Sovereignty, Biopolitics and Technology

• In Event: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Theory & Technological Change and Societal Conflict
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Theory

Abstract

In my paper, I hypothesize that the critical questioning of technology as a neutral instrument and a human activity provides a key to approach anew two issues of biopolitical studies: 1) the antithetical opposition between sovereign power and biopolitical power, Schmitt’s idea of sovereignty and Foucault’s concept of dispositive; 2) the recent formulations of an “affirmative biopolitics.” To substantiate my hypothesis, I address three claims.

First, I examine how Schmitt’s approach to state sovereignty eschews the conventional considerations of technology as a neutral instrument. It is against the mechanization and instrumentalization of the state that Schmitt elaborates the principle of a “sovereign-representative person” who is transcendent vis-à-vis civil organizations and conflicts. What defines the sovereignty of a sovereign person is the will to decide on the suspension of law when the situation requires it. The event of sovereign decision is what puts a limit to the mechanization of a juridico-political order and the indeterminacy of technology.

Second, I argue that Foucault distances himself from the typical analyses of power in terms of sovereignty and law, proposing instead to examine multiple technologies of power that produce and naturalize subjectivities in a wide array of ethico-social relations and institutions. This analysis of power, I argue, eschews a sovereign subject as the master of tools/machines/dispositive.

Third, I polemicize with two motifs defining biopolitical research today: 1) the immanentist figures of resistance (e.g., multitude); 2) the negation of political separation. Against these two motifs, I elaborate on Jean-Luc Nancy’s idea of technology as an end onto itself to argue that the affirmative actualization and retrieval of bare life must pass through twofold movement: the first, Foucauldian one opens the presupposition of a sovereign person onto the processes of infinite self-constitution and pluralization; and the second one actualizes the sense of bare life in the minimal figure of person. These two moves constitute the complementary faces of modern democracy.

Author

• Janar Mihkelsaar, University of Jyväskylä