NOTES

INTRODUCTION

    1.     “No-one talks about that last part. Even though the book is a short one … I suspect people never got as far as this last chapter. All the same, it’s the fundamental part of the book.” Michel Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh,” in Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 194–229, 222 (translation modified). Presumably such readers preferred the chapter’s concluding remarks in which different futures for sex are imagined.

    2.     In his recent dialogue with Lauren Berlant, Lee Edelman reasserts (not specifically as a comment about the different interpretations of The History of Sexuality) sex’s importance given that contemporary critical thought is, he claims, “all too eager to put the subject of sex behind it. Critical discourse now centers instead on questions of rights (civil, natural, and human) of sovereign power and states of exception, of the definition and limits of the human, and of the distribution and control of populations through the categories of citizen and noncitizen.” Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, or The Unbearable (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 63.

    3.     While not using this term, new work in this long-neglected area within Foucault scholarship includes Claire Blencowe, Biopolitical Experience: Foucault, Power, and Positive Critique (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Chloe Taylor, “Foucault and Familial Power,” Hypatia 27, no. 1 (2012): 201–18; Jemima Repo, The Biopolitics of Gender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Michelle Murphy, Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health, and Technoscience (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); and see also contributions by Katherine Logan, “Foucault, the Modern Mother, and Maternal Power: Notes Towards a Genealogy of the Mother,” 63–81, and Vikki Bell, “Foucault’s Familial Scenes: Kangaroos, Crystals, and Continence and Oracles,” 39–62, among important essays in Robbie Duschinsky and Leon Antonio Rocha, eds., Foucault, the Family, and Biopolitics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

    4.     An expression proposed by Jasbir Puar in Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 10, 32, 34, 35–36.

    5.     A collage of these “concerns for women” expressed in contemporary North American antiabortion campaigns is assembled by the brilliant John Oliver at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRauXXz6t0Y (accessed March 2, 2016).

    6.     See Ladelle McWhorter, Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), Elsa Dorlin, La Matrice de la race: généalogie sexuelle et coloniale de la nation française (Paris: Découverte, 2006); Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus. Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986); Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage, 1998); and see Esposito’s mention of Bock in Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 217n91.

    7.     Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40.

    8.     “Every genocidal system is said to follow the same script: a process that starts from a situation of ‘de-individualization,’ and ‘moral disengagement,’ culminating in all-out ‘dehumanization.’ … As the experts on genocide agree, this is how one goes about creating ‘bare life.’” Simona Forti, New Demons: Rethinking Power and Evil Today, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 142–43.

    9.     Although there is (see note 3, this chapter) a new literature on the role in Foucault’s work of family, parenting, and reproduction, their associations with distributions of death is not a dominant theme.

  10.     With the exception of brief passages in essays by Achille Mbembe such as “At the Edge of the World: Boundaries, Territoriality and Sovereignty in Africa,” Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000): 259–84 and “On Politics as a Form of Expenditure,” in J. L. Comaroff and J. Comaroff, eds., Law and Disorder in the Postcolony (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006), 299–336, the role of sex, gender, reproduction, sexuality, and sexual violence has largely been occluded from his discussions of necropolitics. For criticism on this point, see Melissa W. Wright, “Necropolitics, Narcopolitics, and Femicide: Gendered Violence on the Mexico-U.S. Border,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36, no. 3 (2011): 707–31, 710; and see Cihan Ahmetbeyzade, “Gendering Necropolitics: The Juridical-Political Sociality of Honor Killings in Turkey,” Journal of Human Rights 7, no. 3 (2008): 187–206.

  11.     José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 15.

  12.     These can be, he proposes, “nonetheless reworked in the service of a different politics and understanding of the world” (ibid., 16).

  13.     See Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008); and Ranjana Khanna, “Disposability,” differences 20, 1 (2009): 181–98. Thanks to both for discussion of ideas here and elsewhere in this book; to Estelle Ferrarese and Francesca Raimondi, whose exchange about Agamben and feminism at the Bare Life Workshop (Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin, November 12–13, 2015) stimulated some of the comments here; and to Elizabeth Wilson, Laura Bieger, and Francesca Raimondi for their very helpful comments on this introduction.

1. SUSPENSIONS OF SEX

Chapter epigraphs come from Jacques Derrida, “‘To Do Justice to Freud’: The History of Madness in the Age of Psychoanalysis,” in his Resistances of Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 70–118, 118; Michel Foucault, “Polemics, Politics, and Problematization: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Vintage, 1984), 389.

    1.     Agamben’s Homo Sacer was framed by its proposal to flesh out a Foucauldian “blind spot” and what was “logically implicit” in Foucault’s work. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 6; and, for his sharp discussion of Agamben’s stance toward Foucault, see Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1, ed. Michel Lisse, Marie-Louise Mallet, and Ginette Michaud, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 1:330. For an entirely different language of correction, see Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 95.

    2.     Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 44–50, hereafter Bios.

    3.     Didier Fassin, “Another Politics of Life Is Possible,” Theory, Culture, and Society 26, no. 5 (2009): 44–60, 48–49.

    4.     Ibid., 53–54.

    5.     Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Brooklyn: Zone, 2015), 72–73.

    6.     Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40.

    7.     For the immune paradigm, see Esposito’s Bios and, for reflections on insecurity, disorder, and the emergence of a vocabulary of thanatopolitics and necropolitics supplementing or reconfiguring Foucauldian biopolitics, see the inclusions in Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse, eds., Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); and François Debrix and Alexander D. Barder, Beyond Biopolitics: Theory, Violence, and Horror in World Politics (New York: Routledge, 2012).

    8.     Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 1:330.

    9.     Instead, given the role played by Freud in Foucault’s thresholds, Derrida redirects Foucault back to the resources of Freud for thinking the radical ambiguity of the aims of power and pleasure and to the late Freud’s life and death drives.

  10.     Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 3.

  11.     A term used by Foucault (signing as “Maurice Florence”) in “Foucault,” in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984 (in three volumes): vol. 2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), 459–463, 459. See also his discussion of civil society, madness, and sexuality as “transactional realities” (réalités de transaction): “those transactional and transitional figures that we call civil society, madness and so on, which, although they have not always existed are nonetheless real, are born precisely from the interplay of relations of power and everything which constantly eludes them, at the interface, so to speak, of governors and governed” (Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 297).

  12.     Foucault, “Foucault,” 459.

  13.     Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. Alan. M. Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1973) is the work in which Foucault most strenuously repudiates the image of objects of knowledge awaiting their correct observation by a perceiving subject, in which the fantasy of fidelity to the object would equate with an ideal of the absence of imagination, superstition, myth, interpretive presuppositions, interpretive grids, or similarly historical conditions for our modes of perception. This continued to be the demarcating, repudiated alternative in The Order of Things: “I am not … concerned to describe the progress of knowledge towards an objectivity in which today’s science could finally recognize itself” (Foucault, The Order of Things, xxii [translation modified]). The term archaeology is developed among Foucault’s alternatives for the methodology of history. Foucault distinguishes the former from the latter’s assertion of the independence of objects of knowledge. If one assumes that independence, a history of the evolution of medicine, psychiatry, linguistics, economics, or biology might claim (as Foucault does not) to describe the “growing perfection” of their understandings. If one’s object of study is instead the transactional unity of subject and object, the pretention to account for a growing perfection in understanding becomes less viable. Foucault proposed as an alternative the analysis of the “conditions of possibility” for the formation, not of the object, but of these unities, understood in terms of contextualized “styles” and modes of knowledge, and ways of seeing, taking place in “spaces” of knowledge which would then become one’s object of study: “Such an enterprise is not so much a history, in the traditional meaning of that word, as an ‘archaeology’” (ibid., xxii).

  14.     See, for example, the discussion in The Order of Things of exchange, capital, and forms of production as emerging in the space of knowledge (ibid., 252).

  15.     In other words, he adds, it is a matter of determining its mode of subjectivation. Foucault, “Foucault,” 459.

  16.     This is developed well in Claire Blencowe’s Biopolitical Experience: Foucault, Power and Positive Critique (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 3. Blencowe focuses on continuities in Foucault’s accounts of transorganic and historically produced life, from The Birth of the Clinic through Care of the Self, giving a basis for a similar approach to his discussions of death.

  17.     See Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, 91.

  18.     Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 1, 34.

  19.     Ibid., 7.

  20.     As elaborated by Bichat, see Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic, 91, 134, and, more broadly, 88–106 and 124–48.

  21.     See Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975, ed. Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2003), and Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), 54, 125, hereafter AB and HS I.

  22.     Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, ed. Michel Sennelart, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Picador, 2007), 81, hereafter STP.

  23.     

There is not the legal age, the disciplinary age, and then the age of security. Mechanisms of security do not replace disciplinary mechanisms, which would have replaced juridico-legal mechanisms. In reality you have a series of complex edifices in which, of course, the techniques change and are perfected, or anyway become more complicated, but in which what above all changes is the dominant characteristic, or more exactly, the system of correlation between juridico-legal mechanisms, disciplinary mechanisms, and mechanisms of security.

(STP 8)

  24.     In the last lecture of Society Must Be Defended Foucault discusses the Nazi state, of which he says,

No State could have more disciplinary power than the Nazi regime. Nor was there any other State in which the biological was so tightly, so insistently, regulated.… No society could be more disciplinary or more concerned with providing insurance.… Controlling the random element inherent in biological processes was one of the regime’s immediate objectives. But this society in which insurance and security were universal, this universally disciplinary and regulatory society, was also a society which unleashed murderous power, or in other words, the old sovereign right to take life.

Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (London: Picador, 2003), 259, hereafter SMBD (translation modified).

  25.     Lemke offers a good summary of discipline in these terms: “To preclude a possible misunderstanding: According to Foucault discipline is a technology of power that works in very different social formations and historical epochs. He concentrated in his texts on the analysis of processes of discipline from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, but also stressed their importance for fascist … socialist … and liberal-democratic regimes in the twentieth century.” Thomas Lemke, “Comment on Nancy Fraser: Rereading Foucault in the Shadow of Globalization,” Constellations 10, no. 2 (2003): 172–79n12. In addition to remarks made in Discipline and Punish and elsewhere about techniques of surveillance predating disciplinary societies, a number of similar examples are provided in STP. Among the points given emphasis to this end: premodern spectacular punishments were intended to have a deterrent effect on others. Instances of “cell” techniques for the distribution, observation, and self-regulation of bodies could be found in premodern religious contexts and also in the treatment of debtors (STP 8–9). Premodern legal codes embody techniques not only of punishment but also of security, of risk aversion (STP 6–7).

  26.     Lemke, “Comment on Nancy Fraser, 172n12.

  27.     This disassembling approach could be seen as consistent with one of several different strategies with which Foucault is interpreted by Jasbir Puar in Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). Most obviously, see Gilles Deleuze’s Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988) and his “What Is a Dispositif?” in Timothy Armstrong, ed., Michel Foucault Philosopher (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 159–68.

  28.     The suggestion is made that one could understand either the techniques, or the correlations between them, as mutating.

  29.     Fassin, “Another Politics,” 52.

  30.     Even so, here the formulation is framed with the concessive, “but if it is true that … ”

  31.     His best-known characterization refers to its “ancient and absolute form” (HS I 136), the defining power to take life, “derived, no doubt,” from the ancient Roman patria potestas (HS I 135).

  32.     HS I 89 (my emphasis).

  33.     For example, Foucault may “contrast” sovereign power and biopolitics, but, argues Lemke, what is really being described is “the integration,” “rearticulation,” and the “transformation of sovereign power into biopower.” Thomas Lemke, Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 34, 35, 40–41. Lauren Berlant takes it that, on Foucault’s account, “biopower … does not substitute for but reshapes sovereignty.” Lauren Berlant, “Slow Death: Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency,” Critical Inquiry 33 (2007): 754–80, 756. Agamben characterizes Foucault’s view that “sovereign power is progressively transformed into what Foucault calls ‘biopower’.” Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Brooklyn: Zone, 1999), 82.

  34.     Michel Foucault, The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972–1973, ed. Bernard E. Harcourt, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 5; “décomposer en ses éléments”: Michel Foucault, La Société punitive: Cours au Collège de France 1972–3, ed. François Ewald, Alessandro Fontana, and Bernard E. Harcourt (Paris: Gallimard, 2013), 7.

  35.     Foucault resisted offering “histories of institutions” (including the family) and an overly successive account of the waxing and waning of formations of power in part by describing the segmentation of different modes of power and the techniques typically associated with them. For example, he emphasized that those techniques typically associated with disciplinary power had already formed within religious communities in medieval contexts, but operated differently in societies generally dominated more by sovereign forms of power. Isolated segments of disciplinary techniques might be present, as in monastic contexts, but the difference is that they are not interlinked with the “political power-individual body” syntheses important to the nineteenth century, for which disciplinary techniques were “central.” Michel Foucault, Psychiatric Power: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1973–74, ed. Jacques Lagrange, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 41, hereafter PP.

  36.     The Punitive Society begins this discussion with the example of punishment by fining or appropriation of assets. It might involve the suspension of a person’s status within a community or their expulsion from it and so belong to tactics of exclusion. But financial penalties can also be paid in a compensatory capacity by participants in a political space. As such they can be strategies of inclusion. Fines, or other forms of financial appropriation could serve as markers of subordination to sovereign authority, of being governed, ruled, or perhaps unjustly dominated—but not of being illegible—within a political space.

  37.     Foucault, Société punitive, 12; The Punitive Society, 11.

  38.     One could differentiate a seemingly similar technique (such as an execution) as, in fact, quite a different technique, according to the mode of power, tactic, aim, or governmentality with which it is integrated.

  39.     Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 1:332. In HS I Foucault had proposed that capital punishment could be seen as biopower’s “limit … scandal and … contradiction” (HS I 138).

  40.     He does refer to such a decline, and Derrida, in his Death Penalty, also refers to a general acceleration of abolitionism since the Second World War. Derrida stresses, however, that the opposite trend has been seen in the United States. See Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013), 1:91.

  41.     Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 32.

  42.     It is both “an eminently corporeal mode of behavior … a matter for individualizing disciplinary controls that take the form of permanent surveillance … but it is also” as he argues, “in broad biological processes that concern … the multiple unity of the population,” (thus, simultaneously, the disciplinary and the biopolitical). But here the image used is that of an intersection of differentiable axes in, for example, the formations of sexuality and the work of norms (SMBD 251–52).

  43.     See, among his many discussions of the term, Derrida’s reading of Freudian life in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “‘To Do Justice to Freud,’” 118; and The Beast and Sovereign, vol. 2, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 2:130–32. See also Frédéric Worms, “Pouvoir, création, deuil, survie: La vie, d’un moment philosophique à un autre,” in Le moment philosophique des années 60 en france,” ed. P. Maniglier (Paris: PUF, 2011).

  44.     Occupying just a few pages in The History of Madness, it led to considerable debate in the context of Descartes scholarship in France and to Derrida’s famous critique, published as “Cogito and the History of Madness” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 36–76. Judith Revel discusses this in her forthcoming book, Une Controverse philosophique: Foucault, Derrida, et l’“affaire Descartes.”

  45.     For example, Descartes may (as Foucault first argued in The History of Madness) institute the Cogito as a simple exclusion of madness. But, on Foucault’s own account also, Descartes retains a Cogito perpetually threatened by the risk of unreason, given the lurking possibility both of dreaming and of a deceptive evil genius. Freud is presented by Foucault as a hinge figure, representing a number of different tendencies. He is said to carry over, and be tributary to, the lineage of Pinel and Tuke and their thaumaturgical forms of expert authority, associated by Foucault with the classical age. But, insofar as Freud also commits to listening to the voice of unreason rather than relegating it to the pathological, he can also be aligned with the different affiliation of Hölderlin, Nerval, Nietzsche, Van Gogh, Roussel, and Artaud; see Foucault, “‘To Do Justice to Freud,’” 86; and see Michel Foucault, The History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy (London: Routledge, 2006), 157.

  46.     Foucault, The Order of Things, 318–23.

  47.     Derrida, “To Do Justice to Freud,” 93.

  48.     As when Foucault describes Diderot as “prefiguring” the unreason of Nietzsche, see ibid., 89.

  49.     Derrida also goes on to connect this principle of disturbance with the possibility of the Foucauldian event.

  50.     Colin Koopman, Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press: 2013), 51.

  51.     As Trumbull claims, the debate concerns not whether Foucault has the capacity to think everything named in his work as power as disrupting and undoing itself. Rather, the question is whether Foucault must nonetheless commit to a sufficiently coherent sense of power’s (or an epoch’s) (“gathered”) identity to make viable the genealogy which may then recount its profound ambiguity, transformation, de-segmentation, or plasticity. In referring to the ambiguity of pleasure and power, life and death drives, Derrida thinks to identify a more radical challenge to power’s identity than is accomplished when Foucault presupposes some kind of “gathering principle.” See Robert Trumbull, “Power and the ‘Drive for Mastery’: Derrida’s Freud and the Debate with Foucault,” in Foucault/Derrida Fifty Years Later: The Futures of Genealogy, Deconstruction, and Politics, ed. Olivia Custer, Penelope Deutscher, and Samir Haddad (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 151–65, 160.

  52.     Derrida, “To Do Justice to Freud,” 115.

  53.     Ibid., 117.

  54.     And see the elaboration of this theme, SMBD 252.

  55.     See Lynne Huffer, “Looking Back at History of Madness,” in Fifty Years Later, 21–37, 29.

  56.     Lynne Huffer, Mad for Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

  57.     “Reply to Derrida (‘Michel Foucault Derrida e no kaino’. Paideia (Tokyo) February 1972),” in The History of Madness, 575–90, 575–76.

  58.     Ibid., 223.

  59.     Ibid., 606, 609.

  60.     Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, corrected ed., trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 153, 158.

  61.     See Foucault’s “What Is an Author?” in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 2: Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, 3 vols. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), 2:205–21, and see his “Discourse on Language,” in Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 2010).

  62.     See Foucault’s “Reply to Derrida” (1972), the revised version published in the same year as “My Body, This Paper, This Fire,” both in The History of Madness. For related comments on the status of text and of commentary (preoccupations and functions to which he had reduced Derrida in his reply), see Foucault’s “What Is an Author?” and “Discourse on Language.”

  63.     Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 79–102.

  64.     Derrida, Of Grammatology, 153, 158.

  65.     See the more circumspect, brief comments by Foucault in 1984 about the difference between his method and deconstruction, “Polemics, Politics, and Problematization: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Vintage, 1984), 381–90, 389.

  66.     Revel suggests we see a dueling quality in the innovative, brilliant methodologies the two were concurrently developing (Revel, Une Controverse philosophique).

  67.     For her sympathetic reading of the text of sex and the sex of text in Derrida’s work, see Sarah Kofman, Lectures de Derrida (Paris: Galilée, 1984), 144. This is counterbalanced by Luce Irigaray’s less sympathetic response to Derrida in “Le V(i)ol de la lettre,” in Parler n’est jamais neutre (Paris: Minuit, 1985), 149–68. A rich reading of this exchange is to be found in “Derrida, Irigaray, and Feminism,” in Tina Chanter, Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Rewriting of the Philosophers (New York: Routledge, 1985). Questions raised in this chapter about the profitable suspended resources of Foucault and Derrida could come into interesting conversation with Chanter’s speculations, perhaps similar in spirit, about the relationship between Irigaray and Derrida.

  68.     AB 313–14. On this see Mary Beth Mader, “Foucault’s Metabody,” Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 7 (2010): 187–203.

  69.     Again I refer to Huffer’s analysis of The History of Madness in Mad for Foucault, and see a number of comments on sexuality, including Foucault’s articulation of the possibility of an archaeology of sexuality in Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge and a Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 193. In 1971 Foucault flagged the promise of archaeological and genealogical approaches to sexuality; see his “Discourse on Language,” 233.

  70.     Further discussed in the next chapter.

  71.     Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press 1990); Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

  72.     For this term, see Jacques Derrida, Aporias, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 8.

  73.     Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, 1:333.

  74.     Derrida, “To Do Justice to Freud,” 89.

  75.     Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), 266–67, citing Victor Hugo, “Introduction,” in Paris Guide par les principaux écrivains et artistes de la France (Paris: Libraire Internationale, 1867), 1–44, 43, and see 104–6, 110, 114, 118–24.

  76.     Ibid., 265, citing Hugo, “Introduction,” 2–3, 4.

  77.     Derrida, The Death Penalty, 188.

  78.     Ibid. Derrida depicts Hugo’s association of progress with the metaphor of the seed as follows: “progress is germinating, it is irreversible, and that this organism is going to develop … it is a kind of teleological geneticism, organicism, in this vision of the irreversible progress of the abolition of the death penalty. Which is a progress of life. It is the right to life, and it is normal to describe the progress of the right to life as an organic, genetic process” (ibid.).

  79.     Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, 265, citing Hugo, “Introduction,” 5 (“l’ovaire profond du progrès fécondé”).

  80.     On women’s reproductive bodies as complex spatialities and temporalities, insofar as their own lives and vitality is understood to enfold those of real or prospective children and national, collection, and population futures, see Nathan Stormer, “Prenatal Space,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 26, no. 1 (2000): 109–44, 115–19; and see Michelle Murphy, Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health, and Technoscience (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).

  81.     But for new work in this respect, see the contributions to Robbie Duschinsky and Leon Antonio Rocha, eds., Foucault, the Family, and Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Blencowe, Biopolitical Experience; and, most recently, Jemima Repo, The Biopolitics of Gender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

  82.     Discussed further in chapter 4.

  83.     Thus it is not quite the case that there is no Foucauldian thanatopolitics. When Foucault used the term in “The Political Technology of Individuals,” he referred to a phenomenon that emerges at the end of the eighteenth century: formations of the police (in the sense of Polizeiwissenschaft as developed, for example, by von Justi, his reference at this point) and similarly of a state whose object was “to foster the citizen’s life and the state’s strength.” Von Justi compares this new positive task to the more negatively defined tasks of upholding laws, fighting internal enemies (with the law) as one fights external enemies with military force. This more positive role aimed to impact the conduct of the governed. But, as Foucault comments, this was not just a new type of role but also a new kind of governed object, the “population”: “or, in other words, the state has essentially to take care of men as a population. It wields its power over living beings as living beings, and its politics, therefore, has to be a biopolitics. Since the population is nothing more than what the state takes care of for its own sake, of course, the state is entitled to slaughter it, if necessary. So the reverse of biopolitics is thanatopolitics.” Michel Foucault, “The Political Technology of Individuals,” in Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000), 403–17, 415–16.

  84.     Of course, analogy receives considerable attention in one of the epistemic contexts for considering relations between macrocosm and microcosm in a cosmos understood in terms of similitude, discussed in Foucault, The Order of Things.

  85.     See the inclusions in Clough and Willse, Beyond Biopolitics and Debrix and Barder, Beyond Biopolitics.

  86.     See note 43, this chapter.

2. REPRODUCTIVE FUTURISM, LEE EDELMAN, AND REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS

    1.     Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 14, hereafter NF.

    2.     NF 157n18.

    3.     For example, compare this with Wendy Brown’s interest in “political coalitions among groups that otherwise would not instantly fit together” or Deborah Gould’s discussion of members of ACT UP who have engaged in actions defending abortion clinics and their clients against Operation Rescue. See Wendy Brown, with Christina Colegate, John Dalton, Timothy Rayner, and Cate Thill, “Learning to Love Again: An Interview with Wendy Brown,” Contretemps 6 (2006): 25–42, 38; and Deborah Gould, “Becoming Coalitional: The Strange and Miraculous Alliance Between Queer to the Left and the Jesus People,” paper delivered at Northwestern University, October 17, 2013.

    4.     The formulation in an early piece by Wendy Brown represents the sentiment commonly expressed in a reproductive rights context, “abortion is not a positive good but an unhappy necessity.” Wendy Brown, “Reproductive Freedom and the Right to Privacy: A Paradox for Feminists,” Families, Politics, and Public Policy: A Feminist Dialogue on Women and the State, ed. I. Diamond (New York: Longman, 1983): 311–88, 323. Or in the words of After Tiller’s Susan Robinson, “Nobody wants an abortion.” See After Tiller, directed Martha Shane and Lana Wilson (2014).

    5.     No Future has been seen as the “contemporary queer theorists’ negation of feminist influences,” a view characterized by Cassia Paigen Roth, http://www.academia.edu/4470955/_Queering_Feminism_Center_for_the_Study_of_Women_UCLA_Newsletter_October_2009_ (accessed February 15, 2015). But the emergence of queer theory has combined with nuanced arguments for taking provisional breaks from the foci of feminist genealogies and politics. For important reflections on this question, see Janet Halley, Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); and the contributions to Elizabeth Weed and Naomi Schor, eds., Feminism Meets Queer Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).

    6.     He mentions the remark of a former mayor of Lourdes, for whom homosexuals were the “‘gravediggers of society’—those who care nothing [for] the future” (NF 74), in addition to this citation from Gary Bauer, a member of the “Family Research Council” (NF 39). As Edelman notes, this phrase is “itself a commonplace in anti-abortion polemics” (NF 40). The homophobic comments mentioned here referred to forms of sex deemed to reject the aims of reproduction. Among the many works on the broader associations of homosexuality and death, including those that took shape in the context of the AIDS epidemic, see Deborah Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); and Judith Butler, “Sexual Inversions” in Foucault and the Critique of Institutions, ed. John Caputo and Mark Yount (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 81–98.

    7.     In the United States a widely cited contribution to this debate was a 2013 declaration of support for legally recognized gay marriage by the American Academy of Pediatrics. Their review of some eighty studies, books, and articles, conducted over thirty years, concluded that same-sex parenting was not more harmful to children than heterosexual parenting, while legalizing same-sex marriage would benefit children by eliminating the precarious legal status of their same-sex parents. See also Judith Butler’s discussion of debates abut gay marriage in France, insofar as these also prompted and engaged with “expert” views on the impact on children of gay parenting, in “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual,” differences 13, no. 1 (2002): 14–44.

    8.     See http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/03/27/sorry-justice-scalia-theres-no-evidence-that-gay-parents-arent-great-parents/ (Accessed 01/23/2017).

    9.     The Defense of Marriage Act, 1996, was a law blocking federal recognition of gay marriage, struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2013.

  10.     As per the findings of the research summary on gay parenting adopted by the American Psychological Association, at http://www.apa.org/about/policy/parenting.aspx. (Accessed 11/19/2016).

  11.     “The National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study” of 154 mothers in same-sex relationships whose children were conceived through artificial insemination is cited by Benjamin Siegel, one of the authors of the American Academy of Pediatrics report. As the Washington Post reports his assessment: “the children did fine—better, even, than children in a similar study involving more diverse families.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/social-science-struggles-with-the-effects-of-same-sex-parenting-on-children/2013/03/26/a6fa50ca-9655-11e2-8b4e-0b56f26f28de_story.html?utm_term=.be8b1af2b51d. Accessed 12/15/2016.

  12.     So one might expect a positive response from Edelman to Derrida’s formulation of the à-venir. While the latter is, by definition, unpredictable and unanticipatable, Edelman nonetheless identifies what he takes to be Derrida’s residual reproductive futurism, see Lee Edelman, “Against Survival: Queerness in a Time That’s Out of Joint,” Shakespeare Quarterly 62, no. 2 (2011): 148–69. I have elsewhere argued that this underestimates Derrida’s affirmation of the monstrous potential of the “future” in Penelope Deutscher, “The Membrane and the Diaphragm: Derrida and Esposito on Immunity, Community, and Birth, Angelaki 18, no. 3 (2013): 49–68 (special issue on Roberto Esposito). A similar dialogue takes place with Judith Butler, for whom we assume responsibility for a collective future whose direction and contours we cannot know in advance: “the future, especially the future with and for others, requires a certain openness and unknowingness.” Judith Butler, “The Question of Social Transformation,” in Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 204–31, 226. Edelman’s response to Butler’s reading of Antigone is discussed later in this chapter. Where Butler reads Antigone as a figure standing for the possibility of illegible kinship, and unpredictable transformation of kinship structures, Edelman again argues that these remain conservatively projected futures, at least insofar as they suppose that the unpredictable transformation of social forms are to be understood positively.

  13.     The specter of the “obstacle to futurity” is projected onto figures of sinthomosexuality, in particular, he notes, the gay man. But since the preservation of the (never present) past and present would be, in any case, impossible, we therefore lack self-presence in our very constitution, we are our own “obstacle” to any aim at preservation. Edelman suggests we are all, in this sense, the sinthomosexual: “Futurism makes sinthomosexuals, not humans, of us all” (NF 153).

  14.     From an address first delivered at an MLA “Lesbian and Literature” panel, at the Modern Language Association in December 1977, written in a period when Lorde confronted imminent death from cancer. Her formulation spoke to the vulnerability of African American women’s visible blackness in America, only to then redirect it at “most of you here today, black or not”: “Most of all, I think, we fear the very visibility without which we also cannot truly live.… Even within the women’s movement, we have had to fight and still do, for that very visibility which also renders us most vulnerable, our blackness. For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call america, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson—that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings. And neither were most of you here today, black or not.” It might be said that Lorde’s declaration presupposes the identity of the one who confronts her mortality. Republished in Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals: Special Edition (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1997), 20.

  15.     Connecting with a long trajectory of associations between the queer and the antisocial—see in particular Robert Caserio, “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory,” PMLA 121, no. 3 (2006): 819–21; and Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).

  16.     Whose hand is “limp and heavy, deathly cold,… a lifeless thing.” Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca (New York: Doubleday, 1993), 66. Halberstam has offered a critique of Bersani and Edelman’s “excessively small archive” of negativity, an archive she considers confined to the “anti-social queer aesthetes and camp icons.” Judith Halberstam, “The Politics of Negativity,” PMLA 121, no. 3 (2006): 823–25, 824; and see Caserio, “The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory,” 820. So we should not forget Edelman’s (Hitchcockian) birds, nor the directions opened up by figures such as Mrs. Danvers, Katherine, and Ellen, however briefly.

  17.     For this reason, Halberstam proposes the figures of Valerie Solanis and Jamaica Kincaid as “antisocial theorists who articulate the politics of an explicitly political negativity” (Halberstam, “The Politics of Negativity,” 824); they do not (at least in this respect) correspond to female figures of the sinthomosexuality mentioned by Edelman.

  18.     Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 72.

  19.     Ibid., 6. Also troubling the view that Antigone represents the claims of kinship, versus those of the state, is Butler’s suggestion that by defiantly asserting her agency, sovereignty, and “manly” authority her language approximates that of Creon, thereby “embodying the norms of the power she opposes” (10). There is no simple opposition here between the claims of kinship and sovereignty; instead their reliance on each other deforms the ideal norms for both (6).

  20.     Though consider Bonnie Honig’s discussion of Edelman’s comments on Antigone. Honig does not side with the birds (she is mounting a case for an agonistic humanism and attributing to Antigone a politicized form of mourning and a politics of countersovereignty). Yet she has fun reading with Edelman so as to amplify his own resources. After pushing Edelman to up the ante in considering the burst balloon of Strangers on a Train, Honig then remarks on Edelman’s neglect of Antigone’s birds: “in an extended reading of Hitchcock’s The Birds, Edelman invokes the birds as a marker of inhumanity’s expansiveness but, even though he does discuss Sophocles’ Antigone as well, he neglects the complex role played by birds in Sophocles’ play.… Carol Jacobs notes that when the sentry compares the mourning Antigone to a mother bird at an empty nest, the comparison [also] gestures [to] … a more devouring relation, since birds are at that very moment feasting on Polynices’ body.” Bonnie Honig, Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 52.

  21.     Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 23–24.

  22.     Lines 900–920 (cited ibid., 9).

  23.     Edelman notes that some of the sinthomosexuals he discusses are enmeshed in narratives of conversion: as when Scrooge finds the meaning of Christmas and Katherine appears, at least, to have become docile. Thus sinthomosexuality would then be contained or rerouted at the point where Scrooge finds the meaning of Christmas and Katherine comes to approximate an obedient spousal femininity.

  24.     And see his own description: “No Future, by contrast, approaches negativity as society’s constitutive antagonism, which sustains itself only on the promise of resolution in futurity’s time to come, much as capitalism is able to sustain itself only by finding and exploiting new markets.” Lee Edelman, “Antagonism, Negativity, and the Subject of Queer Theory,” PMLA 121, no. 3 (2006): 821–23, 822.

  25.     NF 13, citing a review by Walter Wangerin, whose formulation is “if there is a baby, there is a future, there is redemption.”

  26.     Consider nineteenth-century women’s rights claims formulated in England, the United States, and some European countries in opposition to the legal tradition of coverture, according to which a wife had no independent legal status, no right to her own earnings, no right of divorce, and no legal rights over her children. More recently, consider also the emergence of political movements promoting “father’s rights” (understood in opposition to those of mothers).

  27.     Ann Stoler discusses this issue in the context of research on illegal immigration and child trafficking. Here, she writes, a child might be figured as “at risk” in the context of trafficking or when accompanying adults on dangerous immigration journeys. But the figure of the child can also redouble into that which poses a risk. The question of the child as at risk/or as posing a risk is permeated with age divisions: “The Homeland Security Act of 2002 transferred the care of unaccompanied alien children who were apprehended for immigration violations to the Office of Refuge Resettlement. Children are perceived as both at risk and as risks themselves. In that delicate balance, ‘the politics of compassion’ as [Greta] Uehling notes, stops at adolescence: children elicit it, teenagers decidedly do not.” Ann Stoler, “ Beyond Sex. Bodily Exposures of the Colonial and Postcolonial Present,” in Genre et Postcolonialismes. Dialogues transcontinentaux, ed. Ann-Emmanuel Berger and Elena Varikas (Paris: Archives Contemporaines 2011), 185–214, 207.

  28.     In her reading of Lasse Hallstrom’s Once Around (1991), Lauren Berlant describes the wife whose “body bears the burden of keeping these gendered, racial, class, ethnic, and national identities stable and intelligible.… [She is] an identity machine for others, producing children in the name of the future, in service to a national culture whose explicit ideology of national personhood she is also helping to generate.” See Lauren Berlant, “America, Fat, the Fetus,” in The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 85. A model deeming the woman passively appropriated to the genealogical, national, sentimental reproductive futurisms of others would be wrong here. She may actively participate in the “fetal motherhood” (see note 30 below) at play when pregnancy is attached to pursuits of meaning, identity, teleology, coherence (personal, familial, genealogical, cultural, national).

  29.     A classic essay (discussing the iconic image of an “eighteen week fetus” which appeared on the cover of Life magazine in 1965) is Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, “Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction,” Feminist Studies 13, no. 2 (1987): 263–92.

  30.     See ibid. Developing the argument, Berlant describes a historically recent transformation in ways in which some women could access a form of (albeit ambiguous) recognition through the route of “the promise of maternal value [which] has defined a source of power and social worth.” However problematic and ambivalent those long-standing sources of personal, public, and nationalist-inflected status, she describes a newer phenomenon, to which she gives the term fetal motherhood: the “fetus” has replaced this space of value and the pregnant woman becomes “more minor and less politically represented than the fetus, which is in turn made more national” (Berlant, “America, Fat, the Fetus,” The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 84–85).

  31.     Ronald Dworkin, Life’s Dominion: An Argument About Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom (New York: Vintage 1994), 60.

  32.     A remark from one of the doctors practicing third-term abortions in After Tiller speaks to the normative conduct problematically associated with responsibility in this context:

Why is that fair, what if you’re just not a good story teller? Why would it be okay for me to say, “no you’ve got to tell me a better story than that”? Because what I believe is that women are able to struggle with complex ethical issues and arrive at the right decisions for themselves and their families.… So if somebody comes in and says, “I want an abortion,” whether or not she is articulate about it, let alone whether she has a great story to tell, isn’t the point, the point is that she has made this decision.

  33.     Whereas a number of histories of women’s rights claims describe the philosophical alternatives between formulations emphasizing women’s equality or those emphasizing women’s difference. Joan Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996) describes a number of instances of historical French feminism in which, more paradoxically, claims to equality were formulated by means of a concurrent emphasis of sexual difference.

  34.     Among the figures discussed by Scott, one could consider Olympe de Gouges’s interest in the founding of state-funded, dedicated public hospitals for women in order to improve their survival rates in childbirth and her association of maternity, public duty, and political rights claims. As Scott argues, de Gouges linked women’s equal agency in reproduction (and in other respects) to their claims to a public voice (Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer, 43); and see Olympe de Gouges, “Projet d’un théatre et d’une maternité” (1789), in Olympe de Gouges, Oeuvres, ed. Benoîte Groult (Paris: Mercure de France, 1986), 78–82. See also Scott’s discussion of Jeanne Deroin’s association of women’s political claims with their maternal role (Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer, 70–73); and, for a detailed account of the unfolding of similar arguments, see Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

  35.     See Claire Démar, Ma loi d’avenir, suivi d’un Appel d’une femme au people sur l’affranchisement de la femme (Paris: Bureau de la Tribune des Femmes, 1834); and, for her discussion of this particular formulation (and as discussed also by Benjamin in his Arcades Project), see Christine Blättler, “Claire Démar: Heroine der Moderne und Opfer des Saint-Simonismus,” Märtyrer-Porträts: Von Opfertod, Blutzeugen und heiligen Kriegern, ed. Sigrid Weigel (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2007), 191–95.

  36.     Démar, Ma loi d’avenir, 54. Démar also reminds her readers of Abraham’s near infanticide, of Brutus and Jephthah slitting their children’s throats (ibid., 52).

  37.     Ibid.

  38.     Ibid., 58. They might be all the more prone to egoism if preoccupied with earning their income, but Démar affirms they should be so preoccupied.

  39.     “Et comment le pourrait-elle, si toujours elle est condamnée à absorber une partie plus ou moins longue de sa vie dans les soins qui réclame l’éducation d’un ou plusieurs enfants? Ou la fonction sera negligée, mal remplie, ou l’enfant mal élevé, privé des soins que réclament sa faiblesse, sa longue croissance” (ibid., 58).

  40.     Ibid., 59.

  41.     Ibid., 25.

  42.     Mary Wollstonecraft, “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” in A Vindication of the Rights of Men and a Vindication of the Rights of Woman and Hints, ed. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 65–295, 240.

  43.     See Condorcet:

It is said that no woman has ever made an important scientific discovery, or shown signs of genius in the arts or in literature, and so on, but we would hardly attempt to limit citizenship rights only to men of genius.… Why, then, should we exclude women, rather than those men who are inferior to a great many women? …

It has been said that … women have no real idea of justice and follow their feelings rather than their conscience. There is more truth in this observation, but it still proves nothing since this difference is caused, not by nature, but by education and society.… If we accepted such arguments against women, we would also have to deny citizenship rights to anyone who was obliged to work constantly and could therefore neither become enlightened nor exercise his reason.

Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, “On the Emancipation of Women. On Giving Women the Right of Citizenship” (1790), in Political Writings, ed. Steven Lukes and Nadia Urbinati (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 156–63, 157, 158–59.

  44.     Consider Anna Wheeler, who collaborated with William Thompson in writing Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, Women Against the Pretensions of the Other Half: “The love of rational liberty forms no part of the nature of this willingly degraded sex, and their very propensity for slavery.… Women’s personal courage is never exerted but to fight for a master and their mental courage is chiefly exhibited in the indurance [sic] of oppression exactly where it is unworthily exercised … a woman will fight, with all the zeal of desperation which belongs to a more generous cause to perpetuate the oppression of all mankind, but rarely has she yet been found sacrificing herself for the hallowed cause of human emancipation. Women may burn in thousands ever year, no woman murmurs! Women are not so ignorant, but they are passive, and indifferent to the suffering of their species. Whether from superstition or its stupefying effects on the characters of women, their hearts seem incapable of loving anything but man as he is tyrannical, cruel, selfish, oppressive. There is something very depressive in contemplating this true, but dark side of the human picture.

Anna Wheeler, “A Letter From Anna Wheeler, November 18, 1832,” in Marie Mulvey Roberts and Tamae Mizuta, eds., The Rebels: Irish Feminists (London: Routledge/Thoemmes, 1995), 1–6, 3–4.

  45.     The characteristic so often attributed, see also Olympe de Gouges’s “The Declaration of the Rights of Woman”: “Women have done more harm than good. Constraint and dissimulation have been their lot. What force had robbed them of, ruse returned to them.… Poison and the sword were both subject to them; they commanded in crime as in fortune.” In Women in Revolutionary France, 1789–1795, trans. with notes and commentary by Darline Gay Levy, Harriet Branson Applewhite, and Mary Durham Johnson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 85–96, 93., See also Claire Démar: “vous ne pouvez nier la puissance de la femme … elle a des armes qui sont propres à sa faiblesse: elle minaude, agace, ruse, ment, et ment effrontément, car le mensonge est l’arme familière de l’esclave, arme d’autant plus envenimée qu’on la trempe dans la haine et qu’on l’aiguise dans l’ombre” (“Appel d’une femme au people sur l’affranchisement de la femme,” 67).

  46.     Wollstonecraft, “A Vindication of the Rights of Women,” 269.

  47.     Similarly when she speaks to the programs of education women should be offered, she argues for the basics of medical care and health. This too would save many lives including those of the children in women’s care: “In public schools women, to guard against the errors of ignorance, should be taught the elements of anatomy and medicine, not only to enable them to take proper care of their own health, but to make them rational nurses of their infants, parents, and husbands; for the bills of mortality are swelled by the blunders of self-willed old women, who give nostrums of their own, without knowing anything of the human frame” (Wollstonecraft, “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” 274). Wollstonecraft’s partner William Godwin emphasized her concern that women’s poor education and poor sense was exposing children and contributing to the mortality rate: “from the mismanagement to which children are exposed, many of the diseases of childhood are rendered fatal, and more persons die in that, than in any other period of human life. Mary had projected a work upon this subject, which she had carefully considered, and well understood.… Mr Anthony Carlisle, surgeon of Soho-Square … had promised to revise her production.” William Godwin, “Memoirs of the Author of the Rights of Women,” in Mary Wollstonecraft, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark and Memoirs of the Author of the Rights of Women (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 205–74, 207.

  48.     Wollstonecraft, “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” 240.

  49.     By contrast, Dworkin’s Life’s Dominion contrasts certain European legal regimes whose legalization of abortion remains connected to a legal recognition of the value of human life, whereas the American variant renders abortion rights a matter of privacy. Abortion should, Dworkin argues, be recognized as a matter of deep responsibility.

  50.     Edelman, “Antagonism, Negativity, and the Subject of Queer Theory,” 821.

  51.     Ibid., 822.

  52.     This constitutes the terrain of the debate with Halberstam, given her aim of producing a more political version of queer negativity.

  53.     Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 106.

  54.     Ibid., 106 (my emphasis).

  55.     Love cites NF 27.

  56.     Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Durham: Duke University Press 2009), 22 (my emphasis).

  57.     Tim Dean, “The Antisocial Homosexual,” PMLA 121, no. 3 (The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory) (2006): 826–28, 827. Dean cites NF 16.

  58.     In an unrepresentative passage Edelman uses a language which does not assume importance in No Future: “queerness attains its ethical value precisely insofar as it accedes to [the place of the social order’s death drive], accepting its figural status as resistance to the viability of the social while insisting on the inextricability of such resistance from every social structure” (NF 3).

  59.     Brown, “Learning to Love Again,” 37.

  60.     Herman Cain, “Face the Nation,” October 30, 2011, interview with Bob Schieffer, CBS. Cain leveled the accusation (based partly on a reference to the early twentieth-century eugenic sympathies of Margaret Sanger and partly on a disputed claim that Planned Parenthood centers are disproportionately located in black neighborhoods) at organizations facilitating abortion, rather than at those in the African American community who seek abortions.

  61.     As Alveda King has expressed this view, “Every baby scheduled for abortion is like a slave in the womb of his or her mother. The mother decides his or her fate and does so at will.” Alveda King, How Can the Dream Survive If We Murder the Children? Abortion Is not a Civil Right (Bloomington: Authorhouse, 2008), 2. And see the countering commentary of Loretta Ross of Sister Song Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective:

Our opponents began a misogynistic attack to shame-and-blame black women who choose abortion, alleging that we endanger the future of our children. After all, many people in our community already believe that black men are an endangered species because of white supremacy. Our opponents used a social responsibility frame to claim that black women have a racial obligation to have more babies—especially black male babies—despite our individual circumstances.… Either we were dupes of abortion providers, or we were evil women intent on having abortions—especially of black male children—for selfish reasons. In their first narrative, we were victims without agency unable to make our own decisions, pawns of racist, profit-driven abortion providers. In their second narrative, we were the uncaring enemies of our own children, and architects of black genocide.

http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2011/02/24/fighting-black-antiabortion-campaign-trusting-black-women (accessed November 5, 2011). Also at http://www.ontheissuesmagazine.com/2011winter/2011_winter_Ross.php/ Thanks to Lisa Guenther for her suggestions at the 2011 SPEP meeting concerning this debate and the concurrent figuring of women as potential race protectors or race destroyers. For another variant, see the notorious 2006 “I don’t snuff my own seed” radio advertisements voiced by Cain and funded by the organization America’s PAC (here men are figured as the reproductive agents attributed with the “racial” responsibility not to “snuff the seed”).

  62.     As in the language of billboards which went up in New York, Atlanta, and Oakland under the slogan “Betrayed.” These depict Jesse Jackson and the Congressional Black Caucus as supporters of abortion and so as threatening the black community, reproduced at AbortionInTheHood.com. (Accessed 11/05/2016.) See also http://www.bet.com/news/health/2011/08/16/new-anti-abortion-billboard-points-fingers-at-black-leaders.html (accessed 12/10/2016). More recent examples of billboard campaigns, and related arguments, can be found at: www.the-restoration-project.org ; www.theradiancefoundation.org ; and www.toomanyaborted.com.

  63.     Wendy Brown, “Suffering Rights as Paradoxes,” Constellations 7, no. 2 (2000): 230–41.

  64.     Love’s Feeling Backward and Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure both critically engage with Edelman in works in which Foucault also plays an important role (though the latter is not brought directly into dialogue with the former). In expanding an archive of queer negative affect, Love includes Foucault’s archival interest in the “infamous,” the marginal, those of “no importance.” Both Halberstam and Love work to reconcile their interest in Foucault’s repudiation of the repressive hypothesis, with their own interest in an expanded queer archive attentive to figures of (in Love’s case) shame, melancholia, pathos, depression, grief, regret, and despair and (in Halberstam’s case) a group of affects Love thinks have been more easily associated with possibilities of action: “rage, rudeness, anger, spite, impatience, intensity, mania, sincerity, earnestness, overinvestment, and brutal honesty.… Dyke anger, anticolonial despair, racial rage, counterhegemonic violence, punk pugilism” (Halberstam, “The Politics of Negativity,” 824). One of the interesting effects of the readings is that, while he is not directly positioned by either in such terms, Edelman’s negativity effectively becomes either an alternative to or an alternative way of thinking about a queer archive of affect. Love responds to Edelman that she is more interested in looking back at instances of “ruined or failed sociality” (Love, Feeling Backward, 22). She attributes to Edelman, in distinction to her own, a project of suspending the future. For her part, she proposes other possibilities for imagining the future: for example, through a “backwards” kind of future. On this version, one might engage in an alternative politics of envisaging futures, absent the projections of optimism, redemption or reproductive imperatives. As such her interest in “experiences” of failure is contrasted with his interest in the role of negativity (ibid., 23). A starker version of the engagement with Edelman in contemporary debates about affect is seen in Halberstam’s response to No Future. She contrasts a range of “affective responses” that she attributes more to a gay male archive with those she associates with a number of alternatives including Valerie Solanis, Patti Smith, and Jamaica Kincaid (“The Politics of Negativity,” 824).

  65.     See, however, Edelman and Berlant’s Sex, or The Unbearable, for the former’s brief suggestion that reproductive futurism (or, more specifically, as mentioned here—the conventions of teleological narrative, the future, or future anterior orientation given to the value of life, many forms of sexual—or reproductive or tacitly reproductive—optimism) “compels a regulatory discipline,” that is also understandable, “with apologies to Michel Foucault … as Panoptimism.” Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, or The Unbearable (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 3.

  66.     Ibid.

  67.     I am thinking here of Christoph Holzey and Luca Di Blasi’s interest and promotion of this kind of theory “tension,” or Spannung, as presented in their cowritten epilogue to Forst and Brown’s dialogue on tolerance and toleration. See Christoph Holzey and Luca Di Blasi, “Epilogue: Tensions in Tolerance,” in Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst, The Power of Tolerance: A Debate, ed. Christoph Holzey and Luca Di Blasi (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 71–103.

  68.     Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 211.

  69.     Ibid.

  70.     Ibid.

  71.     Ibid.

  72.     And see his comment: the “figural Child alone embodies the citizen as an ideal, entitled to claim full rights to its future share in the nation’s good, though always at the cost of limiting the rights ‘real’ citizens are allowed” (NF 11). Thus there is a biopolitical component, albeit not developed in these terms, by Edelman. A Foucauldian analysis might take particular interest in Edelman’s account of the shared and mutually consolidating tactics of the reproductive futurists and of those understood as obstacles to the former’s aims.

3. FOUCAULT’S CHILDREN

Chapter epigraph is from HS I 105 (translation modified).

    1.     For discussions of this issue, see Ellen K. Feder, Family Bonds: Genealogies of Race and Gender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); and Jon Simons’s “Foucault’s Mother” (1996), in Susan Hekman, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Michel Foucault (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 179–209. These consider the role in Foucault’s work of family formations, and mothers, while making the point that this theme deserved more attention from him. See also Ladelle McWhorter, Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), particularly the discussion at 171ff.; and the collection edited by Robbie Duschinsky and Leon Antonio Rocha, Foucault, the Family, and Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). The latter presents different approaches to the status of biopoliticized reproduction in Foucault’s work, arguing, as does McWhorter, that the theme is more strongly present in Foucault’s work than has been appreciated. The closer attention has been stimulated by the posthumous publication of a number of Foucault’s lectures, and in particular Collège de France lectures such as Psychiatric Power and Abnormal in which there is more material on the theme. Feminist scholarship was long dominated by other debates. These included the extent to which Foucault ought to have brought the perspective of sexual difference more significantly to his analyses; the extent to which he ought to have offered analyses of power, knowledge, technologies, and disciplines relating to gender; and the extent to which his work could be productively deployed to the ends of such analyses. Some prominent feminist responses to Foucault include Judith Butler, “Sexual Inversions,” in Foucault and the Critique of Institutions, ed. John Caputo and Mark Yount (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 81–98; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Irene Diamond, and Lee Quinby, eds., Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988); Lois McKnay, Foucault and Feminism: Power, Gender, and the Self (Cambridge: Polity, 1992).

    2.     At the conclusion of this chapter, I turn to the differences between Mbembe, Esposito, and Agamben’s usage of these terms, further discussed in chapter 4. They are often used indistinguishably, as particularly evident in contributions to the anthology edited by Patricia T. Clough, and Craig Willse, Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011). Michelle Murphy’s use of the term would also be representative: “biopolitics thus also always involved necropolitics—distributions of death effects and precariousness—at the same time as it could foster life.” She makes a remark distinctive in the literature, insofar as she indicates the procreative variant of necropolitics, specifically: “It was through this multiscaled, differential governing of the diversity within the mass, for the greater good of that mass, that individuals in the twentieth century were so often enjoined to participate in the governing of their own potentialities and reproduction.” Michelle Murphy, Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health, and Technoscience (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 13. For critical remarks about minimal consideration by Mbembe of the relation between necropolitics and gender, sex, sexual violence, and reproduction, see Melissa W. Wright, “Necropolitics, Narcopolitics, and Femicide: Gendered Violence on the Mexico-U.S. Border,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 36, no. 3 (2011): 707–31, 710; and see Cihan Ahmetbeyzade, “Gendering Necropolitics: The Juridical-Political Sociality of Honor Killings in Turkey,” Journal of Human Rights 7, no. 3 (2008): 187–206.

    3.     For particularly relevant discussions of this phenomenon, see Murphy, Seizing the Means of Reproduction; Elsa Dorlin, La Matrice de la race: Généalogie sexuelle et coloniale de la nation française (Paris: Découverte, 2006); Alys Weinbaum, Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic Modern Thought (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nationalsozialismus. Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik (Opladen: Westdeutscher, 1986); McWhorter, Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America.

    4.     While one can speculate about the possibilities for dialogue between these figures as they appear in HS I and in No Future, the many ways in which one would differentiate them would include the psychoanalytic inflection given by Edelman to the formation of the sinthomosexual.

    5.     The “nervous woman” is said to be the “negative image” of the Mother and the “most visible form of [the] hystericization” of women’s bodies (HS I 104).

    6.     Emile Zola, Fécondité (Paris: Le Trésors de la littérature, 2007), discussed in an earlier version of chapter 4 published as “Sacred Fecundity: Agamben, Sexual Difference, and Reproductive Life,” Telos 161 (2012): 51–78.

    7.     See the discussion of the campaign, or “crusade,” against children’s masturbation in these terms, in Abnormal, in which the latter term is used a number of times.

    8.     He shows that, like the surveillance of masturbation, the practice of reproductive control or selectivity associated with the “Malthusian couple” is also, and frequently, understood as a claim to a controlled and optimal future: possible inflections of repression and constraint blur with a language of incentive, and collective and individual interest, and flourishing, and so with a different kind of freedom associated with vitality, proliferation, optimization. See for example, Anne Cova, Féminismes et néo-malthusianismes sous la IIIe republique: La liberté de la maternité (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011).

    9.     Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 206.

  10.     Ibid., 24.

  11.     Despite the diversity of theorists working with concepts of intersectionality, Sara Ahmed’s pithy definition, as Holland observes, characterizes the field well: “given that relationships of power intersect, how we inhabit a given category depends on how we inhabit others.” Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 136, citing Sharon Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).

  12.     Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 212.

  13.     For this reason, the work prefers a Deleuzean modeling of assemblages to a Foucauldian modeling of disciplinary bodies.

  14.     Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 206.

  15.     Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 7. See also McWhorter’s Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America, 212ff., for her extensive account of the intersections of racial difference and sexual difference pursued through a reading of Foucault, a project that integrates the concern with governmentalities of reproduction as race defense. McWhorter gives particular, and very helpful, attention to the conceptual overlaps of perversions of race and perversions of sex.

  16.     Chow, The Protestant Ethnic, 2; Ann Stoler, Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). Among the readings to have reconsidered HS I in light of Foucault’s Collège de France lectures of 1975–76 (now published as Society Must Be Defended), Stoler’s pathbreaking project was the first book-length study arguing for a greater attention to the status of race in the work, and establishing the link between the formations of sex and the role of colonial sexuality. While not foregrounding the imbrication of queer sexualities, she does consider the associations between a history of sexuality and colonialist worries about race perversion. Forms of sex in colonial and race-hierarchical contexts can present concurrently as sexual and race perversion. Thus Puar distinguishes Stoler’s work for the consideration it does give to the “‘evil’ of homosexuality as a racializing discourse” (Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 239n93, my emphasis), making similarly positive reference to McWhorter’s project.

  17.     Chow, The Protestant Ethnic, 6. (Citing HS1 141)

  18.     Ibid., 3.

  19.     Ibid.

  20.     See Stoler, who emphasizes this aspect of HS I and in the associated Collège de France lectures. Showing that these aspects are insufficiently developed in the former, she argues that one cannot disconnect HS I’s account of the formations of sex from those of colonialism, yet the latter disrupt some aspects of HS I’s narrative.

  21.     Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 34–36.

  22.     This separation manifests in approaches as various as Robert Bernasconi, “The Politics of Race Mixing: The Place of Biopower Within the History of Racisms,” Bioethical Inquiry 7:205–16; Thomas Lemke, Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2011); and Claire Blencowe, Biopolitical Experience: Foucault, Power, and Positive Critique (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). By contrast, McWhorter, in Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America, integrates the making of sex, racism, sexual perversion, and governmental reproduction, if not through attention to the same figures or problematic foregrounded by Puar. Dorlin’s La Matrice de la race is another project interestingly assessed from the perspective proposed by Puar. La Matrice, a work intermittently referring to Foucault, considers connections between colonialist expansion, the government of reproduction, sexuality, and specters of overlapping racial and sexual perversion. At the same time, it is more in proximity with McWhorter’s project (which gives attention to the emergence of the latter phenomena in the eugenics movement in America and elsewhere) in not foregrounding the overlaps of race hierarchy, sex, and defensive biopolitized reproduction with the concurrent making, more specifically, of the queer other. The overlaps of race and sexuality and biopolitics have, by contrast, become a point of reference in the field of black queer studies. For example, in a recent work critical of the status of race in Foucault’s work, Alex Weheliye integrates considerations of biopolitics, race, and sexual perversion in a discussion of Hortense Spiller’s reading of sexual difference and slavery and the racialized pornotroping of violence and sexual violence in the tradition of slave ownership and its representation, which is discussed also by Sharon Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012); Alex Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014); and see Hortense Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). See also the discussion of Spillers with Foucault in Feder, Family Bonds.

  23.     Discussed also in Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 128.

  24.     Ibid., xii.

  25.     For example, the phantasmatic terrorist of Homonationalism, who is generally associated with homophobia, may also be taken to be antifeminist, violently opposed to reproductive rights, and has been associated with proneness to sexual violence. Thus there is a feminist correlate to the Puar’s argument concerning homonationalism (Puar suggests the term gender exceptionalism) as when the putative antifeminism of other peoples, religions, cultures similarly becomes the pretext for war and invasion, organized by a narrative of the delivery of Western rights. See Puar, Terrorist Assemblages, 5, 22, 59; and Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

  26.     Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus proposes that we need not turn to figures such as Foucault and Agamben to accomplish such theoretical work. While offering critical readings of the latter, he also proposes alternatives: a turn, for example, to Spillers (also more closely read with Foucault by Feder in Family Bonds). But, insofar as Foucault’s texts remain a point of reference in these debates (including the work of Weheliye, Puar, and Spillers), they can also be engaged maximally from the perspective of the questions they occlude.

  27.     See the discussion of this in chapter one. For an often referenced, very helpful historical overview emphasizing contingency of concepts of reproduction, see Ludmilla Jordanova, “Interrogating the Concept of Reproduction in the Eighteenth Century,” in Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction, ed. Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 369–86.

  28.     Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedecine, Power, Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Robert Bernasconi, “The Politics of Race Mixing: The Place of Biopower Within the History of Racisms,” Bioethical Inquiry 7 (2010): 205–16; Donna V. Jones, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Weheliye, Habeas Viscus; David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Didier Eribon, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self (Durham: Duke University Press 2004); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Janet Halley, Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

  29.     “Given these conditions, you can understand how and why a technical knowledge such as medicine, or rather the combination of medicine and hygiene, is in the nineteenth century … of considerable importance because of the link it establishes between scientific knowledge of both biological and organic processes (or in other words, the population and the body” (SMBD 252).

  30.     So, for Vikki Bell, it will make sense that sex is “one of the most important of the biopolitical apparatuses” [the point from which much contemporary biopolitical theory has surely distanced itself] and also “more than an example of power.” Because sex is the link between the two poles of bio-power, and between the ‘body’ and population, it “became a crucial target of a power organized around the management of life.” Vikki Bell, Interrogating Incest: Feminism, Foucault, and the Law (London: Routledge, 1993), 36, citing HS I.

  31.     See Blencowe, Biopolitical Experience; Murphy, Seizing the Means of Reproduction; Duschinsky and Rocha, Foucault, the Family, and Politics.

  32.     For his analysis of the problematic role in scientific research (and its public funding) of strategies of exclusion and of inclusion of the gender and race identities associated with the individuating disciplines, see Steve Epstein, Inclusion: The Politics of Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

  33.     Fassin has explored the emergence of the biopolitically based rights claimant, and so the emergence of what he terms biolegitimacy: as when health-based claims can trump politically based claims to asylum, and, in this specific context, “biological life” will take on a claim as the “highest value.” Didier Fassin, “Quand le corps fait loi: La raison humanitaire dans les procédures de régularisation des étrangèrs,” Sciences sociales et santé 19, no. 4 (2001): 5–34.

  34.     See, for example, Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, “Nothing Is Political, Everything Can Be Politicized: On the Concept of the Political in Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt,” Telos 142 (2008): 135–61; and Maria Muhle, “A Genealogy of Biopolitics: The Notion of Life in Canguilhem and Foucault,” in Vanessa Lemm and Miguel Vatter, eds., The Government of Life: Foucault: Biopolitics, and Neoliberalism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 77–97.

  35.     Blencowe’s Biopolitical Experience includes an analysis of the status of life and death in Foucault’s work that connects his treatment of biopolitics with his considerations of contingent forms of life and death more broadly throughout his work, particularly in projects such as The Birth of the Clinic and The Order of Things.

  36.     Teresa de Lauretis identifies HS I to be elaborating the technology of sex as a conflation of sexuality with reproduction; see her “Habit Changes: Response,” in differences 6, nos. 2 and 3 (1994): 296–313, 299 (in a special issue, “Feminism Meets Queer Theory”).

  37.     The Reichian hypothesis would be that the repression of sexuality functions to stimulate a (re)productive, procreative sexuality, friendly to the interests of capitalism; see Bell, Interrogating Incest, 19; and, for Foucault’s broad response to psychoanalysis in which his response to Reich played its role, see Mauro Basaure, “Foucault and the ‘Anti-Oedipus Movement’: Psychoanalysis as Disciplinary Power,” History of Psychiatry 20, no. 3 (2009): 340–59.

  38.     To be sure, Foucault stresses, here and elsewhere (particularly in Security, Territory, Population) that the regulation of population includes concerns with health, diet, habitation, immigration, urban space, order, economic stability, employment, etc. But at its heart, he claims, is sex—sex thinkable in terms of rates of fertility and sterility and birthrate.

  39.     And at this point, it is possible for those interested in Foucault’s account of biopolitics as race division to highlight (critically or in an account understood as expanding his project), in response to SMBD and to some extent HS I, the new threshold role he would need to attribute more concertedly (consistent with his own account of the technologies of biopolitics, the concerns of the society that must be defended, and the emergence of theories of degeneracy) to the emergence of biopoliticized procreation with respect to the defensive, race-divided futurities of peoples, races, nations, and colonies he describes. See, for example, Murphy, Seizing the Means of Reproduction, 13, 24; McWhorter, Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America; Feder, Family Bonds.

  40.     See, for example, Malthus’s reference to Susmilch’s tables, included in his Gottliche Ordnung, which provides comparative rates of deaths, marriages, and births for Prussia and Lithuania from 1692 to 1757.

  41.     Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1979), 187.

  42.     Claude-Jacques Herbert, Essai sur la police générale des grains (London, 1753), cited in HS I 25.

  43.     Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Random House, 1994), 92, and see Foucault, The Order of Things, 258.

  44.     Lars Behrisch, “‘Politische Zahlen.’ Statistik und die Rationalisierung der Herrschaft im spaten Ancien Regime,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 31, no. 4 (2004): 51–57, 56.

  45.     On the turn of the century (neo-)Malthusian movement and its proximity with turn-of-the-century feminist movements in a number of countries, see Cova, Féminismes et néo-malthusianismes; Kevin Repp, “‘More Corporeal, More Concrete’: Liberal Humanism, Eugenics, and German Progressives at the Last Fin de Siecle,” Journal of Modern History 72, no. 3 (2000): 683–730; Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: Sexuality and the Early Feminists (New York: New Press, 1995); and Murphy, Seizing the Means of Reproduction.

  46.     This is not to suggest that the moral and political movements known as Malthusian or neo-Malthusian followed the moral principles of Malthus—with a view to population impact such movements turned specifically to a use of contraception Malthus considered abhorrent, and sometimes to a eugenically oriented approach to choice of reproductive partner.

  47.     Thomas R. Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 313.

  48.     Francis Galton would repeat, with the notorious alternative focus on procreative selectivity and “quality,” the vision of the moral obligation of a procreative agent toward something conceived as population future.

  49.     Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population, 213–14.

  50.     Simons, in “Foucault’s Mother,” reviews such formations of maternity in the context of his account of the family, also suggesting the possibility of variants involving performative subversion, resistance, or counterconduct on the part of women. In a generous characterization of HS I, Véronique Mottier allows that Foucault makes some brief recognition in HS I of the specific role of mothers in biopolitical dispositifs, “Foucault suggested that biopower invests women in particular ways, highlighting the ways in which medical discourses and interventions pathologize women by reducing them to their reproductive functions.” But she identifies in Foucault’s discussion of hysterical mothers (HS I 153) a depiction of “the workings on power on women’s bodies primarily in individualizing terms,… producing the ‘hystericization’ of individual women”. Even allowing for HS I’s reference to this phenomenon, she agrees that Foucault “failed to acknowledge (and consequently … under-theorized) the ways in which women’s reproductive bodies become particular targets of population policies such as eugenic policy-making, despite his own use of eugenics as an illustration of biopolitics in modern times at the end of History of Sexuality, Volume one.” Véronique Mottier “Gender, Reproductive Politics and the Liberal State: Beyond Foucault,” in Foucault, the Family and Politics, ed. Duschinsky and Rocha, 142–57, 149. Mottier goes on to outline directions in which the more specific analysis she proposes might have taken him. Michelle Murphy similarly concludes, based on a reading of The History of Sexuality that Foucault largely occluded this particular question. It is true that his discussions of eugenic concerns rarely foreground sexual difference, as Mottier has suggested they should. Yet these theorists are also bringing to light that the Foucauldian material is in the vicinity of an analysis of biopoliticized reproduction, and maternities, in its attention to families, parents, couples, children, birthrate, population. See Mottier, “Gender, Reproductive Politics and the Liberal State,” 149; and Murphy’s Seizing the Means of Reproduction.

  51.     See Jordanova, “Interrogating the Concept of Reproduction in the Eighteenth Century.”

  52.     That differentiation would lead Foucault to both antifeminist accounts, attributing to women specific duties in this respect, and pro-feminist variants that also accorded women a more specific responsibilization than was borne by the “couple.” See, for example, R. S. Steinmetz, “Feminismus und Rasse,” Jahrbuch für Sozialwissenschaft 7, no. 12 (1904): 751–68.

  53.     See Cova, Féminismes et néo-malthusianismes.

  54.     Katherine Logan, “Foucault, the Modern Mother, and Maternal Power,” in Duschinsky and Rocha, Foucault, the Family and Politics, 63–81, 64.

  55.     Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1979), 20. As Foucault describes this, the family becomes, from a political, medical, expert and philanthropic perspective, a problem of health optimization (AB 179) and child raising becomes a biopolitical problem of optimizing collective health. As he argues, descent is then no longer (or not only) organized around the conjugal axis, but rather around the parent-child axis, now oriented around optimization of the health of the child, and concurrently considered a collective governmental problem. Like breast-feeding (whose collective- and future-oriented forms of responsibilization he also mentions), the conduct of child raising is reconfigured as a matter not only of parental responsibility toward the individual life, health, and longevity of the child but also toward the population. The conduct of reproduction itself (this might include the conduct of selection of partner, of timing, or rate of procreation) might become a matter of biopolicized “responsibility” toward a collective future. But one must turn to other commentators (Donzelot providing an early instance) for a sexual differentiation of mother and father in this context.

  56.     Foucault comments: “at this point the central object of the maneuver or crusade is revealed: the constitution of a new family body” (AB 248). Foucault is discussing P.-M. Rozier’s Des habitudes secrétes ou des maladies produites par l’onanisme chez les femmes (Paris 1825), 81–82. The editors of Abnormal identify this as the edition used by Foucault, where the same work was also published under the title Lettres médicales et morales in 1806, and, importantly, under the title, Des habitudes secrétes ou de l’onanisme chez les femmes. Lettres médicales, anecdotiques et morales à une jeune malade et à une mère, dédiées aux mères de famille et aux maitresses de pensions (Paris, 1825).

  57.     See, for example, Michel Foucault, “The Politics of Health in the Eighteenth Century,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 166–82.

  58.     There are a number of similar references to unindividuated “parents” and “couples” in HS I.

  59.     McWhorter, in Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America, reviews a number of the texts considered by Foucault not only with respect to their differentiation of male and female “abnormals” but also, for a degree of a differentiation between the roles of the mother and father. For example, she gives her attention to debates about whether mothers, specifically, could be expected to control successfully for masturbatory activity in their children.

  60.     See Logan, “Foucault, the Modern Mother, and Maternal Power,” 64.

  61.     The reference to maternal power may be mildly misleading: she would be individuated with respect to the deployment of sexuality; she would be a vector of disciplinary power. For one discussion of the relation between the maternal and power that could be elaborated in Foucault’s discussion of the family, see Danielle Rancière (n85, this chapter) for another that stresses the family as a space of vectors of multiple modes of power, see Chloë Taylor, “Foucault and Familial Power,” Hypatia 27, no. 1 (2012): 201–8.

  62.     Insofar as Foucault discusses new parental obligations such as ensuring the child’s health, controlling for masturbation, deterring corrupting outside influences, controlling for the manifestations of dangerous instincts, instilling obedience, and monitoring for the manifestations of various forms of behavioral or congenital abnormality, the child is individualized in terms of the gradations of normal to abnormal in these respects, while (we can add) the mother is simultaneously individualized in terms of meeting private and public responsibilities with respect to the child’s upbringing.

  63.     See Donzelot, The Policing of Families, 18.

  64.     An exemplary version of this trend in interpretation is Mauro Basaure, “Foucault and the ‘Anti-Oedipus Movement’: Psychoanalysis as Disciplinary Power,” History of Psychiatry 20, no. 3 (2009): 340–59.

  65.     In addition to essays examining Foucault’s discussions of family spaces, Duschinsky and Rocha’s Foucault, the Family and Politics includes a short translated section of Le désordre des familles.

  66.     See also the discussion in these terms of the lettres de cachets in Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 28.

  67.     Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault, Le désordre des familles: lettres de cachet des Archives de la Bastille au XVIIIe siècle, présenté par Arlette Fage et Michel Foucault (Paris: Julliard/Gallimard, 1982), 46 (my translation).

  68.     This point is helpfully stressed in Taylor’s “Foucault and Familial Power,” as is the multiplicity of different forms of power Foucault sees intersecting in family spaces.

  69.     In particular, he makes an important distinction in HS I between working-class and bourgeois families. Primarily discussing the metropolitan French context, he identifies the emergence of concern about the possible presence of children’s sexuality, arguing that the discourse and culture of scrutiny for masturbation may have importantly emerged in the bourgeois family some half-century before it did in working-class families. Moreover, the concern about childhood sexuality in the latter took the form more of a polemics about the possibility of incest arising from excessive physical proximity between adults and children, and between children, in working-class family environments that, in other respects also, had come to be considered unhealthy as a matter of public health and philanthropic concern (the latter is further discussed in Donzelot’s The Policing of Families.)

  70.     Where an exception is to be found in Taylor’s “Foucault and Familial Power.”

  71.     See HS I 106, 147, 149; and on this see Taylor, “Foucault and Familial Power,” 206–8.

  72.     In this case, the term [pénétré] used to describe the penetration of sovereign forms of power by the mechanisms of biopower (HS I 89).

  73.     HS I 89. It is not uncommon for commentators to stress the uncannily coherent operations of the disparate-become-compatible, and an excellent example of this approach is to be found in Mauro Basaure, “Foucault and the ‘Anti-Oedipus movement”. The compatible effects of disparate elements is also one of the interpretations given to contingency in Foucault’s work, about which, for a superb account, see Colin Koopman, Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press: 2013). Alternative interpretations, for which Deleuze surely provides the best-known example, can be positioned at the opposite pole to Basaure’s version in stressing that the heterogeneity in apparatuses (heterogeneity of, in, and between techniques, modes, and apparatuses—the multiple participating multiplicities, so to speak) allows for a stronger degree of the complex, dehiscent, incompatible, surprising, and random. Deleuze does not, of course, minimize the extraordinary coalescence of a dispositif described by Foucault, but he provides an important alternative to the more “clockwork,” stable, and integrated variation provided by Basaure. In Deleuze’s version, there is more necessary divergence within what has taken shape as an apparatus, and this is also connected strongly with the possibility of fractures and new directions. Unsurprisingly, Deleuze also rejects the linear interpretation of Foucauldian modes of power. See Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); and Gilles Deleuze, “What Is a Dispositif?,” in Timothy Armstrong, ed., Michel Foucault Philosopher (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 159–68.

  74.     In The History of Sexuality, referring to a number of variants of the family in anatomo-political, demographic, alliance, and biopolitical contexts, Foucault also discusses the concurrently individualized and collective variants of the forms of threatened “death” in question, also proposing multiple times in HS I the term transposition. An example of his use of the term is seen where he speaks to the conversion of what had been an aristocratic interest in bloodlines and genealogy (integrated with the alliance mode) into a bourgeois concern (HS I 124): the diseases and defects lurking in one’s biological inheritance, a “transposition” connected to a concern with “the indefinite extension of strength, vigor, health, and life” (now integrated with the biopower mode).

  75.     Again marking a degree of class differentiation on such points, he adds that this “became routine [canonique] in the course of the century when working-class housing construction was undertaken.”

  76.     As described in the accounts of family presented in AB and STP, though some further disaggregation of Foucault’s “parents” into the respective responsibilization of father and mother is called for.

  77.     Foucault makes this point in Abnormal, while Taylor stresses the conflicting (but also true) point: families can also lose jurisdiction over those in their care where their children are deemed insufficiently “disciplined”; see Taylor, “Foucault and Familial Power,” 205.

  78.     Eighteenth-century physiocrats such as François Quesnay discussed habits and trends within the population that eluded the governmental efforts of the sovereign, yet could be treated indirectly, by working on “milieu” (STP 71).

  79.     Jean-Baptiste Moheau, Recherches et considérations sur la population de la France (Paris: Moutard, 1778).

  80.     See Andrea Rusnock, “Quantifying Infant Mortality in England and France, 1750–1800,” in Body Counts: Medical Quantification in Historical and Sociological Perspectives, ed. Gerard Jorland, Annick Opinel, and George Weisz (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 65–88, 80, and see Andrea Rusnock, Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health and Population in Eighteenth-Century England and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

  81.     His earliest reference to “bio-politique” is to be found in 1974: Michel Foucault, “La naissance de la médicine sociale,” in Dits et écrits: 1954–1988, in four volumes, vol. 3: 1976–1979, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald, with L. Lagrange (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 207–28, 210. Perhaps his last published reference to the term is seen in his “course summary” of research presented in the 1978–1979 Collège de France lecture series, published in the Annuaire du Collège de France and in Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 317. The theme was to have been biopolitics, here described as “the attempt, starting from the eighteenth century, to rationalize the problems posed to governmental practice by phenomena characteristic of a set of “living” beings forming a population: health, hygiene, birthrate, life expectancy, race.… We know the increasing importance of these problems since the nineteenth century, and the political and economic issues they have raised up to the present.” Similarly, in this epoch of reception of Foucault’s work, Donzelot characterizes “what [Foucault] calls the biopolitical dimension” as “the proliferation of political technologies that invested the body, health, modes of subsistence and lodging—the entire space of existence in European countries from the eighteenth century onward. All the techniques that found their unifying pole in what, at the outset, was called policing: not understood in the limiting, repressive sense we give the term today, but according to a much broader meaning that encompassed all the methods for developing the quality of the population and the strength of the nation” (Donzelot, The Policing of Families, 6–7).

  82.     By contrast, an important aspect of Mbembe’s introduction of the term necropolitics is, precisely, that its modality is analogous to the biopolitical: it is an administered and diffused proliferation of murderousness, bloodshed, and chaos which is not based on a repressive model but is instead (as is the characteristic definition of Foucauldian biopolitics) stimulating, capillary, and infectious.

  83.     Donzelot, The Policing of Families, 6.

  84.     Ibid., 66.

  85.     At the time of publication of Donzelot’s The Policing of Families, Genevieve Fraisse and Danielle Rancière queried what seemed to be an oversimplified account, if not a critique, from Donzelot of the alliance of interests of moralizing philanthrophists and feminists (Donzelot, Policing of Families, 36). Donzelot describes forms of power that became possible when wives and mothers took on a revalorized status as manager and “guardienne” of the household, of children, of the husband’s morality, and of household work. Thus they took on a new importance in the apparati of discipline, surveillance, and moral control, becoming a kind of “double agent” of state and capitalism. In consequence, according to Rancière’s commentary on his claims, some feminisms aligned their demands, perhaps unwittingly, with the attribution to women of politically exploitable “natural virtues.” To describe such alliances need not amount to a critique of feminism. As Rancière points out, it might form part of a complex genealogy of different formations of feminism. But Fraisse identifies a critical tenor in Donzelot’s account of feminist defenses of maternity and its social importance. Is he insinuating that feminism became (in this respect) the historical dupe of reactionary forces? Rancière adds that the account disregards the complex responsibilities and capacities of women in households (responsibility for provision of food for children, capacity also to confine some dissolute spouses), a complexity pinpointed, by contrast, in Farge and Foucault’s collaborative Le désordre des familles; and see Farge’s L’histoire ébruitée. Donzelot, according to this argument, would disregard the complexity of philanthropic projects, of the role played by mothers, and of formations of maternal and paternal authority. Rancière invites us to speculate about the type of genealogy of maternal and family formations that would really be needed here, in contrast to Donzelot’s efforts in this respect. See Danielle Rancière, “Le Philanthrope et sa famille,” Les révoltes logiques 8–9 (1978): 99–115, 104–5; Arlette Farge, “L’histoire ébruitée: Des femmes dans la société pré-révolutionnaire parisienne,” in L’histoire sans qualité (collective volume, with contributions by Christiane Dufrancatel, Christine Fauré, Geneviève Fraisse, Michelle Perrot, Élisabeth Salvaresi, Pascale Werner) (Paris: L’espace critique, 1979), 15–39; and Genevieve Fraisse, La raison des femmes (Paris: Plon, 1992), 127.

  86.     I refer back to the earlier discussion of Puar’s argument that attribution of sexual intolerance and death mongering to the (frequently Islamic) “terrorist” foreigner becomes the pretext for violence against this same stereotypical figure (ranging from invasion, illegal incarcerations, to differential legal regimes, including the conduct of immigration policies).

  87.     See Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire; Bernasconi, “The Politics of Race Mixing”; Dorlin, La matrice de la race; McWhorter, Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America; Weinbaum, Wayward Reproductions.

  88.     Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 170.

  89.     She notes that nineteenth-century degeneracy theory developed as a national and a class-specific project that converged with wider purity campaigns for improved natality and selective sterilization (Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 31).

  90.     Dorlin, La matrice de la race.

  91.     For discussion of eugenic decision making in which the role of the woman is specially foregrounded, see Angelique Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). This is a study of turn-of-the-century British literature (some by feminist authors) in which concerns about degeneracy figure the woman as primarily exposed to risk. Her duty (and that of her parents) is, first hermeneutic, in that she must seek (and be cautioned to do so) for signs of dissipated habit and tainted biological inheritance in a prospective husband, a physiological truth (and truth of conduct) he is unlikely to disclose. A bad choice will transmit diseases such as syphilis, and expose her and her children to the harmful physical proximity of his dissipation, and expose her to the transmission of a harmful heredity. The resulting family is depicted as a deadly environment of sapped physiology.

  92.     Threshold of transmission: she must be all the more careful (and hermeneutic) in her selection of a partner. She is reconfigured as overlapping obligation to herself, her children, to the health of the population, the nation, and the vitality and futurity of all these bodies. One can consult a vast literature on the antifeminist and pro-feminist versions of this understanding of responsibility. Antifeminist variants argued for the denial of careers to women, since this would exclude talented women from reproductive stock, or for coercive intervention (through medical or similar advice, policy, laws, or force) into the reproductive decision. Pro-feminist versions could associate women’s rights claims (political and civic rights and reproductive rights) with women’s (reproductive) importance to population. In all cases, including those where women were seen as thresholds of harmful impact, they were also associated with capacities for choice—dangerously or positively. Thus debate takes shape as to the conditions (ranging from the restrictive to the liberal) under which the best choices would be made and best population impact would be seen. These are race-divisive or race-hierarchical politics, avowedly or not, insofar as “quality” choices in reproduction will have a flagrant or implicit racial bias. Secondary studies include Ann Taylor Allen, “Feminism and Eugenics in Germany and Britain, 1900–1940: A Comparative Perspective,” German Studies Review 23, no. 3 (2000): 477–505; Cova, Féminismes et néo-malthusianismes; Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century; Weinbaum, Wayward Reproductions; Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage, 1988); Dennis Hodgson and Susan Cotts Watkins, “Feminists and Neo-Malthusians: Past and Present Alliances,” Population and Development Review 23, no. 3 (1997): 469–523.

  93.     Murphy, Seizing the Means of Reproduction, 11.

  94.     See, for example, Murphy’s cautions, in the context of her analysis of legal and similar regulation of reproduction. Arguing that one should be wary of defaulting to a primarily repressive model in reproductive rights theory, she offers as an alternative a formulation of feminist and other counterconducts in this context (ibid., 183n3).

  95.     Among various formulations of such arguments (with different conclusions) see Wendy Brown, “Reproductive Freedom and the Right to Privacy: A Paradox for Feminists,” in Irene Diamond, ed., Families, Politics, and Public Policy: A Feminist Dialogue on Women and the State (New York: Longman, 1983): 311–88; Mary Poovey, “The Abortion Question and the Death of Man,” Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 239–56; and Ruth A. Miller, The Limits of Bodily Integrity: Abortion, Adultery, and Rape Legislation in Comparative Perspective (Aldershott: Ashgate, 2007), further discussed in the following chapter.

  96.     For Foucault’s fleeting use of the term see my chapter one, n83, p20. For post-Foucauldian biopolitical theory see, for example, see François Debrix and Alexander Barder, Beyond Biopolitics: Theory, Violence, and Horror in World Politics (New York: Routledge, 2012); and Patricia Clough and Craig Willse, eds., Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).

  97.     See, in particular, Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. Mbembe argues, in the wake of Foucault, that we ought to identify, as a contemporary mode of biopolitics, sovereign rights over mortality in a form differing from the forms of sovereign right over life described by Foucault. Mbembe discusses administration through disseminated disorder, insecurity, panic, unease, precarity, and the administered promotion of a seemingly disorganized chaos.

  98.     Roberto Esposito, Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics, trans. Rhiannon Noel Welch (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 72–73.

  99.     Ibid., 74.

4. IMMUNITY, BARE LIFE, AND THE THANATOPOLITICS OF REPRODUCTION

The chapter epigraph comes from Ruth A. Miller, The Limits of Bodily Integrity: Abortion, Adultery, and Rape Legislation in Comparative Perspective (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 173.

    1.     Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 45, hereafter Bios.

    2.     As such, we saw that it is mostly presented as distinguishable from an ancient, sovereign right to kill, of which it is not the return and with which it should not be confused. Thus Foucault refers to the “old power of death that symbolized sovereign power” coming to be meticulously overlaid (recouverte soigneusement) with an “administration of bodies and calculated management of life” (HS I 139–40).

    3.     That’s to say, executions, attacks, massacres, wars, genocides are given an biopolitical inflection if and where they are considered to optimize the life of some, thereby effecting the “break into the domain of life” associated by Foucault with biopolitical aims, between “what must live and what must die” (SMBD 254).

    4.     Translation modified. This seems not to undermine the HS I discussion, partly because it also makes reference to this kind of “penetration”; see HS I 89.

    5.     In fact, Foucault is referring to a biopolitical deployment of sovereign power. The reference occurs in the midst of a broader discussion of this possibility, and the paradox he goes on to mention in this particular passage is a deployment of sovereign power by “this power to guarantee life.”

    6.     The closest account might be seen in Foucault’s identification of security’s aims and strategies. For example, Security, Territory, Population describes the mercantile aim of averting scarcity in advance by a thorough control of prices, a strategy that could only produce the opposite effect to that intended (STP 32–33; SMBD 246, 249). Society Must Be Defended describes the “regulatory technology of life … which tries to control the series of random events that can occur in a living mass, a technology which tries to predict [their] … probability (by modifying it, if necessary) or at least to compensate for their effects. This is a technology which aims to establish a sort of homeostasis, not by training individuals, but by achieving an overall equilibrium that protects the security of the whole from internal dangers” (SMBD 249). Perhaps the more comprehensive the strategy of risk aversion, the more this provokes destructive or self-negating outcomes. That might be a way of understanding technologies of security whose aim is to defend against internal and external dangers: that they are bound to become autoimmune? But such broader conclusions are not Foucault’s interest, and do not form part of his discussion. In the passage mentioned here, Foucault draws, temporarily, a different conclusion. He describes a withdrawal by biopower from forms of death deemed to be outside its control in favor of a possible management of mortality. Here, at least, it is not described as inevitably self-destructive so much, I think, as tending to generate new permutations and possibilities of government (SMBD 249).

    7.     See this point, discussed as principle one (“life and death as transactional unities”) in chapter 1.

    8.     Bios 3–7.

    9.     Esposito refers to ethnic rape aiming at “positive eugenics,” occurring during genocide and as “the most extreme immunitary practice, which is to say, affirming the superiority of one’s own blood to the point of imposing it on those with whom one does not share it,” but also as “destined to be turned against itself, producing exactly what it wanted to avoid” given the “multiethnic outcome of the most violent racial immunization” (Bios 7). See note 58 for debate about the use of the terms ethnic and genocidal rape.

  10.     For example, described in HS I as operating, in conjunction with the growth in importance of biopower, “more and more as a norm” rather than as the juridical arm of sovereign authority (HS I 144), and again in Security, Territory, Population as a tactic. Here he distinguishes the traditional function of the law as accomplishing obedience of subjects to the sovereign through their obedience to the law, in contrast to the emergence of governmental aims such as ensuring population increase or its sufficient subsistence. Instead of being “impos[ed] … on men,” the law will then become just one of a series of tactics (which could include alterations in taxation, for example), arranging and disposing so as to achieve instrumental ends (STP 99).

  11.     This to the difference of Agamben, as discussed later in this chapter.

  12.     Neither the explanatory structure of immunity through which Esposito interprets the thanatopoliticization of biopolitics, nor his aim to loosen the latter’s grip and that of (what he has identified as) new sovereign powers by opening life through a reconfiguration of the terms flesh, norm, and birth, in what he calls a “constructive deconstruction,” belong to Foucault (see Bios 12).

  13.     The closest Foucault might be said to come to describing any such necessity is in his account of how “racism justifies [assure] the death-function in the economy of biopower,” “we are dealing with a mechanism that allows biopower to work. So racism is bound up with the workings of a State that is obliged to use race, the elimination of races and the purification of the race, to exercise its sovereign power. The juxtaposition of—or the way biopower functions through—the old sovereign power of right over death implies the workings, the introduction and activation, of racism.… So you can understand how and why, given these conditions, the most murderous States are also, of necessity, the most racist” SMBD 258). Also HS I characterizes a “tendency” toward biopower’s death function (HS I 136–37) and deems it an increasing tendency. But Esposito will develop, as Foucault does not, an account of the inevitability of these developments and of the philosophical imperatives to which they give rise: the development, for example, of alternative understandings of community, individuality, life, flesh, and defense.

  14.     Maria Muhle distinguishes Foucault from Agamben, on parallel grounds, in “A Genealogy of Biopolitics: The Notion of Life in Canguilhem and Foucault,” in Vanessa Lemm and Miguel Vatter, eds., The Government of Life: Foucault, Biopolitics, and Neoliberalism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 77–97.

  15.     See Anne O’Byrne’s “Communitas and the Problem of Women,” Angelaki 18, no. 3 (2013): 125–38, for her discussion of Esposito on the “suppression of birth” (special issue on Roberto Esposito); and see Catherine Mills, Futures of Reproduction: Bioethics and Biopolitics (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 113.

  16.     Gisela Bock, Zwangssterilisation im Nazionalsozialismus: Studien zur Rassenpolitik und Frauenpolitik (Opladen: Westdeutscher, 1986).

  17.     These including the trumping of sovereign power and political process by neoliberalism and the thwarting of political process by big money, as elaborated in Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Democracy (Brooklyn: Zone, 2015).

  18.     Briefly mentioned in Wendy Brown’s account of eroded, nostalgic, and phantasmatic forms of contemporary state sovereignty, exerting themselves all the more in outward manifestations ranging from laws and policies restricting immigration, the erecting of border walls, engagement in war, all the while, as she argues, that political authority and capacity to ensure democratic process is eroded by a number of forces including the extreme of influence of global capitalism. These are the factors and expressions on which she concentrates. In one comment, in which she discusses her thesis that “as it is weakened and rivaled by other forces, what remains of nation-state sovereignty becomes openly and aggressively … theological,” she mentions George W. Bush, invoking “God to legitimate his use of veto powers or proposed constitutional amendments to protect ‘unborn life’ (from abortion) and the ‘sanctity of marriage’ (from homosexuals) inside the United States and to withdraw funds from organizations promoting condom use or abortifacients in other nations.” Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Brooklyn: Zone, 2010), 62–63. This can be interpreted in conjunction with a discussion in Regulating Aversion of the “corrective [Brown] would add to Foucault’s account.” Brown recognizes Foucault’s well-known challenge to the assumption that the state is the major agent of governmentality. But she argues that we need more attention to the legitimacy (and capacities) of state governance, a preoccupation that may accompany its erosion and, in some domains, irrelevance. She argues that Foucault neglects such crises of legitimacy (whose forms may therefore take shape as nostalgic, phantasmatic, compensatory exertions of sovereign power): “even as [Foucauldian] governmentality captures both the unboundedness of the state and the insufficiency of the state as a signifier of how modern societies are governed, it fails to convey the extent to which the state remains a unique and hence vulnerable object of political accountability … state legitimacy needs determine at least some portion of political life.” Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 83. Brown can be added to other post-Foucauldian theorists discussed in this chapter who identify lacunae in the Foucauldian account and revise the Foucauldian critique of sovereign models of power. But there is also potential for reading together Brown’s account of phantasmatic and nostalgic expressions of state sovereignty with Foucault’s “it is as if,” given that the latter suggests the production of new objects and new governmentalities at the very point of their incapacity.

  19.     Or, in Butler’s reformulation, it could be seen as the power that emerges retrospectively with the suspension of the law, so that there will seem to have been a power to suspend the law. For this reformulation see Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 61–62, hereafter PL.

  20.     Certainly Foucault describes the ways in which modes of power make their objects and subjects, but Judith Butler claims we don’t find in his work an equivalent attention to its power to unmake (PL 98).

  21.     See, for example, SMBD 240. Notwithstanding Agamben’s critical response on this point, in fact Foucault had, as Muhle nicely puts it, “coherent reasons” for omitting to give a definition of life. See Muhle, “A Genealogy of Biopolitics,” 78; and see Giorgio Agamben, “Absolute Immanence,” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1999), 220–43. Connecting the accounts of life (in all its exposure) proposed by Agamben and Foucault, Paul Patton suggests that the life described by Foucault as commanded by sovereign power (and the lives therefore suspended between life and death since ultimately living at the sovereign’s pleasure) correspond most closely to the phenomenon described by Agamben as bare life (and, as such, should be differentiated from the life Foucault considers to be biopolitically governed), see Paul Patton, “Agamben and Foucault on Biopower and Politics,” in Matthew Calarco and Steven DeCaroli, eds., Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 203–18, 213.

  22.     Thus, to claim, as Agamben does, that Foucault neglected a discussion of the camp (HS 76) is not to claim that Foucault omitted all reference to Nazi governmentality, but that he omitted a discussion of the specific forms of power (recoined by Agamben as the sovereign making of the biopolitical) in which qualified life is reduced to bare life.

  23.     Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone, 2012), 83.

  24.     As Agamben notes, in Society Must Be Defended, Foucault addresses paradoxes (see SMBD 240, 253) both with respect to the life governed (and death taken) by sovereign power and with respect to the following formula (as Agamben articulates its paradoxical status for Foucault): “How is it possible that a power whose aim is essentially to make live instead exerts an unconditional power of death” (Remnants of Auschwitz, 84). However, it could also be said that Foucault identifies the paradox at the point where the capacities (including the deadly capacities) of biopolitical governance instead become incapacities. I have argued that, on his account, the sheer fact of biopolitical powers of death do not, alone, amount to governmental incapacity. Agamben argues that his redefinition of the biopolitical as a sovereign reduction to bare life obviates (just as Esposito argues of the accelerating immune paradigm of biopolitics) the paradox seemingly confronted by Foucault. Discussing Foucault’s genealogy of racism, and the caesura it introduces into the biological continuum as divisions between Aryan and non-Aryan and between people and population (ibid., 84), Agamben indicates that such distinctions and their caesura are consistent with exactly the distinction Foucault failed to give (eventually, the distinction between zoe and bios). Since his claim is also that these distinctions allow one to identify a point at which these caesurae transcend race and become pure biopolitical substance (ibid., 85), here we can refer to Alex Weheliye’s criticism of Agamben’s analytic efforts to think a biopolitical substratum as transcending race (and sexual difference). In the Nazi context discussed by Agamben, the making of human lives as lives not worthy of being lived, coincided, as Agamben notes, with the aim to protect hereditary health, giving rise to laws regulating procreative unions, sterilization, and abortion that preceded and continued during the Final Solution. It could be argued that, insofar as he identifies the reduction to bare life in a genocide that includes the aim of protecting hereditary health, his own account tacitly recognizes the inclusion of a biopoliticized reproduction embodying a biopoliticized sexual difference (ibid., 84); and see Alex Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 4–5, 34.

  25.     In this context one could also return to Derrida’s discussions of the death penalty in the United States. Between 1972 and 1976 it was suspended following a Supreme Court ruling that it procedurally violated the Eighth Amendment. Since it was not deemed unconstitutional per se, it could therefore, from 1976, be progressively reinstated by states who introduced new legal procedures through which capital punishment did not incur the terms of the suspension. The reinstatements claim their exception to the (still recognized) terms of the suspension, which in turn had claimed a suspension of the (still recognized) legality of capital punishment. See Jacques Derrida, The Death Penalty, vol. 1, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). Derrida discusses, several times in the seminar, the common combination of support for the death penalty and opposition to abortion, but only in passing remarks.

  26.     See the dicsussion of Roe in Mary Poovey, “The Abortion Question and the Death of Man,” in Judith Butler and Joan Scott, eds., Feminists Theorize the Political (New York: Routledge, 1992), 239–56, 244.

  27.     Ruling cited at www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/texts/410/113 (accessed 12/10/2016).

  28.     “Fetal heartbeat bills” have been introduced in at least nine states, have been passed in Houses of Representatives or Senates in at least four states, then postponed or suspended in committees or legally struck down.

  29.     As reported in the New York Times: “Similar measures to ban abortions when fetal heartbeats are detected are under consideration in several other states, including Kansas and Ohio.” John Eligon and Erik Eckholm, “New Laws Ban Most Abortions in North Dakota,” New York Times, March 26, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/27/us/north-dakota-governor-signs-strict-abortion-limits.html (accessed 12/10/2016).

  30.     A subsequent landmark case held before the Supreme Court, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992), ruled that states could lawfully introduce measures whose effect was to reduce practical availability of abortion so long as they did not impose an “undue” burden on women’s right to choose an abortion, leaving a wide margin of interpretation on what might be considered undue. Having said that, in 2016, two state statutes were passed in Alabama concerning the regulation of abortion. The first forbade the granting or reissuing of licenses to abortion clinics within 2000ft of a public K-8 school. The second was to prevent the “dilation and evacuation” method of abortion—the most common in the second trimester—unless the physician first stops the fetal heartbeat. In October 2016 the first was overturned and the second was suspended by Judge Myron H. Thompson in the District Courts on the grounds that it placed an undue burden (in accordance with the “undue burden test”) on women accessing their constitutional rights (https://www.scribd.com/document/329234060/West-Alabama-Women-s-Center-v-Miller accessed 12/19/2016).

And yet overturning these laws does not necessarily preclude them from producing deleterious effects. In its “roundup” of state abortion restrictions published in January 2016, the Guttmacher Institute noted that there had been nearly as many restrictions regarding abortion introduced in the previous five years as in the fifteen years before that (https://www.guttmacher.org/article/2016/01/2015-year-end-state-policy-roundup accessed 12/19/2016). Even where these were later struck down by various courts of appeal (in many cases, long before they reached the Supreme Court), it seems that it is this climate that is increasing the burden for women to access abortion. For in this same five-year period the number of abortion clinics have significantly diminished, particularly in states that already had a very small number.

  31.     See comments by Tammy Kromenaker, director of the Red River Women’s Clinic in Fargo, on why new regulations restricting admitting privileges would oblige the shutdown of the only abortion clinic in North Dakota: they imposed a radius within which there were only two hospitals, one of which accorded admitting privileges only to doctors who admitted at least ten patients annually. This excluded Red River doctors who fly in from other states to perform the abortions. She interpreted the fetal heartbeat law as follows: “In the past it’s been, ‘We’re going to try and make it more difficult, more hoops, more obstacles for women to have to jump through or jump over. But this is specifically: ‘Let’s ban abortion. Let’s do it. Let’s challenge Roe v. Wade. Let’s end abortion in North Dakota.’” Eligon and Eckholm, “New Laws Ban Most Abortions in North Dakota.”

  32.     Ranjana Khanna has developed the term disposability as a means of expanding and nuancing Agamben’s bare life, correcting the conceptual annihilation of difference she identifies in his failure to factor in the specificity of the political exclusion of slaves, women relegated to households, or the exposure of women to sexual violence, and also as a means of developing a better framework for a new feminist internationalism. See “Disposability,” differences 20, no. 1 (2009): 181–98.

  33.     Unlike the American right to privacy, the right to abortion is negotiated in Germany in the context of the 1949 Grundgesetz whose first two articles constitutionally establish human life to be a fundamental value. This is considered to apply to unborn life, but also to the free development of one’s “personality” without undue harm to others. Thus the legality of abortion must be established within these framing constitutional conditions as the weighing up of different “life” interests.

  34.     In Britain, abortion was a crime from 1803 onward, still illegal under the 1861 Offenses Against the Person Act. Through the twentieth century, increasingly broad exceptions were granted by the Infant Life (Preservation Act) of 1929, allowing term-limited abortions to protect the woman’s life only; the Bourne Ruling of 1938, extending the exception to include psychological grounds; and the Abortion Act of 1968, which consolidated the legality if there was a threat to the physical or mental health of mother or existing childcare and if certified by two doctors. Australian law was first governed by the British 1861 Act. Despite its widespread availability (under grounds of an assortment of exceptions including economic, social, and medical grounds and usually with time limits), abortion has not been fully legalized in any state except the Australian Capital Territory that passed the Abolition of Offence of Abortion Act in 2002.

  35.     Michèle Le Doeuff, Hipparchia’s Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, etc., trans. Trista Selous (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 247. She considers this phenomenon a failure to enshrine women’s control of their own fertility in the constitution as a fundamental right. Though there have been changes to French abortion law since the publication of Hipparchia’s Choice, the conditional nature of its legality has persisted. For example, under the Penal Code of 1992, abortion becomes a woman’s right during (but only during) the first twelve weeks, and abortions are still prohibited if conducted in such a way as to violate public health guidelines.

  36.     Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 2, 7.

  37.     Ibid., 87.

  38.     Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 6–7.

  39.     Catherine Mills notes that Agamben associates women with the potential of infancy in “For a Philosophy of Infancy,” trans. Elias Polizoes, Public 21 (2001), at http://www.yorku.ca/public/public/backissu/v21c.html, and that he depicts women as offering a prospect of (hetero)sexual fulfillment associated with the in-human and unsavable life in Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). He refers to female faces in pornography evoking the pleasure of everyday life in Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose, trans. Michael Sullivan and Sam Whitsitt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995). For this discussion, see Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008), 114–15.

  40.     Catherine Mills acknowledges that a feminist stress on the phenomenology of embodiment will not be appropriate to Agamben’s work (ibid., 115).

  41.     Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky, “Homo Sacer, das bloße Leben und das Lager,” Die Philosophin 25 (2002): 95–115, 103. English translation by Catharine Diehl available at https://adm.blogs.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/publikationen.

  42.     Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 4–5, 34.

  43.     See for example, Rosi Braidotti, “The Politics of Life as Bios/Zoe,” in A. Smelik and N. Lykke, eds., Bits of Life: Feminism at the Interactions of Media, Bioscience, and Technology (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 172–92; Melinda Cooper, “The Silent Scream: Agamben and the Politics of the Unborn,” in Rosi Braidotti, Claire Colebrook and Patrick Hanafin, eds., Deleuze and Law: Forensic Futures (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2010), 142–62; Deuber-Mankowsky, “Homo Sacer”; Catherine Mills, “Biopolitics, Liberal Eugenics, and Nihilism,” in Calarco and DeCaroli, Giorgio Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, 180–202; Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben; Ewa Ziarek, “Bare Life on Strike: Notes on the Biopolitics of Race and Gender,” South Atlantic Quarterly 107 (2008): 89–106.

  44.     For views that European colonialism, slave trading, and the slave plantation are exemplary of Agamben’s camp (not withstanding their criticisms of Agamben’s disinterest in racism and colonialism, see Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus; and Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 48–50. For Weheliye’s criticism that, in universalizing—or ontologizing—the camp, and the modern zone of indetermination in which we all are rendered the virtual homo sacer, Agamben is unable to explain why certain groups of humans are more exposed to a personification or actualization of the homo sacer; see Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 35.

  45.     When Melinda Cooper describes Agamben as “identif[ying] a biological substratum isolated from all political form or identity but nevertheless subject to the full force of law of the modern state,” she asks if embryonic life might qualify as the kind of biological substratum in which he might be interested. She is right to draw attention to Agamben’s omission of this possibility from his discussion. For it could seem, as she puts it, that “Agamben consistently and inexplicably eludes the one figure of contemporary political life that would seem to illustrate most fully his philosophical conception of bare life. This is the figure of the ‘unborn’–a purely potential life which, according to some, has become dangerously exposed to the sovereign violence of women, the state and science.” One reason for not including embryonic life could be found in the fact that Agamben’s analysis has been directed instead at the loss, removal, or forced exclusion of political form or identity from forms of life. This means, at least, that the fetus is not like the slave, the immigrant who loses statehood, the camp internee, the state of coma. Cooper’s argument is that the possible conceptual proximity of embryonic life and bare life allows for a closer inspection of a tacit relationship in his work with Christian, Thomist theology (giving another angle for a feminist and critical point of access into the elaboration, see Cooper, “The Silent Scream,” 142).

  46.     Ziarek, “Bare Life on Strike,” 89.

  47.     For Ziarek, this is an omission, but it remains unclear how easily it could be rectified within the terms of the homo sacer project. She presents a meticulous and innovative response to Agamben and some preliminary notes on how one would need to supplement the project. But she also offers the most acute account available of why, within Agamben’s terms, these omissions are “no accident.”

  48.     Ann Laura Stoler, “Beyond Sex: Bodily Exposures of the Colonial and Postcolonial Present,” in Anne-Emmanuelle Berger and Eleni Varikas, eds., Genre et postcolonialismes: Dialogues transcontinentaux, 185–214 (Paris: Archives Contemporaines, 2011). See her comment, “Key to the sexual politics of colonial rule was never just enacted sexual violation but the distribution of social and political vulnerabilities that nourished the potential for them” (ibid., 186).

  49.     Stoler, “Beyond Sex,” 207–8.

  50.     In giving a different definition to biopolitics, and arguing not only for its longer lineage but for the status of the bare life produced by sovereign power interpreted as the ontological (HS 182) or transcendental (see Muhle, “Genealogy of Biopolitics,” 83) condition of the political, he omits much of what is critical to Foucault’s account— the stress on politico-technological means and measures for thinking of populations in massive and statistical terms, for example. On this see Mills, “Biopolitics, Liberal Eugenics, and Nihilism” and Patton, “Agamben and Foucault on Biopower and Politics.”

  51.     Mills, The Philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, 114–15.

  52.     Johanna Oksala, “Violence and the Biopolitics of Modernity,” Foucault Studies 10 (2010): 23–43, 29.

  53.     Mills, The Philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, 141n12.

  54.     See the related interrogation of the problematic status of slavery for Agamben in Ziarek, “Bare Life on Strike,” 93–94.

  55.     As Khanna comments, “Agamben’s term severance … would not obtain for those who never could participate in political life anyway, though they resided within the city limits,” see Khanna, “Disposability”, 190.

  56.     Considering Agamben’s account from the perspective of slavery, Ziarek expresses the problem this way, “The notion of slavery as a substitute for death complicates Agamben’s central thesis that sovereign decision/bare life constitutes the foundational political paradigm in the West. First, although the extreme delegitimation and the nullity of enslaved life make it another instantiation of bare life, the very fact that such life undergoes substitutions of one form of destruction for another undermines from the start the centrality of just one paradigm of politics” (Ziarek, “Bare Life on Strike,” 96).

  57.     In Patterson’s account of slavery as social death, and its associated liminal and paradoxical status (discussed in conjunction with Agamben in Ziarek’s “Bare Life on Strike”), Patterson includes the exposure of women slaves to rape. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 206, 193. For her criticism of the tacit subordination of women in such accounts of this social death as rupturing traditional kinship, and her emphasis of sexual difference, the sexing of enslavement, and of women under slavery as exposed to rape and a reproduction from which they were alienated, see Spillers, “ Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.”

  58.     The term is used to describe the politically inflected aim to inflict pregnancy through rape with a racial or ethnic dimension intended to damage kinship relations and political communities, often as an organized political orr military tactic. Engle offers a wary account of the term as used in both feminist and legal representations. While not disputing the long-term group detention of Bosnian women for the purposes of rape, leading to prosecution and convictions by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Engle has argued that the aim of systematic enforced pregnancy, and particularly the view that their aim was genocidal, may have been overemphasized in their reporting. See Karen Engle, “Feminism and its (Dis)Contents: Criminalizing Wartime Rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” American Journal of International Law 99, no. 4 (2005): 778–816, 816.

  59.     The distinction was explicitly made in the first constitution of 1791, in which the category included women and domestic servants. So-called universal citizenship, instituted in the 1792 version, covered only men over twenty-one; thus the status of women as the passive citizen persisted (until 1945). See James F. McMillan, France and Women, 1789–1914 (New York: Routledge, 2000), 16.

  60.     Also discussed by McMillan, ibid.

  61.     Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès’s “Préliminaires de la constitution,” in Ecrits politiques (Paris: Editions des Archives, 1985); and see remarks by Jean-Denis Lanjuinais cited in W. H. Sewell, “Le citoyen/La Citoyenne: Activity, Passivity and the Revolutionary Concept of Citizenship,” in Colin Lucas, ed., The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 2: Political Culture of the French Revolution (Oxford: Pergamon, 1988), 105–25, 105.

  62.     See McMillan, France and Women; Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); Candice E. Proctor, Women, Equality, and the French Revolution (New York: Greenwood, 1990).

  63.     McMillan’s France and Women discusses remarks in this vein by André Amar and Pierre Gaspard Chaumette, such as Chaumette’s declaration: “Since when is it permitted to give up one’s sex? Since when is it decent to see women abandoning the pious cares of their households, the cribs of their children, to come to public places, to harangue in the galleries, at the bar of the senate? Is it to men that nature confided domestic cares? No, she has said to man: ‘Be a man: hunting, farming, political concerns, toils of every kind, that is your appanage.’ She has said to woman: ‘Be a woman. The tender cares owing to infancy, the details of the household, the sweet anxieties of maternity, these are your labours”; McMillan, France and Women, 30–31, citing Chaumette’s speech reproduced in Darlene Gay Levy, Harriet Branson Applewhite, and Mary Durham Johnson, eds., Women in Revolutionary France (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 219–20. McMillan discusses further examples from Mirabeau and Prudhomme for whom women’s maternal role was similarly the grounds for the denial of citizenship.

  64.     For its peculiar paradigm, one could suggest a more specific variant of the coma state than that discussed by Agamben (see his discussion of Karen Quinlan, HS 163–64, 186): extreme cases in which women have been maintained in coma states to allow the further development of an unborn fetus.

  65.     See Rayna Rapp, Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America (New York: Routledge, 1999), 127, 131, 307.

  66.     A phenomenon analyzed at length, with respect to the contemporary public policy context in Finland, by Mervi Patosalmi, “The Politics and Policies of Reproductive Agency,” PhD diss., University of Helsinki, 2011. My thanks to Mervi Patosalmi for stimulating conversations about her research on this phenomenon in Finland.

  67.     Ziarek, “Bare Life on Strike,” 93.

  68.     See Khanna, “Disposability,” for the discussion of Agamben’s omission of sexual difference.

  69.     Jill Lepore, “Birthright: What’s Next for Planned Parenthood?,” New Yorker, November 14, 2011, 44–55, 48.

  70.     Miller’s argument is more specifically indebted to Agamben in its interest in paradigmatic spaces of the biopolitical and so in conceptualizing the womb in such terms. As an analogue of Agamben’s use of the term, she is interested in a paradigm of which we also find a general distribution of its characteristics. When Miller proposes replacing the camp as the biopolitical paradigm of the modern, with an account of the womb as the paradigm space, she is thinking specifically of that variant of sovereignty described by Agamben. Adding to the argument that we have all been reduced to a virtual homo sacer, she adds that we are a virtual version of the biopoliticized womb. The argument connects with a downside of increasing emphasis on the importance of consent. In regard to sexual violence, she identifies a correlative default criminality, with respect to which a default model has become a supposition of violation unless consent is given. See Ruth A. Miller, The Limits of Bodily Integrity: Abortion, Adultery, and Rape Legislation in Comparative Perspective (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).

  71.     Stormer offers an account of this governmentality in “Prenatal Space,” Signs 26, no. 1 (2000): 109–44, 135, discussed in Miller, The Limits of Bodily Integrity, 30.

  72.     Miller, The Limits of Bodily Integrity, 44. Miller offers several variants of this account of reproductive space as a preeminent modern political space and also an overlap of different regimes of reproduction. Women’s bodies can have multiple statuses as private (understood as the property of their husbands and fathers), autonomous, and public (for example, in the sense that rape or pregnancy could be understood as collective, moral, national, moral, or public affronts or attacks on national integrity or collective future (ibid., 93–94). They can manifest overlaps of disciplinary, juridical-institutional, and biopolitical management (ibid., 88).

One consequence of these overlaps is the problematic implications of the articulation of biopolitical sovereign spaces in women’s bodies, deemed by her a sovereign (or biopolitical) right to regulate biology and sexuality (ibid., 88). With the emergence of the language of consent in the twentieth century, “ ‘sexual liberty’ was a right that could be possessed only by biopolitically defined citizens” (ibid., 94). Under those circumstances, she argues, consent has “little or nothing to do with ‘choice’ or ‘freedom.’” Consent doesn’t undo the biopolitical and public status of women’s bodies in the sense that women’s sexual and reproductive bodies occupy a biopolitical register— as seen when sexual crimes are understood as much as infringements on public as private interest, and womens’ bodily integrity is understood to overlaps with national integrity, and so national borders as well as futures (ibid., 88–89).

  73.     Ibid., 44.

  74.     She sees the consequences of the overlap between regimes of consent and regimes of biopolitical interest in sexual and reproductive life, which mean that in a) the absence of expressed consent, sex in some contexts would be assumed to be rape and reproduction coerced. In a liberal regime of consent and contract, embodying the traditions of the private/public split, power would not be considered as primarily concerned with rights relating to bodily life. Reproductive and sexual life would be considered private matters. Matters of consent, autonomy of choice, and associated rights would be associated more with public transactions concerning property, contracts. In the absence of proof of consent, it might be assumed that a party is not using my car or my house with my consent. So when, by contrast, governmental and political interest extends to bodily life, and reproduction becomes a matter of biopolitical interest, Miller argues the consequence is as follows. In correlation (because of the concurrent tradition of liberal autonomy, freedom, and property rights) the language of consent extends to the sexual and reproductive body. In consequence, Miller argues we now live in a context of tacit assumption that sex and reproduction do not occur legitimately unless there is stated consent. Moreover, this has also become a means and mode of biopolitical administration of sex and reproduction.

One aspect of this governmentality relates to the (race hierarchizing) caesura in the biological continuum described by Foucault. Again Miller suggests the analysis can be extended to its “reproductive” variant. Since there will be a bifurcation between forms of reproduction considered to foster national interest or to weaken it, there will, Miller argues, also be a bifurcation in between the extent to which sex and reproduction are assumed to be coerced in the absence of explicit consent. She discusses “refugee sex” in camps and sexual contact between Bosnian women and Serbian men in the former Yugoslavia of the 1980s, arguing that in both cases the default assumption is that this is rape or coerced sex. Miller is not the only feminist to query the problematic results of a seemingly pro-feminist and positive focus on the importance of consent. But this is a specific and complex argument that the default models of violence, exposure, and likely criminality have concurrently become means of biopolitical administration of women’s bodies, with a correlate bureaucratic and physical invasiveness of sexual and reproductive bodies. On this argument, it is seen when biopolitical interest in the life of the body and the level of population overlaps with new reproductive rights based on models of autonomy and establishment of “consent.” Not all these analyses are developed, but they are governed by an attention to the phenomenon of overlapping models insofar as they may impact reproductive rights: sovereign individuality, legal personhood, discipline, biopower, and security.

  75.     My suggestion is that in lieu of the possibility of understanding embryonic life in such terms, instead women may be rendered “less than subjects,” insofar as the possibility of making reproductive decisions may be available or be revoked or be denied, often by contrast to equivalent subjects who do access these contexts of decision making by virtue of civic or immigration status, race, religion, nation, or wealth. Again the argument is not that women have these rights and that they are denied, but rather that they are produced as subjects of denied (or absent) rights.

5. JUDITH BUTLER, PRECARIOUS LIFE, AND REPRODUCTION

Chapter epigraphs come from Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 7; Barbara Johnson, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 28–47, 33.

    1.     Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 15, hereafter FW.

    2.     With exceptions discussed in this chapter. In remarks about Agamben and Arendt in Who Sings the Nation-State? she proposes that biopolitics (and, in interconnection, sovereignty) would need to be understood more broadly than is indicated in their work. To see the function of sovereignty as separating life from the domain of the political or of citizenship presumes, she argues, “that politics and life join only and always on the question of citizenship and, so, restricts the entire domain of bio-power in which questions of life and death are determined by other means.” Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging (London: Seagull, 2007), 39–40.

    3.     For example, she mentions the focus by some recent biopolitical theorists on transformations in the paradigms of life (such as the shift to the molecular discussed, among others, by Nikolas Rose in Politics of Life Itself; see FW 17). Cary Wolfe groups her, along with Esposito and Agamben, with the “current avatars” of biopolitical thought. Cary Wolfe, Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 3; but see her remark about biopolitical questions, “Maybe this is work for other scholars to do!,” Judith Butler with Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (Cambridge: Polity, 2013), 169, and see 47. Butler refers often to biopolitical theory as contiguous with, or important, to her concerns, and yet not her primary point of focus, thus see also Frames of War: “it can be argued that processes of life themselves require destruction and degeneration, but this does not in any way tell us which sorts of destruction are ethically salient and which are not. To determine the ontological specificity of life in such instances would lead us more generally into a discussion of biopolitics, concerning ways of apprehending, controlling, and administering life, and how these modes of power enter into the very definition of life itself.… The bibliography on these important topics has grown enormously in recent years. My own contribution, however, is not to the genealogy of concepts of life or death” (FW 16–18).

    4.     Butler and Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? 37–38. In the context of a longer critical rejoinder to Arendt, this is also serving as a critical rejoinder to Agamben. In the previous chapter we explored the status of reproductivity in relation to bare life. But Butler’s evocation here of the “means and legitimate uses of reproductive technology,” as among the questions of life and power prompting her rejection of the view that life is ever “bare” (ibid., 37), does raise the question (not pursued by her) of how precariousness might, as an alternative category, apply here.

    5.     Discussing the human acquisition of language, she describes the body as “alternately sustained and threatened through modes of address.” Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 5–6.

    6.     Ibid.

    7.     Judith Butler, Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 21, hereafter PLP.

    8.     Bonnie Honig offers a critical response to Butler’s concept of precarious life in Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), responding to Butler, “But there are other irrefutable generalizabilities that could be ontologized and on which we could build a politics as well: humans all eat, for example, and this too could ground an equality—a less minimal one—of social rights to food” (31). She attributes to Butler a “sentimental ontology of fragility” associated with a trend for which Honig has coined the term mortalist humanism.

    9.     According to the well-known Foucauldian formulation, “The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound then himself” (DP 30).

  10.     This focus on a livable life has become stronger in Butler’s work. While themes of survival and intelligibility were already present in Gender Trouble, in her revised introduction for the 1999 edition of Gender Trouble, it is noticeable that her references to gendering become references to a “gendered life,” connecting to her ongoing interrogation of the conditions for livable lives. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 1999), viii.

  11.     Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 95, 133; and see also Judith Butler, “The Question of Social Transformation,” in Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 204–31, 226. She was mindful, in the wake of Gender Trouble, to qualify what seemed to some an overly celebratory emphasis in that work’s closing pages on the potential for gender play and parody. Butler sees gender normativity as effecting the conventional, the transgressive, and the illegible, with both positive and negative results. Possibilities for change are embedded in the slight and strong variability arising with the iterations of norms; but, insofar as these possibilities also include the transgressive or illegible, livability may, for some, be threatened. In Gender Trouble’s revised introduction, she connects the making and living of gendered life to the question of how some lives do not count as fully valuable or, as she says, as “livable lives,” “the violence of the foreclosed life, the one that does get named as ‘living,’ the one whose suspension implies an incarceration of life, or a sustained death sentence.” One could unpack at length the many interconnecting resonances in Butler’s work of life, “livable life,” and their role in genealogies of life and death to which her work contributes (Butler, Gender Trouble, viii).

  12.     Butler describes an original and fundamental impingement by the other with reference to Laplanche’s account of an infant flooded and overwhelmed by the other and its incomprehensible meanings. This inhabitation would precede anything resembling “mineness,” or our taking any kind of shape as “subjects,” “egos,” or “selves.” Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 77.

  13.     See both Precarious Life and also a remark in her exchange with Mills and Jenkins which links these problems: “the question of what I ought to do necessitates an inquiry into both the constitution of the ‘I’ and the manner of its ‘doing.’ The socially variable practice of subject production becomes an issue here, since populations are only differentially established as subjects, and power regimes operate in the production and de-production of subjects.” Judith Butler, “Reply from Judith Butler to Mills and Jenkins,” differences 18, no. 2 (2007): 180–95, 191–92; and Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006), hereafter PL.

  14.     In “The Question of Social Transformation” this question of gender is again connected to death: “to what extent does gender, coherent gender, secure a life as livable? What threat of death is delivered to those who do not live gender according to its accepted norms” (ibid., 205)? More generally this essay again reminds that embodying norms may well be a matter of life or death: “the question of how to embody the norm is thus very often linked to the question of survival, of whether life itself will be possible” (ibid., 217). She mentions a number of types of violence against the transgendered (ibid., 218). Moreover, and also important to her concept of the livable life, sometimes forms of violence might not even be recognized as such.

  15.     Butler takes Foucault to have neglected the phenomenon of desubjectivation. In Precarious Life she argues that this phenomenon should have been factored in the depiction of a disciplined subject compliant with the law, whose individuated relation to a standard for the human is a constitutive principle (PL 98). (Of course, one could add to this account—for, as described in Foucault’s Abnormal lectures, Foucauldian discipline is also a normalization which makes, differentiates, grids, identifies, and includes abnormalities, the “monster,” the figures who cannot be “disciplined” or appear indifferent to discipline.)

  16.     Butler and Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State?, 4–8.

  17.     See in particular Judith Butler, “Is Kinship Always Heterosexual?” differences 13, no. 1 (2002): 14–44 and “The Question of Social Transformation.”

  18.     Fiona Jenkins amplifies this possibility: “it becomes very tempting to try to apply a series of questions posed in many of (Butler’s) essays to the case of foetal life.” Like Butler, she acknowledges the difficulty: this could “be something that the Pro-Life, anti-abortion movement seeks to articulate.” Fiona Jenkins, “Queering Foetal Life: Between Butler and Berlant,” Australian Feminist Law Journal 30 (2009): 63–85, 65.

  19.     She reminds also that there are conceptual differences—and tensions—in the field of biopolitics between seeing life in anthropocentric or clinical or tissue-based or molecular terms, and these remain beyond the scope of her project.

  20.     The comment continues, “I don’t know whether one can be a nominalist about life, since there are so many instances of living processes and beings. We have to enter into this complex array of problems, which means as well that social theory has to become more knowledgeable about debates in the life sciences.” Jenkins notes that the applicability of Butler’s arguments to fetal life also comes up in “The Question of Social Transformation.” Again, Butler makes clear her view that, at least for the purposes of her own analysis, the “disenfranchised communities” to whom one might seek to extend the norms of sustaining viable life do not include the “unborn.” Jenkins cites her on this point: “My argument against this conclusion has to do with the very use of ‘life’ as if we know what it means, what it requires, what it demands.” The antiabortion activist seeks to assert dogmatically the value of (fetal) “human life,” rather than joining Butler in exploring and affirming its ambiguity. Judith Butler with Nina Power, “Media Death - Frames of War.” The Books Interview, New Statesman. (August 30, 2009) Original version at http://www.newstatesman.com/2009/08/media-death-frames-war-obama. (Accessed 12/18/2016)

  21.     See my chapter one, p20, for discussion of this formulation. Butler refers to Mbembe’s term necropolitics (Butler with Athanasiou, Dispossession, 167) and, more generally, to the description by Mbembe, Patterson (Slavery and Social Death), and Gilmore (Golden Gulag) of humans whose proper place is constituted as that of “nonbeing,” social death, higher rates of mortality, or death through negligence (Butler with Athanasiou, Dispossession, 19). My argument has been that these differentials are also seen in higher rates of mortality, harm, and death for women in contexts producing a differential (bio)political significance of their reproductive lives. The variability of visibility and grievability relating to this more specific phenomenon is a variant of precariousness. Spillers has indicated the need for it to be factored in Patterson’s “social death.” See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 206, 193; Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 203–29.

  22.     In chapter 4 I made mention of Cooper’s interrogation of this possibility with respect to Agamben’s “bare life,” while arguing that this variant of pro-life politics can be understood as constructing the pseudo homo sacer for whom the woman’s womb becomes a phantom variant of the “camp.”

  23.     For two landmark essays on the question, see Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, “Fetal Images: The Power of Visual Culture in the Politics of Reproduction,” Feminist Studies 13, no. 2 (1987): 263–92; and Donna Haraway, “Fetus: The Speculum in the New World Order,” in Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997), 173–212.

  24.     See Gail Kligman, “Political Demography: The Banning of Abortion in Ceausescu’s Romania,” in Rayna Rapp and Faye Ginsburg, Conceiving the New World Order: The Global Politics of Reproduction (California: University of California Press, 1995), 234–55, for its more complex account of the thanatopolitical differentials at work when race hierarchism will favor the reproduction of some over others.

  25.     On this see Jean L. Cohen, “Redescribing Privacy: Identity, Difference, and the Abortion Controversy,” Columbia Journal of Gender and Law 3, no. 1 (1992): 43–117, 56–57; and Wendy Brown, “Reproductive Freedom and the Right to Privacy: A Paradox for Feminists,” in Families, Politics and Public Policy, ed. Irene Diamond (New York: Routledge, 1983), 322–38, 332–34.

  26.     Ibid., 333.

  27.     Wolfe, Before the Law, 18–19.

  28.     This is to agree with Eva von Redecker who argues that Butler’s precariousness would presuppose a status as human which must already be sufficiently in question to be tacitly revocable, see Eva von Redecker, Zur Aktualität von Judith Butler: Einleitung in ihr Werk (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2011).

  29.     See Butler’s discussion of prisoners deemed less than human (FW 93), and of “Islamic populations destroyed in recent and current wars [who] are considered ‘less than human,’ or ‘outside’ the cultural conditions for the emergence of the human” (FW 125).

  30.     And see her comment in Who Sings the Nation-State?, concerning whether the public can “ever be constituted as such without some population relegated to the private and hence, the pre-political”? (ibid., 22). Butler continues here with a challenge addressed to Arendt’s adherence to a distinction between the public, political sphere, and a prepolitical private sphere. Discussing Arendt’s critique in Origins of Totalitarianism of nation-states as working to disregard those who do not belong to them, Butler muses that Arendt might well have made a similar point about the “disregarding” effects of the “public,” political sphere (Butler, Who Sings the Nation-State?, 22).

  31.     Jenkins, “Queering Foetal Life,” 66.

  32.     Catherine Mills, “Technology, Embodiment, and Abortion,” Internal Medicine Journal 35 (2005): 427–28, 427. It is true that, in dialogue with Mills, Jenkins places the emphasis on Mills’s claim that, as technologically made, the fetus does newly and differently serve to make the woman a moral agent—one formulation proposed by Mills is that such technologies “transform the relations that we bear to each other,… and hence the ethical responsibilities that take hold in that relationality” (ibid.). It is still the fetus that both theorists consider (and speculatively, cautiously) as the possible candidate for terms such as vulnerability, grievability, precariousness (though it should be noted in this regard that Mills is concurrently arguing for a view of the fetus as nonseparable from the mother—and vice versa—in new forms of technologically rendered and stimulated intersubjective relationships and phenomenologies).

  33.     See Catherine Mills, Futures of Reproduction: Bioethics and Biopolitics (Dordrecht: Springer, 2011), 113–14. Mills also suggests this phenomenon is thinkable in terms of Esposito’s concept of immunity.

  34.     Butler, “The Question of Social Transformation” 205, 225 (my emphasis).

  35.     Barbara Duden, Karen Barad, and Donna Haraway have been among the prominent voices in an immense literature here: with Haraway and Barad offering well-known alternatives for thinking about matter and agency in the context of ultrasound technological imaging. Barad also asks how materialization can be rethought so as to dislodge what she argues is a reinstallation of a “passive” matter by Butler in Bodies That Matter. These theorists also emphasize the differentials (geographical, class and wealth based, those relating to disability) of human value and women’s value seen in the making of some pregnancies through such imaging. Barbara Duden offers a historical perspective, contributing to a genealogy of the fetus’s mediation by medical, media, and technological makings and framings, in Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). Barad is among those (see also Haraway’s “Fetus”) who have called for a greater attention to uterine imaging as manifesting an interlocking of materiality, technology, and discourse, downplayed, she argues, by Butler, in a brief mention of the sonograms in Bodies That Matter, xvii. Here a degree of agency would be attributed not so much to the “fetus” (the latter not deemed to be a self-standing, unmediated entity) but perhaps to technologized matter interactively enfolding with the politics of gender and gendering in a differentiating politics (and economics) of visualization and formation. See Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 191–94.

  36.     Rayna Rapp’s Testing Women, Testing the Fetus remains a watershed work in describing this phenomenon. It engages specifically with the genetic counseling offered in clinical contexts in America in the course of amniocentric testing and related consultations surrounding possible or certain fetal genetic defects. These consultations have typically required decision making from mothers and parents—in conjunction with medical and genetic counselors, family, and other figures. Rapp is also attentive to differentiations based on class, culture, and race with respect to the expectations and approach by counselors, medical experts, and others to decision making, its possibility and conduct, and to interfacing with medical data and advice. Rapp’s project is attentive to numerous ways in which decision making of this kind is framed. See Rayna Rapp, Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America (New York: Routledge, 1999).

  37.     Butler is relying on the redoubled senses of the term normative, which emerged early in her writing. See her comment about Gender Trouble:

Some readers have asked whether Gender Trouble seeks to expand the realm of gender possibilities for a reason.… The question often involves a prior premise, namely, that the text does not address the normative or prescriptive dimension of feminist thought. “Normative” clearly has at least two meanings in this critical encounter, since the word is one I used often, mainly to describe the mundane violence performed by certain kinds of gender ideals. I usually use “normative” in a way that is synonymous with “pertaining to the norms that govern gender.” But the term “normative” also pertains to ethical justification, how it is established, and what concrete consequences proceed therefrom.… It is not possible to oppose the “normative” forms of gender without at the same time subscribing to a certain normative view of how the gendered world ought to be.

(Butler, Gender Trouble, xxi)

  38.     Butler, Giving and Account of Oneself, 9.

  39.     Amongst these, and in the context of recent and prominent debates in feminist theory, one would make particular mention of the controversial critique (with a Nietzschean inflection), of the making (and feminist deployment of) a concurrently punitive and self- lacerating moral subjectivity in Janet Halley’s Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

  40.     Butler, Giving and Account of Oneself, 98–99. For example, in her account of the Nietzschean guilty conscience, Butler emphasizes the type of moral conscience associated with a (disavowed) righteous vengefulness toward the other. This “injured and rageful subject … adopts a position of moral legitimacy for rageful and injurious conduct, and, through that moralization transmutes aggression into virtue” (“Reply from Judith Butler to Mills and Jenkins,” 186). To Nietzsche’s description of moral consciences of this kind, a description refuting the view that they seek triumph any less than other creatures, we can also add his concern for the stunted health and vitality of the creatures in whom bad conscience forms. He mentions the disoriented “sea animal,” “imprisoned within the confines of society and peace,” denying or reproving aggressive instincts, denied “external enemies and obstacles, and forced into the oppressive narrowness and conformity of custom,” and whose old instincts of “pursuing, raiding, changing and destroying” have not thereby “suddenly ceased to make their demands!” So, since “all instincts which are not discharged outwardly turn inwards,” they are directed instead back against the sea animal, forming a self-punishing form of conscience to its detriment. Here bad conscience is understood as a mode of “ripp[ing one]self apart,” a raging against oneself. “That,” he says, “is the origin of bad conscience” (On the Genealogy of Morality, 52, essay II, # 16). Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 56–57.

  41.     Dominique Memmi, La seconde vie des bébés morts (Paris: Editions de l’école des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2011), 159n9. (My translation.)

  42.     See Ewa Ziarek, “Bare Life on Strike: Notes on the Biopolitics of Race and Gender,” South Atlantic Quarterly 107 (2008): 89–106, 96; Butler and Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State?, 37; Ranjana Khanna, “Disposability,” differences 20, no. 1 (2009): 181–98.

  43.     Foucault also discusses the decreased importance of the death penalty in France in the context of the increase in the importance and new techniques of biopower; see HS I 137–38).

  44.     From the perspective of those commentators for whom the thanatopolitical aspects of biopolitics amount to a blurring of the boundaries between biopolitical interest in life, the power to take life, and the power to make live, it might not appear mysterious that death penalties coincide perfectly well with the illegality of abortion, euthanasia, and suicide.

  45.     See also his comments on suicide HS I 138–39.

  46.     Memmi, La seconde vie des bébés morts, 166. (My translation.)

  47.     Estelle Ferrarese’s analysis of the gendered politics of consent can be usefully added to this discussion. See her account of how a modern grammar of norms for consent and choice performable before another party concurrently differentiates between those entities whose consent (and its authenticity) is more or less likely to be in doubt, instituting inclusions and exclusions, centerings and decenterings of subjects in this regard. Estelle Ferrarese, “The Political Grammar of Consent: Investigating a New Gender Order,” Constellations 22, no. 3 (2015): 462–72; and see the discussion of consent in Ruth A. Miller, The Limits of Bodily Integrity: Abortion, Adultery, and Rape Legislation in Comparative Perspective (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); in Elaine Scarry, “Consent and the Body: Injury, Departure, and Desire,” New Literary History 21, no. 4 (1990): 867–96; and in Genevieve Fraisse, Du Consentement (Paris: Seuil, 2007).

  48.     See the discussion of Le Doeuff in chapter 4.

  49.     Memmi, La seconde vie des bébés morts, 165. (My translation.)

  50.     This is described by Brown in Wendy Brown with Christina Colegate, John Dalton, Timothy Rayner, and Cate Thill, “Learning to Love Again: An Interview with Wendy Brown,” Contretemps 6 (2006): 25–42, 35–36. Brown responds to a question from Colegate concerning so-called Shared Responsibility Agreements used as a component of the Australian government’s approach to welfare policy in indigenous affairs. An example of one such Shared Responsibility Agreement was the government’s delivery of a petrol bowser to an indigenous community in exchange for undertakings to reduce trachoma through such measures as more assiduous cleaning of children’s faces. The discussion leads to Brown’s suggestion to think together her critique of the fictions of the sovereign subject with her critique of governmental disciplinary power. Of course, this isn’t just a thinking together of modes of critique but also of modes of power. Subjects may be projected as possessing an always already failed sovereignty, understood in terms of irresponsibility. But such phenomena might also manifest some of the forms of docility and malleability associated with the disciplines. As Brown interprets this phenomenon, this is “the practice of making a subject whose sovereignty is granted on the condition that it is given up, not practiced … the site of a kind of sovereign subject that this practice of governmentality means to mow down, to erase.” In particular, she suggests, it may be in the configurations of “race, gender, sexuality, class, subculture, . . nationality … religion … [that] the critiques comes together, in the recognition that the so-called production of the sovereign subject is actually the production of a very specified subject whose sovereignty is only recognized when it gratifies or responds to those specifications. Sovereignty is then internally deconstructed” (ibid., 36).

  51.     Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), hereafter DV.

  52.     Gilligan explains:

In order to go beyond the question, “How much like men do women think, how capable are they of engaging in the abstract and hypothetical construction of reality?” it is necessary to identify and define developmental criteria that encompass the categories of women’s thought.… But to derive developmental criteria from the language of women’s moral discourse, it is necessary first to see whether women’s construction of the moral domain relies on a language different from that of men and one that deserves equal credence in the definition of development. This in turn requires finding places where women have the power to choose and thus are willing to speak in their own voice.

(DV 70)

She identified reproductive decision making in the wake of Roe v. Wade as one such place.

  53.     Barbara Johnson has written of her initial surprise, since abortion seemed precisely one of those issues about which “an even-handed comparison of the male and the female points of view is impossible.” Yet, she continues, “this, clearly, turns out to be the point. There is difference because it is not always possible to make symmetrical oppositions. As long as there is symmetry, one is not dealing with difference but with versions of the same.” Barbara Johnson, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 29–47, 33.

  54.     DV 69. Originally one of his research assistants, Gilligan was responding to Kohlberg’s identification of four to six developmental stages of moral reasoning—amongst these, the highest level would be a capacity to formulate abstract, universally applicable principles. Kohlberg had not considered that sex difference might be relevant to the results of studies oriented toward the assessment of adult moral reasoning.

  55.     Among a number of overviews of subsequent feminist critique and sympathetic identification of widely recognized limits and problems in Gilligan’s project, see the volume edited by Mary Jeanne Larrabee, An Ethic of Care: Feminist and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (New York: Routledge 1993); and see Joan Tronto’s Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (New York: Routledge, 1993).

  56.     Ronald Dworkin, Life’s Dominion: An Argument About Abortion, Euthanasia, and Individual Freedom (New York: Vintage 1994), 60.

  57.     Johnson, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” 33.

  58.     See, for example, the characterization of feminist reactions to the contours of pro-choice activism in the United States, “pro-choice activists have tended to ignore or trivialize the trauma of many women who undergo abortions. They have thus delivered into the hands of the pro-life contingent almost all concern with many women’s tremendous emotional confusion, feelings of loss, and sense of complicity.” Wendy Brown, “Reproductive Freedom and the Right to Privacy: A Paradox for Feminists,” in Irene Diamond, ed., Families, Politics and Public Policy (New York: Routledge, 1983), 322–38, 322.

  59.     Johnson, “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” 33.

  60.     To such tacit apprehensions of differential worth we could consider a number of aspects manifesting in the global commercial market in surrogacy, discussed later in this chapter, to which should be added the market in women’s reproductive tissue, which can bear considerable health risks for the donor; see, for example, Catherine Waldby and Melinda Cooper, “The Biopolitics of Reproduction: Post-Fordist Biotechnology and Women’s Clinical Labor,” Australian Feminist Studies 23, no. 55 (2008): 57–73. Thus reproductive freedoms also become dividing practices of privilege: between those more likely to need the economic benefit of tissue sale or provision of surrogacy and those in a position to purchase these; between those whose abortions and pregnancies are, in a number of ways, or for a number of reasons, more likely to be supported and those for whom reproduction is less likely to signify rights and freedoms; and also those whose material support of the pregnancies of others may come to be equated with their own economic opportunity or, as in the discussion of Google Baby later in this chapter, their own means of “life-improvement.”

  61.     Jenkins, “Queering Foetal Life,” 65.

  62.     Ibid., 76.

  63.     I take this opportunity to thank an anonymous reader of the manuscript of this volume for Columbia University Press for recalling Butler’s early interest in identifying a more vitalist current in Foucault’s understanding of life as well as for the point that this discussion of ontological tact might turn to David Caron’s The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). In discussions of living with AIDS, which articulate a wide range of careful, nuanced, subtly adjusting modes of living with others, Caron introduces the term tact as a means of thinking of a concurrent relationship of distance and proximity that is elaborated in a number of ways in The Nearness of Others: including the consensual flexibility and collective, attentive negotiability about the categories and meanings to which forms of life or death might be understood to belong and their malleability. The term also leads Caron to articulate a kind of negative ethics: “less about doing the right thing than not doing the wrong thing,” a type of ethical gesture lacking a preestablished norm. Among the characteristics of the “ethics of tact” to which Caron speaks, he proposes they “can be determined only in specific situations that, like dysclosure, can never recur identically” (ibid., 308).

  64.     Memmi, La seconde vie des bébés morts, 183.

  65.     Memmi discusses just such regimes of flexibility in medical and expert comportment. Some might be expected to experience distress because their pregnancy is unwanted, others because a desired maternity was thwarted. Such flexibility allows Memmi and Jenkins to discuss the ambiguous threshold between fetal material as waste and as mourned. Where Memmi emphasizes the ambiguous status of fetus differently made depending on the context, Jenkins emphasizes the issues of waste, remainder, and grievability that may be overlooked, she argues, in pro-abortion politics. Often, where abortion is legal, “dealings with the aborted foetal body are effectively invisible,” Memmi, La seconde vie des bébés morts. Of course these matters of invisibility and visibility are complex and relate to comportment as well as imaging. Think of how Memmi in fact discusses the ambiguous, constantly nuanced, responsive, discursive, and behavioral “making” negotiated by medical staff and others in terms of women’s or parents’ hopes and projects. A woman seeking an abortion might produce what all will consider biowaste she might never (in accordance with her own wishes) encounter. But when a miscarriage is made mournable or an abortion has different kinds of meanings, she may be offered more options. The comportment of those concerned will remake matter accordingly.

  66.     A phenomenon differently interpreted by Jenkins but these perspectives are not incompatible. (Jenkins, “Queering Foetal Life,” 64).

  67.     Ibid.

  68.     There is a tradition in some philosophical and applied ethics treatments of abortion of positing the woman and the fetus as separate entities, with competing interests and moral claims which are then adjudicated. In “A Defense of Abortion” the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson famously suggested the thought experiment of a woman who finds she has been connected as the life support to a famous violinist and weighed their competing claims. She concludes that, even if the fetus were to be endowed with competing rights (such as a right to life), the woman cannot be seen as morally obligated to carry it to term, because a right to life does not extend to a right to use someone else’s body. Whatever the reasons a woman may choose to carry a fetus to term, there is not a moral claim on her to do so. See Judith Jarvis Thompson, “A Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 1, no. 1 (1971): 47–66.

  69.     Jenkins, “Queering Foetal Life,” 64.

  70.     Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 9.

  71.     Butler, “Reply from Judith Butler to Mills and Jenkins,” 184.

  72.     Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 10.

  73.     Again: “Ethical deliberation is bound up with the operation of critique. And critique finds that it cannot go forward without a consideration of how the deliberating subject comes into being and how a deliberating subject might actually live or appropriate a set of norms,” Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, 8.

  74.     Reiterating a formulation of liberalism in these terms from Gayatri Spivak, Brown includes reproductive rights in her discussion of the conundrum of the rights we “cannot not want.” See Wendy Brown, “Suffering Rights as Paradoxes,” Constellations 7, no. 2 (2000): 230–41, 234; and see Gayatri Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), 44–46.

  75.     See Brown, “Suffering Rights as Paradoxes”; and, among the diverse discussions of this issue, see Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (New York: Vintage, 1998); Carole Pateman, “Race, Sex, and Indifference,” in Carole Pateman and Charles Mills, Contract and Domination (Malden, MA: Polity, 2007), 134–64, 151; Haraway, “Fetus,” 198; Gayatri Spivak, “A Literary Representation of the Subaltern: A Woman’s Text From the Third World,” in In Other Worlds (New York: Routledge, 2006), 330–69, 354–55.

  76.     Butler, “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?,” 22, 18. Butler has discussed a number of senses in which reproductive rights can delegitimate some subjects, or render others unthinkable, and institute hierarchies between those included and excluded. The reproductive rights claims of gay couples may come to seem immanent, possible, forthcoming, as distinct from “that [which] will never be eligible for a translation into legitimacy” (ibid., 18). Butler has both sexual illegitimacy and illegibilities of kinship in mind here.

  77.     Berlant’s account of understandings of failures of the will is distinctive for having associated with these with a definition of biopower: “Biopower operates when a hegemonic bloc organizes the reproduction of life in ways that allow political crises to be cast as conditions of specific bodies and their competence at maintaining health or other conditions of social belonging; thus this bloc gets to judge the problematic body’s subjects, whose agency is deemed to be fundamentally destructive. Apartheid-like structures from zoning to shaming are wielded against these populations, who come to represent embodied liabilities to social prosperity of one sort of another.” See Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 105–6.

  78.     See his ubiquitous discussions of power as productivity, for example, in Michel Foucault, “The Meshes of Power,” trans. Gerald Moore, in Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography, ed. Jeremy Crampton and Stuart Elden (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 153–62.

  79.     Michel Foucault, “Body/Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 55–62, 57.

  80.     Michel Foucault, “The Eye of Power,” in Power/Knowledge, 146–65, 162.

  81.     Michel Foucault, “The End of the Monarchy of Sex,” in Foucault Live, Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Columbia University, 1989), 137–55, 143.

  82.     Referring to Lillian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men, he argues that the fact that women had been frustrated and isolated for centuries gave them the “real possibility of constituting a society, of creating a kind of social relation between themselves, outside the social world that was dominated by males.” Michel Foucault, “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity,” in Ethics: Subjectivity, and Truth (Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 1), ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1998), 163–73, 168.

  83.     Foucault, “The End of the Monarchy of Sex,” 144.

  84.     Foucault, “Body/Power,” 56 (translation modified).

  85.     Most obviously, the Australian couple widely reported as having abandoned a twin born with Down syndrome to his Thai surrogate mother, Pattharamon Janbua, in Thailand in 2014, following the latter’s refusal to abort the fetus on their request after it had been diagnosed with Down syndrome. A number of U.S. cases have been reported of clients requesting (or offering additional payment for) termination, selective or otherwise.

  86.     Butler, “Is Kinship Always Heterosexual?,” 21.

  87.     Possibilities depicted phobically by Sylviane Agacinski; see Butler, “Is Kinship Always Heterosexual?,” 36.

  88.     Surrogacy arrangements are not illegal in Australia, but cannot be commercial. However the Australian government will recognize the citizenship of a child born overseas through an international commercial surrogacy arrangement. For a full-length study of commercial international surrogacy clinics in India, see Amrita Pande, Wombs in Labor: Transnational Commercial Surrogacy in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), which includes a comparative summary of national laws as of 2014 (14–15).

  89.     http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127860111 (accessed September 9, 2013), and see Pande, Wombs in Labor, 52. Chapter 3 and the epilogue to Pande’s Wombs in Labor offers extensive analysis of the immediate and longer-term economic context of and impact on Indian surrogates.

  90.     See Pande, Wombs in Labor, chapter 4: “Manufacturing the Perfect Mother-Worker”. Pande also offers an analysis of some of the unintended consequences and small resistances she located in surrogacy work, in an analysis consistent with the mood of the question “can we calculate?”

  91.     For early discussions on Foucault on death, see Judith Butler, “Sexual Inversions,” in John Caputo and Mark Yount, eds., Foucault and the Critique of Institutions (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 81–98; and for early discussions on Foucault on life, see Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012 [1987]), 227, 231.

  92.     See Judith Butler, “What Is Critique: An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue,” in The Judith Butler Reader, ed. Sara Salih (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 302–21.

  93.     See Butler’s commentary on this work: “the theory of responsibility that I sought to sketch in Giving an Account of Oneself … is not meant to be abstracted from social and political contexts and critical interrogation of norms.” Moreover, she adds, “this ethical call emerges insistently from scenes of political conflict” (Butler, “Reply from Judith Butler to Mills and Jenkins,” 190).

  94.     Although Giving an Account of Oneself has, as Butler notes, been interpreted as her contribution to moral philosophy, her own understanding of its argument in this respect is that “questions of moral conduct and inquiry cannot be dissociated from social theory and that neither can be separated from the practice of critique” (“Reply from Judith Butler to Mills and Jenkins,” 191). She has also emphasized that an interrogation of the framing or genealogical or indeed the political conditions of responsibility, of moral conduct, and of ethical struggles and calls need not be seen as invalidating ethical inquiry. Among her explorations of this point, see remarks in “Reply from Judith Butler to Mills and Jenkins” where she distances herself from one possible interpretation of her work: that norms operate through a normalizing violence, resulting in an ineluctable ontological violence attributable to normative constitution (ibid., 183). Even if this were so, she argues, the fact that a resulting ethics (particularly a nonviolent ethics) would then be “necessary but impossible” need not diminish its importance: “perhaps that paradox names the impasse from which any and all ethical struggle emerges” (ibid., 184).

  95.     Butler with Athanasiou, Dispossession, 169, and see 47.

  96.     Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 5, 22, 59.

  97.     Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 106.

  98.     For this reason, one would also need a circumspect response to the conclusions proposed in Cynthia Daniels’s analysis of the twentieth-century U.S. legal history in which personhood and fetal rights have been progressively granted to embryos, in a series of legal cases whose precedents were partially set by parents claiming damages with respect to lost pregnancies resulting from accidents for which other parties (car drivers, state and local agencies who had failed to repair roads) were to blame. As the agent deemed to have suffered the loss in question shifted from the parent to the embryo “itself,” the stage was set for impending legal configurations of women as entities against which the interests of fetuses could also be asserted with the language of criminal neglect, harm, or homicidal intent. The result has been a slew of “fetal homicide” cases against women, prosecution of women for exposing fetuses to substances they ingested, and new configurations of antiabortion measures, such as Arkansas’s recent initiative to assign legal representation to fetuses. The question is whether the solution will be best found, as Daniels proposes, by a move away from seeing women and fetuses as having separate and competing individual interests to reconfiguration of reproduction in terms of collective responsibility. The argument of the present book is that these should not be seen as philosophical or political alternatives but as concurrent regimes. Thus the construction of the woman as a potential criminal actor with respect to an embryo is both a manufacture of private competing interest, but also a manufacture of the competing interest of state sovereignty, and it is a reconfiguration of the state’s avowed, if highly conditional, interest in providing welfare services (as in the assignation of public legal representation to the fetus) and of governmental aspirations to administer heath and ensure optimal life (as seen in cases against women for exposure of fetuses to drugs in utero). Because of the capacity of these regimes to coexist, sometimes reinforcing each other, sometimes jostling against each other, one should be cautious of a solution aiming at a shift from one register to another (for example, a shift from individualized rights to the language and aspirations of collective interest). See Cynthia Daniels, At Women’s Expense: State Power and the Politics of Fetal Rights (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).

  99.     Here we return to the formulation proposed about liberalism by Spivak in Outside in the Teaching Machine, 44–46; and amplified in Brown’s discussion of the conundrum of rights for “articulating and redressing women’s inequality and subordination in liberal constitutional regimes” (Brown, “Suffering Rights as Paradoxes,” 230). One of the distinctive methodological insights of Brown’s account of the rights we “cannot not want” is seen in its multiplication of the senses and dimensions in which there is a paradox of rights. The argument concerns a number of different ways of understanding the problem of paradox. That we would need to think together all such dimensions of paradox is a possibility that emerges as the senses of paradox accumulate. These dimensions (Brown includes reproductive rights) are parsed in the following terms: Rights mitigate but do not resolve subordinating powers. Or they may serve to regulate and distribute subordination. Rights can be “blind” (for example, race blind) and so enhance privilege. Or they can reinscribe a designation of subordination and so enhance subordination by means of that subordination. They differentially empower according to the privilege of those concerned. The rights of some may directly deprive others. They consolidate the fictions and norms of a lacking sovereign individuality. They disavow their own contingency or genealogical conditions. They attach subjects to injury. They deploy a discourse which was founded on the constitutive exclusion of those who later deploy it in their pursuit of inclusion. They may imply that a subordination is intelligible and reducible to its possible redress by rights.

And, among the many contributions of the argument, we see how an intensification of intersectionality is both required but will begin to breach its limits:

As many feminist, postcolonial, queer, and critical race theorists have noted in recent years, it is impossible to pull the race out of gender, or the gender out of sexuality, or the colonialism out of caste out of masculinity out of sexuality. Moreover, to treat these various modalities of subject formation as simply additive or even intersectional is to elide … a production that does not occur in additive, intersectional, or overlapping parts, but through complex and often fragmented histories in which multiple social powers are regulated through and against one another.… the powers producing and situating socially subordinated subjects occur in radically different modalities, which themselves contain different histories and technologies, touch different surfaces and depths, form different bodies and psyches.

(ibid., 236)

100.     Derrida’s rethinking of the event, the decision and the à-venir is a resource here suggesting a means of assuming their possibility, despite their constitutively resisting our capacity to identify their specific taking place. See, for example, his account of the decision: “Who will ever be able to assure us that a decision as such has taken place?” This would be a decision which has ‘truly’ gone through the order of the incalculable. Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” in Drucilla Cornell, Michael Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson, eds., Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (New York: Routledge, 1992), 25. See also his related discussion of justice: “justice again impl[ies] … non-gathering, dissociation, heterogeneity, non-identity with itself, endless inadequation, infinite transcendence. That is why the call for justice is never, never, fully answered. That is why no-one can say ‘I am just.’ ” Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida, ed. John D. Caputo (New York: Fordham University Press, 1996), 17. And for his discussions of the event, as by definition exceeding my horizon of expectation, see Jacques Derrida with Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, trans. Jennifer Bajorek (London: Polity, 2002), 12–13.

101.     See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990); and see Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Vintage, 2010), 340–72, 353–57; and Arnold Davidson, “Ethics as Ascetics: Foucault, the History of Ethics, and Ancient Thought,” in Gary Gutting, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 115–40, 118.