Bare life, plain life, a life

My point of departure is the relation between power and life. What power over life today (biopower) is, and what the potency of life today is (biopotency), and how the relation between them occurs in the form of a Moebius strip. But today more than ever, the power over life as well as the potency of life are necessarily connected to the body. Therefore, I would like to work with three modes of ‘life’, that is, three concepts of life, each with its correspondent bodily dimension, as if going through this strip of Moebius.
The first is bare life, with Agamben as point of departure. The prisoners of extermination camps called muslims those who had ‘given up’, who submitted themselves to fate without reserve. They were the living dead, the mummy-men, the shell-men, the indifferent, the glazed look, mere silhouettes, which the Nazis called Figuren; figures, dummies, mere walking bodies. They inhabited an intermediate zone between life and death, between human and inhuman. Biopower reduces life to biological survival, produces survivors. (We can confirm this from Guantanamo to Africa).
But could it be that survivors are only those populations submitted to an extreme state? Or should we widen the notion of bare life to contain the contemporary ‘survivalism’, that characterises our capitalist system (Zizek), this form of life reduced to low intensity, tepid hypnosis, sensorial anaesthesia disguised as hyper excitement, this cyber-zombie existence gently grazing among services and merchandises, Living and thinking like pigs (Châtelet)? Wouldn’t it be necessary to think about this terminal stage as the extreme form of contemporary nihilism?
This leads us to a second category, plain life, to account for this nihilism, this degradation of existence, this depreciation of life, this exhaustion of the “last man”, this non-wiling (Nietzsche), but in a very precise, capitalistic, context. Since the emergence culture of the body in the last decades, its correlative is: no more the disciplined body, trained, striated by the Fordist panoptical machine, but rather the body submitted to voluntary askesis, according to the double precept of normative scientificifty and the culture of the spectacle. The obsession with physical perfectibility in body-centred culture, with the infinite possibilities of transformation announced by genetic, chemical, electronic or mechanic prostheses, the compulsion of the self to incite the desire of the other, even through self-imposed mutilation. The tyranny of corporeality in the name of sensorial enjoyment requires a new modality of askesis, bioaskesis (Ortega). The present care of the self (unlike in ancient times when men aimed for a beautiful life) has the body itself as target (the body is identity: subjective bio-identity); its longevity, health, beauty, good shape, scientific and spectacular happiness, or what Deleuze would call the fat dominant health.
How to escape this? David Lapoujade defines the body as ‘what endures no more’. But what is it that the body cannot endure? Disciplinary drilling, biopolitical mutilation, survivalist mortification, be it in a state of exception or in the nihilist everyday (the ‘muslim’, the ‘cyber-zombie’, the ‘spectacle-body’).
It would be necessary to come off the obsession of researching ‘what can be done with the body’ (a biopolitical issue: what interventions, what manipulations, what improvements, eugenics …), and start to experiment “what can a body do“ (vitalistic, Spinozian issue: what power to affect or be affected are we capable of, what potencies of life are striated by the powers over life). But how can we differentiate Spinoza’s perplexity with the fact that we do not yet know ‘what the body can do’ from the challenge of technoscience, which experiments precisely with ‘what can be done with/to the body’? How to differentiate the necessary decomposition and disfiguration to enable the forces that cross the body to create and liberate new potencies – a current that has characterised part of our culture of the last decades in its diverse experiments, from dances to drugs to literature – from the decomposition and disfiguration that biotechnological manipulation ellicits and stimulates? Potencies of life that need a Body-without-Organs for their experimentation, on the one hand, power over life that requires a post-organic body to be annexed by the capitalistic axiomatic, on the other.
Thus, in a third moment, in opposition to both bare life and plain life, it would be necessary to define Deleuze’s conception of a life, in its dimension of virtuality, of immanence, of pure potency, of beatitude. In the wake of such a definition to be unfolded, the body emerges as open to the outside (Hijikata, Blanchot), in a passiveness thought as affectivity (Nietzsche, Kafka), to recreate a body with the power to start (Artaud). Artaud’s ‘innate genital’ is the story of a body that puts the born-into body, its functions and organs, which represent the orders, institutions, technologies that he named ‘God’s judgement’. Life as this body, as long as we discover the body in its genetic power, in its dimension of virtuality, of molecularity, flow, vibration, intensity, affects, event, composition and connection, speed and slowness.
Finally, it would be necessary to oppose a life and bare life, where the latter is understood, as seen above, as life reduced to a state of mere actuality, indifference, deformity, impotency, biological banality. If they are both so opposed, but at the same time so ‘superposed’, this is by virtue of the fact that, in a biopolitical context, life is a battle field; and, as Foucault said, it is where power falls upon with greater strength – life, the body – that resistance will be find its ground from then on… but precisely by inverting the signals… In other words, it is sometimes in the extreme of bare life that we discover a life, as it is in the extreme of biopower that we discover the biopotency that was already there. Perhaps there is something in the extortion of life that should come to term, so this life can appear in a different way… Something must be exhausted, as Deleuze sensed in L’épuisé, for another game to be thinkable…
Peter Pal Pelbart
Peter Pal Pelbart is a philosopher and teaches at the Catholic University of Sao Paulo. He lives in Brazil. 2008-06-26T05:36:51Z 37 true Bare life, plain life, a life

2008-06-28T11:00:25Z