Against the Biopolitical State
What makes us “free”, has least to do with either God or Biology. The radical freedom consists in looking around, examining the so-called “realization” that “the way things are”, one way or another, be it warfare, the battle between the sexes, exploitation, greed, oppression, exclusion, that these relations are somehow inevitable - or any similar “realist-pessimist” expression of contentedness; any biological givenness of the human condition — taking that attitude… and crushing it, beating it to a pulp and burying the remainder deep-under so that it dissolves and merges with the earth passing away like another ugly face drawn in the sand.
To refuse what we are means to affirm how we are becoming and the endless flux of being as all that occurs. Neither medicine nor religion can tell us who we are, because we are not a thing, we are not an “organism” nor “god’s children”. Power tends to fix; to fix in place and time, cutting off the flows of becoming or encoding them to its advantage. To reject being, means to reject the true essence, to remain true without trying to be truthful. To speak truly, without wanting to document the truth. This is the essence of paressia, the courage of truth. And this is a letter to the parresiasts.
The human being is a being without purpose, without a teleology. She has no work cut out for her. Biological health is a poor foundation for our ethical lives, because the being that we call man always makes his own being an issue for himself. She always makes “the normal” an object to be questioned. To prosecute this being in the name of the normal or the pathological means to subject her to the most artificial and sinister interventions — the violence of the biopolitical state.
These are the times, so to speak. Where the biological health of the population has become the new sovereign, where genocide now carries the name of “isolating”, “curing” and “securing”; of “increasing birth rates”, “reducing mortality-rates”; a time of demographic management — a soft word for times of soft deployments; of soft power. The true name of this soft word is nothing other than eugenics. It is a time when the emergency carries the party-line. A permanent state of crisis and a constant state of exception.
Today, more than ever, life is simultaneously most precious and most easily disposable. Most sacred and profane, most valuable and completely worthless. There is no hidden paradox, just a trick of language. The life of some is precious, the life of others is negligible. A life that’s lamentable and a life that simply — isn’t. These are the terms & conditions of the biopolitical state.
The scientific naturalization of power-relations is the underlying structure of oppression at present. What is in effect a series of artificial installations are instead portrayed as a natural outcome. Of the so-called “human nature”; just another code-word for some philosophy of “stay-in-your-place-ism”. A freezing over of social asymmetries. A new productive form of power, where complacent subjects: the homo economicus, the homo politicus, the homo academicus and last but not least: the homo pandemicus — produce and reproduce their own subjection, docility and obedience. Subjects that desire their own subjection and go to great lengths in obtaining it.
Through social media, economic transactions and identity politics we turn out to be the most active oppressors of ourselves. Handing our so-called rights willingly and happily into the hands of corporations, governments and international organizations in the form of data, identities or investments. Freedom itself is currently an artificial deployment located inside a security apparatus placed within a growing carceral system. The Neoliberal playground is increasingly being surrounded by an enormous prison-system. And the system of checks and balances becomes suspended in the name of a biological crisis. An 8000 year old influenza virus, constantly spreading and mutating with no hope for a cure, the state of exception will therefore be postponed indefinitely, as long as the lockdown works to the economic advantage of those who reap the most benefits from the contrivances of the Biopolitical State.
