Biopolitics of Security

Michael Dillon 

  Michael Dillon is Professor of Politics at the University of Lancaster, UK. His books include: Politics of Security: Towards a Political Philosophy of Continental Thought (1996); Foucault on Politics, Security and War (2008; co-ed with Andrew Neal); The Liberal Way of War: Killing to Make Life Live (2009, with Julian Reid); and, Biopolitics of Security in the 21st Century. A Biopolitical Analytics of Finitude (December, 2009)

“Nothing is more important than a revision of the concept of security as a basic principle of state politics.” (Giorgio Agamben, 2001)

“The game of freedom and security is at the heart of this new governmental reason….[t]he problems of what I shall call the economy of

power peculiar to liberalism are internally sustained as it were, by this interplay of freedom and security.”

(Michel Foucault, 2008: 65)

Introduction:

There are now several schools of biopolitics. In addition to those inspired by the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, others include that of Paolo Virno (2005), Negri and Hardt (2000; 2004) and, more recently, Roberto Esposito (2008). This chapter leaves the detailed task of differentiating between these different schools of biopolitics for another occasion. It nonetheless does offer a summary overview of the two most prominent accounts of biopolitics. The first of these is the original one supplied by Foucault. The other is that supplied by Agamben. In explaining how Foucauldean biopolitics fundamentally differs from Agamben’s, the chapter also indicates how, taking these different projects as their inspiration, Foucauldean biopolitics focus on the micro-practices and governing technologies of contemporary biopolitics, exploring, in addition, how these change along with changing accounts of the nature of life and of the economy of species existence to which life is reduced

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biopolitically, while the biopolitical analysis inspired by Agamben tends, instead, to focus on the nihilism of modern politics, the juridical reduction of ‘natural’ life to bare life and the ramifications of the claim that the juridical exception is the rule and that ‘the [concentration] camp’ is the nomos of rule (Agamben 1999; 2000).

Foucauldean biopolitics has in many respects, however, been somewhat overshadowed by Agamben’s in the last ten years. Although Foucault’s The Order of Things (1989) first presaged, and The History of Sexuality (1981) first broached, the idea of biopolitics for the Anglo-American world, the lecture series in which he extensively explored biopolitics have only recently been published and translated into English (Foucault 2003; 2007; and 2009). For that reason, perhaps, Foucault’s account of biopolitics remains in some respects less well explored in the English speaking world than that of Agamben’s; and this despite the significantly more esoteric and philosophically difficult account which Agamben provides. Whereas Foucault’s account is genealogical, clearly influenced in addition by Nietzsche’s emphasis on the importance of relations of force, Agamben’s biopolitics is very much more concerned with interrogating “the originary” relation of law to life. In consequence, Agamben’s biopolitics is driven much more by his engagement with the German jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt and, in particular, with pursuing Walter Benjamin’s critique of Schmitt’s theory of the correlation of sovereign power, the law and the exception (Benjamin 2004; Schmitt 2008; 2007; 2005a). “In fact,” as Catherine Mills observes in her excellent study of The Philosophy of Agamben, Agamben’s, “account of biopolitics is more accurately read as an attempt to fulfil or complete Benjamin’s critique of Schmitt’s theory of sovereignty than it is an attempt to ‘complete’ Foucault” (Mills 2009).

Foucault’s biopolitics is thus a direct extension of his genealogical analysis of the diverse and heterogeneous domain of modern power relations, in which the issue of the originary nature of things is displaced by differentiation of the concrete micro-practices through which historically different apparatuses or technologies of modern power and governance work. Agamben’s project is instead a direct extension of his preoccupation with language (Agamben 1993; 1999c), sustained critique of the nihilism of western metaphysics (Agamben 1991; 1999b), the workings of its ‘anthropological machine’ (Agamben 2004), and a certain politics of the messianic (Agamben 2005b). If Foucault’s project can therefore be said to be that of interrogating the power of truth-telling in the modern period, and the collateral effects which different orders of

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power/knowledge have on the simultaneous empowerment and subjection of the modern subject, Agamben’s project is in many ways more traditionally philosophical; however idiomatic every philosophical voice may be, and Agamben’s is quite distinctive.

Less concerned with the ethos and power/knowledge of truth telling, and of different figurations of the truth-teller, as is Foucault, Agamben is more concerned with the taking place of language as such (Mills 2009). Deeply influenced also therefore by Heidegger, as Foucault admitted that he was too, the Heidegger in Agamben is, however, not leavened by Nietzsche in the way that it is in Foucault. Neither is Agamben’s account of language the same as that of Heidegger’s, or of what he regards as the negativity of the metaphysical tradition as a whole in the context of which he would still locate Heidegger’s account of language. Agamben’s concern for history also conflates more than it discriminates. It is the history of western metaphysics, its nihilism and the prospect of a new taking place of the experience of language in which the poem, especially, for example, is said to reveal, “the goal of its proud strategy: to let language finally communicate itself, without remaining unsaid in what is said.” (Agamben in Mills: 40)

Neither Foucault nor Agamben is enamoured of western politics and power relations, therefore, but that does not mean that they share a common modus operandus or, indeed, share the same terrain of enquiry. Despite Agamben’s insistence in Homo Sacer (1998) that he is following Foucault, an insistence he repeats in his most recent work Il Regno e la Gloria (2008), their biopolitical analytics, and in particular their biopolitical analytics of the biopolitics of security, differ substantially. It would therefore be careless to pursue the biopolitics of security through conflating the projects of these two thinkers (Genel 2006; Ojakangas 2005).

In short – brutally and therefore incautiously short - if Foucault’s project may be said to be ‘power’, Agamben’s might be said to be ‘language’. If the analytics of power led Foucault to language in the form of orders of discourse and knowledge, the experience of the taking place of language takes Agamben, among other concerns, to novel conceptions of identity, ethos and community, as well as to a certain account of ‘the messianic’ in his reflections on ethics and governance. If Foucault, finally, calls for the unfinished work of freedom to be continued through experimentation in what it is to be a subject or a self, Agamben’s calls for “an experimentum linguae, or a new experience of the taking place of language” (Mills 2009: 133). Their projects, and the biopolitics of security in particular

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which follow from them, nonetheless do intersect at a variety of key points, including: sovereignty, biological being; emergency; economy; and, ontopolitics. And they do so in a variety of ways. We will return to these, in the conclusion, once some basic clarification of their different trajectories of thought, and the implications that these have for the biopolitical security analysis, have been clarified a little more.

Agamben and Foucault

Whereas Foucault did address himself directly to the re-problematisation of security which takes place when security discourses and practices also take the biological properties of human species as their referent object of security (2007), Agamben does not directly address the biopolitics of security as a ‘politics’ of security. His work has nonetheless influenced many concerned with, for example, the camp as the nomos of western society and security politics (Diken and Lausten 2005; Edkins 2003), with the vast increase in powers of surveillance by western governments in response to their widespread hyperbolicisation of security (Lyon 2006), and in the unlawful holding of suspected ‘terrorists’ in a wide variety of ‘camps’ globally, on the grounds of security, the most notorious of which has been Guantanamo (Fleur 2005; Gregory 2006; Munster 2004; Neal 2006; Scheuerman 2006; Thurschwell 2008). Or, at least, Agamben showed little interest in doing so until the hyperbolicisation of security following 9/11. In a celebrated news paper article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 20th September 2001, in which he also draw directly on Foucault’s 1970s lectures, Agamben observed:

“Today we face extreme and most dangerous developments in the thought of security. In the course of a gradual neutralization of politics and the progressive surrender of traditional tasks of the state, security becomes the basic principle of state activity. What used to be one among several definitive measures of public administration until the first half of the twentieth century, now becomes the sole criterium of political legitimation. The thought of security bears within it an essential risk. A state which has security as its sole task and source of legitimacy is a fragile organism; it can always be provoked by terrorism to become itself terroristic” (Agamben 2001, http://www.egs.edu/faculty/agamben/agamben-on-security-and-terror.html, last referenced 26th October, 2008)

For Agamben, then, biopolitics of security may be said to be an integral, violent and practical, expression of the nihilism of western metaphysics.

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For Foucault, however, it remains characteristically distinctive of a specific regime of power, that of liberal governance, in which security and freedom are, moreover, intimately correlated in the establishment of a mutable but extraordinarily effective dispositif of power.

Neither thinker is, of course, concerned with making security practices more effective or powerful. Their target is not satisfying the insatiable demand of security practitioners for more effective means of securing; however that securing is problematised; whatever its object; and, however it is pursued. Quite the contrary each, albeit differently, is concerned with detailing how the project of securing is foundational politically, how it is expressive of distinctive operations of power and what is lost, excluded or elided from the human experience, in the process. Here, in both of their thought, the analytic of security does not aim at applying more powerful economic metrics of truth to the many different project of securing. Each is focused ultimately on indicting the de-politicising politicising which security practices relentlessly enact in their different ways. In consequence each, albeit differently, provides a basis of fundamental dissent from our contemporary biopolitics of security.

Whereas Foucault’s target is explicitly historical, it is liberal governmentality that he expressly sees as peculiarly characteristic of biopolitics; Agamben’s target is the western tradition of law and sovereignty as such. In neither instance however can a Foucauldean or an Agambenian analytics of the biopolitics of security remain at the level of mere description. In that sense, these biopolitics of security are always already critical enterprises. But how they are ‘critical’, indeed if they are critical at all by some measures of what ‘critique’ means (Neocleous 2008), remains a basic matter of discussion and dispute.

One final introductory, and indeed obvious, point to make is that the nature of nature, specifically, here the nature of human nature, is traditionally taken for the foundation of politics and rule; consider classically, for example, Aristotle, Machiavelli and Hobbes.1 Biopolitics thus refers to the ways in which politics and power are instituted and operate when this, politically foundational, ‘nature of human nature’ is taken to lie in the biological properties that human being displays as a form of species existence (Foucault), or when a production of biopolitical life as bare life lies at the centre of the operation of sovereign law (Agamben). 1 With the significant caveat that this point would have to be detailed in relation especially to Foucault’s discussion of the nature of natures, both ‘natural’ and ‘human’, in The Order of Things (1989). For a fascinating reflection on the nature of nature as hidden, however, see, Pierre Hadot (2006)

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Biopolitics of Security: Foucault

“…only when we know what this governmental regime called liberalism was, will we be able to grasp what biopolitics is.”

(Foucault 2008: 96, n. 5)

One cannot understand Foucault’s account of biopolitics – and thereby of the biopolitics of security – unless one first addresses that generic understanding of power which lies behind Foucault’s analytic of liberal governmentality in particular.

Foucault teaches that power is less a commodity that can be held than a force which comes into circulation when human beings – which he considers in his way to be free beings – come into relation with one another. To be crude, for Foucault, power as a force that circulates is more like electricity than it is like a mechanical device or a weapon. From Foucault’s perspective, human beings are also extraordinarily good conductive material for the generation and circulation of power. However energising and conductive they may be, however, it is also fair to say that Foucault does not think that human beings exist for the sole purpose of generating and conducting power. Whatever they are – and, since Foucault scrupulously avoids saying what they are, I suspect he thinks that the question is not only radically undecidable but also the wrong place to begin any analytics of power if it does not also recognise that the way the question is posed and answered are radically historical - humans are not mere creatures or epiphenomena of power relations.

If all conductive material displays resistance to the power that it conducts, one might therefore say that for Foucault human beings are no different. Human conductivity to any individual form of power therefore also appears in Foucault as being restricted by the resistance that this very ‘material’ also displays. Humans resist power out of the composition of the radically undecidable material of which they seem to be comprised. Posing the question ‘Why resist?’ to Foucault, therefore poses the wrong question. The right questions for Foucault are: ‘Which resistance?’ and, “How is resistance manifested?” In the process, the human’s capacity to continuously also generate new power relations, by generating different grids of intelligibility for themselves, is always also in play. Finally, Foucault considers that power relations are not only also diverse and changing, the traction they gain is always partial and fallible. When he rests from analysing the operations of power, Foucault seems most

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interested in those practices which excite human beings into exploring the exercise of their undecidability and acting it out in novel ways. This is what he calls the unfinished work of freedom.   In general terms, then, we can characterise Foucault’s understanding of power as relational and strategic. Relational, because it arises in the context of networks of relations established when human beings relate to one another and to ‘things’, strategical, because relations of power are structured by different generative principles of strategic formation.2 The result is not only a field of formation, in which the dynamics of the logic of strategic formation can be conjugated, but what Foucault also calls a ‘field of intervention’. Fields of intervention are where the problems addressed by different strategic formations of power find their specific problematisation. These in turn allow power to discover what Foucault also calls their specific ‘points of application’. A good example of a site or point of application brought into play through the exercise of biopolitical regulation exercised through biopower would be ‘population’. It is the one to which he first gave most attention, but biopower may find many points of application according to which biological features the human as species life may be said to display: for example, what is now widely said to be its complex adaptive behaviour.

In the instantiation of the political rationalities, and in the operation of the governing technologies, of biopolitics, Foucault also adds, new surfaces of friction arise and new fields of adversity emerge. He clarifies this specific observation at a number of points in The Birth of Biopolitics especially. While discussing the developments which led to the emergence of German neo-liberalism towards the end of the 1930s, specifically the thinkers of the Freiburg School, for example, Foucault explains that, “Nazism enabled them to define their field of adversity that they had to define and cross in order to reach their objective.” (106) In the process they “had to define not just the set of adversaries they could come up against in achieving this objective, but, fundamentally, the general system which this objective and the pursuit of this objective could clash.” (106-107) Tracing the formation of an adversarial field in this way, he also noted how, in response to German economic policy after 1948, new surfaces of friction emerged which called for a multiplication of juridical interventions.

This Foucauldean analytic is not Schmittean. Foucault is not examining any declaration of exception following the identification of an existential enemy on the basis of which the state may be founded. He is instead 2 Foucault gives a concise account of what he means by strategy on page 42 of The Birth of Biopolitics.

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working through how a new formulation of economy was developed by neo-liberals, German and later American anarcho-liberals’, how that account of economy differed from classical economics and how it also led to a transformation of biopolitical governmental regulation; notably founding politics, the new German state (The Federal Republic of Germany) and the EEC, on a new account of economy. Here Foucault argues that the political economy of the classical age was eclipsed by the neo-liberal revision of the nature of economic activity. The market economy – where the market emerges as a kind of truth-telling machine (Foucault 2008: 32-33) - became foundational not just to the establishment but also to the legitimation of the new state. That state thereby became an economic polity rather than the locus of a political economy (Foucault 2008). Not without failure and dissent, the idea continues to inform the EU today.

A third generic point needs emphasising. For Foucault, modern power relations are also distinguished by the fact that they seek to ground themselves in truth, specifically the regional truths or rationalities of their referent objects or fields of intervention and points of application. Thus, for example, the rationality of sovereign power in the modern period was raison d’etat. Correspondingly we might say that biopower seeks to ground itself in ‘the truth’ of human being as biological being and more generally now, in the 21st century, in the ‘informationalised truths’ and ‘economic truths’ of what is now said to be a living being as such; life as a dynamic, informationally constituted and driven, productive and re-productive bioeconomy. That power/knowledge revolves thus around its referent object does not mean that power/knowledge succeeds in grasping its referent object. Curiously the object, the epistemic object of power/knowledge, continuously escapes or otherwise remains fugitive to the very processes that seek epistemically to fix it (Rheinberger, 1997). There is excess and an exteriority here that incites power/knowledge precisely in evading the will to power/knowledge.

A final generic point therefore concerns the traction that relations of power get on their referent objects. Dispositifs of power, their very fields of intervention and points of application, are never without controversy and dispute. They fail to gain traction, their techniques misfire, break-down and have unintended consequences. Indeed, this is another way of speaking about the emergence of countervailing ‘fields of adversity’ and ‘surfaces of friction’. Such governmental assemblages are always projects, rather than accomplishments, and they transform their very own conditions of emergence: “So we arrive, if you like…at the idea that in the end this liberal art of government introduces by itself or is the victim

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from within [of] what could be called crises of governmentality.” (Foucault 2008: 68)3 Discussing the conditions that precipitated the transformation of classical economics by neo-liberal economics, Foucault observes, for example, how “the liberal art of government [had become] intimidated, so to speak, by its own consequences.” (Foucault 2008: 115)

Despite calling for the dethroning of the sovereign conception of power, Foucault also maintains that what he calls the ‘royal questions’ of power continue to set the scene for the operation of the plural and diverse modes of modern power relations, including those of liberal biopolitics. And here is another generic point to make. Opening his Birth of Biopolitics lectures on 10 January 1979, Foucault announced that: “I would like to continue with what I began to talk about last year, that is to say to retrace the history of what could be called the art of government” (2008: 1). Not only is biopolitics an historical rather than a juridical phenomenon for Foucault, he associates it very directly with the liberal art of government.

In his earlier lectures on Society Must Be Defended (2003) and Security Territory Population (2007), Foucault had detailed how biopolitics arises as one of the principal means by which liberal response to sovereign absolutism originally sought both to constrain sovereign power, and itself, to offer its own distinctive account of how power, as such, and in particular the rule of rule, might best operate to rule more effectively. In The Birth of Biopolitics (2008) he further details how biopolitics is not only characteristic of liberal regimes of power, however, he also details how they are characterised by bringing economic criteria to bear on the problematic of rule - introducing a homo oeconomicus disruptively into the sphere of the subject of rights established under sovereign rule - and how they also suffer successive ‘crises of governance’ as well (Foucault 2008). One might even observe here that, in as much as Foucault had always claimed that biopolitics was distinguished by the ways in which it brought economy into politics, the revision of classical economy introduced by neo-liberalism, which he examines in such detail in The Birth of Biopolitics, also led to a revised neo-liberal biopolitics.

One of the key points to emphasise is therefore this. Foucault treats economy not only as one of those ‘natural’ regional ontologies, or independent, domains of existence posited by the political ontology underlying the epistemologies (power/knowledge) of liberal regimes of power; that one originally defined in terms of relations of production and

3 Foucault specifically differentiates these crises of governance from crises of capitalism. Crises of capitalism may also produce crises of governance, he says, but crises of governance may occur in ways and at times unrelated to the crisis cycles of capitalism (Foucault 2008 69-70).

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exchange. He also treats ‘economy’ as a specific rationality, a set of criteria introduced into the operation of rule to guide and continuously measure and qualify how well rule rules. Moreover, ‘economy’ for him was introduced less because it served a pre-formed class interest than that it introduced a novel and extraordinarily effective metric that was originally used to constrain absolutist claims as it served, in addition, to improve governmental regulation. Progressively, once can therefore say, what gets applied increasingly in biopolitics, and to each and every relation and institution of social and cultural life, is ‘the truth’ of economy: economy as a rationality and not simply economy as an unequal distribution of wealth and wealth creating power. For economy is not only a distributive system; socially determining who gets what, where, when and how. There is, in addition, a ‘truth’ or a rationality’ to economy; albeit, of course, what the power/knowledge of economics, for example, says that truth and rationality consists in also changes. It is that very rationality, that very mechanism of making true, according to Foucault, which gets significantly revised by neo-liberalism in its revision of the very nature of economy as such. Correlatively, such a revision of economy necessarily introduced a revision of governmental biopolitics, the biopolitics of neo-liberal governance (Foucault 2008). This is a governmental analytic of economy.

Foucault is also concerned with how this ‘truth’, a truth in the emergence of modern power relations, distinctive of liberal regimes of power, gets applied to every aspect of life. Biopolitics, and specifically one might also say through the biopolitics of security, is a veridical machine, one that seeks ‘to make true’. From the perspective of this biopolitical analytic, capitalist economies are vast experiments in the securing of widespread social engineering through the governing of life.

Here one can also observe an under-examined connection between species life and economy. Foucault’s lectures The Birth of Biopolitics (2008) are almost exclusively concerned with the universal extension and application of a revised neo-liberal truth of economy to the problematisation and operation of government and governance via successive ‘crises of governance’ in the 20th century. What he does not recall directly or explicitly, although the point is clear in retrospect, is that if circulation and contingency fundamentally characterise species existence (Dillon 2006; Foucault, 2003 and 2007), so also does economy (Foucault 2008). In as much as species existence is said to be a re-productive economy of continuous transaction and exchange between the organism (in this case human being) and its environment it is a form of economy; to which the truth or rationality of economy – essentially

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different forms of utile means-ends analysis – can, and is, also rigorously applied. Little wonder, therefore, that risk, for example, should become such a prevailing biopolitical security practice; since risk makes contingency fungible and commodifies the exposure to danger and opportunity for advantage which constitute risk (Dillon 2008a; Foucault 2008: 144-145).

It is also possible now, however, not only to observe how the application of economy to government and governance helped curtail the tyranny of sovereign absolutist power, but also to observe how economy itself has become a tyrannical ‘rule of rule’, one applied remorselessly throughout the 20th century to all the relations and institutions of western societies via the neo-liberalism revision which moved liberal governmentality from classical political economy to neo-liberal economic polity. There it has been the engine of relentless reform of almost all relations of social and cultural institutions and commerce; progressively, driving-out other criteria of rule which once applied to them, or which they once applied to themselves.

It is helpful, in addition, to make clear that, and how, a fundamental shift occurs in the kind of questions asked of government and governance when the human is thus reduced to species life and to economy, indeed to the economy of species existence. Respecting the truth of economy as a metric which itself could be applied to the evaluation of the rule of rule, from the 18th century onwards the task of rule acquired a new criterion biopolitically and a new grid of intelligibility. Subject to the truth of economy, both as a metric of rule as well as a separate domain of social behaviour, it was no longer sufficient, for example, to ask if rule was legitimate. Foucault observes that it also became necessary to ask, biopolitically, if rule was effective and successful:

“...you can see that this critical governmental reason, or internal criticism of governmental reason, no longer revolves around the question of right and the question of the sovereign’s usurpation or legitimacy. It will no longer have that kind of penal appearance that public law still had in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when it said: If the sovereign breaks this law, then he must be punished by a sanction of illegitimacy. The whole question of critical governmental reasoning will turn on how not to govern too much. The objection is no longer to the abuse of sovereignty but to excessive government.” (Foucault 2008: 16–17)

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Indeed, it became obligatory to ask the question, and pursue diverse means of answering it, if the biopolitical project of rule to make life live was to be practiced and realised. A new moral, and bio, political economy was thereby instituted. Foucault summarises the shift this way:

“A government is never sufficiently aware that it always risk governing too much, or government never knows too well how to govern just enough. The principle of a maximum/minimum replaces the notion of natural equilibrium, or ‘equitable justice’ that previously organised the prince’s wisdom” (Foucault 2008: 17)

The criteria of success were now to be found, therefore, in how well power regulated these domains of life, navigating between regulating too little and regulating too much, seeking to discover how much regulation was enough for successfully promoting life in pursuit of making life live.

The direct relevance of all this to the biopoliticisation of security has begun to be intimated but let me now address it directly. When power comes to take species existence as its referent object, and when the biopolitics of security come to take species life as their referent object as well, then the dispositif of power relations follows suit and begins to revolve around the properties of species existence. There is little space to go into what the properties of species existence are said to be, or explain in detail how the account of species existence has been changing over the last two hundred years along with transformations in both economy and the life sciences. Suffice to say that it has, and that as it has done so biopolitics and the biopolitics of security in particular have followed suit (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero, 2008; Dillon, 2008a). But we can add that whereas for Foucault circulation and contingency were the primary characteristics of species existence which he addressed in Society Must Be Defended and Security, Territory, Population, so also, later, was economy; a point he seems himself to forget when in a footnote to Lecture 4 (31 January, 1979) of The Birth of Biopolitics he apologised to his audience for having talked too much about neo-liberalism’s revision of economy instead of biopolitics (96, n. 5). My point is simply that having earlier identified economy as a defining characteristic of biopolitics, the neo-liberal revisions of economy that Foucault details in The Birth of Biopolitics are in fact, of course, directly relevant to neo-liberal revisions and intensifications of biopolitics as well.

Thus, under contemporary neo-liberal regimes, in ways congruent also with how life has come to be defined by the life sciences as well, species

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are said to survive through the operation of a continuously contingent economy of circulation in which the, now radically informationalised, living entity emergently co-evolves with its environment. Moreover, when the truth of economy begins to be applied systematically to the governing practices of security and war – to the very transformation of cognition brought to the re-problematisation of the entire problem space of security and war through transformation of military strategic discourse and security talk, as well as operational concepts, doctrines and equipment acquisition, such that military strategists can now say that they make war in the same ways in which capitalism makes wealth (Cebrowski and Gartska 1997) – further radical conflation of the civil and the military takes place throughout the governing practices of liberal societies. Such has been the experience of the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs of the last twenty years, of the advent of network centric warfare and the intensification of The Liberal Way of War (Dillon and Reid 2009), in which killing to make life live has become the pervasive rationale of security and war for the powers of the Atlantic basin.

It is therefore important to recall Foucault’s original remarks on the reduction of life to species existence. The discourse of life understood as species existence - espèce humaine –differs fundamentally, he observed in his lectures on Security Territory, Population, from life understood as ‘le genre humaine’ (Foucault, 2007). The root of le genre humaine – gens - refers to the jus gentium of Roman and medieval law. Usually translated as ‘the law of nations’, and extensively treated in the work of two early modern international jurists, Hugo Grotius and Emmerich de Vattel, the gentium of jus gentium invokes the juridico-political and cultural notion of a ‘people’ or ‘peoples’ belonging together in respect of law and custom, and not the biological notion of ‘species’ (the root of espèce, or être biologique), in which the principle of belonging together is furnished by shared biological properties. Être biologique is therefore not, for example, Machiavelli’s or the Renaissance’s republican civere civile. The move from gentium to espèce thus effects a transformation in the very discursive understanding of what it is to be a living being and, correspondingly also therefore, of how the governmental regulation of such a living thing will operate.

What followed, then, in that shift from gentium to espèce was a transformation not only in the referent object of power relations, in the very mechanisms by which power operates and circulates, but also in the very understanding of the ‘nature of the nature’ from which politics and power are said to follow; what Foucault calls the political rationalities as well as the governing technologies of power. Specifically, in relation to

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espèce humaine, power comes to be exercised on, in and through the biological mass which constitutes the ‘species’, an empirical example of which is ‘population’, rather than the juridico-political and cultural processes of belonging and rule said to constitute the gens of gentium, or of ‘le genre humaine’ (Dillon and Lobo-Guerrero, 2008). Foucault thus argues that the eighteenth century witnessed an historically unique event, one indeed attached to the emergence of the specific governmental regime of liberalism, that is, “the entry of phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species into the order of knowledge and power, into the sphere of political techniques” (Foucault, 1981: 141-142). He goes on to claim that “for the first time in history, no doubt, biological existence was reflected in political existence” (142). It was to do so both as biology and economy – indeed through the progressive conflation of biology and economy. Thus the administration of life has become the central characteristic and defining rationale of the regime of power operative in the modern world.

From this, Foucault suggests that the conception of man proposed by Aristotle as a “living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence” should be revised to acknowledge that “modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question” (143). From there he goes on to argue, with some force, that wars made in the name of making life live make massacres and genocide vital and that the threshold of modernity is reached when it comes to wager the life of the species on its own political strategies; strategies by means of which war is not the extension of politics by other means but strategies, rather, in which politics is construed as the extension of war by other means (Foucault 2003; Dillon and Neal 2008; Dillon and Reid 2009). Security discourses and practices thus become the means by which the logos of war is deeply inscribed into the logos of peace. Indeed, biopolitical security discourses are the logos of war written as the logos of peace (Dillon and Neal, 2008; Dillon and Reid 2009).

One final move requires explanation, and that is how Foucault sees security as integrally involved with the biopoliticisation of politics. The first point to make is this. Like discourses and practices of power, security discourses and practises, notwithstanding the fugitive nature of the object referred to earlier, similarly also revolve around the properties of their referent object. Biopolitical security practices revolve around the properties of biological being, including that of its necessary freedom to transact. Other security practices do not. Geopolitical security practices, for example, revolve around sovereign territoriality, its properties and

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exigencies. In each instance one should add that species is no less an elusive fugitive object than is sovereignty. In this I side more with John Locke than with Robert Boyle in their dispute about the real or nominal character of species. Neither species nor sovereignty territoriality arises outside the complex processes of signification in which they arise as species, or as sovereign territoriality.

Traditional security discourses and practices tend to suppose the existence of pre-formed subjects comprised of more or less fixed properties or values which it is the job of security practices, in the main prophylactically, to preserve. Sovereign power has not disappeared. Neither has its allied geopolitical account of security. But things are different biopolitically because the referent object of biopolitical security practices, life, is different. Biological beings are not comprised of preformed bodies characterised by more or less fixed attributes. Biologically speaking, especially these days, what it is to be a living thing has become radically informationalised, defined in terms of informational processes, such that biological beings are said to be complex adaptive and continuously emergent bioeconomic information exchange processes. Their properties are not pre-given. They are always under formation because biological beings are observed to evolve and adapt not just their behaviours, but, ultimately also, their very constitutive make-up. They are now said to consist as much in potential as they do in actuality, and the actuality of their potentiality is space-time dependent. It depends among other things, even in respect of the expression of their genetic composition, on the correlations of time and place.

My expression for this is that the mode of biological being is now understood as ‘being-in-formation’. Securing the making of life live is comprised of an assemblage of techniques, discourses and now also institutions and practices that articulate, while they simultaneously also interrogate refine and further deploy, this truth of biological being. By and large, then, if you seek to secure a living thing prophylactically sealing it from its environment you will assuredly constrain that life, or kill it off. Life as species being thus poses a different problematisation of security for modern security. It turns them into biopolitical regulators of life. Here, biopolitically, security is less a matter of raison d’état than it is a life science.

The very problematisation of security and the very mechanisms of security are thus radically transformed when their referent object becomes that of making life live. Foucault makes this point directly in the very early lectures of Security, Territory Population (2007). There he

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explores how the early empirical object of the biopliticised referent object of security becomes population and how population is characterised, among other features, by its radical contingency and by circulation (Dillon 2005; 2006). He also states quite baldly that biopolitics is a dispositif de sécurité designed to promote the multiple transactional freedoms which comprise biological existence, and that, therefore, ‘freedom’ – this transactional account of freedom - is nothing but “the correlative of the development of apparatuses of security” (2007). Security is secured through rather than against the transactional freedoms of species life.

It is possible here, however, also to pursue the logic of biopolitical securitisation beyond Foucault. Or, at least, to schematise, in ways that he did not, this re-problematisation of the entire problem space of security – its manifold fields of intervention, points of application, fields of adversity and surfaces of friction. There is space to specify only a few salient points. First, biological being as being-in-formation exists in a permanent state of emergence. Emergence is however a dual process. It simultaneously entails destruction as well as production. Indeed, there is no novel production of new form, new modes of individuation, without the destruction of old ones. This permanent state of emergence is therefore also a permanent state of emergency; an emergency which differs significantly in its drivers and attributes from that which Agamben details in Homo Sacer (1998). That is how and why biopolitics hyperbolicises security. Making life live – biopolitics - simply is a security problematic, one moreover which operates through the freedoms of liberal biopolitics. Second, in the very process of its emergent adaptation and change there is no guaranteeing that life will not go acerbic and become a danger to itself. Life understood as being-in-formation is life understood to be continuously also becoming-dangerous.

Third, then, whereas the project of making life live appears to be an unproblematically benign project, it is far from that. If life is to be promoted, life has to be rigorously assessed and sorted. Some life is good for life and some life is not. Biopolitics institutes a remorseless assay of living things subjecting them to the most intense evaluation of their biopolitical utility – the contribution they may make to the biopolitical project of making life live. Life that fails this test, or scores low on its many proliferating governmental metrics, is systematically demoted, devalued, cast aside and, if necessary, eliminated. Foucault conjugated this biopolitical strategic logic towards the end of Society Must be Defended (2003). There he detailed how race operates as one such metric, or sorting device, for determining which life is utile for making life live

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and which life is not. All three of these features therefore help explain how it is that biopolitics is a lethal security business. It is characterised, among other features, by racial discrimination (Dillon 2008b; Stoler 1995); necropolitics (Mmbembe 2003; Montag 2005); and, war whose warrant is killing to make life live (Dillon and Reid, 2009).

What most therefore defines a Foucauldean biopolitics of security is a preoccupation with the manifold ways in which the properties of species existence determine how making life live becomes a changing ensemble of security practices, or dispositif de sécurité. For the purposes of its current dispositif de sécurité, the most characteristic properties of species existence at the beginning of the 21st century include: the transactional freedoms of species existence; its radical contingency; its global/local space of circulation; the truth of the economy of this global/local contingency and circulation; and, the permanent state of emergency posed by its continuous emergence.

Biopolitics of Security: Agamben

As Catherine Mills observes: “The entry of life into the mechanisms of power and correlative organization of political strategies around the survival of the species constitutes the ‘threshold of modernity’ for Foucault” (Mills 2009: 59). His biopolitical analytic is, typically, an analytic of the advent, plural and heterogenetic character of modern power relations, however much they continue to correlate with sovereignty. This is precisely where the two most currently prominent accounts of biopolitics, those of Foucault and Agamben, not only meet but also differ, and they do so fundamentally.

Agamben claims instead that, rather than being characteristic of the modern era, biopolitics and sovereignty articulate in much more fundamental and pre-modern ways going back to the very originary definition of politics supplied by Aristotle. For Foucault, biopolitics emerges in complex correlation and competition with sovereign power, as each form of power developed out of the political, economic, religious and intellectual revolutions which so transformed European civilization from the 17th century onwards. Agamben claims, however, that rather than being characteristic of the modern era, biopolitics and sovereignty articulate in such a way that “production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power”; that biopolitics is therefore “at least as old as the sovereign exception”; and that ‘the sovereign exception’

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goes back to the Aristotelian account of man as an animal which has politics (Agamben 1998: 6).

Just as these rival accounts of biopolitics begin with quite different conceptions of the origins of biopolitics, so also do Foucault and Agamben differ in the mechanisms they see operating. In Foucault, those mechanisms tend to be plural because they proliferate according to what historical truths and rationalities are told about species being. Essentially, these concern those that arise in the life sciences and in changing accounts of economy; albeit what the life sciences especially consist in is also a diverse and variable matter. In general for Foucault these are epistemically driven.4 If species being is construed as operating within an economy of radical contingency, for example, then risk based strategies of biopolitical regulation will be a natural consequence. If species being is said to be existence in time whose horizons are fundamentally futural, then preventive and pre-emptive security strategies will be a natural consequence. Finally, if species existence is said to be adaptive and emergent, then the sciences of emergence will furnish biopolitics with strategies of regulation and control designed to breed the right kinds of (human) animals (Dillon, 2007; 2008a and b). Liberal biopolitics, for example, and for that reason, is logically given to eugenics (Agar, 2004). In Agamben there is only one mechanism albeit that mechanism will find different sites of operation. Agamben’s biopolitical mechanism is that of the structure of the operation of sovereign law itself.

Agamben’s heritage is thus not so much the Nietzschean emphasis on relations of force, that so deeply informs Foucault’s genealogical approach to biopolitics of security, but the metaphysical or ontological concerns of Aristotle, Heidegger, Benjamin and Schmitt; even though these are critically reformulated by Agamben. Neither is Agamben interested in the specification of species life or the historical transformations in the life sciences and of economy which so concerned Foucault, and whose further development into the 21st century have so influenced other Foucauldean inspired interrogations of the biopolitics of security (Amoore 2006; Amoore and Goede 2007; Cooper 2006; Elbe 2005; Lobo-Guerrero 2007 a and b; Masters and Dauphiné 20007; Reid 2004 and 2007). In a sense Agamben is not interested in the changing accounts of the specification of the biological properties of living beings at all.

4 The Order of Things is, for example, an account of the historical a prioris or quasi-transcendentals (specifically life, labour and language) which such epistemic power/knowledge must ‘retroject’ in order to sustain itself. They thereby become the unacknowledged assumptions on the basis of which modern power/knowledge currently operates (Foucault 1989; and, Han 2002).

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the economy in the modern sense, that is, the historical self-production of humanity.” [He has recently however applied himself to a philosophical analysis of ‘economy’ that typically focuses upon the semantic register of the word oikonomia its entry into Christian theologytheology of economy, in Il Regno e la Gloria 2007]. Indeed, Agamben’s account of the referent object of power, biopolitically, is not the product of those discourses of power/knowledge concerning the changing truths told about the nature of species being which so concerned Foucault; deeply informed as he was also by his teacher Canguilhem (1988; 1991). Alongside his fundamental preoccupation with language, Agamben is concerned with law.

Apart from his cursory identification of biometrics as a digital version of the tattooing which took place in the camps, therefore, Agamben has shown little if any sustained interest in the historical development of the life sciences or, until recently, of ‘economy’ and the power/knowledge effects of their truth-telling. He begins instead with a reappraisal of the structural character of sovereign power which takes him back to a reconsideration also of Aristotle’s base distinction between Zoē and βios; in which Zoē stands for politically qualified life and βios stands for biological live. Resisting Foucault’s account of biopolitics as distinctively modern operation of power, Agamben therefore finds the source of biopolitics in an ‘originary’, rather than an historical, relation, Moreover, that originary condition does not lie in the relation between changing historical orders of power and life, but in a pre-ordinate relation between law and life that has obtained throughout the history of western metaphysics, its political imaginary and the nomos which has governed its existence. Deriving from this base Aristotelian distinction, Agamben also finds the biopolitics of the west operationalised through the ‘exceptional’ structure of sovereign law. According to Agamben, then, political order in the west arises out of a certain manoeuvre that institutes the law itself. In effect ‘law’ – that is to say sovereign law – is this manoeuvre, one that continuously re-produces itself.

The order of western politics, according to Agamben, is considered as if it were dissolved, so that the legal power that institutes and preserves it may be specified and continuously re-instituted. Also engaging the contract theorists of the 17th century, Hobbes in particular for example, Agamben maintains that the state of nature, which he also says stands for the state of exception, is, “not a real epoch chronologically prior to the foundation of the city but a principle internal to the city, which appears at the moment the city is considered tanquam dissoluta” (1998: 105) Moreover, the foundation of sovereign power which occurs through this manoeuvre,

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“is not an event achieved once and for all but is continually operative in the civil state in the form of the sovereign decision” (109). This ensures the “survival of the state of nature at the very heart of the state”(106).

By virtue of its very formal structure, then, the political topologising of sovereign power tends towards the indistinguishability of the spheres of inside/outside, physis/nomos, norm/exception which it claims to establish and preserve. The state of nature (in Agamben’s terms that of ‘the exception’) express two aspects a single topological juridical manoeuvre in the process of which what was “presupposed as external (the state of nature) now reappears, as in a Mobius strip or a Leyden jar, in the inside (as state of exception)” (109) In its political topologising, sovereign power in fact becomes a-topic as this “very impossibility of distinguishing between inside and outside, nature and exception, physis and nomos” (37). Which is why the search for the definitive place in which sovereignty ultimately resides is always a mythic, a-topic or even u-topic, one. Indeed, it is integral to the way in which Agamben understands the functioning of sovereign power that it cannot be located in a material place since it is itself the principle that does the locating and differentiating of inside from outside as such.

Precisely speaking, then, the political topology of sovereign power is not a space at all for Agamben but a mode of operation. As such it does work. That work is not simply or even exclusively, however, to command and preserve the domain of the inside of law and order, or to promote the interests of the inside externally with and against sovereign outsiders. Rather, it operates as a switching mechanism that effects a passage between inside and outside, law and violence, physis and nomos, norm and exception. In commanding the trafficking thus instituted, as it were by it for it, sovereign power thereby continuously institutes and re-institutes itself. It is the mode of power which juridically both establishes and regulates this trafficking. The state of exception is not so much a spatio-temporal suspension, therefore, as a complex topologising figure in which not only the exception and the rule but also the state of nature, exception and law - outside and inside - pass in and out of phase with one another. Sovereign power - as a generative principle of formation that institutes a strategic ordering of relationships, thereby instituting itself through that very manoeuvre as the arbitrator of the play of the relations thus established - is simultaneously premised, then, both, “on the violence that posits law and the violence that preserves it”(40).

Here then also lies another key point of distinction between Agamben and Foucault. The life whose biopolitical regulation comprises the very object of Agamben’s account of biopolitics as the operation of sovereign law is

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not biological life at all. It is not the politically qualified life of βios, of course, but neither is it Zoē. It is in fact a life constituted by the law for the purposes of remaining always amenable to the writ of the law; where law is of course understood as the operation of exclusion to include as excluded. If the life that informs Foucault’s account of biopolitics refers to changing understandings of species existence provided in particular by the life sciences and by changing accounts of ‘economy’, the life that underwrites Agamben’s biopolitics is a life constituted by the operation of sovereign power itself.

The name of that life is what Agamben calls nuda vita, usually translated as ‘bare life’. And what characterises bare life most is not any account of its biological properties but the fact that the operation of sovereign power, as Agamben understands it, places ‘life’ in the position of being continuously exposed to death. Bare life is therefore not biological life. Bare life is, as Agamben says quite precisely, homo sacer. And homo sacer is a form of ‘legally’ constituted life that arises out of the remorseless operation of the very structure of sovereign law as such, as Agamben understands it. One might therefore say that if the project of Foucauldean biopolitics is to secure making life live, the project of Agambenian biopolitics is to secure the continuous reproduction of the bare life of homo sacer.

Thus, as Catherine Mills pithily summarise the point, for Agamben, “the state of exception, law without significance, passes into life while life always subsists in relation to the law” (Mills, 2009: 64). And she emphasises the point in a way that deserves further emphasis: “Importantly, Agamben is not simply suggesting that natural or biological life founds the existence of law. Rather the key figure in the exclusive inclusion is bare life, understood as ‘the zone of indistinction’ or hinge through which political and natural life articulate.” (Mills 2009: 64) As Agamben himself states, “not simple natural life, but life exposed to death (bare life or sacred life) is the originary [bio] political element” (1989: 88). Moreover, this bare life is no modern invention. It has been, he says, foundational to the very political imaginary and operation of the west since its earliest Greek inception.

Thus, if we characterise Foucault the analyst of power as constantly asking the question what truths and rationalities inspire modern power relations, Agamben is quite differently inspired. When addressing himself to western biopolitics, the question he asks was that first formulated in Walter Benjamin’s celebrated essay “Zur Kritik der Gewalt”, translated as “Critique of Violence” (Benjamin 2004). And that question is this:

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‘From whence does the force of law arise?’5 His answer is ‘biopolitical’ in the sense that the force of law derives from the way in which law reduces ‘natural’ life (in Aristotelian terms Zoē) to nuda vita or bare life. It does this he says, following but reformulating Schmitt, by deciding the exception. The exception is not some chaos preceding order. The exception is the outcome of a decision which institutes the law by determining where and when, or, to be precise, in the form of homo sacer, to whom, it does not apply. Thus: [t]he exception does not subtract itself from the rule; rather, the rule, suspending itself, gives rise to the exception and, maintaining itself in relation to the exception, first constitutes itself as a rule. The particular force of law consists in this capacity of law to maintain itself in relation to an exteriority” (Agamben 1998: 18). Which exteriority, we should add, the law itself constitutes as it institutes itself.

The formal structure of sovereign law, understood as a strategic principle of formation rather than a metaphysical point of origin, is therefore precisely this: ‘the excluded included as excluded’. By virtue of that inclusion as excluded, bare life is simultaneously both produced by the exercise of sovereign law and subject to it in a particular way. As excluded life, bare life the product of the strategic ordering of sovereign law, is life exposed to death - life available to be killed – homo sacer. Mundanely, it is life that is disposable – at the disposal of the law which disposes of it. Thus created, nuda vita is included in the political order “solely through an exclusion” (Agamben 1998: 11) It is that ‘included as excluded’ which produces bare life, allowing Agamben to maintain, as we observed earlier, that: “The production of bare life is the originary activity of sovereignty” (Agamben 1998: 83). Only by effecting a zone of indistinction between nomos and physis - inside and outside, law and nature – does the force of sovereign law therefore come into operation.

All force of law, all power, requires material upon which it can gain traction. It requires material that is, in fact, peculiarly amenable in its composition and formation, to that traction. Without such traction there is no force of law. Agamben’s point is, in effect, that the force of sovereign law lies in the way in which it produces the very material that it requires to gain traction for itself. A form of life is thereby instituted that is capable of continuously bearing the rule, of being ‘included as excluded’ as a correlate of the power which produces it. The name which Agamben gives to this ‘securing’ of bare life - and by now it is evident that what is 5 I deliberately use the terms of Derrida’s equally celebrated response to Benjamin in his essay “Force of Law. The ‘Mystical Foundations of Authority’” (Derrida, 1992). Derrida and Agamben studiously avoided engaging one another. Among other things, in asking from whence arises the force of law Benjamin plays on the term ‘Gewalt’, which may both force and violence.

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being ‘secured’ here is continuous exposure of life to death via the force of law - biopolitics. This is not a deliberately obscure account of biopolitics of security. It is a different one. For Agamben also claims that all life is captured through this manoeuvre: “life...[is] the element that, in the exception, finds itself in the most intimate relation with sovereignty” (1998: 67). Since the law, he argues, “is made of nothing but what it manages to capture inside itself through the inclusive exclusion,” it exists in the, “very life of men” (1998: 27). Indeed life becomes what sovereign law makes of it, and nothing falls outside the all encompassing manoeuvre by means of which sovereignty secures a peculiar status for life, that ultimately of being at the disposal, alone, of sovereign law. It is this state of exception, he concludes, which has become the norm not only of western biopolitics, but of sovereignty as biopolitics. Thus whereas Foucault continued to discern a distinction between the security politics of sovereign and biopower, Agamben detects an epochal conflation of crisis proportions. What is more, for Agamben, sovereign law has no purpose or function other than the operation of this continuous biopolitical securing of life. It is, he says, “in force without significance” (Agamben, 1998: 51). Biopolitically, for Agamben, life is reduced to being that which is required for the force of sovereign law to continuously re-institute itself. While this ‘law without significance’ passes into life, life passes out of itself biopolitically for Agamben into ‘law without significance’ (Mills, 2009: Chapter 3). Biopolitics of security becomes the living death of life which characterises late modern times after Auschwitz for Agamben, and in ways which while intersecting with, nonetheless also differ from, the necropolitics integral to the biopolitical appel of Foucauldean biopolitics.

Conclusion

Foucault and Agamben’s biopolitics therefore do intersect on a variety of issues. Those intersections serve les to conflate the two accounts of biopolitics, however, than they serve to further illuminate their key differences. And so, for example, where these two accounts intersect in relation to the problematic of sovereign power one might say that Agamben’s account of sovereign power is far more philosophically sophisticated than that of Foucault’s. But, one can also see from Agamben’s account of it, that sovereignty is not only nothing to do with the expression of a will, but the operation, instead, and in a curiously Foucauldean way, of a kind of manoeuvre or strategy.

In respect of the biological being Agamben has little to say about how accounts of its properties translate into apparatuses of regulation of

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population and global circulation of every conceivable kind of material description, from people to information and money, or how these also impact on health care strategies designed to regulate the incidence and circulation of disease, military strategic discourse and the operational concepts, doctrines and burgeoning surveillance techniques of network centric warfare, homeland security and national resilience strategies designed around global/local circulation and flows as well. Once it is understood how pervasively the account of species existence has become radically informationalised – such that what it is to be a living things is almost defined in terms of being in informational exchange, hence the interest in cyborg life and theorisations of the post-human - it is possible also to recognise how contemporary accounts of biological existence emphasise its complex adaptive and emergent character. Here life unfolds in radically contingent emergent ways. But, as was explained earlier, such emergence is also an emergency since as it unfolds such life is continuously also engaged, and necessarily so, in destructive as well as a productive processes. This state of emergency also differs radically from the Agambenian understanding of the permanent state of emergency instituted by sovereign law through its operation of the manoeuvre of inclusion by exclusion or permanent ‘state of the exception’ that Agamben derives from his Benjaminian torsioning of Schmitt. The emergency of emergency derives from the way biological life is said to be contingently adaptive. The permanent state of exception is instituted by the structural manoeuvre which characterises sovereign law.

It is, however, in relation to securing the ‘ontopolitics’, indeed the securing ontopolitics that the relation between Agamben and Foucault’s accounts of biopolitics remains in many ways significantly under examined. Foucault is generally coy where ontology or metaphysics is concerned. His instinct is for the historical and the micro-practical. But, like Agamben, Foucault is nonetheless also a kind of philosopher and when he philosophises in his own distinctive way he does directly address the historical a prioris and transcendentals which underwrite modes of historical being of which liberal biopolitics is a direct expression (Han 2002). This he did with supreme skill in The Order of Things (1989). Here, nonetheless, it is possible to observe that Foucault’s account of the analytics of finitude, a direct expression of which is the biopolitics of security, contrasts once again with Agamben’s analytics of sovereign exception a direct expression of which is a biopolitics dedicated to securing the bare life of homo sacer as that form of life which sovereign law requires if it is continuously to enact and institute itself.

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