Not Fostering Life, and Leaving to Die*
Judith Revel
What follows is a strange kind of text. It is on the one hand an attempt at philosophical reflection; my profession, after all, is teaching and research in contemporary philosophy. But it is on the other hand an expression of indignation that has little to do with my professional qualifications. My indignation has for some time come in response to the litany of horrors, churned out by the televised news every single day at dinnertime, that make up the situation of the refugees in Europe and at its gates: at the borders of Macedonia and Hungary; in the snows of the Serbian winter; in all of the fleeting encampments where human beings are cramped in mud and misery; across the now-familiar landscapes blocked by walls, fences, and wire; and, of course, along the terrible route that crosses the Strait of Sicily to arrive at the island of Lampedusa.
The question that arises from all this is the following: does the toolbox of concepts that Foucault employs in his 1978–1979 Collège de France lectures, Naissance de la biopolitique, help us understand the manner in which the European countries have nearly unanimously decided to administer, manage, and govern these men and women whom we call the migrants, for fear of giving them the status of refugees that they seek? Or is there, on the contrary, an emergence of a new paradigm of government, one that demands that we return to older formulations in Foucault’s work? I have in mind here particularly the final pages of The Will to Knowledge entitled “The Right of Death and Power over Life,” written in 1976, or the final lesson of Society Must Be Defended, given at the Collège de France on March 17 of the same year.
In both of these 1976 writings, Foucault points to a transformation, an inversion of his formulation of the sovereign right “to put to death or let live.” Between the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, the inverse formula, “to foster life or leave to die,” became characteristic of a new system of political right. This system was reorganized both by the disciplinary governmentality of individuals put to work—that is, the anatomato-politics of bodies—and by a new level of government superimposed on the old, which Foucault calls a biopolitics of the human species, or a government of populations.
The question I would like to pose is extremely simple: Are we still faced with the governmental formula of “fostering life or leaving to die”? In order to answer this question, we will need to take into consideration the prolongation of these problems raised in 1976. We find this prolongation in Foucault’s Naissance de la biopolitique, where he attempts to extend his reflections into the contemporary era through the double analysis of both German ordoliberalism and American neoliberalism (in the courses between March 14 and April 4, 1979). We also need to dwell on Foucault’s attempt to create a model of the internal rationality of human behavior that he infers from certain theories of human capital. Finally, we take particularly serious Foucault’s analysis of the emergent figure of homo economicus. A certain number of elements in these reflections permit us to speculate that Foucault does provide us with a functional framework for understanding the governmental rationality that is applied today to what we call the “influx of migrants” to the south and east of Europe. These are the elements that demand our attention.
Let us begin with a banality that is nonetheless indispensable if Foucault’s undertakings are not to remain opaque: history never repeats itself. If it does indeed “advance,” it does so following a regime of historicity that excludes all forms of linearity or teleology: It is filled with discontinuities and change, jumps and ruptures. But these ruptures do not simply appear as substitutions. Far more often, they consist of simultaneous permanence and transformation, making them difficult to grasp historically and analyze politically. At the end of The Will to Knowledge, Foucault writes that “the old power of death that symbolized sovereign power was now carefully covered up [recouverte] by the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life.”1 Note that Foucault writes “covered up,” and not “replaced.” What he’s describing is both a stratification and an effect of reinvigoration, or reorganization, of the regime of government, starting with its final historical “stratum”—that is, what has emerged—and this represents a profound discontinuity. At the same time, this discontinuity is in no way a simple substitution. It opens up a general reconfiguration or redistribution of the economy of government beginning with what is new, and not just a logic of erasing what is old. In the same manner, this simultaneity between what is added and what is already there is in the background of Foucault’s course on March 17, 1976 at the Collège de France, three years before the biopolitics lectures:
I believe that one of the most massive transformations in political right in the twentieth century has consisted in the substitution—though I don’t mean substitution so much as completion—of this old right of sovereignty, “to put to death or let live,” by another. This newer right does not erase the first, but rather penetrates it, traverses it, and modifies it. This is the right, the exactly inverse power, to “foster life” or to “leave to die.”2
Returning to our original question, can we understand what still works and what no longer works in the double-management of biopower—both individualized (disciplinary anatomato-politics of productive bodies) and massified (biopolitical management of populations)—when trying to analyze the manner in which our governments are directing the movements of migrants? Or rather, is there something else to be added today as the tangible sign of a redefined and deeply transformed rationality?
Things become all the more complex in the pages Foucault devotes to American neoliberalism in the 1978–1979 lectures. Here, Foucault identifies a number of elements of the transformation of contemporary governmentality since the initial moment of its liberal birth. At least two elements seem important. The first consists not only in confirming the centrality of labor in the value of commodities (this we had already learned from Ricardo), but also in reformulating both what is meant by labor today, and the processes of economic valorization in which labor takes place. Based on the analyses of Gary Becker, Foucault hypothesizes that we have passed from a commodity economy, founded on the commodification of labor-power, to a service economy, where man himself becomes his own capital. The second shift is simultaneous with and linked to the first, and it consists of a translation to this first shift on the level of government. It is no longer a question of governing bodies, but rather of governing conduct. Here, we see the passage from the extraction of “productive services” from bodies literally “attached” to their labor—which Foucault analyzed in its classic form in certain pages of Discipline and Punish—to a new type of extractivism founded on the management, the maximization, the pillaging of the (social) conduct of the workers. The worker is no longer considered exclusively as an object of extraction, but rather as an active economic subject. It is this new conception that Foucault takes as the basis of what he calls homo economicus: the productive subject, at the same time producer and capital.
The problem of Gary Becker and the Chicago School in general is to formulate, to calculate by anticipation, the possible models of behavioral rationality given this notion of the subject: a subject that not only produces capital, but produces because it is capital.
Near the end of Foucault’s lecture on March 14, 1979, there is a passage where after having enumerated the foundational elements of the notion of “human capital,” Foucault inserts a strange paragraph:
In the elements making up human capital we should also include mobility, that is to say, an individual’s ability to move around, and migration in particular. Because migration obviously represents a material cost, since the individual will not be earning while he is moving, but there will also be a psychological cost for the individual establishing himself in his new milieu. There will also be at least a loss of earnings due to the fact that the period of adaptation will certainly prevent the individual from receiving his previous remunerations, or those he will have when he is settled. All these negative elements show that migration has a cost. What is the function of this cost? It is to obtain an improvement of status, of remuneration, and so on, that is to say, it is an investment. Migration is an investment; the migrant is an investor. He is an entrepreneur of himself who incurs expenses by investing to obtain some kind of improvement. The mobility of a population and its ability to make choices of mobility as investment choices for improving income enable the phenomena of migration to be brought back into economic analysis, not as pure and simple effects of economic mechanisms which extend beyond individuals and which, as it were, bind them to an immense machine which they do not control, but as behavior in terms individual enterprise, of enterprise of oneself with investments and incomes.3
And at the end of the lectures, Foucault adds that innovation, as a possible resolution of the problem of the falling rate of profit, is not (or is not only) linked to competition. As he explains:
If there is innovation, that is to say, if we find new things, discover new forms of productivity, and make technological innovations, this is nothing other than the income of a certain capital, of human capital, that is to say, of the set of investments we have made at the level of man himself.4
Finally, he returns obliquely to the problem of migration (which he seemed in a sense to have decontextualized or rendered abstract, taking it out of any concrete determination):
In the same way, the problems of the economy of the Third World can also be rethought on the basis of human capital. And you know that currently an attempt is being made to rethink the problem of the failure of Third World economies to get going, not in terms of the blockage of economic mechanisms, but in terms of insufficient investment in human capital.5
Nearly forty years after Foucault uttered them, I believe these three quotations are indispensable for reflecting on the urgency of our present. We are no longer in 1979; our time is neither that of Gary Becker nor that of Foucault. Foucault is of course not Becker, but they nonetheless reflect (though in politically opposing ways) on the same historical situation, one that is fundamentally different from our own today. It is the gap between their world and ours that we must examine. Hence a series of questions that we cannot ignore. First, are we not, at the gates of Europe today, in the midst of leaving behind “fostering life or leaving to die,” and adopting a contrary formula? That is, if not the old formula of sovereign right (“put to death or let live”), one that might indicate a transformation of today’s governmental rationality: “not fostering life, and leaving to die.”
Another novel element is that if this new rationality at times still retains the validity of “fostering life” in the management of migrants (precisely because a transformation is a recomposition, not a substitution or an erasure), it implies at the same time a shift in scale. The restriction of this “fostering life” to a regime of naturalizing life is no longer what Foucault describes when he speaks of biopolitics, because this naturalization seems to have become autonomous. Recall what Foucault had to say on the subject in 1976, in The Will to Knowledge:
This transformation had considerable consequences. It would serve no purpose here to dwell on the rupture that occurred then in the pattern of scientific discourse and on the manner in which the twofold problematic of life and man disrupted and redistributed the order of the classical episteme. If the question of man was raised—insofar as he was a specific living being, and specifically related to other living beings—the reason for this is to be sought in the new mode of relation between history and life: in this dual position of life that placed it at the same time outside history, in its biological environment, and inside human historicity, penetrated by the latter’s techniques of knowledge and power.6
It is precisely this naturalization that is literally “taking off” today, stripping the natural out of politics, and as a result, the natural becomes autonomized.
Let’s take an example of particular concern for the question of migrants. In Humanitarian Reason, Didier Fassin observes that a sick body has more chances of obtaining the (political) status of refugee than a healthy body. Humanitarian reason has become that of biological life—biological life not (or no longer) understood as the instrument of political management of populations, nor as the condition of possibility of the productivity of bodies put to work—this is what for Foucault constitutes biopolitics. But now this has become an end in itself. The greater the coefficient of reduction of a man to the biological (e.g., through the exclusive consideration of the pathologization of the body), the greater the humanitarian response—in other words, the more the human is taken as a political and social subject. Fassin provides as an example the French juridical architecture, the circular of June 24, 1997, which states that the irregular situation of certain foreigners can be reexamined precisely when “the foreigner residing permanently [habituellement résident] in France is afflicted by a serious pathology requiring medical treatment.” Thus, legal regularization is founded not on the length of irregular residence in France, but rather on the presence of a grave pathology affecting the body of the claimant. One year later, the law of May 11, 1998 made this measure permanent by modifying Article 12 of the 1945 ordinance: “relative to the entry and stay of foreigners and the right of asylum.” In short, the sick body merits permanent papers and work authorization. We have passed from the right to asylum based on a protocol of compassion to a biologization of the political and social body of the migrant. The legitimacy of requests for asylums now demands this as its price.
One is reminded of a remark by Levinas in Totality and Infinity, which Fassin takes as the epigraph of his book: “Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality.”7 Though it might be worth updating for the present: “Everyone will readily agree that it is of the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by rationality.”
I would like to conclude with a number of questions raised by the above discussion, before proposing a brief sketch of a hypothesis.
First question: How can we explain that “fostering life” is no longer recognized today as the general rule? In other words, the fact of assuring a qualitative and quantitative augmentation of human capital (once again, not only the possibility of putting bodies to work, but also of extracting economic value from life as a whole, whether social, relational, linguistic, affective, or cognitive), no longer holds even in the analysis of the neoliberals themselves.
Any responses to this question founded on the supposition of a shortage of labor fail to satisfy, because they only consider one specific (Fordist) type of labor, reduced in effect by increasing automation to a process of production. There is, however, a growing socialization of another type of labor. This decidedly post-Fordist labor, even from the perspective of capitalism itself, calls for the ever-growing integration of the “atoms” of human capital, of those who are investors in themselves, of the incarnations of homo economicus that Foucault not only describes, but also recognizes in the figure of migrants. Migrants are investors just like anyone else, even more than anyone else if one considers the radicality of the risk that goes into their self-investment.
Neither can we accept the vulgate of objections founded on the supposed costs of welcoming and directing the waves of migrants. These costs are often explained—in well-known formulations by economists, demographers, and sociologists—either as costs of the demographic catastrophe awaiting the aging countries of the “first world,” or as the price of that other catastrophe in which the demographic base works alongside mutations of the labor market, presaging the inevitable collapse of retirement systems. One never dares think of the actual cost of maintaining security and “defense” policies along Europe’s borders, or the billions Europe has sent to Turkey to persuade it to serve as a retention center. Not to mention the exorbitant costs that would be imposed by the literal implosion of Europe on this question of migrants, if we allow the recent emergences of nationalism and neo-fascism to intensify.
Why, then, this inverse logic that is indefensible not only in terms of the indignation many of us feel in the name of our common humanity, but also in the terms of neoliberalism itself? And why, rather than manage the migrant influxes as one might have done in the past, have we simply decided to block them? Why have we accepted it as more rational to collect the corpses washed up on the beach rather than save living men and women? Why does death capture our attention more than intervention? Has biopolitics actually become a “thanato-politics”?
To this question, I have no complete response, but only a fragment of a hypothesis.
I believe that the moment that explains, at least partially, the move from “fostering life or leaving to die” to “not fostering life, and leaving to die” is a profound inflection in the relationship of politics to time. This transformation deserves our attention, to the extent that it is grounded in three radical changes: the exit from the temporality of economic cycles for a large part of the world, that is, crisis as a new economic and political temporality; the imposition of an extremely short temporality corresponding to an essentially electoral governmentality, at least in the short term; and finally, in a parallel manner, the installation of a governmentality “without limits” in the uncertain space of juridical exceptionality stretched to the extreme. This last element is undoubtedly all the more “without limits” the more we continue progressively constructing the conditions of its paradoxical constitutionalization. In summary, economically speaking, time has flown off its hinges; politically, it has split paradoxically into two opposed and contradictory paths. Political temporality has on the one hand been compressed, squeezed “just in time” into elections and polls, and on the other hand dilated into an unlimited state of emergency. So “not fostering life, and leaving to die” has become not only less onerous in the very short term (from the point of view of the real cost of foreseeable interventions), but outright profitable from an electoral point of view. But in the long term, the political, economic, and human costs quickly reveal themselves to be monstrous. No one can ignore them, but everyone makes certain to forget them. After all, confronting them involves another temporality from that of the immediate present. It’s the next electoral cycle, so what does it matter? Après nous le déluge.
Time is off its hinges, or as Hamlet put it, “Time is out of joint.” Our humanity is not far from slipping out of our grasp, but we have become too blind to understand that our being as men and women is at stake. The reinvention of hospitality, the construction of a community of men and women—these will arise only through a reappropriation of political time, and this reappropriation is infinitely urgent. What is needed is a time of living, a time of doing, a time of producing and dreaming, a time of constructing and inventing—a reclamation of the depths of history as a whole.
NOTES
* This chapter was translated from the French by Jacob Hamburger.
1. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction (La volonté de savoir), trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 139–40. (Translator’s note: To follow Revel’s discussion, I have changed the word “supplanted” in Hurley’s translation to “covered up.”)
2. Michel Foucault, Il faut défendre la société, Cours au Collège de France, 1975–1976 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1997), 214.
3. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, ed. Michel Senellart (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 230.
4. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 231.
5. Ibid.
6. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 143.
7. Cited in Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 1.