From biopolitics to biophilosophy, or the vanishing subject of biopolitics

ENThe proliferation of theories of biopolitics raises the question: Who is the subject of biopolitics?1 If every theory of biopolitics refers to a different subject, then how are these different theories compatible? In this essay I will examine three ways in which the biopolitical opposition between “appropriate bodies” and “improper bodies” has been defined: the division between citizens and non-citizens; the division between persons and non-persons; and the division between humans and non-humans or animals. The first division, between citizens and non-citizens, is discussed as the paradox of human rights, which is revealed in the works of Hannah Arendt, Jacques Rändere, and Giorgio Agamben. The problem here is that so-called human rights are attributed only to those individuals who are defined as citizens of a certain nation-state; by contrast, all other subjects are treated as the objects of humanitarian help. The second division is related to the notion of person that is the founding concept of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. By contrast to the 1789 Declaration, which emphasized the concept of citizenship, the Declaration of 1948 praised the dignity of the human person. Unfortunately, the concept of person was immediately accompanied by the creation of a shadow realm of non-persons.This leads us to the third division between humans and non-humans, or between human and animal, discussed in Agam- ben’s and Jacques Derrida’s works. Agamben and Derrida insist that the animalization of man and the humanization of animal are two sides of the same biopolitical division. The analysis of these three divisions makes us question the notions of citizen, person, and human, and to rethink the body in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s terms. Deleuze and Guattari oppose the modernist notions of subjectivity with their theory of becoming-imperceptible, that is to say becoming asubjective, asignifying, and inorganic. Thus the philosophy of the imperceptible erases the division between zoe and bios, or between naked life and political existence, and creates the conditions for fluid ontology and non-hierarchized being.