The Camp

Agamben on the camp and biopolitics

Toward the end of his life, Michel Foucault turned his attention to what he called “biopolitics.” Biopolitics is in part the product of an expansion of state power, which intrudes on the people until it assumes jurisdiction over the most basic and intimate processes of human life. It is an exercise of power that brings biological life directly under the umbrella of politics.

Giorgia Agamben (Homo Sacer) thinks the roots of biopolitics are deep. He compares Article 29 of the Magna Carta (1215), which protects every “free man” (homo liber) from arrest, imprisonment, and confiscation, with the 1679 formulation of habeas corpus, which makes the corpus, rather than the homo, a subject of politics. He finds an echo of this shift from man to body in Hobbes, who grounds the equality of man to man on the capacity of each to kill the other, on the vulnerability of each man’s body to his enemy. He finds another source in the emphasis of modern politics on the natural fact of birth as the “immediate bearer of sovereignty” insofar as it makes someone a member of the “sovereign people.” Birth - life - becomes politicized.

Biopolitics is the product of, and encourages, an anthropological reduction of politics. Agamben speaks of biopolitics as the politics of “bare life,” an exercise of power directed toward sheer biological humans, who have been (in effect) stripped of all cultural and legal clothing. Biopolitics doesn’t treat human beings as citizens but as biological organisms.