Skip to content

4.3 On life, and Death

By examining the ways in which life and death are controlled, I highlight how these forces are used to manipulate and transform individual and collective identities, particularly in contexts of occupation and political domination in the analytical chapters (Chapters Five to Eight). This analysis will further illuminate the profound impact of biopolitical power on oppressed populations’ social and cultural continuities.

Regarding power over life and death, Foucault (Foucault 1980)1 observes a shift in the sovereign’s right over death starting from the seventeenth century, particularly in the context of the Western world, with France as a notable example. Foucault argues that the sovereign’s “power of death” did not disappear with the emergence of modern politics; rather, as Lemke (Lemke 2011)2 suggests, the “right of death” became subordinated to a power that seeks to maintain, develop, and manage life.

Foucault notes that entire populations have been mobilised for the purpose of the “wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity” (Foucault 1980, 136--37)1 since the nineteenth century. According to Lemke, life has become subject to “previously unimaginable technical and political means of destruction” (Lemke 2011, 39)2.

In terms of resistance against sovereign power, Foucault (Foucault 1980)1 describes how the very power employed to control life ultimately generates resistance that demands recognition in the name of the body and life itself:

[T]he forces that resisted relied for support on the very thing it invested, that is, on life and man as a living being… [W]hat was demanded and what served as an objective was life, understood as the basic needs, man’s concrete essence, the realization of his potential, a plenitude of the possible… [W]hat we have seen has been the real process of struggle; life as a political struggle was in a sense taken at face value and turned back against the system that was bent on controlling it. (Foucault 1980, 144--45)1

Foucault’s exploration of biopower encountered challenges in explaining the persistence and expansion of sovereign violence and its varying manifestations (Bargu 2019)3. In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault (Foucault 2003)4 refines his initial research on biopower.

Biopower appears to categorise people into those who must live and those who must die. Foucault employs the concept of racism to delineate the distribution of individuals into different groups and subgroups (Foucault 2003)4. According to Mbembe (Mbembe 2003)5, this emphasis on race in Western politics highlights the prominence of racial thinking and practices over class divisions when it comes to dehumanising foreign populations and exerting domination over them.

Thus, racism, as conceptualised by Foucault, should be seen as a technology that regulates the distribution of death and enables the murderous functions of the state (Foucault 2003)4. However, Bargu (Bargu 2019)3 argues that this incorporation of racism into biopower leaves a gap in understanding forms of violence that do not manifest solely in crises or restrict themselves to acts of life eradication.

A Foucauldian perspective of power can be understood as the conceptualisation as ubiquitous and thus productive and relational, rather than located in certain groups and merely repressive and reified (Foucault 1980, 1990)1 6.

In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben (Agamben 1998)7 offers a different perspective from Foucault by emphasising the interdependence of biopower and sovereign power. He introduces the distinction between “qualified life” or bios, which refers to social or political life within legitimised interactions, and “bare life” or zoê, which represents life reduced to mere physiological needs of the body.

Agamben (Agamben 1998)7 criticises Foucault for abandoning the traditional approach to the problem of power and instead argues for a logical connection between biopower and sovereign power. According to Agamben, natural life is not elevated or replaced by political life; rather, it is sovereignty itself that constructs the concept of natural life with the aim of subjecting it to the law.

The notion of bare life captures the subjugation of natural life to sovereign violence. Agamben (Agamben 1998)7 employs the term homo sacer or “sacred man” from ancient Roman society, which, in his view, epitomises the conjunction of sovereign power and the state of exception:

[T]he sovereign and homo sacer present two symmetrical figures that have the same structure and are correlative: the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sarci, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns. … Homo sacer names something like the originary ‘political’ relation, which is to say, bare life insofar as it operates in an inclusive exclusion as the referent of the sovereign exception. (Agamben 1998, 84--85)7

Agamben identifies the death camps created by the Nazis during World War II as the “hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity” (Agamben 1998, 123)7, where the distinction between politics and bare life is established. He views the camp as the space that emerges when the state of exception becomes the norm (Agamben 1998, 168--69)7.

Abujidi (Abujidi 2009)8 raises two objections to Agamben’s concept of the state of exception in relation to Palestine. Firstly, Abujidi argues that the concept is limited in its ability to fully capture and explain the exceptional conditions experienced by Palestinians, as it relies on a juridical definition that fails to encompass the broader forms of exception Palestinians face beyond legal discussions.

Secondly, Abujidi (Abujidi 2009)8 points out a limitation in the binary approach employed by Agamben, where power is portrayed as opposed to powerlessness. This aligns with Foucault’s observation that power relations do not operate solely within two opposing classes (Lemke 2011)2. Lemke (Lemke 2011)2 also critiques Agamben, highlighting the one-sided and narrow perspective through which he approaches biopolitics.

Agamben emphasises the dichotomy between bare life and political existence, disregarding crucial aspects of biopolitics and focusing solely on the law and the sovereign’s right to exclude rather than recognising biopolitics as a political economy of life. Moreover, Agamben’s analysis predominantly revolves around state apparatuses and centralised forms of regulation.

Lemke’s (Lemke 2011)2 third critique pertains to Agamben’s use of a static and ahistorical notion of life, stemming from his quasi-ontological concept of biopolitics. While Agamben’s understanding of the state of exception as a necessary condition for sovereignty offers valuable insights into the sovereign’s violence towards the Other, it falls short in accounting for historical transformations in sovereignty and the mechanisms of violence (Bargu 2019)3.

Mbembe (Mbembe 2003)5 questions Foucault’s concept of biopower, which, as described above, equates the exercise of sovereignty to the control over death and life as the manifestation and deployment of power. On the one hand, he seeks to approach death from the perspective of the subject and their relation to this power, while on the other hand, he questions whether biopower is sufficient to understand the contemporary ways in which politics makes the death of an enemy a primary or absolute objective.

Mbembe (Mbembe 2003)5 relates, next to Foucault’s work on biopower, two other concepts, namely the state of exception and the state of siege (Schmitt 1996)9. The state of exception as per Agamben ceases to be a temporal suspension of the state of law, which requires a permanent special arrangement that remains outside the normal state of law (Mbembe 2003)5.

Although Agamben does not use the term necropolitics, his suggestion that everyone who is subjected to sovereignty is a potential target for its violence can be understood as modern society being necropolitical to the core (Bargu 2019)3. Regarding the state of exception, Mbembe (Mbembe 2003)5 argues that it, in combination with the relation to hostility, becomes the normative basis of the right to kill through forms of power which continuously refer to and appeal to exception, emergency, and a fictional notion of an enemy.

By recognising the perception of the mere existence of the Other as a threat to life, the relation to hostility largely reinforces the objectification of the human being or the subordination of everything to a form of impersonal logic (Mbembe 2003)5. The notion of Foucault’s biopower alone is not wide enough to cover contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death, which leads to the concept of necropolitics and necropower to account for the contemporary ways of inducing maximum destruction of human life (Mbembe 2003)5.

Indeed, Mbembe’s (Mbembe 2003)5 framework of necropolitics considers the economies of management rather than the political rule of law (Bargu 2019)3. This will become clear when I discuss, for instance, the way Palestinians are left to bleed to death at checkpoints after being shot by the IOF (Chapter Six).

Bargu argues that violence can become “an ordinary mechanism of socialisation into and subjugation to dominant social norms, ensuring the conformity of social agents and the reproduction of hegemonic values” (Bargu 2019, 3)3. Within a governmentalised and democratised modern form of state sovereignty, necropolitics implies a wide spectrum of violence that continues to remain outside the law as a means to eliminate perceived threats which is seen as detrimental to its survival, where the sovereign bases itself on the usefulness to the reproduction of its own sovereignty (Bargu 2019)3.

In the case of settler-colonialism, or as Mbembe (Mbembe 2003)5 refers to it, “colonial occupation”, space becomes the raw material of sovereignty and carrier of violence. In other words, sovereignty means occupation, which in turn means that the occupied people find themselves between subjecthood and objecthood. The differences between forms of colonisation and forms of settler colonisation lie in the combination of the disciplinary measures and the bio- and necropolitical aspects implemented by the coloniser, based on its claims of sovereignty and legitimacy that stem from its own historical and identity narratives.

Within the settler-colonial framework, Mbembe (Mbembe 2003)5 recognises three distinct features which work in conjunction to form the necropower at hand, namely the territorial fragmentation, the sealing of territory, and the expansion of settlements, all of which proliferate the sites of violence.

The combination of the disciplinary, biopolitical, and necropolitical gives the settler-colonial power absolute domination over the occupied people, and it is under these settler-colonial conditions of necropower that the lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom become blurred (Mbembe 2003)5.

Bargu (Bargu 2019)3 emphasises the often unseen and obscured nature of the underlying necropolitical currents, calling for a broader understanding of necropolitics that incorporates other structures of biopower to recognise its diverse modalities.

When Israel invokes death, grief for the loss of life follows. As mentioned earlier, Israel has the tendency to hold on to the bodies of Palestinians it killed, leaving families and countless people to grieve in an altered way: without the body. Grief, then, as the next section will cover, is powerful, but especially in the context of this thesis, not without external powers trying to control the grief of those who mourn.

References

  1. Foucault, Michel. 1980. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Vintage Books. ↩↩↩↩↩

  2. Lemke, Thomas. 2011. Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction. Translated by Eric Frederick Trump. New York University Press. ↩↩↩↩↩

  3. Bargu, Banu, ed. 2019. Turkeys Necropolitical Laboratory Democracy, Violence and Resistance. Edinburgh University Press. ↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩

  4. Foucault, Michel. 2003. Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the [Coll[è]{.nocase}ge]{.nocase} de France, 1975-76. Picador. ↩↩↩

  5. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. "Necropolitics." Translated by Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15 (1): 11--40. ↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩

  6. Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Vintage; Reissue edition. ↩

  7. Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer - Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford University Press. ↩↩↩↩↩↩

  8. Abujidi, Nurhan. 2009. "The Palestinian States of Exception and Agamben." Contemporary Arab Affairs 2 (2): 272--91. https://doi.org/10.1080/17550910902857034. ↩↩

  9. Schmitt, Carl. 1996. The Concept of the Political. University of Chicago Press. ↩