“A Zone of Indistinction” – A Critique of Giorgio Agamben’s Concept of Biopolitics
“A Zone of Indistinction” – A Critique of Giorgio Agamben’s Concept of Biopolitics
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“模糊地带”——对乔治·阿甘本生命政治概念的批判
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发表时间：
2005
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Antonio Negri
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
M. Hardt;Antonio Negri
直到最近，米歇尔·福柯提出的“生命政治学”一词还不为一群专家和学者所知。正如福柯所理解的，这个术语指的是“将生命及其机制带入明确计算的领域，并使知识力量成为人类生活转变的媒介”（Foucault 1979：143）。他从历史角度和分析角度区分了这种“生命力量”的两个维度，即一方面对个体身体的规训，另一方面对民众身体的社会调节。福柯认为，生命政治标志着政治现代性的门槛，因为它将生命置于政治秩序的中心。在这种理论视角下，资本主义社会的构成与生命政治的诞生之间存在着密切的联系：“社会对个人的控制不仅是通过意识或意识形态来实现的，而且是通过身体和身体来实现的。对于资本主义社会来说，生命政治、生物的、肉体的比其他任何东西都重要”（福柯，2000：137）。此外，福柯对生命政治概念的引入标志着对“司法话语”权力模式的理论批判（Foucault 1979：82）。在这个模型中，权力被假定为在最终取决于主权问题的法律和合法性框架内以拦截和镇压的方式行使。相比之下，福柯用生命政治学的概念来强调权力的生产能力，这种能力不能被简化为古代主权的“死亡权”。主权主要作为一种“减法机制”来运作，通过控制生命来压制生命，而新的生命管理力量则致力于煽动、强化、监控和优化其控制下的力量（参见福柯，1979）。如今，“生命政治”一词在科学文献和新闻文本中越来越频繁地使用。大多数情况下，它被用作中性概念或一般类别来指出生物技术干预的社会和政治影响。这种以技术为中心的方法忽视了福柯概念的历史和批判维度，即技术发展如何嵌入更多的全球经济战略和政治战略中。
Until recently, the term “biopolitics” as developed by Michel Foucault was unknown beyond a group of experts and scholars. As Foucault understood it, the term designates what “brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledgepower an agent of transformation of human life” (Foucault 1979: 143). He distinguished historically and analytically between two dimensions of this “power to life”, namely between the disciplining of the individual body, on the one hand, and the social regulation of the body of the population, on the other. According to Foucault, biopolitics marks the threshold of political modernity since it places life at the center of political order. In this theoretical perspective, there is an intimate link between the constitution of a capitalist society and the birth of biopolitics: “Society’s control over individuals was accomplished not only through consciousness or ideology but also in the body and with the body. For capitalist society, it was biopolitics, the biological, the corporal, that mattered more than anything else” (Foucault 2000: 137). Furthermore, the introduction of the concept of biopolitics by Foucault marks a theoretical critique of the “juridico-discursive” model of power (Foucault 1979: 82). In this model, power is assumed to be exercised as interdiction and repression in a framework of law and legality resting ultimately on the problem of sovereignty. In contrast, Foucault uses the notion of biopolitics to stress the productive capacity of power that cannot be reduced to the ancient sovereign “right of death”. While sovereignty mainly operated as a “subtraction mechanism” that seized hold of life in order to suppress it, the new life-administering power is dedicated to inciting, reinforcing, monitoring and optimizing the forces under its control (see Foucault 1979). Today, the term “biopolitics” is used more and more frequently in scientific literature and journalistic texts. Mostly it is employed as a neutral notion or a general category to point out the social and political implications of biotechological interventions. This technology centred approach ignores the historical and critical dimension of the Foucauldian notion, how technological developments are embedded in more global economic strategies and political