JUDITH BUTLER, PRECARIOUS LIFE, AND REPRODUCTION
From Social Ontology to Ontological Tact
These norms draw upon shifting scenes of intelligibility, so that we can and do have, for example, histories of life and histories of death. Indeed we have ongoing debates about whether the fetus should count as life, or a life, or a human life; we have further debates about conception and what constitutes the first moments of a living organism; we have debates also about what constitutes death, whether it is the death of the brain, or of the heart, whether it is the effect of a legal declaration or a set of medical and legal certificates.… The fact that these debates exist … implies that there is no life and no death without a relation to some frame.
—Judith Butler, Frames of War
The central ethical question analyzed by Gilligan is precisely the decision whether to have, or not to have, an abortion. The first time I read the book, this struck me as strange.
—Barbara Johnson, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion”
This chapter returns to a philosopher for whom biopolitics has not been a dominant theme, Judith Butler. As we will see, it is interesting that her engagement with the concept has been brief, particularly insofar as related terrain in her work has brought her into debate with Foucault and Agamben. She has made intermittent responses to both, in the course of developing an understanding of life as always framed by social mechanisms through which life, or lives, emerge as differentially grievable.
My argument is not that Butler herself introduces a Foucauldian approach to life, nor is the object of the following discussion the interested and critical responses to Foucault to be found in Butler’s work, dating back to Subjects of Desire. Instead, recalling a form of critical encounter also pursued in previous chapters, particularly between Foucault and Derrida, I pursue an alternative means of understanding the possible dialogue between their interests.
Foucault has encouraged interrogation by means of the questions—“what life?” “what death?”—in contexts ranging from The Birth of the Clinic through The Punitive Society and beyond. But in a great number of ways he has also encouraged interrogation of what the problematizations of life and death “do.” When the making of lives and deaths (most obviously, as differently mattering) play an important role in Butler’s social ontology, this is in part because she is asking a similar question. Her own answer uses the language of subjectivation and desubjectivation: subjects are made and unmade as differentially grievable.
Thus one possible approach would be to interrogate the seemingly different understandings of life in Foucault and Butler’s works, her early attribution to Foucault of a form of vitalism, or her critique of the role he seems to attribute to death in the biopolitics of The History of Sexuality. Chapter 5 takes a different route, however, redirecting to another interrogation: what kind of reading is facilitated by the encounter between Butler and Foucault. In chapter 1 I suggested (of the working space which opens up between Foucault and Derrida) that the results of such encounters ought to be surprising. The best way of understanding the resources that thereby emerge is not always through asking how the one characterized the other—to the contrary, we might sometimes conclude. Having discussed a number of alternatives, in this chapter I return, accordingly, not only to the interests Foucault and Butler have certainly shared (genealogy, Nietzsche, the making of life, death, sexuality, the stimulations of power …) but to a figure whose role is marginal in the work of both. This is an implausible figure, one might be tempted to say, almost un-Butlerian, un-Foucauldian. In chapter 1 I considered themes that were, in a sense, similarly implausible—biopolitics for Derrida, sexual difference for Foucault, terms with which they certainly could have spent more analytic time, but which were also bad, jarring fits, and I pursued a reading arising from that working space. In this chapter the “fetus” is also proposed as a jarring figure.
This figure will not prompt an evaluation of Butler on Foucault, nor of their likenesses or differences, rather it will lead us to something different. Within a working space opened up between the Butlerian and Foucaudian projects, I am going to reroute their common interest in contingent formations of life toward an interrogation not just of precarious life but also of subjects understood as newly responsible for contingent formations of life: the conjoined making of new forms of ethical subjects. And where Butler has developed the concept of social ontology, in the space between Foucault and Butler I am going to explore the recent emergence of a phenomenon we might instead call ontological tact.
PRECARIOUS LIFE
Among the many quarters in which biopolitical theory has provoked caution, Judith Butler has, in her preface to Frames of War, characterized the following nervousness on the left: “It is difficult for those on the Left to think about a discourse of ‘life,’ since we are used to thinking of those who favor increased reproductive freedoms as ‘pro-choice’ and those who oppose them as ‘pro-life.’”1 The context for these remarks is Butler’s development of the concept of precarious life. Only rarely has she used the terms biopower and biopolitics.2 Although related problems are considered in her work, she has contrasted her approach to studies that “situate the discourse of life within the sphere of biopolitics and of biomedicalization more specifically.” Rather than grouping herself with post-Foucauldian biopolitical theorists, she has identified herself more as a compagnon de route.3 Differentiating her own interest from genealogies of life or death, she sees “precariousness as something both presupposed and managed by” biopolitical administrations of life which not only rely on but also contribute to the framing and apprehension of life (FW 17–18). Speaking to the further level of precariousness embedded in the very availability of ‘life” to be managed (or reduced or precluded) by biopolitics, she has asked:
Can life ever be considered “bare”? And has not life been already entered into the political field in ways that are clearly irreversible? The question of when and where life begins and ends, the means and legitimate uses of reproductive technology, the quarrels over whether life should be conceived as cell or tissue, all these are clearly questions of life and questions of power—extensions of biopower in ways that suggest that no simple exclusionary logic can be set up between life and politics. Or, rather, any effort to establish such an exclusionary logic depends upon the depoliticization of life and, once again, writes out the matters of gender, menial labor, and reproduction from the field of the political.4
Precariousness adds to an earlier and extensive use of the term vulnerability (Excitable Speech, The Psychic Life of Power, Giving an Account of Oneself) to describe subjects as originally dependent on others in a number of ways (for example, for the language that installs us as speaking subjects concurrently vulnerable to one another,5 including the vulnerability to being named in injurious ways by the very language which brings us into being,6—thus language can simultaneously install subjects as human while embodying the terms and names that render some humans less than human). The Psychic Life of Power uses vulnerability to characterize “terms of power that one never made but … on which one depends in order to be.”7 Here Butler favors the terms power and recognition to characterize the formative dilemma of the subject. A subject seeks—may passionately seek (PLP 113)—a necessary recognition (by individual and collective others) that simultaneously confers its subordination. This is true of processes of recognition of individual subjects and true also of the ways in which we belong to collective, social categories: for “social categories signify subordination and existence at once” (PLP 20). The result is that subjects seeking their own persistence can be characterized as necessarily “desir[ing] the conditions of one’s own subordination … the very form of power-regulation, prohibition, suppression—that threatens one with dissolution” (PLP 9). Across a number of projects, then, Butler refers to formational and ongoing affective, intersubjective, linguistic, psychic, and social existence in terms of an unavoidable exposure and dependency on what formatively and continuously comes from the other (desire, language, recognition, norms),8 whose role is to constitute and simultaneously deconstitute. A Foucauldian inflection is also seen in the account of paradoxical subjects as effects of the productivities of power even in their very hopes to resist the latter.9
An early focus on precariousness is evident in Gender Trouble, whose connection of gender normativity with questions of survival was amplified in later essays. Gender’s dependence on its iteration contains the possibility of surprising and transformative versions. But Butler does not minimize the fact that gender illegibility may be unlivable10 or deadly.11 Psychic Life’s account of subjection (being made as subjects by the forces, which concurrently, in a number of senses, also undo us) connects this to a problematics of death and survival. Norms and constituting forces are depicted as vulnerable, just like the subjects they bring into effect and deconstitute: “social categorizations that establish the vulnerability of the subject to language are themselves vulnerable to both psychic and historical change” (PLP 21). But these comments also lead to the different inflection of vulnerability: to be differentiated in terms of social categories for the fully human concurrently produces and maintains the “socially dead.” The normative categories interpellating some as socially legible relegate others to social marginality or invisibility. Some are produced as belonging (by virtue of legal inequality, lesser social resources, misrecognition, social or political disinterest, exposure to prejudice and violence) to categories exposing them to harm or death (PLP 27). And in a different sense norms are also vulnerable. Insofar as they must be reiterated, Butler has consistently emphasized that they are exposed to change and unpredictability.
Butler’s work engages a Foucauldian conceptualization of biopolitics more than may appear. Much of her work concerns the formation of subjects rather than the focal point of Foucauldian biopolitics: the (differential, life-enhancing, and death-delivering) management of populations. Her articulation of precariousness certainly gives attention to individual formations of subjectivity, from those of gender, to the neonate overwhelmed by an incomprehensible adult presence discussed in Giving an Account of Oneself.12 But, from her early work, Butler has argued that the cost of normalization, of subjectivity, of one’s intelligibility as human is the concurrent rendering of certain humans as less than human, less than intelligible, and as vulnerable and exposed to abjection and violence as such. This argument straddles an interest in individual subject formation, with an approach which is just as concerned with the divisions of populations into groups framed as more or less human, groups whose abjection contributes to the centering of others.13 She acknowledges that there are multiple meanings and formations of life available for archaeological, genealogical and biopolitical analysis. Affirming the importance of such projects, the aspect on which she particularly focuses is the unmaking of life and of lives (in the sense of some lives versus those of others) as less “worth living,” less valuable, less livable,14 less human: with the consequence that the making of the human dehumanizes some. This countering production of the risks and conditions of dehumanization concerns both the formation of the conditional terms in which as human one could otherwise be apprehended as less than human. It also includes the formation of categories of humans who are, sometimes tacitly, sometimes overtly, ascribed a status as less than human by contrast to those whose lives will have mattered. These differentials, centerings, and concurrent marginalizations, inclusions, exclusions, and “included” exclusions hold Butler’s main focus, rather than—more generally—the many ways in which one could describe the making of categories, epistemologies, forms, modes, materialities, norms, errors, errings, and contingencies of life.
More recently, in Precarious Life and in Frames of War, Butler has described how tacit or overt perceptions of the differential value of lost lives relate to interpretative schemas and epistemological frames. This might manifest in phenomena such as moral repulsion in response to some forms of killing, deaths, imprisonment, and torture but not others (FW 25). Thus, when she comments “If certain lives do not qualify as lives or are, from the start, not conceivable as lives within certain epistemological frames, then these lives are never lived nor lost in the full sense,” she qualifies that “the frames through which we apprehend or, indeed, fail to apprehend the lives of others as lost or injured (lose-able or injurable) are politically saturated. They are themselves operations of power” (FW 1). In describing subdivisions within groups or populations into those more likely to be apprehended as threatened lives or as “threat to life” (FW 42), and into the more or less grievable, she is describing forms of power that can be understood as biopolitical. Butler will characterize this as “population management” (PL 96) not just by states but also by the capillary and retroactive effects of “petty” sovereigns (PL 56, 65), local administrators, bureaucratic measures, expert knowledges, forms of media, and other modes of diffusion and relay of power.
Precarious Life suggests that the biopolitical account of the optimization and administration of life ought to provoke at least two types of critical interrogation: a) Whose lives are not optimized to the ends of the management of the life of some? About which peoples or populations does a lesser interest (or thorough disinterest) in their being governed “well” manifest? b) How, moreover, do some populations or groups come to be managed precisely by being constituted as less than human or attributed some lesser status—such that these lives and their administration are apprehended as of lesser consequence? How can we understand dehumanization itself, or the production of subjects with lesser rights, or no rights, as a form of governmentality? (PL 97–98).15
Butler’s interest in biopolitical questions of population governmentality can be identified even in her interest in the conditions of subjectivity. Thus she similarly relates the management of dispossession, expulsion, social invisibility, reterritorialization, statelessness, and those deprived of legal protection to an individuation of subjects as belonging to more or less valued groups (within or external to populations) and their differentials of grievability.16 This precariousness is both made and presupposed by state powers, by powers with “state-like features,’, and by the lateral, diffused processes characteristically described by Foucault’s biopower.
This is to review the very long trajectory seen in Butler’s work concerning the framing of human life by virtue of (included) exclusions of differential value and intelligibility.
We can also add Butler to a trajectory of theorists for whose projects the critical diagnosis of Foucault’s occlusions, gaps, intervals, and blind spots has played a significant role. Sometimes, I have argued, this gesture can be refracted back to include the critic in a similar interrogation. For there is often an additional reserve of suspended resources identifiable in the contours of critique. Critique delimits, so it also allows us to think just beyond its limit points—to adjust its terrain a little or to reverse the relationship between the foregrounded and the overshadowed. Butler’s responses to Foucault on a number of points are well-known: her discussions of his relationship to vitalism in Subjects of Desire, gender trouble, and the psychic life of power; her location of Foucault’s limitations concerning Herculine Barbin, sexual difference, the modern relationship between biopolitics, death, and sex; the effects (both retroactive and nostalgic) of contemporary sovereignty (including the capillary “petty” sovereign); and her focus on the deconstitutive roles of discipline and governmentality. There is also an important dialogue between Butler and Foucault’s respective definitions of critique.
But in this project I have pursued a particular occlusion reiterating in the work of the theorists under discussion. This is not to assume that such occlusions have the same status when considered in the work of Derrida, Edelman, Foucault, Esposito, Agamben, or Butler. Also, the engagement of each with Foucault has been characteristically different. Perhaps Butler’s has been the most sustained and ongoing. Yet, if they have shared one feature, it is that the biopolitics of procreation have tended to strike a jarring note in their work.
Butler is a surprising inclusion—in a number of essays she has considered the politics of reproduction far more directly than theorists considered in earlier chapters.17 Yet one awkward reproductive figure can be located in her work, although its advent will barely be recalled. Again it is a liminal figure. Little discussed by Butler, and still less by Foucault: it is the figure of the fetus.
PRECARIOUSNESS AND FETAL LIFE
Addressing the relationship between the epistemological framing and differential grievability of life in a work entitled Frames of War, we are not surprised to see Butler direct attention to the framing conditions of prisoner detention and abuse, state-sanctioned torture, and military strike attacks. More surprisingly, because it is unclear that the theme could be productively pursued as a part of this project, Butler, at the outset, also evokes the status of embryonic life.18
Broaching the issue in the margins of Frames of War provides another occasion for her to differentiate her project from the foci of biopolitical inquiry: the focus on the administration of life and its technics and on new modes of knowledge/power for defining, managing, and/or regenerating life.19 She clarifies that although she will be focusing most directly on war as a means of thinking life’s epistemological framing and differential grievability, this is not to deny the potential for analysis of “the biopolitics of both war and reproductive freedom” (FW 17). But that possibility, particularly with respect to the latter, is set aside in being raised.
In fact, we have seen that reproduction has long been a concern of biopolitics, but has not always been emphasized as such. Moreover, I have argued that it presents an intriguing and undertheorized problem for those who have foregrounded the deadly and thanatopolitical aspects of biopolitics. What then of the variant we can attribute to Butler: the account of precarious life? It is not implausible to imagine a reproductive variant of the precariousness she understands to be both presupposed and managed by biopolitics (FW 18). But we might first consider some reasons mentioned by Butler for caution.
For there is a more specific variant of that nervous reaction on the left she had mentioned, evoked both in Frames and in an interview with Nina Power, who asks:
You touch upon the question of abortion in your discussion of how we value “precarious” or “grievable” lives. “Life” is an extremely contested term, as you say. How do you understand some of the difficulties attached to this word in the context of the way it has been mobilized, for example by the Christian right in America?
Judith Butler: Yes, of course. But my sense is that the Left has to “reclaim” the discourse of life, especially if we hope to come up with significant analyses of biopolitics, and if we are to be able to clarify under what conditions the loss of life is unjustifiable. This means arguing against those who oppose abortion and making clear in what sense the “life” we defend against war is not the same as the “life” of the foetus.20
Of course a “pro-life” politics has tended to conceptualize fetal life as exposed to the mother’s seeming sovereign right to “make live or reject into death.”21 But this is to assume that the precariousness in question would be that of ambiguous embryonic life.22 I have promoted an alternative in the previous chapters.
With respect to the recent trend toward a post-Foucauldian biopolitics foregrounding necro- and thanatopolitics, its making and management of biopoliticized forms of death and of precarious life, I have, in this book, offered three arguments. First, as one of the major concerns of the biopolitical, reproduction can also be thought in terms of its thanatopolitical variants. Second, the hesitation in developing this question may relate to the phantom fetus that tends to pull focus as the possible precariousness in question. Third, I have argued instead that the relevant thanatopolitics is seen in the attribution of a fetus’s (or a people’s) phantom vulnerability to the seemingly life-death decision-making capacity of the woman become pseudosovereign. That in itself is thanatopolitical insofar as it renders the woman the “agent of life-death decision making” (or, more extremely, in the tradition of antiabortion politics, “agent of death” and obstructor of futures). In other words, just as a biopolitics makes the forms of managed life and the corresponding agencies, a thanatopolitics makes its forms of death and the corresponding agencies. We have seen the long history in which women become biopolitical agents of life (of three enfolded types of life: potential pregnancies, actual pregnancies brought to term, and children’s lives considered to enfold the futures of family, population, and nation). The counterpart is their intensified counter-role as impediment to these futures. Thus we have also seen the imbrication of these formations of women as “principles of life” in their counterpart: if they can deliver life, they can withhold, harm, or impede it and they can deliver “death” in all the corresponding variants. We can also use the term thanatopolitics in a further sense. The very association of reproduction with threat to “future” life has stimulated new forms of women’s precariousness and precarity, vulnerability, illegality, and sometimes literal death to which they are exposed by legal and extralegal regimes of biopoliticized reproduction. While the fetus is a form of life whose malleability can be seen in its hovering between “desired future life,” “biological life,” and “biological waste,” it is not, as such, independent of the technologies that render it,23 nor from the female bodies who would carry it. An embryo, thanatopoliticized or otherwise, is not an independent entity. But insofar as it is understood as precarious life, the woman has become a redoubled form of precarious life. The woman is particularly precarious insofar as she has been attributed with both a sovereignlike and a biopolitically inflected power of decision or impact on the futures (individual, population, biopolitical, collective, the social good) her conduct is considered to unfold.
I begin with an example closest to the definition of precariousness considered so far, the differentiation of populations and parts of populations into greater or less value. Abortion was illegal under Ceaușescu’s Romania, and (we will return to this later in the chapter) some nine thousand women are considered to have died from illegal abortion during this period. Gail Kligman has pointed out that, under this same regime, Romany women in Romania, whose reproduction was associated with an excessive and devalued population impact, could access abortion far more easily in a regime notorious for enforcing abortion’s illegality.24 Here the differences in access to abortion relate not only to power, wealth, and networking but also to differential valuations of women’s biopolitical impact (here, by virtue of ethnicity) as “principle of life.” Their status as more or less relevant to a thanatopolitics (the politics administering forms of population “death”) produced the differentials in their own exposure to harm and death via this particular conduit. One has no need of Esposito’s categories of “future birth” or “forestalled life” if we locate a differential thanatopolitics and precariousness in the making of women as concurrent principle of life and principle of harm to life and in the differentials of their own corresponding exposure.
In the United States the intersection of reproductive politics with assessments of women’s differential value were strongly marked when the Hyde amendment denied federal funding for abortion, while leaving poor women no less free, legally, than wealthy women to access it.25 In the ruling’s declaration of the state’s interest in “life,” one sees the differential grievability of the reproductive lives of the poor and the wealthy. An early essay by Wendy Brown discusses Justice Stewart’s commentary on this point: “by subsidizing the medical expenses of indigent women who carry their pregnancies to term while not subsidizing the comparable expenses of women who undergo abortions … Congress has established incentives that make childbirth a more attractive alternative than abortion for persons eligible for Medicaid. These incentives bear a direct relationship to the legitimate congressional interest in protecting potential life”).26 In fact, congressional interest in “life” bifurcated the worth of women’s reproductive rights claims and lives.
In what follows, I consider further the making of effects of “fetal precariousness” as a making of maternal precariousness. I will also identify this phenomenon in the very understanding of abortion as a moral decision. One more time, this will involve a consideration of a theorist’s suspended reserves. Two further questions pursued in this chapter arise from, but push the edges of Butler’s discussion. One concerns the differentials of mattering in maternal precariousness. Also we can ask if some forms of ethical life amount to modes of precariousness. A Nietzschean genealogy of morals (discussed by Butler) would be just one variant allowing an affirmative answer.
I will also add to the discussion two feminist responses to Butler who have ventured an analysis of the fetus in terms of precarious life. Again I respond with an argument proposing an expanded attention to the woman in these two accounts. Before turning to these, I first review some reasons the fetus will not, for Butler, be an obvious example of precariousness.
WOMEN’S REPRODUCTIVE LIFE AS PRECARIOUS
A fetus is a living organism, but Butler’s remark that it could be considered precarious life (FW 16) comes with a caveat. For, in this broad sense, differentially grievable life would also include animal life, and all organisms “that are living in one sense or another” (FW 16), and “it does not suffice to say that since life is precarious, therefore it must be preserved” (FW 33).
Also because an important aspect of precariousness on which Butler focuses is the capacity of power, governmentality, and epistemological framing for dehumanization, the fetus is a less than ideal example (as is animal life, despite the challenge by those who note her adherence to a human/animal species divide).27 Certainly a fetus can be grievable life, and an indication of the latter’s differential value (for example, as Mills has argued, by virtue of race norms or norms of health or able-bodiedness). For some it is an important example of the ambiguously human (FW 7). But the fetus is not established with sufficient social subjectivation to be vulnerable to a significant unmaking or desubjectivation, the annulment or deconstitution of its historical or plausible subjectivation (PL 91).28 Other candidates considered by Butler possess citizenship they might lose, identity papers, political status, rights such as habeas corpus or the rights governing prisoners of war. These interned, wounded, and attacked lives differentially serve to humanize other lives whose loss will register more strongly. Examples given in Frames of War include those interned at Guantánamo Bay or those bombed to “humanitarian” ends in Afghanistan.29 The two aspects of this inflection are made clear:
The question of who will be treated humanely presupposes that we have first settled the question of who does and does not count as a human.… The term and the practice of “civilization” work to produce the human differentially by offering a culturally limited norm for what the human is supposed to be. It is not just that some humans are treated as humans, and others are dehumanized; it is rather that dehumanization becomes the condition for the production of the human to the extent that a “Western” civilization defines itself over and against a population understood as, by definition, illegitimate, if not dubiously human.30
(PL 91)
On this view the human is always undergoing its own making, and the conditions for this making have tended to include the apprehension of otherwise default human lives as less than human (FW 93, 125). Butler is not committed to the human as an essential or ontological category. Still, there is a redoubling of differential grievability or an additional level of apprehension establishing that we are in the presence of what could count as the strongly human, so that the alternative—apprehending those lives as less than human—is describable as deconstitution of those subjects.
IN THE CLINIC I: PRECARIOUSNESS AND FETAL LIFE
While, for all these reasons, Butler’s references to the possibility of thinking the fetus as precarious life have been both brief and cautious, it has seemed more promising to Catherine Mills and Fiona Jenkins. As Jenkins characterizes the debate on which Butler’s work has been brought to bear: “Mills has argued that we are wrong to discount the moral relevance of emotive arguments with respect to foetal life, particularly insofar as the relation to this form of life has been changed through ultrasound imaging.”31
When Butler’s language of vulnerability is brought to bear on the technologically rendered fetus, the vulnerability of women is not far from these discussions. But both Mills and Jenkins direct attention to the fetus as the precarious life on which one might concentrate renewed feminist attention. Butler’s account of how “being human requires fulfilling a usually implicit set of normative criteria that more or less effectively regulate the process of humanization” would then “highlight[t] the way in which the fetus itself is vulnerable to those criteria of humanization.”32 (This would give a means, Mills suggests, of understanding prenatal genetic diagnosis, and associations of the human with genetic perfectionism.)33
Yet Mills’s material need not lead us only to this conclusion—we can draw on it differently. Mills could also be seen as describing how the technologically mediated and epistemically conditioned fetal imaging creates the conditions of a mother’s differential humanization and individuation. Certainly, as Mills is arguing, she may be understood to bear a “decisional responsibility.” This should command analytic attention, not feminist disregard. But what if the very responsibility in question, a process for which we could adapt Foucault’s use of the term responsibilization (HS I 105), is an interpellation understandable as the woman’s precariousness—one we could consider theorizing in Butler’s terms?
For none of these theorists is the fetus an intrinsically valuable form of life. To claim otherwise would be, according to Butler, Mills, and Jenkins, to deny the work of framing and the necessary ambiguity with respect to “the very use of life as if we know what it means, what it requires, what it demands.” In fact, though, this particular remark is made by Butler in the context of a discussion that redirects us more specifically to the precarious life of the woman. The discussion occurs in the midst of a reflection on feminism as long having engaged with questions of life and death and with difficult questions such as “whose life is counted as a life? Whose prerogative is it to live? How do we decide when life begins and ends, and how do we think life against life? Under what conditions should life come into being, and through what means?”
Butler reroutes such dilemmas to the following questions asked by feminists: “Who cares for life as it emerges? Who tends for the life of the child? … Who cares for the life of the mother and of what value is it, ultimately?”34 If we were to consider the framings of reproductive life, Butler’s work could facilitate reflection on how both fetus and women are made and framed so that the very question of “the one” making a possible emotional call on “the other” could even be plausible.35
In Futures of Reproduction Mills describes some of the ways in which women come to bear appropriate forms of decisional responsibility, with choices to exercise as subjects with technologically mediated emotional responses. Under certain circumstances, some women are, in contexts of reproduction and of reproductive choice, made “moral.”36 So consider, in addition to its technological conditions, the “many other factors” mentioned when Mills describes the conditions for the woman’s emotional response: the correlative vulnerability of the body of the woman, her interdependence with the fetus, the “decisional responsibility” she bears but must also have the “freedom to exercise,” the fields of law and justice in which a pregnancy takes place. Despite the interest in revisiting the fetus, these comments acknowledge the hollowing out and stimulation of the woman’s subjectivity, in these respects, and the processes through which she is humanized as reproductive decision maker.
Among the options for how to analyze this subjectivation as a “making” moral, we could turn to Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself for its exploration of the contingent and normative conditions of a plausibly or legibly ethical encounter. For normative confrontations have, in the second sense of normativity,37 prior normative conditions. As Butler has proposed: “we must ask, however, whether the ‘I’ who must appropriate moral norms in a living way is not itself conditioned by norms, norms that establish the viability of the subject.”38 The many framings and makings of moral subjects39 considered by Butler range from the seeming immediacy of the Levinasian address to the forms of responsibilized moral conscience open to Nietzschean critique.40 We are invited to recall that neither the ethical subject nor the demand from the other is ever immediate or original. Instead we are asked to interrogate this encounter’s conditions of possibility and the framing Butler generally associates with precarious life.
This suggests that the analytic force of Butler’s reflections on precariousness could be differently deployed as a means of considering the contingent conducts of responsibilization produced by reproductive biopolitics. Processes of subjectivation should be understood in terms of their concurrent work of differentiating desubjectivation and deconstitution. The right question would be who in these circumstances might be best understood is deconstituted (unmade, rendered illegible) by the framing conditions of reproductive choice? There are a number of ways of answering this question. Butler is among those to have considered illegibilities of sexuality and kinship stimulated by reproduction’s normalization. There are also versions of maternal, or potentially maternal, life whose deconstitution one can understand in terms of precariousness. (This is not to deny the ambiguity of embryonic life, also acknowledged by Butler in Frames of War and elsewhere).
IN THE CLINIC II (GIVING AN ACCOUNT OF ONESELF)
Describing changes in the regulation of abortion in late twentieth-century France, Dominique Memmi has described a concurrent transformation of modes of power linking the state, the local expert, the administrator, the individual, and the fetus. She first establishes the relationship between the abolition of the death penalty in 1977 and the effective legalization of abortion in France in 1975. Connecting these phenomena, Memmi suggests that we might understand these together as a relinquishing by the state of the strong hand it had long held on bare life, or on zoe:
What dominated biopolitics until the nineteen-seventies was the valorization of “bare” life—zoe, to adopt the antinomy introduced by Giorgio Agamben, albeit to the detriment of a defined existence within these material conditions (bios).… The essential vocation of medical care was to save, conserve, if not bring into being bare life. Before the nineteen-seventies and nineteen-eighties, a fairly fixed hierarchy of values was in force: no abortion, no euthanasia, no public debate about them. The State, and health professionals made life, as an ultimate value, trump all other considerations except when it came to those who threatened these values: for example criminals, and also abortionists. In short the State-as-interdictor had largely redoubled and perpetuated religious interdictions: a clearcut priority protected by a clearcut authority. But in the seventies, other values came to compete with “bare life’s” dominance. That became clear with respect to procreation, as with death.41
Here, Memmi is not so much referring to human life reduced to bare life, but to human life in what she refers to as its minimal quality of being alive. But it becomes clear that (as emphasized by Butler, Khanna, Ziarek, and others) life is never mere life.42 This is seen in its very political value as “mere life” and in the onus on those held responsible for it.
Prior to the legalization of abortion, Memmi argues, there had been little room for arguments that euthanasia or abortion might be “more” justified in certain circumstances. The quality or type of life of the subject who sought suicide or of the woman who sought abortion or of the state of advancement of a fetus was not in question. The value of life was not to be differentiated by its quality, it was (as Memmi characterizes this legal and policy regime) a brute value.
Where Foucault had differentiated the death penalty associated with sovereign power to take life from the forms of biopolitical power that, administering life, had an interest in maintaining bodies in life,43 Memmi suggests that the sovereign claim to decision making about life had been seen in the death penalty and in the illegality of euthanasia and abortion.44 All had been forms of state control over life (la vie même). Thus the aborting woman or the euthanizing or suiciding individual bore the status of challenging the state’s sovereign power over life (we could include them with other criminals whose challenge to the sovereign is characterized by Foucault: “by breaking the law, the offender has touched the very person of the prince” (DP 49).45 Thus the state power to take life (as in the death penalty) or to prohibit others from taking their own life (euthanasia, laws against suicide) or to prohibit women from aborting would all be instances of state control over life. Understood as such, Memmi argues that the following change has taken place since the 1970s: “The tendency is towards a loss by the State of its dominant grasp on bare life, and over the power to put to death, or to pardon. Meanwhile others—simple individuals—recuperate a part of this power over bare life.”46 Here Memmi suggests we identify a phenomenon she calls “biopolitical delegation” to the individual: in the case of euthanasia and abortion, responsibility for decision making has been transferred from the state to the individual. In fact, it becomes a very different kind of decision making. Now its logic is not only that of the “phantom sovereign” but also biopolitical, given an overall rubric of general well-being and its appropriate conduct. The decision making transferred to women has taken the form of a new kind of responsibilization: for physiologically and psychologically healthy choices become a new kind of biopolitical obligation. Decision making is individuated in an interface with local experts in relation to new norms for responsible conduct.
In the context of legalized and usually state-funded abortion, a woman is invited to provide a legible narrative about her choice in consultation with a second party, a health counselor or medical professional. Perhaps it is a form of testimony to the fact that she has taken an organized and reflective decision and that the decision is her own. We need not see this as a delegation of a sovereign right directly to an individual right. Nor need we see this as a redirection of the same kind of right. Nor need we see the life once grasped by the state in its sovereign hold over life-death decision making, as the same as the life over which the woman is understood to have acquired new powers of decision. Instead one can identify a rerouting, a replacement, one that lends itself to Foucault’s interest in strange forms of survival of the biopolitical in the sovereign (and the reverse). We can see it also as the coincidence of modes whose possibility also interested Foucault, the segmentation of their techniques, their capacity for penetration.
It is as if, argues Memmi, so far from exercising its rights over the woman, her pregnancy, and over life, the state has withdrawn its hand to the extent of insisting the woman now bear this responsibility. It is as if something is transferred from the state to the woman. The woman must not just decide (as those with reasonable access to health care may regularly do about any number of choices and medical interventions), she must more specifically be seen to decide and in a form a second party can recognize and bear witness to.47
Memmi draws our attention to the recent and long period in which women in France went to sometimes dangerous lengths to obtain illegal abortions. The final abolition of this legal regime involved not only the setting aside (a precarious setting aside, we’ll recall Le Doeuff’s rejoinder)48 of abortion’s illegality but also a concurrent, strange distribution of a phantom sovereign will and the requirement of a performed, self-reflexive selfhood. In consequence, Memmi deems more significant than might otherwise appear the often rote presque rien required by the woman as a presentation to the medical counselor:
To make oneself temporarily or permanently sterile, to have a baby artificially, to have an abortion for a various reasons, to control after the fact a sexual encounter with the morning after pill: today individuals can do many things with their own procreative body. On one condition, always the same one: to present oneself before a health professional. What will that health professional ask of you? Seemingly, almost nothing. You will be asked to take a seat, and to talk about your condition, what you are asking for, and often, the reasons. In short, what has brought you there. The authority of Church and State have retreated in favor of a regulation reduced to “almost nothing”: government by means of one’s words [par parole]. With respect to medically assisted procreation, medically assisted termination of pregnancy, and termination of pregnancy on medical grounds, even if these interviews aren’t required by law, they are required by medical protocols.…
On the whole, it is only a matter of evoking a few of the common “good reasons,” to produce, consensually, the argumentation on which patients and healthgivers can agree.
But all of a sudden, the administration of reproduction has been delegated to the subjects directly concerned, through these practices, and their allies in this respect—the health professionals, under the protective wing of the State: here we find a true transformation of the administration of life [du vivant].49
Women may find themselves specially attached to the expected forms of subjectivity understood as responsible choice: integration, coherent explanation of motives, thought, reflective decision, display of these before a counselor or medical expert. It is not that every woman is expected to have the same kind of reaction to pregnancy, its termination, or its continuation (they are not normalized in that sense). Rather they are normalized in the Foucauldian sense: they enter contexts in which they are differentiated somewhere on a range of legible behavior concerning the norms and conventions of personal decision taking and its organized self-narratives.
I have earlier argued that the interest in a framed fetus be considered in terms of complex practices of subjectivation of “decision making.” As technologies, these conducts of consultation can be added to the attention long directed by a number of feminist scholars (among them Petchesky, Duden, Haraway, Barad, Berlant, Mills) to the role of sonogram or ultrasound imaging in rendering a humanized fetus. There are a number of reasons (legal, economic, political, religious, historical, traditional) that some women are describable as the relays for, and as particularly open or vulnerable or privileged in relation to such contingent formations of moral life. They may be seen, and made, as decision makers, making specifically “significant” choices. So they may see themselves and be expected to see themselves. In addition to imaging techniques, we will add the various forms of consultation, the role of counselors, experts, friends, and family, and a number of questions (and self-questioning) directed at or by the woman. So we will see the production of fields of knowledge (social work, sociology, psychology), the protocol of medical regimes, and self-organizing behavior related to the procedural, economic, insurance, and similar regimes associated with accessing reproductive choice. Depending on the context, there will be tacit norms for conduct in relation to medical practitioners, counseling and consultation, and interaction with the dispensers of advice. Incited reflection and interrogation will integrate with practices of secrecy, privacy, anxiety, appeal, disclosure, judgment, or tact. These may be preconditions for the emergence of the woman as moral agent in relation to decisions about life. And, for some, reproduction has come to be associated with forms (rituals, conventions) of freedom.
The conduct of such decision making has come to be understood as paradoxical in a number of ways—among these, I have suggested the coincidence of disparate modes of power and their segmented techniques. Among other resources earlier mentioned, we can turn to the “cruel optimism” described by Lauren Berlant as a form of thanatopolitics. Here the agent embodies always already failed forms of responsibility (relating to health, diet, good choices—and, we can add, reproductive choices). Good choices become a social and biopolitical expectation of oneself and toward the social body. Depending on a number of factors and available options, such organized self-management is not equally plausible for all. Moreover it reflects the expectations of the conduct of a phantasmatic sovereign subject all have in some way already failed. Wendy Brown has spoken to forms of responsibilization-as-failure seen in the strange intersections of biopolitical care, the redirections of the sovereign state back to the individual, combined with the making of the individual as the similarly failed sovereign.50 The insight of these theorists is not just that contemporary biopolitics simultaneously presuppose the responsible conduct of phantom sovereign subjects. Such “responsibilizing” is also a dividing practice according to which some are produced as particularly “failed” subjects: manifesting irresponsible, unhealthy, repeating negative behavior, incoherent, less than optimal with respect to their care of themselves and others.
To explore this further, I turn to two contexts for the making of responsibility in abortion decision making, one taking place within the clinic and the other outside it. The first allows a reconsideration of technologies concurrently making ambiguous embryonic and the conduct and subjectivities of the “decision makers.” These, I have suggested, include not just the more easily identifiable technologies such as the sonogram, but the conduct of consultation. Here we will find a number of ways of thinking vulnerability, for these technologies produce categories of illegibility both within the clinic and well outside its space. A reconsideration of Carol Gilligan’s now classic In a Different Voice produces some instances of the former.51
IN THE INTERVIEW: GIVING AN ACCOUNT OF ONESELF II
In In a Different Voice Gilligan reassessed hierarchical evaluations of moral thought, according to which universalizable, impartial, objective, and abstract reasoning would be considered (as in American psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg’s influential account) the more advanced form of moral reasoning. Interested in exploring the role of gender difference in moral thought and in its tacit comparative assessment, Gilligan devised studies involving a number of different groups: including a group of men and women participating in a university course on moral philosophy and a group of twenty-nine women confronted with abortion choices in the United States.52 If there were divergences between men and women in moral reasoning and in differently valuable forms of moral thought,53 Gilligan challenged the supposition that a relational, context-specific, and empathic approach, oriented toward the sustaining of relationships, must be deemed more rudimentary and inferior to a more principle based moral reasoning.54
Gilligan does not hesitate to situate abortion within the moral register, one to which women would bring what she famously described as a different voice. Beyond noting that the “dilemma of choice enters a central arena of women’s lives” only when “birth control and abortion provide women with effective means for controlling their fertility” (DV 70), there was little room in the project to think about the contingency through which modern abortion has come to appear so intuitively as a moral issue. She gave no room to the differential and circumstantial ways in which it is framed as such, nor to the role played by differences of culture, wealth, age, religion, nation, citizenship. Nor was there room to interrogate the conduct, modes, and conditions of this emergence, nor the role of family, peers, school, religious, and other types of counselors, nor the stimulating dyadic conduct of consultation, nor the making of the “psychic” space of introspective reflection, nor the role of the architecture and spatial distribution within clinical and consultation spaces, nor the role of media, technology, or other techniques of visualization. There was no room to think about the microfactors at work, including stimulation by the subtle expectations of questions, the invitation to organize experience in terms of motives, and the tacit supposition that those interviewed had reasons, desires, and wishes, sometimes of an obscure form that might become clearer over time. One thinks of the possible mismatch between the relatively articulate eighteen year old whose “I really didn’t think anything except that I didn’t want it” would be greeted with Why was that? “There is no right decision.” (Why?) “I didn’t want it” (DV 73). Women who might well answer the question How would you describe yourself to yourself? “I don’t know” (DV 33).
Gilligan’s challenge to the hierarchy between principle-governed, universalizable abstract reasoning and empathic, relational moral thought is well-known. Yet in its representation of the relational forms of responsibility attributed to some of the women, some feminist critics, among them Joan Tronto,55 have noted that a different kind of progressive register seemed to be reestablished. Of course, the project’s aim was to observe such expressions, the language in which they were expressed, and the forms of moral thought they manifested. Gilligan noted that the language of responsibility tended to emerge as a primary concern and to undergo a number of transformations. The women were interviewed, sometimes multiply, most of them before and after an abortion. Gilligan described a number of transitions from an initial reaction that was often deemed to be “center[ed] on the self. The concern is pragmatic and the issue is survival. The woman focuses on taking care of herself because she feels that she is all alone” (DV 74). But, often, in a “transition that follows this position, the concepts of selfishness and responsibility first appear” (DV 75). Self-interest has “so far formed the based of judgment,” but, suggested Gilligan, it might come to be redefined by the woman. “As the criterion for judgment shifts, the dilemma assumes a moral dimension, and the conflict between wish and necessity is cast as a disparity between ‘would’ and ‘should’ ” (DV 77). Of one woman, Gilligan says: “the abortion decision becomes for her an opportunity for the adult exercise of responsible choice.… In [an] epiphany of … cognitive reconstruction” (DV 76). The woman struggles with the expectations of others, the desire not to hurt others, and the concern that her choices may be selfish or perceived as selfish. In another transitional phase, the woman may begin to “scrutinize the logic of self-sacrifice” (DV 82) and to find a means “to be responsible to herself as well as to others and thus to reconcile the disparity between hurt and care. The exercise of such responsibility requires a new kind of judgment, whose first demand is for honesty. To be responsible for oneself, it is first necessary to acknowledge what one is doing. The criterion for judgment thus shifts from goodness to truth” (DV 81–82).
For example, one woman is said to have realized that continuing her pregnancy had been a means of punishing her husband, another realized she had been doing so largely for the benefit of her parents. Gilligan also describes some women suspended in such phases, trapped in contradictions, unable to separate their own voice from that of others, unable to scrutinize their own attitudes, perhaps unable to make any decision (DV 82, 85). (Gilligan draws attention to the important role of counseling situations in giving a woman the opportunity for lucidity, for example, about the possibility that one’s pregnancy may be overdetermined by the wish to please.)
But while room was given to the gender differences inclining some women toward the languages of responsibility and anxiety about selfishness, there was no room for thinking about the context, conduct, and technologies through which abortion and pregnancy in particular become attached to special and conventional expectations of responsible behavior and decision making attributed to a moral register. Nor was there room to think about how even the form of the interviews was participating in the process and conditions to which they bore witness. (This is a banal remark to make about interview situations, and all situations of observation, but not inappropriate here.) The project’s intent may have been characterization, not stimulation of the forms of moral thinking of the women in question. But, looking back at the interviews, it is hard not to see the questions framing and contributing to the production of the appropriately introspective subject—counseling and interviewing mildly blurs in the study. (It may be recalled that some women had been referred by the clinic in hopes that the study’s interviews might serve the function of further counseling.)
We see the ways abortion gets framed as a moral issue (dyadic discussion supposing organized selves, deep motives, and a confrontation with dilemma) in the supposition that this is an apt moment for the reflective questions posed. No doubt some of the women manifested progressive stages of moral thought, as described. Yet the temporally sequential interviews prompt the possibility of a new answer to the question: How would you describe yourself to yourself? A revision to I don’t know is invited by the situation. If this is plausible, it is also because of many factors hollowing out the introspective self as reflective, transitional, progressive (or as a failure thereof)—in relation to abortion’s framing as moral dilemma. These include the conduct of peers, family, doctors, teachers, fictional or cinematic depictions of abortion. Gilligan observes: “the abortion decision comes to be seen as a ‘serious’ choice affecting both self and others” (my emphasis). But the women are being prompted for “seriousness.” “This is a life that I have taken, a conscious decision to terminate, and that is just very heavy, a very heavy thing” (DV 94) says a woman … before an interviewer whose questions (presented at the time she is considering an abortion) have included: is “acting morally … acting according to what is best for the self or … a matter of self-sacrifice?” (DV 84). Practices of counseling and related conventions in such contexts can work very similarly to sonograms.
Among the illegibility produced, we lose sight of the role played in psychic and moral life by incoherent wishes and desires and an absence of answers to questions about who we are and how we understand ourselves. The study renders some voices less successfully transitional, less coherently narrativizing, paralyzed, self-contradictory, if not verging on “moral nihilism.” Think of the woman who has vaguely rejected the option that she might “sell” the baby “in a black market kind of thing” (DV 78). She is included in the pages of In a Different Voice, but we see the production of illegibility when Gilligan suddenly breaks the frame of In a Different Voice, assuming a more hermeneutic role on the woman’s behalf. As if merely characterizing the interviewee’s voice is suddenly intolerable, Gilligan’s own voice intervenes, translating the woman’s vague irresoluteness into deeper, more explicable (and coherent) motives and feelings as follows: “It is not surprising that she considers selling her child, since she feels herself to have, in effect, been sold by her parents” (DV 78). A production of surpluses of illegibility might then be seen in Ronald Dworkin’s subsequent characterization of the women facing abortion decisions in Gilligan’s study: “each was trying, above all, to take the measure of her responsibility for the intrinsic value of her own life … to see the decisions about whether to cut off a new life as part of a larger challenge to show respect for all life by living well and responsibly herself.”56 A modest variant of the same production of conditions of illegibility is seen in Gilligan’s commentary that Roe allows a woman to legally “speak for herself” and assume the complex “responsibility for life and for death” (DV ix).
One of the poems about abortion discussed in Barbara Johnson’s “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” Gwendolyn Brooks’s “The Mother,” includes the eloquent line “Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate,”57 to which Johnson adds the following commentary: “I have not chosen the conditions under which I must choose.” Perhaps we can add to Johnson’s reading in several ways. In an essay offering a complex elaboration of the subjectivities arising with decisions about, and experiences of, abortion, Johnson makes a case for the recognition of an emotional life that may include guilt or grief. It is not uncommon for feminist reconsiderations of abortion to characterize (other) feminist readings as having more typically failed to register or give proper account to such affect:58 “Readers of Brooks’ poem have often read it as an argument against abortion.…. But to see it as making a simple case for the embryo’s right to life is to assume that a woman who has chosen abortion does not have the right to mourn. It is to assume that no case for abortion can take the woman’s feelings of guilt and loss into consideration, that to take those feelings into account is to deny the right to choose the act that produced them.”59
To this reading we can add that the very complexity of emotional life attributed to women’s lives of reproductive choice, whether those associated with the “moral philosophers” or those of the “poets” (with the poets often being, of course, very good moral philosophers), plays its role in the normalization of some kinds of women’s subjectivity in relation to reproductive choice. We are rightly invited to recognize complexity here, but complexity of emotional life in this domain also participates in a normative register: it, too, is stimulated and stimulating. It too participates in a hollowing out of psychic depth, involving the exploration of the likely presence of conflict and mixed feelings which are both widely expected (to think of one sense of normativity) and whose gradations also offer a means of differentiating and including the presence of all reactions ranging from “normal” to “abnormal” (to return to the Foucauldian sense of normativity). Without minimizing this complexity, or the difficulty of its articulation, we can recognize that nothing has come to seem more appropriate than a woman writing a complex, even a very good poem about selfhood and the ambiguity of address in some contexts of contemporary abortion.
So to return to Johnson’s commentary on Brooks’s “Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate”: “I have not chosen the conditions under which I must choose.” Some will find themselves in circumstances in which they are particularly solicited and self-prompt for “deep” forms of reflective subjectivity (musing, self-interpretive, motive oriented, the recognition of fraught and contradictory desires). But, of course, women are not just placed in these circumstances (legal, social, and historical), nor are they just passively worked on by conventions (for introspection, for emotional response, humanization, for a psychic life of complexity and contradiction in relation to certain issues, for responsibility). Women become relays just as much as they are targets or recipients of the norms of choice.
Thinking with the resources of Butler and Foucault, I have begun with two points. First, these are contexts in which normalized and normalizing forms of responsibilization are stimulated and transferred. For her part, Butler offers an argument in Giving an Account for a critical approach to the ethical: this would include an analysis of the normative conditions through which subjects are made as normative (for example, as ethical subjects). The many contexts appropriate for this kind of redoubled analysis could well include, I have argued, the modern contexts in which fetuses appear. But this is because the appearance of the “fetus” is the conjoined appearance of modern subjects as reproductive “decision makers.” To see this as a context of precarious life is to see a process through which some (modern “decision makers”) will be centered as fully human while stimulating categories of illegibility (those making other kinds of decisions or those for whom reproduction cannot be a matter of decision or indeed those who may refuse to take decisions). And, to the forms of unintelligibility mentioned so far (those who become illegible within the clinic), we must add a number of subjectivities, social and political life, priorities, and forms of commerce and choice positioned as exterior to the clinic, sometimes deprioritized by the latter’s subjects.60
BARE LIFE
Also in conversation with Butler, Fiona Jenkins has criticized feminist approaches that excessively emphasize the “bare materiality” of the fetal body to the point that the fetal body “become[s] somehow invisible where abortion is a right.”61 A pro-abortion politics could, she claims, allow for a recognition of the ambiguity of the fetus’s materiality as opposed to seeing the fetus as “nothing more than matter.” Feminism can afford, she argues, to register the anomalous and ambiguous status of embryonic life and recognize that it can be a source of “affective dissonance and ethical trouble” without this amounting to the thesis of its “innate or individual human dignity.”62 With this suggestion to hand, let’s return to the clinics described by Memmi. These are spaces in which the malleability of the modern fetus is inseparable from the modern conduct of decision making. In a context institutionally supportive of reproductive choice and access to abortion, Memmi depicts the multiple technologies making the fetus ontologically flexible (making it as makeable) in accordance with women’s choices. Her account illustrates how conduct accomplishes a context of sensitive recognition of ambiguity, in a tacit upholding of the potential parent’s right to this very ambiguity. It is among the signature aspects of modern reproductive choice. Again this means that the choosing agent is no more unframed than is fetal life. Similarly the biological waste or “mere biology” to which a fetus can seemingly be returned is not natural. It too is a category made by protocol producing its ambiguity of status as significant to contemporary registers of freedom and choice.
I am proposing the term ontological tact to characterize medical and social protocols and conduct accessed in a number of contemporary clinics.63 Ideally, a consensual making and unmaking of the fetus takes place between women or parents and health professionals in conformity with the woman’s or the parents’ choices. This means that it may be as important to respect and support a fetus’s lack of human, moral, or anticipatory significance as it can be important to join in the anticipatory attribution of its significance for those hoping for their pregnancies—with all the accompanying conduct, interface with technology, and affective exchanges with family and health professionals.
Similarly, the sadness of a hoped for pregnancy which results in miscarriage will be the context for a number of ambiguous overlapping modes, makings, and perceptions. The mother or parents may desire to get rid of a dead fetus as soon as possible, to avoid sight and reference, to see the fetus as mere matter with no relationship to an anticipated future, and medical protocol can support that perception. But in some cases it may be just as important to consider the embryo not as biological waste but as a regretted or deceased or forestalled humanity, perhaps mournable. In such a case, notes Memmi, the tactful medical expert might well expect to humanize the fetus, to remove it with a different ceremony, in a “slower” temporality, perhaps allowing for questions such as preferred means of disposal of the remains.64 There may also be either slow or rapid transitions between these modes, between different “lives” of the fetus, between shared perceptions of pregnancy, of fetal life, grieved potential life, or matter. Differential conduct, legal regimes, economic conditions, medicalization, and the conduct of care play their role in the availability of “tactful protocol”: the range of malleable possibilities for a fetus to appear as biological waste or as life anticipated or regretted.65
But this form of attentive nuance in the making of the fetus (at least in this form) is more available to women in some kinds of medical, legal, and economic circumstances. For this reason, the very possibility of such flexible protocols, the very tact in question, is part of the making of some women as human and the deconstituting of others by contrast (as when it is assumed that others belong to contexts not offering or participating in such consensual relationships and makings). Only some women can access these forms of clinically inflected ontological tact and the related malleability, etiquette, attentiveness, mindfulness, and nuanced conduct from health care and associated contexts. This is both an economic and procedural divide and also a perceptual divide. It is not to question the importance of this tact with respect to fetal ambiguity to recognize that this very possibility also plays its role in a kind of reproductive exceptionalism. It may be tacitly supposed as the right or the protocol expected of some nations, health systems, or economic classes of women or of those able to access an approach considered enlightened—and not a right or possibility attributed to others. It certainly can divide populations of women in terms of economic privilege. But while accessing this ontological tact can be an emblem of privilege, this is not to say that easier access to abortion is a consistent indicator of privilege. Freedom from imposed abortion, from differential promotion of abortion, and the freedom not to be coercively sterilized have also been among the major reproductive rights claims of many groups of women. A prior, differential biopoliticization of women as principle of life (or death) for populations will often be determining of such variations in policy, and the latter will also stimulate the former.
There are, then, broad reasons to conclude that the fetus’s ambiguous status as “more” or “less” human, as grievable, disposable, waste, anticipated or desired, also distributes the precariousness of the woman. Since a woman can only have the experience on which Mills reflects (responding to 3-D uterine images as to the “call” and the “face” or interacting with a technologically and “decision oriented” fetus) by virtue of mutable legal and medical regimes, the analysis also enfolds the conditions (geographical, economic, political) which differentially place some women in clinics at all and leave others well outside them. The contingencies and normativities relevant here relate also to the conditions under which women’s decisions can be taken as decisions. Modern responsibility takes place in a context of regimes and techniques ensuring the ontological flexibility of a fetus. Yet even this flexibility, I have suggested, amounts to a principle of division.
I have so far considered unmaking in the “clinic”: the context in which some women have come to be understood as appropriately deciding agents with respect to reproductive life, while others will emerge as particularly aberrant or failed decision makers. But Jenkins’s exploration of framed fetal grievability also invites us to think about fetal ambiguity, and its differential grievability, as this emerges outside the clinic. The variant discussed by Memmi (where fetal ambiguity becomes associated with advanced conducts of choice in the clinic) can be juxtaposed with a variant considered by Jenkins. It reminds of how the ambiguity of the fetus may be differently confronted outside the clinic, but in an encounter that should not be understood as less mediated or more biologically real. Again it emerges only as enmeshed in its framing conditions. It entails dangers, anxieties, complex financing, legal, medical, and criminal conducts, subjectivations and desubjectivations. Here the problem it may present of disposal and disposability demarcates some as particularly exposed to the associated regimes of punishment, affordability, the necessary networks of connections and confidences, calculations of the thresholds of time, trust, and risk. These can be seen as the framing conditions of the disposability—not just of fetuses, but in conjunction, the differential grievability and precarious life of women. Even where legal, in most countries, and for most women, access to reproductive services, technologies, and options will be determined by matters of wealth, education, religion, age, immigration status, connections, networks, and practical and/or financial mobility. Such differentials, like the revocability of their legal regimes, render potentially pregnant women precarious life: practically, subjectively, institutionally, legally, economically, and to regimes of greater or lesser concern about the harm or death to which some women are exposed by regimes with interests in reproduction.
Individualization in terms of the alternatives of responsibility and inappropriate conduct is also an effect for those whose reproductive choices must take place “outside the clinic” particularly where this involves recourse to illegal abortion. In turn, to be made a subject “outside the clinic” (in this sense) stimulates new division of legibility and illegibility. This is to add to feminist analyses of the “made fetus” discussed through the lens of Butler’s work, a further exploration of the associable forms and relays of “made responsibility” (in all their concurrent inclusions and exclusions) manifesting in Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (2007), as interpreted by Jenkins.
OUTSIDE THE CLINIC: PRECARIOUSNESS AND THE FETUS
4 Months is set in the Romania of the Ceaușescu regime, when abortion was inaccessible to most except through the illegal and dangerous measures that proved deadly to women in the thousands. Jenkins’s discussion directs our attention to a scene in which a woman confronts a fetus lying on a hotel bathroom floor following her mid-term abortion. Gabriela, her friend Otilia, and the abortionist, Mr. Bebe, face the possibility of arrest and long imprisonment. Yet Gabriela jeopardizes her own and Otilia’s safety by asking her friend to disregard the abortionist’s detailed instructions for how to dispose of the fetus with the least risk of detection. Instead, the fetus seems to make some kind of call, prompting Gabriela’s response that it ought to be buried.
These are complex stories of response, responsiveness, responsibility, and impingement in illegal medical procedures. So it matters that Gabriela is herself presenting a hapless helplessness. She is an irresponsible agent according to the limited options for appropriate decision making and covert reproductive choice under these circumstances. She is dangerously deceptive about the advanced state of the pregnancy, vague on the details she ought to have followed in setting up the abortion, vague about the money, not managing to ensure the detailed planning, not clear to her friend about the instructions, nor about the fact that she hasn’t followed them. She presents a passivity to which her friend’s hypercapability, in turn, seems particularly vulnerable. We find the latter compensating, organizing the money and many of the details, exposed in consequence to sex extorted by the abortionist as his condition for proceeding with the unexpectedly late-term abortion. Where Gabriela is dangerously vulnerable to the (framed) call that the fetus ought to be buried,66 in these interconnected networks of illegality Otilia is also vulnerable. Not just her rape but her mission to dispose of the fetus, carrying it at great distance through remote urban areas late at night, are scenes reminding that the risks, exposures, and productions of subjectivity also may include a woman’s concerted responsiveness under these circumstances.
So we can think differently about some of the framed modes of responsibilization of the women. We are confronted with the complex making of the conditions of their ethical life and of their differential vulnerability at the point where Jenkins is proposing an understanding of the fetus as framed and precarious: “Gabriela’s response seems to suggest that to the extent that the foetus looks like a human infant it also addresses us with a human claim, the minimal claim, if not to subjectivity, then at least to having died, a condition that demands a burial rather than sheer disposal.”67
I am suggesting an alternative in focus to the view that the mother responds to the (technologically and/or discursively framed and produced) face or ethical call of the fetus or that (according to another tradition) she is more like a hostage to the fetus.68 Rather she might be seen as vulnerable to the stimulations of responsibilization.69 This would also be to draw differently on the resources available in Butler’s consideration of ethical formations. We would turn instead to Butler’s account of the “‘I’ who must appropriate moral norms in a living way,” and who, as such, is understood as “conditioned by norms, norms that establish the viability of the subject.”70
This account can help keep our focus on the conditions and norms through which it might become possible for the woman (thinking of the arguments considered in this chapter) to be “called” by a fetus in a register framed as ethical. Insofar as Butler proposes (though not in a discussion of this phenomenon) a critical and paradoxical relationship to the moral register,71 we would be invited to analyze “not the relation that a subject has to morality, but a prior relation: the force of morality in the production of the subject.” In a commentary on Adorno she emphasizes, “one cannot will away this paradoxical condition for moral deliberation.”72 The phenomena described by Mills and Jenkins include the productions and relays of responsibilized subjects. The approach specific to Butler might ask us to attend to these in their genealogy, their framing conditions, the contingency of their social norms, the ways in which precariousness is both presupposed and produced in such contexts, the microdetail and the retroactive effects of such moral making. In this encounter between their resources, Butler’s capacity for a critical genealogy of morals would encounter Mills’s and Jenkins’s stronger interest in the fetus: the result would be a reoriented means of thinking precariousness that reroutes from the arguments of all three.
An understanding of some subjects as precarious (in an establishment of the conditions for their humanization and dehumanization), specifically as they are made (in relation to certain contingent problems) as moral—and of the conditions and effects of this phenomenon—is important to feminist genealogies of the politicization and responsibilization of women in regimes of reproductive choice and also of its illegality. In other words, a critical approach to ethics available in Giving an Account could allow attention to the conditions of possibility of subjectification in moral choice and its concurrent function as a dividing practice.73 It would allow analysis of the retroactive institution of some subjects confronted by reproduction made moral. This register is also a practice of division—of populations, peoples, groups, and subjects—such that some are not expected to fit modern narratives of reproductive choice.
ILLEGIBILITIES, ILLEGITIMACIES
Feminists, queer theorists, critical race theorists, and others have argued that reproductive rights may be among those rights we “cannot not want,”74 even if they also circulate heteronormativity and progressive exceptionalism. When promoted as a general good, they can obscure race, class, and wealth differentials of access and priorities.75 The supposition that all women’s reproductive rights concern, primarily, contraception access and abortion can obscure the different priorities of some: such as the right not to be forcibly sterilized or the parenting rights of gay couples.76
As I have argued, the modern, individualizing images of women who make reproductive choices need to be placed in a broad context of regimes of a) women whose reproductive choices count for little; b) women whose reproduction is not legible as “choice” but as failure, of coherence, attention, responsibility, or of the will (as in depictions of “excessive” pregnancy, sometimes associated with poverty or teenage pregnancy),77 and those who, in a register of choice, seem to make inadequate or inhuman choices; and c) the many women unable to access the reproductive rights that in some cases technically belong to them. To these we have also added the groups of d) the many who are unable to access the reproductive rights that do belong to others, so that reproductive rights in this sense also become principles of inclusion/exclusion, and e) those whose different priorities also manifest as obscurely indifferent to reproductive legibility.
This has been to argue for an intertwined analysis drawing on at least seven malleabilities. First, the malleability between the potentially reproductive woman as politicized, as biopoliticized, and as thanatopoliticized. Second, the malleability of reproduced life (for example, anticipated individual life or statistical contribution to collective life; “quickening” or “fetus”; the problem of soul, law, or choice; 2-D or 3-D imaging; distinctions between fetus or waste, underreproduction or overreproduction). Third, the malleability between the woman perceived as having a faculty of sovereign decision making, a capacity for collective biopolitical impact or as responsible for the corresponding lives and deaths. Fourth, the malleability of the law, its inverted states of exception and their chronic revocability. Fifth, I have mentioned the malleability of the techniques and segmentation of modes of power. This can intersect with the multivalence of the relevant subjects, objects, and practices. For example, vagaries in ease of access to abortion can reflect and stimulate differential human worth; it can produce the terms through which some decision makers (or those who don’t, won’t, or can’t decide) will take on a status as less than human. Another factor reinforcing these associations is the making of reproduction as a mode of neoliberal choice, personal project, or investment in human capital. Sixth, as I suggested in chapter 4, reproduction has been associated with malleability in one’s relationship to citizenship and political status. Capacity for reproduction as principle of life is a factor of concurrent inclusion in and exclusion from political domains as is its thanatopolitical variant (reproduction as principle of death). Seventh, I have also emphasized the malleability of the philosophical resources deployed in this project. The mobilization of a number of reserves and suspensions has been operative in this reconsideration of the biopolitics and thanatopolitics of reproduction.
FOUCAULT, POWER, AND ABORTION
One of Foucault’s best-known contributions to theories of power was seen in his proposal that one will sometimes need to forgo the supposition that one group is disempowered as a means to another’s empowerment. Sometimes one might more usefully ask what has been problematized (and under what conditions) such that both groups have become legible opponents in this regard, thereby sharing more common ground than may be perceived. In certain cases (and biopolitical conditions are exemplary of these) strategies of power are complex and unpredictable, involving productivities, stimulations, unexpected by-products, and complex capillary networks for which we need new forms of analysis.78 Foucault famously claimed that power might stimulate forms of resistance, which would not therefore be in a position of exteriority with respect to power (HS I 95), and that such struggles would be indefinite. Such forms of resistance were least interestingly described as adversarial: “For every move by one adversary, there is an answering one by the other.”79 In interviews brief mention was made, in such terms, to resistance and counterattack by workers responding to techniques of surveillance,80 to Oscar Wilde and Gide,81 to the formation of the “lesbian movement.”82 He provided a similar characterization of the emergence of feminism:
For a long time they tried to pin women to their sexuality. They were told for centuries: “You are nothing other than your sex.” And this sex, doctors added, is fragile, almost always sick, and always inducing sickness.… Towards the end of the eighteenth century, this very ancient movement quickened and ended up as the pathologization of woman: the female body became the medical object par excellence.… But the feminist movements have accepted this challenge. Are we sex by nature? Well then, let it be, but in its singularity, in its irreducible specificity. Let us draw the consequences from it and reinvent our own type of political, cultural, and economic existence.… Always the same movement: take off from this sexuality in which movements can be colonized, go beyond them in order to reach other affirmations.83
And it was amidst such reflections that Foucault took a moment to consider the politics of abortion:
As always with relations of power, one is faced with complex phenomena.… Mastery and awareness of one’s own body can be acquired only through the effect of an investment of power in the body: gymnastics, exercises, muscle-building, nudism, glorification of the body beautiful. All of this belongs to the pathway leading to the desire of one’s own body, by way of the insistent, persistent, meticulous work of power on the bodies of children or soldiers, the healthy bodies. But once power produces this effect, there inevitably emerge the responding claims and affirmations, those of one’s own body against power, of health against the economic system, of pleasure against the moral norms of sexuality, marriage, decency. Suddenly, what had made power strong is used to attack it. Power, after investing itself in the body, finds itself exposed in that same body. Do you recall the panic of the institutions of the social body, the doctors and politicians, at the idea of defacto couples [l’ union libre] or abortion? But the impression that power vacillates here is in fact mistaken; power can retreat here, shift ground, invest itself elsewhere … and so the battle continues.84
Foucault had offered an elegant argument that such resistance did not arise from a position outside what was resisted. Adversaries shared the terrain whose politics and stakes both presupposed. Yet Foucault left room for further intensifying the complexity with which such relations of power could be analyzed. For one thing, the passage seems to suppose the possibility of identifying the adversaries, if not their opposed interests. But what if we added some of the most recent battles to have emerged in the arena of reproductive rights, such as rights concerning surrogacy arrangements and the dilemmas to which they have given rise? The latter have included new variations for abortion politics, as when those paying for a surrogate pregnancy have sought abortions. The politics of surrogacy have been uncertainly parsed (as more or less exploitative) as gifting or as commercial arrangements, as more or as less regulated by the state, and as permissable or illegal. The politics of differential access will play a role: as with the politics of inclusion/exclusion seen when gay couples are sometimes denied access to surrogacy arrangements legally accessible in some states or nations by heterosexual couples. How are their reproductive rights to be understood in these and other contexts? If they include surrogacy, do they also include surrogate abortion? The politics of surrogacy will be complicated by economic differentials, given that some nations makes less expensive surrogacy options available to citizens from wealthier nations. The differential value of pregnancies will be seen in the lesser value of the pregnancy accompanied by medical problems. It may begin to seem unsatisfactory to see the adversaries of abortion politics as bearing calculably opposed interests. Foucauldian resources will, however, allow us to intensify our understanding of such complexity. So let’s turn, not to the cases that have been reported with a largely unanimous abhorrence,85 but to variants where the question of who has become whose adversary is harder to determine—as is an appropriate language of reproductive rights.
Recent instances of the conditional circumstances through which gay marriage rights have been granted have seen the denial of equal adoption rights or access to assisted reproduction technologies legally available to heterosexual couples. Thus there has been considerable confusion between gay marriage and debate about the fate of the “children.”86 But (returning for a moment to that language) to see gay reproductive rights as counterattacks and countereffects will not do justice to the complexity of power to which Foucault himself refers—particularly in developing his reflections on biopolitics. Let’s consider a complicated case of the politics of reproductive technologies,87 depicted in Zippi Brand Frank’s 2009 documentary Google Baby.
Two gay men living in Israel seek a surrogate to bear a child for them. An entrepreneur, who explains that most “would like to have a Caucasian donor,” facilitates a form of international commerce now commonly accessed in countries where commercial surrogate arrangements are legal: such as the United States, India, the Ukraine, and Thailand. The couple’s sperm is transported to North America to fertilize the eggs of a commercially contracted white American donor. The resulting zygotes are transported to India, where cheaper commercial surrogacy is available. The arrangement is only viable because an Israeli passport for the resulting baby will (in a departure from the policies of a number of other nations) be issued by the Israeli government. Yet this reflects neither the vigor of their national pro-natalism nor a progressive political affirmation of the diversities of kinship nor of gay rights. For surrogacy contracts, although legal in Israel, have been regulated by the state and restricted to heterosexual couples. Willingness to issue such passports divides countries such as Israel and Australia from others such as Germany and France (where surrogacy is illegal and passports are also not issued for children born overseas to foreign surrogates).88
Adding to the complications, the Israeli couple will gain financially from choosing over a U.S. surrogate for the pregnancy a surrogate based in India. This is most easily understood as the latter’s economic subordination. But the payment, amounting to a “lot of money” for the Indian surrogate mother, will buy a simple house,89 whereas the going fee in the United States (for a U.S.-based surrogate in the context of most North American real estate forms and economies) would not.
Then one would want to factor the conditions set by the surrogacy clinic for the surrogate’s participation: both physiological (she must already have had an unproblematic pregnancy) and psychological. Again we will find the requirement of performance before a witness of psychic motives and norms for a responsible decision, also understandable as contributing to the carving out of new forms of psychic space. The clinic’s director explains: “the women need to have a strong desire to improve and upgrade their lives.” How should we understand the interest in this question and in a surrogate’s subjectivity being configured in this particular way? Why must their desire be “strong,” why must it concern a desire for improvement and life “upgrade”? What kinds of psychic lives and motivations would present as less appropriate to or legible as an optimal surrogacy?
Moreover, the interests at work in the requirement to desire an “improved” and “upgraded” life are complicated. In one case, a common answer—the desire to buy a house—is provided by the husband by the side of the woman who is being interviewed as a possible surrogate. Later we are confronted with a husband’s declaration, about his wife’s work as a surrogate, that “women are good for very little.” But some women are financing the purchase of houses by this means. This will also impact their economic relationships with their husbands and families in unpredictable ways. Another uncertainty concerns their health and their risks: the American egg donor talks about her fears of cancer from the hormone stimulation. The Indian surrogate, reminded that she could die in childbirth, is informed that, if so, neither the couple nor the clinic will bear responsibility.
In a special deal, offered by the clinic, embryos will be implanted in two surrogates to maximize the chances of successful pregnancy. One of the prospective fathers makes a nervous joke (or is it a plan?), as he realizes the risk, that one or both pregnancies might lead to twins. We hear one father on the phone as the couple considers the offer: “OK you will have four children. So we’ll do a selective abortion. (Laughter.) That was good… ”
“We would do a reduction,” reassures the entrepreneur, seriously.
And so they could and may (can we calculate?). But they may also find—as embryo transforms into anticipated life or back to possible disposability—that this is not (or else it is)—so lightly done.
The surrogates are among the cheapest, globally: is their status mere disposable life? For whose ends? Is the husband really making the decision to “send his wife to work,” is she entirely subordinate, or might he also be nostalgically performing the rhetoric and gesture of a sovereign patriarchal power, given that this is being reconfigured by a number of forces in play? And, true, the Israeli couple and entrepreneur are, comparatively, economically privileged, and they stand to save and make money from this arrangement. Yet the entrepreneur seems hesitant to mention the couple’s homosexuality when told the clinic will “only accept genuine cases for surrogacy”:
“What do you mean genuine?”
“Genuine cases mean that medically it should be genuinely indicated.”
“OK.”
User’s guides to international commercial surrogacy in India have distinguished between clinics understood to be gay friendly and those that are not. As of January 2013, restrictions in India on visas to gay couples—and single individuals—seeking these surrogacy arrangements were introduced.
The reference to genuine medical cases comes from the clinic’s director, and she is a complicated figure: careful in warning the surrogates of their death risks (yet differently careful in warning the clinic bears no financial liability). Naming herself a feminist, telling a husband that she would like the purchased house to be in his wife’s name alone. And to another she will say—but, who knows, perhaps she is referring to the gay male parents (can we calculate)?—“one woman helping another woman. She cannot have a child [for] which she longs, which you are going to give, and you cannot have a house. You cannot educate your son beyond school. For that, they are going to pay.” And, in relation to his hopes for such a son, the surrogate’s husband will say, later (can we calculate?): “How will I make his future and pay his fees? I will have to send her to be a surrogate again. I will do whatever it takes to make him an army officer. And if not I will send him into the police force.”
Just how definitively can the subordination of the woman to the man, to the interests of her husband’s or her own reproductive futurism, the commercial interests of the clinic, or to the interests of her son be calculated here? Is this exploitation of her reproductive body and, more generally, the subordination of third world Indian surrogates to first world reproductive futurisms pursued at bargain prices? How to understand the relations between nations, between state and individual rights, the differentials of biopolitical citizenship, the variably progressive aspects of reproductive rights, controls, and technologies, the state’s role as bearing both sovereign and biopolitical interest in the question, and a number of further politics and modes of power, in the geopolitical distinctions between countries that will recognize these arrangements from those that will not? How definitively are some subjects rendered illegitimate, or illegible, in these interpenetrating regimes, powers, and politics of reproductive rights?
The ontological tact accessed by this couple in relation to the possibility that they could “do a reduction” is premised on the denial of that same ontological tact to the Indian surrogate who is cautioned accordingly: “you don’t have a right over the baby … you have to give the baby to them.” For the parents depicted by Memmi and for the male couple in Google Baby, reproductive freedom is importantly connected not only to the ability to access abortion and surrogacy but also to the associated ontological tact I have discussed: the consensual making of embryonic life as valued potential life, or as biological waste, and its consensual making as a flexibility between these possible perceptions and outcomes. In this case, couples access the ontological tact associated with their reproductive freedom through a tacit occlusion of the surrogate mother’s subjectivity. (We are not presented with a reflection on the possible claims of the surrogate with respect to this abortion.) The commercial arrangement is premised on the supposition that the surrogate does not access fetal reversibility on equivalent terms. It is assumed that, having borne her own child with personal interest, she could bear another couple’s embryo impersonally. It is also supposed she will have no right to participate in the latter’s malleability of status (as it oscillates between business proposition, bargain, fetishized future child, or “reduction”), unlike the couple for whom this very malleability has just become a fundamental reproductive freedom. Amrita Pande has discussed the contradictory demands negotiated by surrogates in this respect, given that they are expected to be, simultaneously, disciplined contract workers and nurturing mothers but selfless mothers.90
Yet this is not to presuppose that the most importantly foreclosed freedom is the surrogate’s decision making with respect to that developing fetus, nor equal access to consensual tact with respect to its ambiguous ontological status. We can say that the tact accessed by the couple is premised on a denial of an equivalent tact to the surrogate in these particular circumstances: but we cannot say that the exclusion of the latter is the best way of understanding the cost of the former’s reproductive freedoms. Nor should we assume it is not.
Thus a critical analysis of these complex interrelations must try to factor what cannot always be factored: expense, occlusion, illegibility, penetration. This would be the concerted attempt to acknowledge the component of incalculability in delegitimations, sacrifices, the making of disposable life, its expense, the complexity of concurrent forms of power, techniques, penetrations, segmentations, and malleabilities. This has also been to unfold (with Mills and Jenkins) the resources offered by Butler’s work—not necessarily anticipated by the latter—such that biopoliticized reproduction might become thinkable as precarious life. At this point it might also become thinkable in terms of a critical ethics. This I am defining as the ethics that will always require genealogy, all the while that this genealogy is willing to negotiate with the question “can we calculate?”
REPRODUCTIVE BIOPOLITICS AS HYPERGENEALOGY
Judith Butler’s engagement with Foucault has been as singular as that of each of the theorists considered in this project. Each has articulated missing links in Foucault, oversights, blind spots, and unasked questions. To the extent that they have done so in the mode of critique, I have suggested that this mode has demarcated limit points: For Derrida, I suggested this limit point arose with Foucault’s biopolitics. For both Agamben and Esposito, I suggest the limit would be a consideration of biopoliticized reproduction become thanatopolitics. For Foucault, it concerned the making of biopoliticized reproduction as a “power of death” manifesting in the very making of women’s agency as threatening and as capable of impacting peoples in an excess to projects of governability (where the thanatopolitical parallel in his work was the atomic bomb or virus or any biopolitical measure reconfiguring both as power of death and as risk of governmental paradox).
The many respects in which Butler has critically explored Foucault’s work have not, specifically, thematized his biopolitics. But Butler has queried the status of both life and death in Foucault’s work.91 Foucault’s inattention to the phenomena of desubjectivation, a phenomena she considers in both individual and population terms. Butler’s engagements with Foucault have also included her interrogation of critique: the term has been one of their most important points of theoretical encounter.92 It arises also in Giving an Account of Oneself.93 Responding to the term critique, Foucault eventually articulated his own variant of a genealogy of ethics. Engaging with this, Butler offers the prospect of a critical ethics.94 Although her resources speak to the availability of the ethical encounter to genealogical critique, she has not foregrounded the way in which certain types of subjects emerge as particularly accessing moral status, normatively humanizing ethical decision-making conduct as itself a problematic mechanism of desubjectivation, a stimulation of illegibilities, and a principle of population division.
In exploring this alternative possibility, I have directed it into the consideration of abortion politics foregrounded neither by Foucault nor Butler. The biopoliticization of abortion and modern responsibilization in relation to embryonic life could be seen as limit points in the analyses of both. My view is not that Foucault or Butler “ought” to have given these phenomena more extensive consideration. To the contrary, we gain insight into the parameters of Butler’s Frames of War project by understanding why the modern fetus can emerge only briefly in its prefatory remarks. Moreover, Butler comments that biopolitical analysis might be “for other scholars to do.”95 And, despite the elements discussed in chapter 3, we cannot turn back to Foucault for an adequate treatment of reproductive biopolitics. By contrast, I have suggested that the mutual engagement between the suspended reserves of Foucault, Butler, Mills, and Jenkins is productive in this regard.
Through this distinctive form of mutual encounter (not between arguments or texts but between suspended reserves) we can foreground the genealogical conditions of calls, responsibilities, and ethical encounters, their agencies, subjectivities, and objects, their framing conditions, their privileges and deprivileging with Butler’s resources suggesting the importance of asking which subjects and problems are generated as illegible to, or excluded by, such ethical encounters. I have asked this question in relation to responsible decision making in modern reproduction, the dilemmas sometimes manifesting as reproductive ethics, and the responsibilization of women as “life and death” decision makers or “quality of life” decision makers, as fundamentally responsive, consequential, or moral agents.
This has also been to agree with those who have queried the formulation of abortion rights as the platform for personal responsibility, for responsibility for and to others, and as a means of being enfolded into life. The critique that abortion delivers antisociality, or even death (whether of futures, peoples, potential, growth), is not best rebutted with the claim that women’s reproductive choice is instead a claim to quality of life, to only the most wanted children and the most deliberative parents, to responsibility, care for the self, or an aesthetics of existence. This is to support the argument presented in chapter 2: such claims operate too easily as a dividing principle. Too much and too many fall outside this claim to inclusive sociality, too many categories of antilife and of illegibility and nonconformity are stimulated in relation to these modes of reproduction as responsible life choice. That some claims to ethical life and the normative protocols of decision making play an overvigorous role in stimulating registers of illegibility and antilife is not an argument made by Butler. Yet, I have argued, this phenomenon—as becomes clearer as one broadens the consideration of those inevitably excluded from its parameters—has its place among the phenomena she has termed precarious life, as does the argument that forms of moral responsibility arise in conditions to be understood politically and biopolitically.
In chapter 2 we saw Puar’s discussion of homonationalism make mention of the corresponding phenomenon of gender exceptionalism.96 An even more specific “reproductive rights exceptionalism” is seen if reproductive rights claims reinforce conventional associations of class and cultural difference and norms for responsible conduct. Those taken to counter the interests of reproductive rights certainly have included those grouped by virtue of nation, community, or culture, in addition to religion or politics, as the putative deniers of rights. The language of reproductive choice also produces categories of those whose reproduction is assumed to be coerced, unenlightened, those for whom choice is assumed to be unavailable or irrelevant or whose agency might not be legible as choice. Those representing an impediment to the imaginary of reproductive choice are also seen in figures of reproductive irresponsibility, disorganized motives, incoherent behavior, the imposition on others of social burden, late, vague, or “poor” choice. To mention the latter might seem a challenging invitation: the defense of poor choice and irresponsibility has rarely suited a feminist imaginary. Yet the very implausibility indicates the contingency of modern reproductive choice. Consider, I suggested, that the right to poor, uninformed, reckless, and irresponsible decision making in voting often goes unquestioned, as it is in many other respects, even where negative impact on others might be supposed a concern. And consider the immediate associability of certain groups with irresponsible reproductive choice or poor parenting, incapacity of choice or a reproduction assumed not to count as “choice.” These tacit assumptions about the groups or types making good or poor reproductive decisions, combined with suppositions that some forms of reproduction are less than human when considered from the perspective of responsibilized decision making, manifests the biopolitical hierarchies and principles of division with which reproductive choice is intertwined.
Lauren Berlant has suggested that biopower is at work when specific populations, groups, or subgroups of bodies come to be seen less competent at maintaining health or other conditions of social belonging. Their agency is deemed destructive or they “represent embodied liabilities to social prosperity of one sort of another.”97 The analyses of Berlant and Brown have been particularly insightful in identifying the biopolitical making of failed responsibility as a principle of population management and division. In this final chapter I have considered variants of this phenomenon in relation to reproductive choice, rights, freedoms, a making of both responsibility and illegible irresponsibility and a making of some groups and subjectivities as excluded from such freedoms. These are phantom responsibilities and failed responsibilities stimulated by the clinical consultations emerging in Gilligan’s study but also by the spaces of illegal abortion evoked by the Romanian hotel rooms of 4 Months. To describe the conditions under which groups of subjects are made as those excluded from rights, freedoms, responsibilities, or as those whose irresponsibility makes them a liability, is, Berlant has suggested, to describe one of the fundamental operations of biopower.98
This is also to conclude in agreement with the formulation that reproductive rights are what we cannot not want.99 It means they can be pursued while at the same time articulating, as strenuously as possible, questions such as the following: At whose expense? Where are the generated figures of impediment and antifuture? What is the contingency of the relevant “life,” “lives,” and “deaths,” of concern and of the providential state? Of neoliberalism? Of the personal and collective project and the care of the self? Of the making of risk and security? And it is also to do so while affirming the need to multiply such questions to the point of affirming their incalculability. Pushed to its limit, an analysis of the paradox of rights will also undermine a stable understanding of the paradoxes at work, their positive and negative impact.100
Considering the multiple conducts and counterconducts of Google Baby as an example, what coinciding regimes and registers we will not find: postcolonial, sovereign, nostalgic, and phantasmatic; state, states of risk, and risk aversion; biopolitical, thanatopolitical, divisions of the biological continuum; differentials in worth of life, neoliberalism; a number of projects of care of the self, both consistent and conflicting. These can’t settle into a stability: of meaning, of mode of power, of subordination, of exploitation, of progress, of rights, of self-development, of self-making, of optimization, of harm, of choice, of rights, of freedom, of the latter’s occlusions and illegibilities. We might better understand these as coinciding, sometimes in the mutually reinforcing conjunctions of an apparatus, sometimes in relations of dissonance or mutual resistance.
I have concluded by suggesting that the multiplication of modes of power, their techniques, segments, subjects, objects, expenses, penetrations, became so complicated as to make unstable the answers to questions such as “who pays?” At whose expense is this subject’s rights claims pursued? What counts as power, what as resistance, what as conduct, what as counterconduct? This is both a point arising from Foucault’s work, while also constituting the point of resistance to some of Foucault’s formulations of “resistance”—if, for example, the identification of “counterconducts” would require a stabilization of a mode of power, or a formation, rendered less plausible by the complexity of segments and penetrations to which his own analyses also speak.
This is a project building on the commitment to a genealogy of ethics: in this case a genealogy of the reproductive decision makers, responsibilized as “moral philosophers,” who have emerged with the biopolitical, as have its objects, its lives and deaths, its legibilities and illegibilities. Speaking to the project of critique, Butler has included its capacity to undertake genealogical, and political, interrogation of the ethical subject (its framing conditions, its imbrication in power and making, its status as formation) while reminding that this need not amount to invalidation of the ethical register. The stories we would need to tell about the retroactively self-forming and deconstituting activity of a moral agent, its norms, conducts, spaces, ends, how the latter are pursued, by whom, under what conditions, in conjunction with whom and what, as opposed to what, at whose expense, are complex. For we are not just “moral agents,” we are moral agents in particular spaces, with particular conduct, about particular problems and in relation to appeals that come to seem self-evident. There is no “ethics” proper, Foucault will argue: there are contingent ethics in relation to concurrently coalescing objects for concurrently forming agents or microagencies or collective agents. This is the analysis we need of the ethical life, moral philosophy, and responsibilization of reproduction. This kind of genealogy of ethics will ask: About what? In relation to what aims? How? By whom? In relation to what? Constituting what parts of ourselves? Through what kinds of acts and conducts? In what kinds of relationships, through what kinds of transformations? Presupposing what?101 Undone by what? Dividing whom? Deconstituting whom?
This is to explore the possibility that rights claims, and normative reflection, could be pursued while pursuing, and tolerating, critique of their framing conditions, their political, biopolitical, necropolitical, and thanatopolitical conditions, their interrelation with modes of power and their exposure to genealogical critique. So we would be brought, not just to genealogy but to critical genealogy, and to critical ethics: for which one formulation is the genealogy of ethics that would not invalidate ethics. In the discussion of these chapters I suggested another formulation: the ethics that will always require genealogy, but a genealogy that negotiates with the question “can we calculate?”