A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation, not on death, but on life.
—Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics Book IV, Proposition 67
Human beings will confront a choice in the not-so-distant future about what death both offers and mandates for postmortem technologies that alter and shape the dead body. The Bisga Man, the living dead person on life-support machinery, the HIV/AIDS corpse, the plastinated dead body, and the necroeconomics of body parts all illustrate how living humans can exert both technical and political control over postmortem conditions. These mostly invisible technologies of the corpse also directly involve three distinct yet interconnected political concepts that explicitly shape the human concept of the human: biopolitics (a politics of life), thanatopolitics (a politics of death), and necropolitics (a politics of the dead body).1 Each of these political concepts appears and often overlaps in any number of postmortem conditions when the politics of life, death, and the dead body collide. The management of HIV/AIDS and the HIV/AIDS corpse was one such example. Carl Lewis Barnes and Gunther von Hagens are two further examples of individuals working in distinctly different time periods, but who still exercised (and exercise) control over the dead body in ways that the other would recognize.
Given these political considerations, it is important to ask this question: What distinctions need to be drawn between biopolitics, thanatopolitics, and necropolitics, in order to recognize their political effects on both extant and emerging technologies of the corpse? A further question is this: What is the relationship of death and the dead body to the sovereign control (i.e., the state, local authorities, national politicians, religious denominations, etc.) of life? Answering these questions means momentarily, if not entirely, abandoning the historically constituted definition of Homo sapiens—an action made possible by contemporary human attempts at technologically controlling both death and the dead body. These human actions involve both authorities at the highest levels of national power and lone individuals seeking to control death’s material reality. In other words, the full scale political production of dead human bodies without death, but also human bodies that resist becoming dead.
Life and death are two of the keywords that make dead body technologies tangible. Each of these terms produces different kinds of political meanings and uses that then explicitly shape a third keyword, the corpse. As Giorgio Agamben explains, the Ancient Greek words for life were in fact two different terms and produced two different meanings. The Ancient Greeks “used two semantically and morphologically distinct terms: zoe, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, humans, or gods) and bios, which signified the form or manner of living peculiar to a single individual or group.”2
The bios, for Agamben, is a form-of-life, and the zoe is the concept of living as a condition common to all beings. Agamben then develops these distinctions about the concept of life in explicating the differences between “naked life” and “form-of-life.” He lays out parameters for the zoe and the bios: “By the term form-of-life ... I mean a life that can never be separated from its form, a life in which it is never possible to isolate something such as naked life.”3 The form-of-life, as different than naked life, can take on many qualifiers to define a human and represent the modes in which life becomes lived. As Agamben suggests, “[T]he voter, the worker, the journalist, the student, but also the HIV-positive, the transvestite, the porno star, the elderly, the parent, the woman.”4
These two distinctions about the word life in biopolitics are useful since similar points should be raised regarding the use of the word death in thanatopolitics. In Ancient Greek, death is translated into different concepts but remains today in two distinct forms: nekros and thanatos.5 Thanatos is death as a concept, as well as the Greek God of death when used as a proper name. Nekros is a corpse and suggests the dead body in all forms.6 It is correct to say that both necro and thanato mean “death,” but each word’s use connotes quite specific conditions. As with zoe and bios, thanatos is death that affects all being and nekros is a form-of-death, as in the human corpse. Nekros defines a kind of body while thanatos surrounds the body as the immanent possibility of death. If a sovereign authority’s biopolitics, per Agamben’s suggestion, focuses on managing life and its thanatopolitics encompasses managing death, then a necropolitics manages dead bodies.7 Stated another way, necropolitics is the political power most explicitly related to dead body technologies, and it only produces, manages, and encompasses human corpses. The necropolitical has little ultimate use for either “life” or “death,” even though these terms intersect over time.
Biopolitics, on the other hand, requires the constant possibility of death as its equal part nemesis and collaborator in maintaining social order. Michel Foucault makes this very point in The History of Sexuality, Volume I, by focusing on the classical sovereign king’s right “to take life or let live.”8 The threat of death, but more importantly the juridical ability to force or cause dying, remains the ultimate power of the modern state. Necropolitics and thanatopolitics, conversely, do not require living for their persistence. To make a person dead means concerns over life are secondary at best. So, for example, a human corpse is not threatened by the prospect of forced living.9
In Foucault’s 1975–1976 Society Must Be Defended lectures, where his concept of biopolitics first appears, he outlines and argues that since modern-day state authorities now almost exclusively intervene to make individuals live (through public health campaigns, reduction of risky behaviors, etc.), death becomes the end point of that same power. Where the sovereign king once made die and let live (following the Foucaultian analysis), now the state made live and let die—but only to a point. Sovereign power may infiltrate and manage life at every turn, but it still remains unable to exert total control over death. He explains: “Death is beyond the reach of power, and power has a grip on it only in general, overall, or statistical terms. Power has no control over death, but it can control mortality. And to that extent, it is only natural that death should now be privatized, and should become the most private thing of all. ... Power no longer recognizes death. Power literally ignores death.”10 For Foucault, an individual’s mortality now represents the simultaneous possibility of both living and dying in any given moment; it functions as the midway point between the sovereign’s attempted control of both life and death.
Implicit in Foucault’s argument that power “ignores death” is the suggestion that sovereign power indirectly acknowledges the impossibility of controlling death by turning a blind eye toward it. Any and all things must be done to keep a person alive; death will be fought until the limit is reached.11 The act of ignoring, however, suggests that whatever is being ignored is, or has necessarily been, recognized as present by authorities. But by ignoring death, sovereign authorities hardly make the end of life or dead bodies disappear. On the contrary, what ignoring death makes inadvertently visible are the technologies that then support the power struggle over mortality between the individual and the state. Dead bodies often emerge from this same struggle, but the human corpse is also biology’s challenge to sovereign power’s limited control over death.
Agamben uses the WWII German internment camp system in Remnants of Auschwitz as a clear historical example that further explicates the challenge posed by death to the control of life. He explains that in the camps “an unprecedented absolutization of the biopower to make live,” intersected “... with an equally absolute generalization of the sovereign power to make die, such that biopolitics coincid[ed] with thanatopolitics.”12 For Agamben, the collision between biopolitics and thanatopolitics in the internment camps suggests a paradox, i.e., that an absolute power to make live and an absolute power to make die cannot simultaneously coexist. When Agamben discusses the biopolitics and the thanatopolitics of the camp, he is also, arguably, discussing the production of dead bodies. The seemingly impossible, simultaneous overlap between biopolitics and thanatopolitics in the camps was then negotiated by the explicit emergence of necropolitics; necropolitical technologies transformed the human body from a living state to a dead state without any acknowledgement of death or dying taking place. Death (in any individualistic or non-industrial-scale production sense of the word) was totally ignored. Necropolitics facilitates this production of dead bodies without death through the radical rejection of death from both biopolitics and thanatopolitics. Agamben describes what the camps accomplished: “In Auschwitz, people did not die; rather, corpses were produced. Corpses without death, non-humans whose decease is debased into a matter of serial production. And, according to a possible and widespread interpretation, precisely this degradation of death constitutes the specific offense of Auschwitz, the proper name of its horror.”13
These bio-thanato-necro relationships, especially in the internment camp context, involve postmortem politics and technologies of the corpse that extend well beyond the Nazi system and into the present day. The danger in solely discussing the camp as part of the Nazi regime is that these internment spaces become overly fixed in that particular historiography. As a new kind of political space constructed by authorities to control the population, the camp represents for Agamben “the inaugural site of modernity: it is the first space in which public and private events, political life and biological life, become rigorously indistinguishable.”14 In Europe and the United States (especially since 2001) the camp becomes the contemporary site for modern life, death, and dead bodies to emerge as explicitly managed biological forces.15 One of the single most important tools for these camps is the language used to explain how prisoners went from living to dead. The US government’s prisoner of war or enemy combatant camps in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Cuba illustrate this very point regarding authorities’ management of death and dead bodies.
These contemporary camps have led to the production of dead bodies where the true cause of death was simultaneously ignored and intentionally hidden. In many situations, an individual died as a direct result of torture and abuse but the camp authorities ignored the death by defining it as a natural, biological event. The American detention camps must rhetorically invoke biopolitics for interrogation purposes (i.e., to make the prisoners live) and not invoke necropolitics, since the publicly stated, governmental purpose for detaining individuals is to protect the nation precisely through the detention and interrogations—not to produce dead bodies. In 2004, Dr. Steven H. Miles from the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota published an important article in The Lancet that detailed how the interrogation practices producing corpses in these camps were in fact hidden to make the deaths appear natural. Miles documents how:
A medic inserted an intravenous catheter into the corpse of a detainee who died under torture in order to create evidence that he was alive at the hospital. ... Death certificates of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq were falsified or their release or completion was delayed for months. Medical investigators either failed to investigate unexpected deaths of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan or performed cursory evaluations and physicians routinely attributed detainee deaths on death certificates to heart attacks, heat stroke, or natural causes without noting the unnatural aetiology of the death. In one example, soldiers tied a beaten detainee to the top of his cell door and gagged him. The death certificate indicated that he died of “natural causes ... during his sleep.”16
These examples illustrate that when the authorities overseeing a camp decide that a dead body is not a living body made dead by the authorities in charge, rather a dead body produced by an always-possible “natural death,” then no wrongful act ever occurred. Yet these same authorities still face a persistent political problem: the presence of the dead body. It is the human corpse, produced either naturally or unnaturally, that momentarily exposes the sovereign’s inability to ignore, hide, and control death. The dead body remains irrefutable, political proof that an individual died. To surmount this dilemma, authorities simply stated that living bodies became dead bodies without any recognizable form-of-death ever occurring. This impossible suggestion becomes possible when the biopolitical power to make live and the thanatopolitical power to make die no longer matter. Necropower then takes hold as the unconditional sovereign power to make the living body dead without death by totally ignoring the possibility of individual or biological death ever occurring. Agamben describes how contemporary sovereign power came to so easily regulate and define human mortality: “This means that today ... life and death are not properly scientific concepts but rather political concepts, which as such acquire a political meaning.”17 Death as both a concept and a reality of biological life ceases to even register as a concern.
What will happen to Homo sapiens’ taxonomic status as the twenty-first century unfolds is a curious situation that underscores the value of discussing the technologies of the corpse alongside these bio-thanato-necro power relationships made so visible by the camp system. While the camp system clearly demonstrates how the power relationships between life, death, and the dead body can function, new kinds of mortality fights are beginning to emerge. Previous conflicts between the individual and the state over the management of a person’s life that took shape in the 1970s will soon become secondary to twenty-first-century political contests over controlling death and the dead body. Not controlling death to attain an immortal life, rather controlling death to make it something different, something less absolute. The possibility of humans technologically controlling death and the corpse, however, is about far more than exerting just political control. Control of death in all its forms, by any authority of any scale and through every means possible, is also the largest remaining obstacle to redefining the “human” as a concept. That new definition of the human necessarily requires both the biopolitical control of life, the thanatopolitical control of death, and the necropolitical control of the dead body.
It is this ongoing political transformation and redefinition of dead body technologies into death prevention technologies (e.g., the necrotechnical revitalization of supposedly dead tissues for transplant) that suggests the control over human mortality is viable. If technologically controlling the dead body is possible, so one argument goes, then why not take a step back in time and physically eradicate dying from ever producing that human corpse. For this life-extension-merging-into-death-prevention concept to work, however, the radical, physical alteration of human mortality also requires an equally significant redefinition of how dead body technologies coincide with political power. These alterations to postmortem definitions, technologies, and politics are well under way, but so too are critiques of their possible taxonomic outcomes.
The technological control of the First World populations’ mortality is being redefined and made increasingly possible as the entire human genome is broken apart and refolded into new combinations of organic biology merged with machines.18 Gilles Deleuze suggested over thirty years ago that these genetic manipulations would produce what he called the superfold, something “borne out of the foldings proper to the chains of genetic code, and the potential of silicon in third-generation machines, as well as by the contours of a sentence in modern literature, when literature ‘merely turns back on itself in an endless reflexivity.’”19 The superfold comes at the end of Deleuze’s book on Michel Foucault in an essay, appropriately titled “Appendix: On the Death of Man and Superman.” A superfold becomes the Superman of Nietzschean description when “forces from within man enter into a relation with forces from the outside, those of silicon which supersedes carbon, or genetic components which supersede the organism ... in each case we must study the operation of the superfold, of which the ‘double helix’ is the best known example.”20 Deleuze suggests that the superfold is the production site of a new kind of human, wherein the mergers of external and internal forces constructing this new kind of being are themselves unstoppable and largely outside public view.21 Deleuze cautions us about these changes: “As Foucault would say, the superman is much less than the disappearance of living men, and much more than a change of concept: it is the advent of a new form that is neither God nor man and which, it is hoped, will not prove worse that its two previous forms.”22
What the superfolded human could potentially become, as a concept and increasing biological reality, is a new kind of taxonomic animal that escapes death and the dead body by technologically stopping physiological deterioration. As an example, groups of people have already formed to produce what the President’s Council on Bioethics23 called “Ageless Bodies” in its report Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness.24 One of these groups, the World Transhumanist Association, seeks public understanding and acceptance of its core mission: “Humanity stands to be profoundly affected by science and technology in the future. We envision the possibility of broadening human potential by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering, and our confinement to planet Earth.”25 More recent writing about Transhumanist projects, especially Mark O’Connell’s 2017 book To Be a Machine: Adventures among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death, document the “deathist” ideology (i.e., a belief system that makes the terror of dying seem acceptable) challenged by Transhumanist beliefs.26
It is worth noting that groups such as the Transhumanists (and the similar Posthumanists) are supported both financially and philosophically by a number of computer technology innovators now focusing on significantly extending human mortality through new kinds of computing machines. Ray Kurzweil, a prominent computer technology researcher and Posthumanist advocate, describes the manipulation of his own body in the following manner: “Genes are sequential programs. ... We are learning how to manipulate the programs inside us, the software of life. And personally, I really believe that what I’m doing is reprogramming my biochemistry.”27 What these ageless bodies portend is not a persistent physical adolescence but the prolongation of living by slowing down and outright stopping the body’s deterioration over time.
And while contemporary online digital technologies and social media platforms exponentially increased during the 2000s, producing ageless human lives in dramatic new ways that theoretically challenged if people really ever died—these developments are temporary. Sooner than later, humans will again change what the internet does, and many dead people will finally disappear. It is also in that same moment of technological change that social media companies will likely become the world’s largest online cemeteries, and I seriously doubt that company executives fully grasp how politically contentious graveyard decommissioning becomes.28
So one of the more important questions to consider is How might technologically augmented ageless bodies actually become “deathless” bodies? Or, potentially, death-resistant bodies that age at an exceptionally slow pace but still encounter decades-long physical deterioration? The President’s Council on Bioethics report addressed these concerns by highlighting human mortality as a primary “Ethical Issue” given the steep overall decline in “untimely deaths.” Yet, through the advent of modern antibiotics, life-support technology, and preventive medicine, a “stretched rubber band” life span might actually emerge. The report notes: “Under such circumstances, death might come to seem a blessing. And in the absence of fatal illnesses to end the misery, pressures for euthanasia and assisted suicide might mount.”29 The President’s Council on Bioethics underscored, perhaps unintentionally, a primary biological concern with any human life extension: dying often becomes preferable to living at all costs.
Current laws that attempt to limit an individual from choosing to die may in fact become obsolete as suicide’s current definitions simply become a new kind of normalized death, minus the associated legal or social repercussions. What biopolitical threats can authorities make when the durability of the human body is exponentially prolonged and death ceases to be undesirable? In the event that ageless bodies do become prevalent, an individual’s choice to not supplement or change his or her body could itself be considered choosing a form of death. The question then becomes how much choice an individual will be given as a citizen of a nation and subject to its laws regarding how long to live or what to do with his or her body to prevent aging. Or, could permanent living itself become a new kind of punishment from the state? Not a lifetime sentence in a prison but a person made to live when in fact that body would otherwise die.30
The underlying technological and political issue for individuals, groups, and state authorities attempting to control mortality and ignore death is a seemingly overlooked but all the more fundamental point about human biology. George Canguilhem succinctly explained this phenomenon: “Life tries to win against death in all the senses of the word to win, foremost in the sense of winning is gambling. Life gambles against growing entropy.”31 Yet the human gamble with death means that both the individual and the state will make choices in the hopes of beating the biological odds against an inevitably dead body. If, and when, total control of death and dead bodies becomes the normalized power of human individuals or state authorities (a significant bio-thanato-necro power struggle unto itself), then the “human being” as a category of animal life will have crossed a threshold into a whole new state of existence. Deleuze’s “death of Man” might actually become the successful rejection of human death through the total control of a humanly understood biological mortality.
Death has always been the human body’s final act against its biology being pushed too far. The human corpse, as the end result of that action, is the one body that reminds individuals to think about death—if only in the simplest of terms. Total control of death, its administration and undoing, suggests not the end of dying but certainly the end of the human. In The Open, Agamben evokes Heidegger to suggest two potential outcomes for the future human: “(a) posthistorical man no longer preserves his own animality as undisclosable, but rather seeks to take it on and govern it by means of technology; (b) man, the shepherd of being, appropriates his own concealedness, his own animality, which neither remains hidden nor is made an object of mastery, but is thought as such, as pure abandonment.”32
It is clear that we humans are in the midst of this first scenario as the technologies of the human corpse begin encroaching on death and working toward the prolongation of mortality. This fundamental shift in the necro-thanato-bio relationship suggests that at some point in the not-so-distant future the technological control of human life will have run its course. Humans will then necessarily abandon the concept of the “human” in the very moment that the second scenario comes into being. In the simplest of terms, abandoning the human necessarily means questioning the most fundamental assumptions about what makes the historically and mortally defined human being both a living and a dead body. Those questions will scrutinize the technologies of dead bodies as death becomes embraced rather than hidden within the animality of the human. It would seem that one day “pure abandonment” will describe a moment in the life of the human wherein Homo sapiens are no longer governed by a politics that makes live, makes die, or makes dead bodies. In that moment, none of these concepts will apply.
09/08/2018
Watching My Sister Die → Airports
I’ve been in Airports all summer, little sister
So many trips, I don’t remember all the times
or places
But I remember where I was when I got the
call
the one that said you’d died.
And I’m not crying as much
but I’m still sad
The time is bending
it feels both like yesterday and centuries ago
when I held your dead hand.
And said goodbye, one final time.
I feel like I’m running out of ways to talk about
you
little sister
And it’s partly because your lived story ends at 43.
But we’ll always have airports.