I specifically deflected: as if the aims of heterosexual reproduction are dominant and organizing.21 One could see HS I as demonstrably about the vicissitudes of reproductive heterosexuality, albeit showing that its ends are not produced as one might expect (not primarily through repression of abnormality or of “nonproductive” sexuality, nor through reduction of discourse about or interest in abnormality, nor through normalization, not primarily through the promotion of economically useful and predictable reproduction). Yet even this reading would similarly fail the specifics of Foucault’s analysis if it presupposed that the interests of a productive and reproductive heterosexuality were the organizing principle of the contingent formations he describes (HS I 38, 45, 103).
Moreover, Puar’s question is this—why do the analyses of biopoliticized race, colonialism, and Empire, insofar as they undertake to highlight the concurrent importance of biopoliticized reproduction, then seem to occlude the intersection of perverse sexualities with race and racism? The problematic bifurcation of literatures cuts both ways. If much sexuality studies literature has neglected the biopolitics and the genealogy of racism offered by HS I and the associated Collège de France lectures, some of the literatures amplifying the genealogy of racism in Foucault’s work have seemed prone to neglect the perverse sexualities.22
This response to Foucault embedded in Terrorist Assemblages adds to his genealogy of the intersection between race division and biopolitical governmentalities an analysis of the association of stigmatized race identities and perversions. Puar shows that the latter are racialized and the former sexualized and that this very intersection has become a mode of population management, a technique of security, and of proliferating control. Population logics, biopoliticization, sexualization, and racialization are shown to be interlocking modes of circulating politicized affect and governmentality. For example, she analyzes the fearmongering circulation of images of Muslims as imminent terrorists whose foreignness is associated with their supposed repudiation of homosexuality and who may incur a retaliating aggression whose race vilification comes to merge with homophobically inflected attack in which they are savagely associated with the perverse sexuality they are supposed to find intolerable. Thus race-based attack merges with homophobic forms of sexualization.
Despite the differences between their Deleuzean and psychoanalytically inflected analyses, Puar and Edelman share the concern that the claims to family values by gay politics can occur at the expense of sexualities not encompassed within such claims: those associated with “antilife” and unintelligibility.23 As Puar puts this, a newly sanctioned homosexuality is “folded into life” (associated with the values of life) through “market virility … and ‘regenerative reproductivity.’” But, focusing more than No Future on the interlocking of race, sex, reproduction, and biopolitics, Puar notes the generation of figures of less tolerant nations, religions, and foreigners now reconfigured as challenging this new variant on American (and European) claims to a (sexual) exceptionalism. The attribution might amount to its own form of death mongering—as when the ascribed intolerance of other nations, religions, or peoples is used to justify differential immigration policies, occupation, or war. So when (some) gay and queer subjects are positively associated with the values of “life,” Puar argues for a closer and more critical attention: in fact, “how queerness folds into racialization is a crucial factor.” Offering a critique of homonationalism allows her to show how sexual and queer politics can integrate with “patriotism, war, torture, security, death, terror, terrorism, detention and deportation.”24
Countering the division of literatures, Puar offers a distinctive working together of the aspirations of sex, race, biopolitics, and reproduction. Yet there is one respect in which she limits her attention to the role of reproduction in this cluster. She discusses its association with inclusive claims to be enfolded in life, rather than the conducts of reproduction understood as forms of death and death mongering. Yet the routes through which procreation can also be understood in the latter terms are consistent with her analyses.25
To return to the theme of suspension: when Puar offers a critique of Foucault, she also favors the least identitarian (to use Puar’s term) Foucault. But we can favor a different reading of HS I by foregrounding its most flexible, segmented, and disassembled dimensions. We’ve seen the possible view that a Foucault returned to reproductive sexuality will be less favorable for a queer reading. But I will argue that another variant of analysis of Foucault on reproduction is available.26
WHAT CAN REPRODUCTION BE?
According to a Foucauldian analysis of sexuality, its “terminal forms” (HS I 92) must not be presupposed in genealogical analysis. That approach can similarly be extended to his references to “life,” “birthrate,” “reproduction,” “birth,” “family.” How should we approach some of the most liminal figures from the work: “phthisic child,” “erotomanic aunt,” “neurasthenic mother” (HS I 125)? According to a possible rereading of HS I, the making of perverse sexualities is also a making of hysterical, absent, or failed, irresponsible, harmful, or deadly mothers. The material, if not its dominant rhetoric, directs us to the contingency of procreation. It can be individualized or massified. It can be a passivity or an agency, belonging to nature or humans. It can be prepolitical, extrapolitical, or thoroughly political. It can be nature, fate, or personal project, conduct, moral choice, or technology. It can be the figure of security or jeopardy—the maintenance of family bloodlines or the defense of a society or the flourishing of a nation—or the figure of their various declines. It may be ateleological or any number of teleologies, convergent and divergent.
How to pursue the analysis so that a discussion of HS I in terms of its procreation does not reduce to what we think we know about procreation’s agencies, aims, and interests? How, in this context, to generate an appropriately segmented, decomposed, and dehiscent “reproduction?” How to undertake the analysis of a figure such as “mother,” so as to resist the “knowing, naming and thus stabilizing of identity across space and time” for which both Foucault and Puar invite alternatives? The project serves as a reminder that the resources of Foucault’s analyses and their (self-) identity are also not definitively resolved.
I argued in chapter 1 that Foucauldian segmentation resists the periodization attributed to him, offering reserves of resistance to aspects of Derrida’s critique. The following section will propose some similar implications of this segmentation for the seeming self-identity of “race,” “sex,” “mothers,” procreation, and “reproduction” and for alternatives to what Derrida refers to as the principle of gathering.27
THE PARALLEL LIVES OF THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY’S VOLUME 1
To continue an exploration of untried readings of HS I, although Foucault’s dispositifs read most effectively when their elements are understood as interconnecting, in this chapter I argue for a provisional disentangling of the terms: sexuality, life, reproduction, and population, for a specific, and temporary, reason. This allows a closer focus on procreation as a hinge between Foucault’s account of sexuality and his account of biopolitics operating in a society which “must be defended.”
So why do we hear so rarely of the procreation of HS I? The work had a number of parallel lives. Looking back twenty years, and considering the figurings of Foucault from Agamben (1998), Rose (2006), Esposito (2008), Bernasconi (2010), Jones (2010), and Weheliye (2014), on the one hand, and Halperin (1995), Eribon (2004), Sedgwick (1990), and Halley (2006),28 on the other, it might indeed seem as if there had been (at least) two quite different HS Is, depending on whether the work has been read though the prism of sex or life. Sex is presented as the means of “access” in a number of ways, but one might focus in particular on the stimulated interest in confession and the will to talk about interior desires. Confessional sexual subjects fascinated by the presence of the possibly abnormal deep seat of a sexual self, talk, and want to talk, as Foucault noted, to all and sundry. Discursive explosion and expert knowledges intersect with the data of statistics and demographics—all critical to the possibility of biopolitical governmentality.
Given the very widespread concerns of biopolitics, it might appear unclear why Foucault would attribute any special significance to sex in thinking about the relation between (disciplined) bodies and (biopoliticized) population (addiction, for example, will also link individualized confessional selves with the concerns of managing population). Here is Foucault, presenting sex as the hinge or link between these. It is given a special status insofar as it is particularly involved in the scrutinizing, gridding, differentiating, normative, and individuating work of the disciplines, but is also the concern of the biopolitical management of populations:29
Why did sexuality become a field of vital strategic importance in the nineteenth century? … On the one hand, sexuality, being an eminently corporeal mode of behavior, is a matter for individualizing disciplinary controls that take the form of permanent surveillance (and the famous controls that were, from the late eighteenth to the twentieth century, placed (exercés) both at home and at school on children who masturbated represent precisely this aspect of the disciplinary control of sexuality). But because it also has procreative effects, sexuality is also inscribed, takes effect, in broad biological processes that concern not the bodies of individuals but the element, the multiple unity of the population.… It is, I think, the privileged position it occupies between organism and population, between the body and general phenomena, that explains the extreme emphasis placed upon sexuality in the nineteenth century.
(SMBD 251–52)
This passage from Society Must Be Defended specifies (perhaps more clearly than HS I) that this is “because it also has procreative effects (effets procréateurs)” (SMBD 251, my emphasis).30 My intention is not to misleadingly suggest that Foucault gives a greater focus to procreation than is the case, but I do want to draw attention to the reasons that this (procreative) variant of sex is said to link the biopower of (disciplined) “bodies” and of (biopoliticized) “populations.” In the secondary literature (both the reception of Foucault in biopolitical literature and in sexuality studies), this is one of the least emphasized aspects of Foucault’s discussion, although an attention to this question has emerged.31 We tend to accept the account of sex as critical to biopolitical management, because of its role in normative individuation in the libidinized practices of disclosure and confession, examination, and self-presentation. Thus it is said to be the key hinge between the bodily life of the disciplines and the government of the biological life of “populations.” Indeed, the same incited interest in identity will stimulate one-to-one scrutiny and “gridding” of parallel types of identities (for example: the “delinquent,” “the addict,” the “anorexic,” the “fundamentalist,” the “terrorist”) about which population, administration, and expert and scientific inquiry may also come to be most interested (as distributions within populations).32 Many types of hermeneutically inflected identities (including some not considered by Foucault: those identified with ADD or anorexia) emerge in accordance with what he describes as a sexual identity model (psychic depths or secrets, disclosure, discovery, gridding, norms, classifications, the “case” of which one comes to understand oneself as an instance). The models Foucault particularly associates with sex (the charge of interest with which confessing and interrogated bodies with hidden depths are stroked into individuality) become paradigmatic for other forms of close examination and interior truth (HS I 44–45).
Thus, when we ask what is this “life” (of the “body” and of the “species”) to which sex (on Foucault’s account) supposedly gives access (HS I 146), we will find we are dealing with multiple forms and makings of life. Sex has a great number of lives from a biopolitical perspective. It is just one subdomain of biopolitics (it becomes governmental, as does health, aging, etc.). It is also depicted in HS I, but less so in the prevailing biopolitical literature, as the critical means of power’s access to life. And it stimulates the kind of interest, and the contours and mode of examined, individualized corporeal information, and disclosure models, the corresponding “perpetual spirals of power and pleasure” (HS I 45) proliferating in the relevant expert knowledges, human sciences, and governmentalities.
But we saw in the passage quoted earlier another point to which Foucault refers: the “sex” managed biopolitically is also procreative: it is concerned with birthrate, with population futures, with the way in which reproductive “health” impacts the population. This domain also bears its corresponding hermeneutic dimension; Foucault describes the hidden secrets and disclosures associated with heredity.
While queer theory will readily recognize sex as interconnecting with the biopolitical vicissitudes of life and death, it has shown less interest in some of the biopolitical preoccupations mentioned by HS I that seemingly have less to do with sex (biopolitical interest in alimentation, healthy circulation in urban environments, for example). With respect to the question “what is this life” of the “body” and of the “species” supposedly accessed by biopolitics, we’ll find different answers to the question if we turn to the Italian philosophers Roberto Esposito and Giorgio Agamben (both considered in the next chapter), or to Didier Fassin,33 to those who (for example) return Foucault’s interest in life to his dialogue with Georges Canguilhem34 or to the epistemes described in the The Order of Things.35 Life can be a reference to biological process, to species, to formations of life as contingent, as open to chance and error, or as having epistemic conditions. It can be a reference to the possible objects of governmentality, taking shape in tandem with the latter. Minimally, reproductive biopolitics belong to the prisms of life through which one can read HS I, operating at the nexus between the biopolitical administering of life and the biopolitical intensification of sex. So let’s now reconsider procreation’s transition in HS I from the conservative teleology supposed by the repudiated repressive hypothesis to a significant biopolitical preoccupation.
HS I AND THE PROCREATIVE HYPOTHESIS
Foucault’s engagement with the status of procreation is present from the first pages of HS I.36 In rejecting the repressive hypothesis so stimulating to confessional sexual selfhood, he rejects the view that the perversions were subdued as illicit or illegal to the ends of a Victorian and capitalist-friendly sexuality oriented to the reproduction of the family unit. According to the view of repression he repudiates, excessive and unproductive desires, pleasures, and symptoms—those of homosexuality, masturbation, hysteria—are rendered problematic not just because they offend declared norms for sex but also because they compete with the requirements of a nonsquanderous reproductive sexuality. He depicts the received narrative of a repression of sexuality in relation to which the perversions would have to be pursued covertly: “sexuality was carefully confined; it moved into the home [emménage]. The conjugal family took custody of it [la confisque] and absorbed it into the serious function of reproduction.… The legitimate and procreative couple laid down the law.… A single locus of sexuality was acknowledged [reconnue] in social space as well as at the heart of every household … a utilitarian and fertile one: the parent’s bedroom” (HS I 3). So procreation’s stakes are first at work in HS I in the guise of this replaced or rejected repressive hypothesis. Revisiting our suppositions about the latter, he was also revisiting suppositions about a reproductive hypothesis, asking: “was this transformation of sex into discourse [mise en discours du sexe] not governed by the endeavor [ordonnée à la tâche] to expel from reality the forms of sexuality that were not subordinated [soumises à] to the strict economy of reproduction: to say no to infertile [infécondes] activity, to banish casual pleasures [les plaisirs d’à côté], to reduce or exclude practices whose object was not procreation?” (HS I 36 translation modified). He answers: even if the apparent aim is to deter nonprocreative, sexual activity,37 even if “all this garrulous [bavarde] attention which has us in a stew over sexuality [dont nous faisons tapage autour de la sexualité] is … organized by [ordonnée à] one basic concern: to ensure population, to reproduce labor capacity … to constitute a sexuality that is economically useful and politically conservative” (HS I 36–37 translation modified), “reduction has not been the means employed for trying to achieve it.” Here, the “it” refers to the (putative) economically useful reproduction.
The implantation (in Foucault’s sense) of pleasures figured in the nineteenth century as abnormal and perverse—from masturbation to homosexuality—could, in fact, be depicted as an excellent “means” to generate the most calculable, normative, statistically comprehensible, fully administered, gridded, procreative heterosexuality at the level of population. But that is not quite the point, not least because Foucault resisted reducing an apparatus to a uniform aim. What then, is the role of newly biopolitical formations of procreation in his account of the formation of perverse sexualities?
THE PROCREATIVE HINGE
When Foucault considers the formation of sexuality as interconnecting with regimes of truth, expert knowledge, and biopolitical administration, notice how one can substitute the terms procreation or procreative sex, for the word sex (as I have done in the following passage):
At the heart of this economic and political problem of population was [procreative] sex: it was necessary to analyze the birthrate, the age of marriage, the legitimate and illegitimate births, the precocity and frequency of sexual relations, the ways of making them fertile or sterile, the effects of unmarried life or of the prohibitions, the impact of contraceptive practices—of those notorious “deadly secrets” which demographers on the eve of the Revolution knew were already familiar to the inhabitants of the countryside.
Of course, it had long been asserted that a country had to be populated [peuplé] if it hoped to be rich and powerful; but this was the first time that a society had affirmed, in a constant way, that its future and its fortune were tied not only to the number and the uprightness [virtu] of its citizens, to their marriage rules and family organization, but to the manner in which each individual made use of [their] sex [chacun fait usage de son sexe].
(HS I 25–26)
Now consider the following citation as encapsulating the more specific hinge that takes place in The History of Sexuality and in the last lecture of Society Must Be Defended, between Foucault’s concept of those mechanisms of power addressing themselves to life and those mechanisms of power addressing themselves to sex or sexuality. Small as it is, this intersection is the reproductive “hinge” in the work, a hinge that is identified by Foucault, but not greatly emphasized as such: “We … are in a society of ‘sex’ [du sexe], or rather a society ‘with a sexuality’ [à sexualité]: the mechanisms of power are addressed to the body, to life, to what causes it to proliferate, to what reinforces the species, its stamina [sa vigueur], its ability to dominate, or its capacity for being used. Through the themes of health, progeny, race, the future of the species, the vitality of the social body, power spoke of sexuality and to sexuality; the latter was not a mark or a symbol, it was an object and a target” (HS I 147).
Clearly, most of Foucault’s references to sex are not procreative. But for Foucault it is (procreativity oriented) sex and (biopolitically oriented) reproduction in populations that hinge together, as when he describes the formation by which: “sex was not something one simply judged; it was a thing one administered. It was in the nature of a public potential [il relève de la puissance publique]; it called for management procedures” (HS I 24). Introducing this administration of sex, Foucault mentions its becoming a “police” matter (the reference is to discourses of management—as in the eighteenth-century meanings of Polizeiwissenschaft). He cites Johann von Justi’s 1757 text on the importance of having knowledge about the assets of those who belong to the Republic, to “make them serve the public welfare.” The example Foucault gives of the regulation of sex is that of birthrate in the population and healthy or optimal reproduction.38 If, in this one sense, the sex formations discussed by Foucault are somewhat more procreative than it may appear—so, too, with his biopolitics. My point is that when biopolitics intersects with sex in Foucault’s own references in HS I (in association with what he describes as the management of “life”) both are procreative.39
In other words, at several points in HS I Foucault brings together two problematics that do not necessarily fit together. One can, for example, describe the process by which from the eighteenth century onward births are increasingly counted and recorded in the registers of churches, parishes, in medical and local government contexts in relation to the rates of death and marriage.40 The other problematic relates to the conceptualization of “population” and the broader beginnings of demographics. Although Foucault discusses in HS I the nexus of the policing of sexual (reproductive) habit and the conceptual formation of an interest in population, it helps to separate these concerns (rather than assuming their coincidence) just long enough to pay closer attention to the conditions under which they come to overlap. But in his work he presents their overlap in such a way as to occlude a question that is germane for his own purposes: how does reproduction come to present as a mode of responsibility toward “population” or its future? How does it become a problem of both bodily conduct and of governmentality (including the administrative conduct of conduct?) What kind of responsibility is this, and how can we best highlight its contingency? Who comes to be understood as bearing it? Under what conditions?
WHAT CAN POPULATION BE?
That an account must be given of how population comes to include the conduct of procreative sex is apparent from his variously faceted discussions of the former in a range of projects from Security, Territory, Population, back through The Order of Things. There, referring to the formation of the concept of population and its movements, Foucault first discusses a 1740 text by Nicolas Dutot, and the belief that “population tends to move in the contrary direction to money … the poorer countries thus have a tendency to become depopulated.” A number of subsequent accounts referenced in the work describe how population levels might be impacted by stimulation of coinage,41 by the level of wages (188, and see 259), by availability of food and natural resources (256), movements in levels of industrial profit (258–59), or the relationship between the value of the commodity and the value of labor (260).
More in line with these comments, in HS I Foucault mentions Claude-Jacques Herbert’s 1753 Essai sur la police générale: “men multiply like the yields from the ground and in proportion to the advantages and resources they find in their labors.”42 Foucault continues with an account of how an interest in managing population can include patterns of sexual behavior, marriage, births in and out of wedlock, and the use of mechanisms to interrupt pregnancy (HS I 25–26). But in other work we are offered interestingly different accounts of what may be understood to determine levels of population: sex only appears to be the most obvious agent.
The Order of Things is a resource in this respect, with its account of Smith’s law of population according to which better wages are conceptualized as the population stimulus; “the demand for men, like that for any other commodity, necessarily regulates the production of men.”43 The tacit idea might still be that increased or decreased wages stimulate or deter rates of marriage or procreation yet the determining factor is not necessarily depicted as sexual, and so may not be considered a matter of the “conduct of sex,” nor of the governmental conduct of that conduct. This is just to make the obvious point that a management of population is not necessary a management of either sex or sexual “agency.” A governmental conduct of conduct aiming to impact population levels might, for example, aim to act on wage increases (for example, by modifying taxation conditions). And the relevant governmentality might target the overall patterns of abstract masses rather than the behavior of individuals. As Foucault elaborates most extensively in Security, Territory, Population, concepts of population will reconceive of peoples in terms of multiplicities whose trends may be collectively affected by action on their “milieu” (STP 21)
Lars Behrisch has discussed eighteenth-century calculations of how the availability of sufficient looms could stimulate population levels in Lippe.44 Thomas Robert Malthus does consider, despite his attention to the “geometric” impact of sex as on population, other factors with “arithmetic” impact: war, emigration, wages, and food availability. Security discusses a great number of eighteenth-century accounts of how population varies (and may, or may not, be directly or indirectly manageable) according to the variables of climate, commerce, and currency flows, the use of wet-nursing, the availability of subsistence, the demand for exports, and the availability of work (STP 70–72). Thus Foucault’s remark, “At the heart of this economic and political problem of population was sex” (25), can be reconsidered. The contingency of this formation is highlighted by alternative approaches to population levels, many of them discussed by Foucault himself. What, then, is significant about sex?
POPULATION, PROCREATIVE AGENCY, AND WOMEN
As described in HS I, one eventually sees an individualized “responsibilization” (HS I 105) with respect to procreation: a responsibility associated with sexual, or reproductive, conduct as moral or civic duty toward populations. That biopolitical responsibility comes to include maternal duty. He will eventually refer to the twentieth-century responsibilization of the “Malthusian” couple,45 and we could compare that phenomenon to a variant manifesting a century earlier in Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798): the formation of a relevant concept of moral duty.46 This contrast helpfully highlights the contingency of associations between moral duty and reproduction and their agents, telos, substance, and practice. Malthus explores a concept of reproduction as morally reprehensible toward one’s own offspring if the agents lack the means of supporting them. He also conceives individual reproductive duty in terms of one’s reproductive impact on the abstract collective entity: “population,” reconfigured as the matter of moral teleology.
But who is the agent? Where this is a moral duty concerning the conduct of procreative sex, we can ask: does this moral duty have a sex? Is this moral duty sexed? Yes, and very specifically. Malthus recommends a mindfulness concerning population impact such that individuals should delay marriages. He imagines the premarriage years to be passed in celibacy. Here those who would bear this responsibility for delayed marriage unions are male: “It is clearly the duty of each individual not to marry till he has a prospect of supporting his children; but it is at the same time to be wished that he should retain undiminished his desire of marriage, in order that he may exert himself to realize this prospect, and be stimulated to make provision for the support of greater numbers.”47
This individual duty is born by a potential reproductive agent toward immediate offspring and concurrently toward a collective future (general happiness) negatively impacted by “geometrically” expanding population.48 Here we will see vivid illustrations of the absence of an equivalent concept of reproductive agency attributable to women. Malthus does at one point acknowledge that reproduction is dependent on something specific to women: their childbearing “power.” But when he does so, he is not discussing a female reproductive agency but a natural law: “The fecundity of the human species is, in some respects, a distinct consideration from the passion between the sexes, as it evidently depends more upon the power of women in bearing children, than upon the strength or weakness of this passion. It is, however, a law exactly similar in its great features to all the other laws of nature. It is strong and general … it is an object of the Creator, that the earth should be replenished … and it appears to me clear, that this could not be effected without a tendency in population to increase faster than food.”49 It is tempting to interpret this as an occlusion of the mother as a maternal agent. But Malthus is associating the ethics of reproduction with an agency to instigate marriage whose social and legal possibility did not belong equally to women. Malthus’s suppositions invite us to consider the conditions under which contemporary versions of women’s reproductive agency eventually take shape.
If women will come to be considered as agents exercising reproductive choice, they also come to be reproductive thresholds of the health of nations, populations, peoples, and futures in a number of ways associated with norms for responsible conduct.50 But the plausibility of that association ought not be taken for granted. It has a number of conditions, and these include a different configuration of procreation’s association with maternal agency, conduct, telos, outcomes, and associated obligations. These might include the survival, health, or growth of offspring and the nation; the competitiveness of the latter, its colonial expansion; a continuing or thriving family unit; the transmission of the bloodline, the family name, property, genealogy, as well as reproduction of the labor force; maternal, religious, or social duty. Eventually it can be associated with such matters as individual flourishing, domestic or personal happiness, personal freedom, reproductive autonomy, individual rights.
HS I can therefore be read in terms of its “nonstaging” of a question that can, nonetheless, be thought with its capacities: How can we understand the genealogical conditions for the problematization of the procreative conduct of women? The preliminary questions include, first, an analysis of the conditions under which procreation can be understood as “moral conduct” at all.51 Also, it includes an analysis of the conditions under which women, more specifically (rather than men) emerge as plausible agents in relation to that conduct.
THE PROBLEMATIZED MOTHER
What are the suspended resources of Foucault’s work in this regard? Under the rubric of the “socialization of procreative conduct [conduits],” Foucault describes incitements and restrictions, beginning in the eighteenth century, “brought to bear on the fertility of couples; a political socialization achieved through the ‘responsibilization’ of couples with regard to the social body as a whole” (HS I 104–5). It is here that he averts a discussion of the sexual differentiation of this reproductive responsibilization. Not differentiating this “couple,” he is not prompted to include a fuller discussion of the respective (and different) roles and responsibilizations of the “man” and “woman” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.52 For (and unlike the forms of responsibility imagined by Malthus) forms of neo-Malthusianism would address women with new understandings of reproductive choice. (Indeed, this responsibility would be enthusiastically embraced by a number of turn-of-the-century feminist movements.)53
It might seem that Foucault considers specific forms of responsibility attributed to women in his discussions of families, although he does not do so in his discussion of population impact and management. Katherine Logan belongs to a group of researchers to have recently revisited Foucault’s work on families and to have argued that “when Foucault refers more generally to ‘the family’, we ought to take this as lacking its necessary specificity in terms of the way in which the members of the family are individuated.”54 Other commentators, including Foucault’s contemporaries, had considered the roles more specifically assumed by women. In the first major Foucauldian study in this area, The Policing of Families, Jacques Donzelot described the emergent forms of parental responsibility newly informed by expert knowledges giving mothers the authority of the expert’s opinion. Women have been the latter’s auxiliaries within the family space,55 despite also being (socially and legally) subordinated to their husbands and (differently so) to medical and lay figures of expertise.
But Foucault reroutes the specificity of the woman’s or mother’s role to that of a fairly consistent reference to “parents,” as seen in his discussion in Abnormal of family spaces mediated by expert concern about the effects of masturbation for which the parents are held responsible (AB 244). He describes the consequent injunctions on parents, the techniques for linking “the parent’s body to the child’s body [insofar as] … the child must be prevented from arriving at the state of pleasure,” the “instruction for the direct, immediate, and constant application of the parents’ bodies to the bodies of their children” (AB 247). This systematic favoring of the “parent” is seen in his discussions of eighteenth-century child-rearing tracts. He included a recommendation from P-M. Rozier’s early nineteenth-century Des habitudes secrètes that a mother should closely shadow her child. By almost encompassing it, through a marsupial-like corporeal proximity, she can deter its masturbation.56 But Foucault follows Rozier’s commentary on how responsibility falls on “parents”:
Children’s bodies will have to be watched over by the parents’ bodies in a sort of physical clinch. There is extreme closeness, contact, almost mixing; the urgent folding of the parents’ bodies over their children’s bodies.… This is what Rozier says about the example I have just given: “The mother of such a patient is, so to speak, like the wrapping or the shadow of her daughter” … The parent’s body envelopes the child’s.”
(AB 248)
Similarly, Foucault speaks to the “urgen[t] [enjoining] of “parents … to reduce the large polymorphous and dangerous space of the household,” the overlaps of the doctor-patient relationship and the relationship between parents and children (AB 250), the antimasturbation campaigns which took place in the broader context of invitations at the end of the eighteenth century to parents to prevent children from dying, watch over them and train them, to take responsibility “for the child’s body and life” (AB 255).
We see the degree to which Foucault is averting a differentiation—which in this case would be available and meaningful—between the ways in which mother and father become responsibilized within family clusters. In none of these discussions (including Foucault’s references to an emergent, widespread concern about the importance of women breast-feeding their own children as a matter of the latter’s health and survival)57 is there a discussion of the different roles of fathers and mothers as “parents,”58 whereas, revisiting the many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts discussed by Foucault, one will find this difference.59
On the other hand, turning back to Logan’s critical response to the lack of sexual individuation in Foucault’s discussion of families,60 she continues: “within the family, the mother can be described as a central figure and maternal power as a central mechanism in the deployment of sexuality.61 While the mother is necessarily linked to the father within the sovereign realm of the family, the mother ought to be regarded as having been quite distinctly individuated with respect to familial participation in the deployment of sexuality.” Thus, Logan also touches on the contexts when Foucault most demarcates the significance of sexual difference. For, as is rarely observed, the family formation is, in Foucault’s work, also depicted as the locus of sovereign spousal formations whose function, as Foucault describes these, is primarily to individuate husbands and fathers. In Psychiatric Power he describes the family, in the period immediately following the institution of the French civil code, as an “alveolus of sovereignty” (PP 83). It is based in relations of domination between men and women, and over children: “What do we see in the family if not a function of maximum individualization on the side of the person who exercises power, that is to say, on the father’s side?.… The father, as bearer of the name, and insofar as he exercises power in his name, is the most intense pole of individualization, much more intense than the wife or children. So, in the family you have individualization at the top, which recalls and is of the very same type as the power of sovereignty, the complete opposite of disciplinary power” (PP 80, and see 115).
I had asked what a Foucauldian approach could offer, more specifically, to this question, particularly when thinking in terms of his suspended reserves. A first step directs attention to locations where Foucault either does—or could—distinguish the sexual difference of the parents. A second step considers the registers of power described here. We have, first, the sovereign mode. But we also have disciplinary modes. The husband and father is individualized by the former. The mother (in addition to the children) is individuated by the latter. The regimes of parenting informed by the “expert” knowledges described by Foucault also distinguish good and bad mothers, let’s say: those said to raise their children responsibly or irresponsibly. In this sense, the mother is individuated, and becomes a vector of the disciplines, in tandem with the child.62
As we follow Logan’s gambit and reinstate (where plausible) the sexual difference sometimes lost in Foucault’s own references to the roles of parents and couples, a complex account emerges of coinciding, inconsistent techniques of power. The family is depicted by Foucault as a space of historical, social, or legal subordination of mother to father, a phenomenon whose history is that of sovereign authority, and this he deems persistent. The family space is also one in which “parental” authority is described as becoming subordinate to expert authority. In fact, in Psychiatric Power that expert authority is also described as a kind of sovereign authority or as partaking in some of its aspirations and resonance, also. Thus the “parent” in the family is both the expert’s auxiliary, subordinate to the latter, but also newly authorized by expert knowledge. The resulting techniques and stimulations of disciplinary power are not to be understood in sovereign terms. This gives redoubled (but also conflicting) techniques and apparatuses of paternal authority over children and the overall project of a conduct of conduct: of parenting, by parenting. And other commentators (among them Donzelot)—albeit not Foucault—have added that this new subordination of parents to the expert, complex as it already is, also could give the mother a new authority as medical ally within the family space.63 Yet that does not mitigate women’s concurrent subordination in other ways, patriarchal, legal, traditional, as wife and mother. In short, the techniques associated with the relevant, coinciding apparatuses of power in which women are intertwined are multiple and not necessarily consistent. It’s common to think of Foucault as describing the coincidence of elements working strangely well in conjunction.64 But Foucault also describes spaces of coinciding modes and techniques that don’t necessarily work in this way: they may also be disjunctive and contradictory. All such elements, and not only the most consistent, are at work in this enmeshing of the apparatuses of discipline, biopower, pastoral interest, and various forms of sovereign power, for example.
Consider another of Foucault’s discussions of family spaces, this time his collaborative work with Arlette Farge, published as Le désordre des familles (1982).65 Here the intersection of a number of forms of sovereignty with family constellations is described. In the century leading up to the French revolution, the authority of French monarchs vested in their local auxiliaries might intervene into “disordered” family spaces, both wealthy and poor. Charged with an interest in maintaining domestic order, they could confine, through lettres de cachet, those accused of dissipation, licentiousness, alcoholism, brutality, vagrancy. Thus this was also a type of sovereign authority secured, as Deleuze has emphasized, as much from below as from above.66
Sexual difference is distinguished in these discussions. Discussing specific archival cases, Farge and Foucault emphasize that women no less than men could and did successfully appeal for the confinement of their violent or dissipated spouses and children. The family is a space in which women may suffer (as amply illustrated in Le désordre des familles’s archival material) the violence of spouses, and it is also separately described by Foucault as the space of subordination of the wife to the husband, but we’ll also find an account of the woman’s multiple and complex roles in the relays of sovereign power, in their ability to confine husbands and children by means of the administrative auxiliaries of monarchic authority.
But there is an eventual “withdrawal of sovereign interest” from the (sometimes) minor discords of family order, for this was a relatively inefficient, individualized form of management. The result for women is a reconfiguration of male authority within the private, domestic sphere: “reproduction will henceforth be managed by the masculine domain.” According to Foucault and Farge’s commentary in Le désordre des familles: “Families are no longer a royal matter, and gradually a domestic space emerged in which the man laid down the law. Suddenly detached from the fabric of public events, the woman was obliged by the life of the couple to quit the scene. In this sense there is no longer a reciprocal relationship between the state and the woman. Their spheres disconnect, fairly definitively, with men now serving as their point of connection. Women are relegated to the confined space of private life. The Civil Code will complete this shift.”67
We are brought to the conclusion that Foucault most distinguished the sexes when discussing sovereign authority in the family, complex as these analyses are.68 This is not to say that the family is only (in Foucault’s work) or even best thought in these terms (and Foucault’s work includes a number of different discussions of families and of different types of families).69 But Foucault disaggregated father and mother most, to whatever extent that techniques within families and relations between the sexes were understood in terms of sovereign power. Otherwise (and sometimes in conjunction—both variants are present in Psychiatric Power and in Abnormal) we are more likely to see a reference to the (sexually indistinguished) “parents” of the disciplines, and of normalization, who monitor, defend, spatially separate, stimulate. Similarly, “parents” and “couples” tend not to be distinguished where Foucault refers to biopolitical aims such as the conservation and maximization of life, the defense against degeneracy or reducing the overall child mortality rate, the new importance of medical authority, itself integrated with the state and practices of good government.
So women in the family are (legally, traditionally) under the sovereign authority of their husbands, who become the point of connection between women (in the private sphere) and the state. And women (and also men) in these contexts are also differently individuated by way of the disciplines, with the result being that they are nexus points and relays of multiple modes of power. But they also take on a new significance in the biopolitical interests of child raising and of healthy reproduction: “The family will change from being a model to being an instrument; it will become a privileged instrument for the government of the population rather than a chimerical model for good government.… From the middle of the eighteenth century, the family really does appear in this instrumental relation to the population, in the campaigns on mortality, campaigns concerning marriage, vaccinations, and inoculations, and so on” (STP 105).
In other words, once we begin to differentiate the sexes in Foucault’s various accounts of family spaces, we can pay attention to a different phenomenon, relevant for our purposes. First, it is not only that Foucault has more to say about families (and sexual difference) than is sometimes perceived. More importantly, insofar as Foucault’s accounts of the family can therefore be understood as contexts in which he is outlining the coincidences of multiple, differently, and concurrently functioning techniques and modes of power (sovereignty, discipline, biopower, biopolitics, security, and governmentality, and later neoliberalism), we again see him troubling the more linear models with which he is sometimes associated.
In the introduction we considered a number of commentators interested in the different ways in which biopolitics and governmentality seem to “replace,” but may also “rearticulate” sovereign power. Discussions of the coincidences of sovereign, disciplinary, and biopolitical modes often default to his brief mention of the Nazi regime in the last lecture of Society Must Be Defended (259). His account of “penetration” (of sovereign by biopower and the contrary) and of the coincidence of modes (most typically of discipline, sovereign, and the biopolitical) has not, by contrast, been extensively explored by means of revisiting Foucault’s discussion of family spaces.70 Yet they offer an excellent elaboration of the nonlinearity of modes of power, and of the correspondingly segmented and divergent techniques in family, reproductive and child-rearing contexts. They foreground the point that these are complementary (in the fortuitous interconnections of apparatuses) but also divergent.
“Penetration” and similar metaphors used by Foucault to discuss the relationship between sovereign power and biopolitics have allowed much debate among scholars interpreting the status of sovereignty in Foucault’s work. It is sometimes proposed that new modes replace and absorb older modes or the reverse (that sovereignty is penetrated by biopower—or vice versa)—as also seen in the language of “rearticulation” of one mode by another. But, I am suggesting, this replacement can amount to a simultaneously complementary and conflicting survival of the replaced mode, a “survival” containing dehiscence as well as absorption. This is the line of interpretation I propose as the best means of understanding the status of women and of the family in these discussions.
Consider, in particular, the eight or so pages on “alliance” (the “system of marriage, of fixation and development of kinship ties, of transmission of names and possessions,” HS I 106) in The History of Sexuality, volume 1.71 It is particularly in Foucault’s discussion of a transition from alliance models that terms proliferate reiterating the image of power’s rearticulation, if not “penetration” of,72 or in, new formations. The discussion of reproductive aims and unions indicates concurrent connection and disconnection of the sovereign mode of power corresponding to marital alliance and the biopower corresponding to sexuality. He stresses there is no simple replacement of the one by the other; rather he identifies the “interchange” (l’échangeur; HS I 108) between them, their “interpenetration” or “coupling” (épinglage; HS I 108, 113), that the one is “propping up” (soutenir; HS I 113) superimposes (superpose; 106) on or “covers up” (recouvrir) the other, while not rendering useless or obliterating (il ne l’a pas effacé ni rendu inutile) what it covers up (107). Rather they operate in conjunction or in relation to each other (par rapport à; 108); the one gains “support” from (en prenant appui sur; 108) the other. It is not exact to say that alliance is supplanted (s’est substitué à) by sexuality, even if one day it will be replaced (remplacé) by it (107). Foucault’s point is that the family form of alliance (a space of sovereign modes, of prohibition, of the law) is also the site where sexuality (and its techniques of incitement and interest) is the most active (109):
The family cell, in the form in which it came to be valued in the course of the eighteenth century, made it possible for the main elements of the deployment [dispositif] of sexuality (the feminine body, infantile precocity, the regulation of births … the specification of the perverted) to develop along its two primary dimensions: the husband-wife axis and the parents-children axis. The family, in its contemporary form, must not be understood as a social, economic, and political structure of alliance that excludes or at least restrains sexuality, that diminishes it as much as possible, preserving only its useful functions. On the contrary, its role is to anchor [ancrer] sexuality and provide it with a permanent support [le support permanent]. It ensures the production of a sexuality that is not homogeneous [homogène] with the privileges of alliance, while making it possible for the systems of alliance to be traversed [traversés] by a new tactic of power.
(HS I 108, trans. mod.)
While interpretation of HS I has generally concentrated on the point that sexuality was not being repressed in the family, and on Foucault’s innovative concept of productive power, Foucault’s text erupts with multiple images providing alternatives to the consecutive replacement of modes of power: here sovereign v. biopower, alliance versus sexuality. Foucault promotes a relinquishing of repressive understandings of forms of power better understood as productive, to be sure. But he also invites attention to the exchange and persistent coincidence between disparate, incongruous, concurrent, modes of power and their segmented techniques.73 Just one of the many conclusions to be drawn from Foucault’s explosion of images (I have suggested these be grouped as the images of “penetration”) would be a very obvious point: we can’t stabilize the mother as one thing or as belonging to one mode (one role, one technique, one vector): her role is a remnant of a sovereign mode, she is both object and subject of pastoral and panopticized modes of examination, of scrutiny and self-scrutiny for conduct, of normative individuation, of “birthrate” and responsibility for birthrate. She belongs to a milieu on which governmentality might hope to act. She belongs to the techniques of security that aim at the regulation of the uncertain, or at disturbing trends in reproduction, and she belongs to the conduct of family investment and self-investment. She is the coincidence of multiple modes. She is, among other things, a multiplicity of techniques, operations, individualizations, statistics, trends, risk factors, forms of human capital.
Rereading The History of Sexuality from this perspective, we find it presents a family space to be understood in just such terms:74
It’s often said that modern society has attempted to reduce sexuality to the couple—the heterosexual and, insofar as possible, legitimate couple. There are equal grounds for saying it has, if not created [inventé], at least carefully arranged [soigneusement aménagé] and made to proliferate, groups with multiple elements and a circulating sexuality: a distribution of points of power, hierarchized or brought into apposition [affrontés]; “pursued pleasures [des plaisirs poursuivis]” that is, both sought after [désirés] and hunted down [pourchassés]; fragmented [parcellaires] sexualities that are tolerated or encouraged; proximities that serve as surveillance mechanisms and that function as mechanisms of intensification; contacts that operate as inductors. This is the way things worked out in the case of the family, or rather, the household, with parents, children, and in some instances, servants. Was the nineteenth-century family really a monogamic and conjugal cell? Perhaps to a certain extent. But it was also a network of pleasures and powers [plaisirs-pouvoirs] linked together [articulés] at multiple points and according to transformable relationships. The separation of grown-ups and families, the polarity established between the parents’ bedroom and that of the children,75 … the relative segregation of boys and girls, the strict instructions as to the care of nursing infants (maternal breast-feeding, hygiene), the attention aroused [éveillée] concerning infantile sexuality, the supposed dangers of masturbation, the importance attached to puberty, the methods of surveillance suggested to parents, the exhortations, secrets, and fears, the presence—both valued and feared—of servants; all this made the family, even when brought down to its smallest dimensions, a complicated network, saturated with multiple, fragmentary, and mobile sexualities.… Educational or psychiatric institutions, with their large populations, their hierarchies, their spatial arrangements, their surveillance systems, constituted, alongside the family, another way of distributing powers and pleasures, but they too delineated [dessinent] areas of extreme sexual saturation, with privileged spaces or rituals such as the classroom, the dormitory, the visit, and the consultation. The forms of a nonconjugal, nonmonogamous sexuality were drawn there and established.
(HS I 45–46, trans. mod.)
Clearly, the significant claim here is that apparently repressive mechanisms of supervision and control (parental, expert, and institutional) in fact constitute a proliferating distribution of nonmonogamous sexualities. But Foucault’s notoriously counterintuitive account of power has been so transformative that we can overlook other points made in such familiar passages. What if we return to the misleadingly simple use of the term aussi to discuss the multiple techniques and modes of power for which the elements of the family are vectors? “Was the nineteenth century family really a monogamic and conjugal cell?” (HS I 46). Perhaps, we are told, and Foucault considers what it was also. What are the consequences for the woman in this family? As part of a conjugal cell, her role as wife and mother is (on Foucault’s account) one of subordination to a husband individuated as such and understood in terms of sovereign conjugal authority. Concurrently interconnected with networks of expert advice and surveillance systems, she is also addressed by norms for parenting: newly negative views about the involvement of household servants in childcare, the biopolitically inflected injunctions to women to breast-feed, rather than using wet nurses. As “parent,” the mother could share with her husband what Foucault describes as a sovereign authority over the child, but she is described as sharing the child’s subordination to the father’s sovereign authority. The intense interest in the child’s health and sexuality is also disjunctive with this subordination: for the child is not just “subordinate” insofar as it becomes a point of inscrutability, depth, secrecy, hermeneutics, and fascination. The same point is widely made of the mother’s negative images: such as the “hysteric.” The woman bears an individualized responsibility for the “child’s body and life,” but is also critical in the instrumental relation the family will play as vector in the government of “population.76 We can recognize in Foucault’s “also” the different techniques in play, corresponding to the coincidence of sovereign, disciplinary, governmental, biopolitical, and security apparatuses. This “also” is the work not just of conversion, not just of addition, nor transformation, survival, nor even plasticity, but in all of these, their concurrent divergence.
Similarly, consider Foucault’s argument that the disciplines are not modeled on the tradition of family discipline, and, to reverse the point, “family” discipline is not to be confused with Foucauldian discipline. This point rightly takes the focus. But there can be an incongruent coincidence of these modes. As we have seen, the former is that of the sovereign cell-like unit organized in terms of a sovereign father’s authority to discipline its child. Foucauldian disciplines are capillary-like multiplicities (laterally connecting techniques within families with those of institutions ranging from schools to prisons and with associated expert knowledges) differentiating behavior in relation to gradations of abnormality and stimulating individuation. Yet the “same” family and some of the same techniques (segmented, and correspondingly belonging to different, mutually repelling but also complementary apparatuses) may be loci of both kinds of discipline. In fact, Foucault argues that one factor enabling the disciplinary work of normalization is the availability of sufficiently adapted bodies. Some role is also played in this respect by conventional family disciplines, even while the family is also a vector of “Foucauldian” disciplines. The latter’s individuation in relation to norms will stimulate categories of extreme recalcitrance or disobedience: the undisciplined, the delinquent, the nonresponsive, the poor learners, the nonadaptive. The warning issued within the family is that the child’s abnormality destines it for the prison, but the family can also be considered the space to which those who cannot be disciplined may be returned.77 The family space is multispatial. It is both hierarchical and horizontal, both cell-like and enveloping of populations, a vector of the interconnected, linked, multiple bodies of the disciplines, a necessary “prior” to the disciplines, and seemingly also a surplus to the disciplines. Thus we would attribute to Foucault’s family “a complicated network, saturated with multiple, fragmentary, and mobile sexualities” and of conflicting modes and techniques of power.
With respect to debates in Foucauldian commentary about the relationship between sovereignty, biopower, and their mutual penetrations, this brings us back to the powers of death elaborated by Foucault in relation to both. Let’s return to Foucault’s point from HS I, mentioned earlier (and also developed in STP), that the family also becomes an instrument in the management of “populations.” It also becomes a vector in techniques of security. This means that the child’s life is both principle of life, a body at individual risk, and a likely mortality rate (sometimes a body at risk and a potentially dangerous transmission factor). It is both a governmental problem to which an administrator should attend and also a problem of government at the level of family. This may be seen in the view that family practice or child mortality rates are amenable either to administration or to modification through stimuli by governmental conduct, for example by changing their conditions and milieus.78
This offers a new inflection to the dehiscent complexities to be registered at the level of the family space and to the senses in which the family becomes a milieu for the child’s life or death. As a milieu, the family is a zone of risk. As the space of the child’s desirable survival, it also becomes the context for calculating its likelihood of death. A practice such as breast-feeding might be a normalizing, expert-inflected “discipline” (targeting individual maternal conduct) and the topic of a biopolitical aim to modify overall rates of breast-feeding. Thus it emerges as the context for different types of management of (individualized, collective, and multitemporal) health, vitality, and mortality. In 1778 Jean-Baptiste Moheau, proposed by Foucault as “no doubt the first great theorist of what we would call biopolitics, biopower” (STP 22),79 joined other early demographers in accumulating data about birthrate and death rate from parishes, establishing disturbing trends in infant death, at a time when this could be attributed to factors ranging from smallpox to inoculation practices to the impact of unhealthy climates or to the perceived trend toward the use of wet nurses or more generally deficient mothering:80
Population … is dependent on a series of variables. [It] varies with the climate … the material surroundings … the intensity of commerce and activity in the circulation of wealth … the laws to which it is subjected, like tax or marriage laws … with people’s customs, like the way in which daughters are given a dowry for example, or the way in which the right of primogeniture is ensured, with birthright, and also with the way in which children are raised, and whether or not they are entrusted to wetnurses … with the moral and religious values associated with different kinds of conduct … with the condition of means of subsistence.
(STP 70–71)
Like the formations of “sexuality,” those of “maternity” and “children” also assemble and disassemble at the interfaces and overlaps of concurrently sovereign, disciplinary, biopolitical, governmental, pastoral, security, and neoliberal modes and their aims, techniques, conducts, and forces. Practically disseminating and stimulating biopolitical preoccupations, a maternal body is simultaneously subordinate to the husband; scrutinizing with the husband, jointly subordinate to the expert’s authority, and authoritative as the latter’s auxiliary in the home, the vector of overlapping normalizations (both of children and of maternal conduct) linking the disciplinary, individuating and differentiating work of normalization with governmental interest in population trends and risk factors—all the while that maternal conduct could also come to play a role in some neoliberal understandings of self-investment in family capital, choice, or self-making. These conduct and their effects may be contradictory. There may be an expectation of deliverance, by parents or public authorities, of care, safety, order, liberty, and autonomy. Children or mothers might be positioned as deliverers of the future, as rights claimants, as entities “at risk,” or as harmful—to individuals or collectivities. Moving forward, I focus on the latter possibility: the concurrent making of childhood and maternity as thresholds of harm, death, insecurity, threat, and exposure in divergent and concurrent multiplicities: linking child, parent, authority, law and state in sovereign, security, disciplinary and biopolitical forms of power, and in correlates of defense and exposure.
FROM THE BIOPOLITICAL TO THE THANATOPOLITICAL
While incorporating references to an optimal management of death, Foucauldian biopolitics are most commonly associated with his interest in power as a capacity to foster life (HS I 138).81 Biopower was galvanizing in the context of Foucault’s work insofar as it allowed him to attend to what had been less commonly attributed to power: its capacity to enhance and maximize, to make and produce rather than limit, repress, marginalize, constrain, and subordinate. An emphasis on its concurrently deadly, subtractive, or negligent components may initially have appeared to be a mistaken focus on the repressive function from which he was importantly differentiating biopower.82
As we’ve seen, what makes such dimensions part—arguably an indissociable part—of any biopolitics is, as Foucault argues, the new logics provided to what might otherwise appear to be its repressive, subordinating, depriving, or deadly components. The biopolitical power of death is distinctively characterized by its putative justification in terms of overall health and well-being, good management of the population, its overall needs and its “collective” and futural interest. Its mode, similarly, is proliferating rather than repressive.
The stimulations of the biopolitical also include its making of figures of death. The thanatopolitical understanding of Foucauldian biopolitics (its making of death) is not always evident, but it is rarely far from the scene. It is seen in his reference to sexual, reproductive, parental, and maternal agents of biopolitical harm. If we turn back again to Donzelot’s The Policing of Families we will similarly find repeated elaborations of children variously deemed at risk. On the one hand, we have Donzelot’s definition of the so-called Polizeiwissenschaft, in other words: “The proliferation of political technologies that invested the body, health, modes of subsistence and lodging—the entire space of existence in European countries from the eighteenth century onward. All the techniques that found their unifying pole in what, at the outset, was called policing: not understood in the limiting, repressive sense we give the term today, but according to a much broader meaning that encompassed all the methods for developing the quality of the population and the strength of the nation.”83
Here we have the well-known analyses of techniques of power as productive in the aim of an optimal administration of life. Yet it is not difficult to relocate the powers of death in the aims described by Donzelot to enhance the quality of the population and the nation’s strength. Those aims optimize presupposed differentials of worth in the distribution of resources. For example, Donzelot presents calculations made by philanthropic movements in late eighteenth-century France concerning the groups they might most productively assist: children rather than the aged. Women in preference to men, since this concurrently preserved their children also. Poor mothers were to be preferred—but only those mothers who agreed to breast-feed their own children and not to abandon them to wet nurses (whose use was associated with higher mortality rates).84 In this context, saving the children really does amount to denying resources to the aged while also differentiating the lesser value of recalcitrant mothers.85 Thus biopolitical calculations can (and, some would argue, always) carry their thanatopolitical component. Perhaps they always stimulate their figures of death, complements of the figures of life: the children whose masturbation was sapping their future strength and that of any lives to which they might give rise: “The child … was in danger of compromising not so much his physical strength as his intellectual capacity, his moral fiber [devoir], and the obligation to preserve a healthy line of descent for his family and his social class” (HS I 121). The negligent mothers who sent their children out to wet nurses delivered similarly redoubled negative effects for the individual and the collective, the short and the long term. In its figures of harm, a biopolitical governmentality includes this proliferation of thanatopolitical imaginaries and identities.
To differentiate the role of mother and father in relation to this proliferation is to be confronted with the redoubled role of mother. At the level of individual bodies, conduct, discipline, individualization, there was the problem of “the individual diseases that the sexual debauchee brings down upon himself” (SMBD 252). Foucault will include women among this group of debauchees and will emphasize that the dissipation and death incurred is individual, yet also considered to collectively weaken the nation. But they are being transmitted through the generations as well: here women have the extra role as principle of their (reproductive) transmission: “debauched, perverted sexuality has effects at the level of the population, as anyone who has been sexually debauched is assumed to have a heredity. Their descendents also will be affected for generations.… This is the theory of degeneracy: given that sexuality is the source of individual diseases and that it is the nucleus of degeneracy” (SMBD 252). Similarly, we have the child who, in masturbating too much, “will be a lifelong invalid” (SMBD 252): with negative impact for a number of multiplicities, the collectivity vitality of family and national futures. When such risks were attributed to childhood conduct, the relevant responsibility of averting these multiple deaths may have been attributed to the parent, but, as a number of commentators have argued, differently so. For even if the strictures against masturbation and perverse sex belong to paternal (and expert) authority, the preventive parental conduct will fall more to the mother (who is also being alerted to the dangers of wet nurses, nursemaids, servants, older children, erotomanic aunts and uncles—none of whom can be fully trusted with the relevant surveillance, for they are frequently being refigured as the dangerous outside influence against which the mother must defend). Thus the mother takes on an additional role as figure of death, not just because of her dissipation or unhealthy physiology or character but also because her maternal failings might result in a failed defense of children against these influences.
In sum, a great deal of suspended capacity lurks in this conjunction of texts and of problems. Foucault turned toward the biopoliticization of sex and toward a biopolitics that could be differentiated from sovereign modes associated with the privative—at the extreme, the taking of life. He did not occlude biopolitical “powers of death.” But, when he articulated the latter, he omitted a foregrounding of reproduction, parents, children, and mothers as the biopolitical envers: as the thresholds of death stimulated by biopolitical logics. Nonetheless, his work is a resource for showing how reproduction, parents, children, and mothers are made as powers of death—how biopoliticized reproduction and reproductive futurism becomes (to borrow the term not used by Foucault in this context) thanatopolitical. The perverse and the maternal come to be associated with the possibility of biopolitical harm, becoming forces and subjects obstructive of reproductive futurism. This phenomenon includes negligent maternities and the point to which I turn in the next section: the proliferation of phenomena (including legal regimes) stimulating a new kind of vulnerability associated with the specter of their maternal capacity to (according to an extreme imaginary) impose death. In fact, as I shall argue, a phenomenon emerges for which Puar’s analysis of the “terrorist” of homonationalism is illuminating.86 The attribution to some women of conducts of procreation deemed irresponsible and antilife becomes the pretext for harms to which women are subject. (Simply put, women are subject to new forms of harm insofar as they are associated with new forms of doing harm.)
REPRODUCTION, RACE DEFENSE, AND THE DEATH OF FUTURES
A number of commentators (Weinbaum, Bernasconi, McWhorter, Stoler, Dorlin) have suggested that the association between hereditary, reproductive truth, and the risk of degeneracy implies in Foucault’s work a link between race hierarchy, the defense against forces understood as jeopardizing biological, or national integrity, the principles of divisions of populations, and the differential worth of life rights.87
As Stoler and Elsa Dorlin have shown, colonialism problematized exactly these overlapping bodies, and all the more strongly given its figuring of national wealth in terms of expanding white and healthy population. The paradoxes of colonialist expansion (a claim to expanding life intertwined with its new risks of death and degeneracy) are seen in images of France’s spatial, security, physiological, and sexual exposure. Against bodies understood to transmit harm, the necessities of colonialism were associated with a sexual defense of the conjoined, corporeal multiplicities of child-mother-nation.
Thus Stoler adds, to Foucault’s account of the simultaneously vulnerable and dangerous masturbating child, the colonial depiction of European children as sexually (as described by Foucault) but also racially vulnerable and dangerous, threatened by sexual desire in their new colonial locations, sexually vulnerable as compared to “precocious Indies youths.” In an overlapping of the exposed bodies of child and empire, Europeans were said to be threatened by the lesser sexual discipline and sexual contamination of colonial contexts.88 In drawing attention to the child as threshold of sexual transmission and risk (the European child said to acquire, with multiply disastrous results, premature sexual maturity in colonial climates), Stoler gives less attention to the mother, who becomes the vector (either through nondefensive child- rearing or through reproductive transmission) of the fear that degeneracy will impede the vitality and growth of colonial expansion.89 For the dangers associated with sexual relations between colonizer and colonized are not just those of moral decay and sexual disease. As argued in Dorlin’s La matrice de la race, exposed to such contaminants, the woman is also understood as the primary conduit through which this deadly transmission will then proliferate into the following generations.90 Thus a vigilant hermeneutic practice could be included among her new responsibilities: to identify the signs of degeneracy in a real or prospective spouse as much as in the conduct of her children.91
Yet the passage from Society Must Be Defended, cited previously, concerning degeneracy and reproductive transmission continued into the well-known discussions of the paradoxes of biopolitics: its atomic power, its viruses, its capacity for self-destruction. That the following question forms no part of his rhetoric does not inhibit us from amplifying the point that connects these near paragraphs so immediately. And so we turn to the question: the murderous capacities of the biopolitical were, for Foucault, to be thought as potentially paradoxical at (as I will further argue in the next chapter) the point of their ungovernability. So what was the reproductive equivalent of this paradox? For Foucault, procreation was not, of course, a natural phenomenon.
It was a problem of conduct, of governmentality, of preemptive security. It delivered biopolitical life, but also the equivalent possibility of biopolitical catastrophe. Foucault cannot mention the concern about degeneracy’s transmission into the “seventh generation” without gesturing toward this reproductive conduit and its problematized agents.92 The fears for the “seventh generation” remind us that reproduction had become associated with the possibility of poor management, and the latter was seen as capable of delivering biopolitical catastrophe.
Space of overlap of the child’s life, its futurity, and that of the population and nation, the family is, as Chow and Foucault both note, one of the sites where life and death enter “into history.” Insofar as she has become principle of life (of both child and nation), the mother also becomes a potentially destructive figure. This is almost, yet not quite, Foucault’s own conclusion: overlapping with the racial inflections of national life, health, and vitality, women’s reproductive bodies are associated with the “society that must be defended”: in a making of dangers understood as disastrously transmitted to entire generations, as principle of life they becomes the thanatopoliticized thresholds of possible harm, population decline, or race decline. Foucault’s account of reproduction, procreation, and child raising as principles of biopolitical life is also an account of the proliferation of forms of antilife, with implications for women he left unexplored.
In other words, women can only be represented as the thanatopolitical threat to the future of a population or community insofar as their reproductive lives have come to count in new ways politically and biopolitically. Having emerged as a biopolitical resource (key, for example, to birthrate in a sense Malthus would not have recognized), as reproductive agents or else conduits of the problematized population impact, they occupy a redoubled role: objects and agents of biopolitical technics, potential for thanatopolitical threat they would relay and to which they can also be considered exposed.
POPULATION AND THE SOCIETY THAT MUST BE DEFENDED: RACE, RISK, REPRODUCTION
Thus, perhaps it is not quite, as Michelle Murphy formulates this, that Foucault’s accounts of the biopolitical “largely foreclosed” not only colonialism and capitalism but also “reproduction, or even women.”93 Foucault is not entirely omitting from the discussion the problematization of women, their reproductive and maternal conduct, and their emergence as either categories of abnormality or vectors of harm emerging within the apparatuses he analyzed—though certainly he is not foregrounding them.94 But, when he writes of the strategies that crossed through “and made use of the sex of women, children, and men” (HS I 105), he is clearly describing the making of those invested subjects and objects. It is a rigorous point for Foucault that strategies, problematizations, governmentalities, subjects, and objects form together. Thus the women his analysis remembers but does not foreground are those who (as responsibilized principles and thresholds) emerge within the biopolitical strategies he describes.
There certainly is not a comprehensive omission of reproduction and women, still less of the problematics with which they are intertwined in Foucault’s work. So these questions prompt methodological choices for reading Foucault. It is an option to mark omissions as foreclosures—but these can also be read as suspensions. We might not want to accept that women have been—or can be—erased quite as thoroughly, as is sometimes taken to be the case.
We can’t entirely separate the “Children” (in Edelman’s sense) jeopardized by the antisocial and antilife factors deemed to impede their (and societal) futures, from the conjoined formations of masturbation, and perversion, Malthusianism, and the negligent, nervous, or neurotic mothers. These are all intertwined: imbricated in sovereign, disciplinary, pastoral, biopolitical, and security modes and techniques. But they are not addressed by just one kind of power, nor in a singular way.
This is also why we can challenge the supposition that a focus on the women, the children, or the reproduction returns us automatically to a more identity-based analysis of the disciplines or to a default heteronormativity of perspective. Instead, we should maximally foreground that we do not know what procreation is, by means of a genealogical making strange of its problems, politics, interests, identities, lifes and deaths, vitalities and mortalities. This includes the emergence of “woman” as a segment of harm, impeded growth (of child and of people), mortality, death. Reproduction has become a conduct capable of rendering multiple kinds of death, and women have become agents of a simultaneous life and death. Foucault’s account is never more focused on the intersection of bodies and populations as when he partially elaborated this making of death, its factors, agencies, and paradoxes.
Reproduction is, then, not just the principle of life against which perverse and race vilified subjects have been opposed, nor the interest to which they have been subordinated. Just as much is reproduction a principle of death and its protagonists those of antilife. This challenges the supposition that we can isolate, disaggregate, and speak on behalf of the interests of any of the overlapping forces described: whether that be reproduction or reproductive rights or “life,” as opposed to the preoccupation with death attributed to necro- and thanatopolitical theory, or indeed “sex” as opposed to “maternity.”
This is also to put pressure on the view that preexisting reproductive rights come under threat once reproduction becomes a saturated matter of biopolitical interest. That view must be exchanged for a different approach: an account of how the very possibility and concepts of reproductive rights have taken shape in tandem with these biopolitical formations.95
To proceed, I frame the next chapter with a definition of the thanatopolitical in eight parts:
- 1. With one exception, thanatopolitics is not a term used by Foucault—rather the term is increasingly used in post-Foucauldian biopolitical theory.96 Yet its origins can be found in the following point. When Foucault defined the biopolitical as a form of political governmentality that endeavors to “administer” (gérer), increase (majorer), and multiply (multiplier) life (HS I 137), he also described the latter’s “power of death,” its capacity to be murderous and genocidal. As described by Foucault, “biopolitical” powers of death have a distinguishing characteristic: they are deaths or harm or what he calls “indirect murder,” pursued not in an exertion of sovereign power (i.e., power to execute, to attack, to withhold, to capture) but rather as a part of overall biopolitical aims—in other words, to the (putative) ends of administrative optimization of a population’s “life,” quality of life, health, environment, flourishing, order, stability, etc.
- 2. Such powers of death take a wide range of forms, many of which are referred to by Foucault. For example: a) they may be seen in the differentials of biopolitical interest relating to wealth, class, national, political and media interest, visibility, sentiment. They are, as stressed by Judith Butler, dividing practices bearing the differentials of interest versus disinterest, valuable versus less valuable lives, legible versus socially invisible individuals, groups, bodies, populations, etc. b) They may be seen in (overt or tacit) suppositions or calculations concerning the acceptable margins and collateral damage of biopolitical aims. c) They may be seen in a caesura Foucault describes as directly cutting into the “domain of life that is under power’s control” or “within the biological continuum addressed by biopower … between what must live and what must die” (SMBD 254–55), as when whole groups (ethnic, sexual, antiprocreative, etc.) are deemed to threaten or impede futures.
- 3. Confusingly, biopolitical powers of death may share capacities Foucault attributed to sovereign power: the power to imprison, to deprive, to deny the means of life, to expose, to kill. As sovereign, however, the latter would be understood as primarily privative (power over territory, power to dispose of bodies, the power to deprive of freedom of movement, of land, possessions, life). Thus biopolitical powers of death can be differentiated from sovereign power in a number of ways: their telos, language, their overt and tacit justifications, their epistemic conditions, their technics and technologies, their administrative modes, the type of life and death with which they are concerned (biopolitics are primarily concerned with distributions of life and death in populations). Sovereign power to kill may be more individualizing. Since governmentalities and their objects form together, the “life” and “death,” like the power, aims, and conduct of sovereign and biopolitical modes, would, technically, all be differentiable.
- 4. However, the overlap of such “powers of death” has led a number of prominent commentators to argue that biopolitics rearticulates, transforms, reshapes, and/or integrates sovereign power. Others have preferred to emphasize the thresholds Foucault sometimes asserts (distinguishable historically or “analytically”), for example, between sovereignty and biopower in DP and HS I. This ambiguity has also led to Esposito’s elaboration of an immune relationship between biopolitical powers of life and death or other approaches to a seemingly paradoxical relationship, most obviously from Agamben.
- 5. A related term to have emerged in contemporary literature is necropolitics, introduced by Achille Mbembe. In secondary, post-Foucauldian literature, the terms thanatopolitical and necropolitics are sometimes used interchangeably.97 But they should be distinguished: the latter term would be a management in populations of death and dying, of stimulated and proliferating disorder, chaos, insecurity. In particular, a reference to necropolitics rejects Foucault’s characterization of modern biopolitics as managing death to the ends of “life” (however murderously). The dissemination of chaos, violence, disposability, and disorder understood as necropolitical is not necessarily subordinated to the putative “vital” ends associated with biopolitical direct and indirect murder. However the necropolitical may share (in its distribution of death) some of the proliferating and disseminating modes associated with biopower’s governmentality of life.
- 6. By contrast, the term thanatopolitics refers to a problem introduced by Agamben and Esposito in their discussions of Foucauldian biopolitics. Esposito has characterized the “thanatopolitical drift” of biopolitical administration, seen when politics comes to “decid[e] what is a biologically better life, and also how to strengthen it through the use, the exploitation, or, when necessary, the death of a ‘worse’ life.”98 As such, the extreme of this thanatopolitical drift would be seen when death’s role in defending life is extended to the point where “the defense of life and the production of death truly meet at a point of absolute indistinction.”99 This means that the introduction of the term thanatopolitics also marks Esposito’s disagreement with Foucault, for the former sees the thanatopolitical as demonstrating the very paradigm (he terms this the immune paradigm) of the biopolitical.
- 7. The term similarly marks an extended response to Foucault by Agamben. In a number of his references to Foucauldian biopolitics in his early homo sacer volumes, Agamben has placed sovereign interest in bare life (and so “biopolitics”) at the origins of politics dating to ancient Greece, presenting both in terms of the sovereign exception. In other words, sovereignty institutes political life through the latter’s self-constituting exclusion of those who are no more than bare human life or (as discussed in the next chapter) who are responsible for life. But there are modern formations Esposito, Foucault, and Agamben can all agree to call biopolitical. For Agamben, insofar as politics undertakes the management of life and attaches rights to basic human life, the space of this exception has yawned open, exposing humans to becoming life “not worth being lived.” (Contentious in Agamben’s work is the very wide scope he gives to this possibility.) Thus what Foucault would call modern biopolitics is reconceptualized by Agamben as, in this different sense, thanatopolitics. As we shall see in the following chapter, this phenomenon has also been associated by Agamben (fleetingly) and by Esposito (briefly) with forms of sexual and specifically reproductive violence.
- 8. In exploring the thanatopolitical counterpart of the biopolitics of reproduction, I will argue in chapter 4 that this includes modern figurations of women as the agents of reproductive decisions but also as the potential impediments of individual and collective futures. This takes shape through the attribution of a pseudosovereign power—as when women are attributed a seeming power of decision over life. Thus, to whatever extent there is an administration of reproduction, it may also include the administration of a phantasmatic reproductive agency both positively and negatively understood. These modern subjectivities, as I argue in chapter 5, can also be understood as a form of precarious life.