You are on page 1of 19

alt-parfitt-fin.

qxd 6/10/09 4:37 PM Page 41

Alternatives 34 (2009), 41–58

Are the Third World Poor Homines


Sacri? Biopolitics, Sovereignty,
and Development

Trevor Parfitt*

This article examines how the concept of biopolitics is applied


in development studies, focusing especially on Giorgio Agam-
ben’s account of biopolitics as intrinsic to the analysis of sover-
eignty and a state of exception. Agamben analyzes sovereignty as
a biopolitical enterprise of disciplinary control in which sover-
eign power is able to enforce its role by the most draconian
means while remaining nominally within the law. Agamben fur-
ther claims that development is a biopolitical enterprise through
which the Third World poor are reduced to a situation of bare
life. The article interrogates this proposition, questioning how
far biopolitics/development must necessarily be conceived as an
exercise in oppression. KEYWORDS: biopolitics, sovereignty, de-
velopment, Agamben, Foucault

Biopolitics is very much the coming concept in many spheres of so-


cial science including development studies. It has been made partic-
ularly fashionable by the Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, for
whom biopolitics is intrinsic to the analysis of sovereignty and its role
in ruling on what constitutes a state of exception. Agamben analyzes
sovereignty as a biopolitical enterprise of disciplinary control in
which sovereign power is able to enforce its dominance through the
law. This can entail suspending the law by means of declaring a state
of exception, a situation in which the operation of the law is sus-
pended while it remains nominally in force. A state of exception en-
ables sovereign power to enforce its role by the most draconian
means, including murder of those whom it wishes to eliminate, while
remaining nominally within the law. Those who are subjected to a

*Reader in International Development, School of Social Sciences, Media and Cultural


Studies, University of East London, Docklands Campus, University Way, London, E16
2RD, UK, E-mail: t.w.parfitt@uel.ac.uk

41
alt-parfitt-fin.qxd 6/10/09 4:37 PM Page 42

42 Are the Third World Poor Homines Sacri?

state of exception are reduced to a situation that Agamben terms


“bare life” in which any rights they may have had are rendered null,
and their lives can be taken with impunity. Agamben uses the term
coined in ancient Rome, homo sacer (homines sacri in the plural) to
identify those reduced to a state of bare life. The Romans used the
term homo sacer to refer to somebody who could be killed with im-
punity, but whose death could not constitute a sacrifice. Those who
had been classified as homines sacri were outlaws in the particular
sense that they had been placed outside of the law; they could be
harmed and slaughtered without it constituting any breach of the law.
A central aspect of Agamben’s analysis involves the contention that
modernity has led sovereign power to take ever-increasing recourse to
the state of exception. This has led to a situation in which the state of
exception is becoming the norm and increasing numbers of people
are being reduced to a state of bare life.
Increasing numbers of commentators have embraced Agamben’s
analysis. Since the start of the War on Terror a number of observers
have commented on the exceptional nature of the Guantanamo prison
camp that was specifically created so that suspected terrorists could
be held in circumstances where law would impose no constraints on
the disciplinary regime to which they were subjected. Similar atten-
tion has been paid to the practice of exceptional rendition under
which the US administration has handed over suspects to countries
whose laws are more permissive than those of the United States con-
cerning the use of torture.1 In these circumstances it does seem clear
that the law has been compromised so that people suspected of ter-
rorism or complicity with terrorists can be subjected to draconian
conditions, including torture, in the attempt to extract information
and/or confessions. People in such circumstances have been reduced
to a state of bare life.
However, Agamben’s perspective has also been applied to the sit-
uation of such groups as refugees, aboriginal groups, and the third
world poor. It can be seen how refugees such as those in camps at
Darfur or in Central Africa are being placed in a situation where the
law does not afford them protection and they are reduced to a state
of bare life. Elizabeth Povinelli has argued that the growing influence
of neoliberalism in Australia has led to the increasing marginalization
of already impoverished aboriginal groups. She maintains that the
methodological individualism implicit in neoliberalism has led to a
crisis of social responsibility in which the reluctance of the right-wing
administration of John Howard to take any responsibility for aboriginal
poverty led to a situation in which the aborigines are treated in a dif-
ferential and racist manner. She cites the example of a group of abo-
riginal people who were driven off land that was legally theirs (at a
alt-parfitt-fin.qxd 6/10/09 4:37 PM Page 43

Trevor Parfitt 43

place called Belyuen) and who were consequently reduced to a state


of abject poverty without any seeming recourse to the law as their white
neighbors occupy aboriginal land.2 All of these seem fairly apt exam-
ples of how Agamben’s analysis might appropriately be applied to var-
ious marginalized groups who have been deprived of legal recourse
by various means and reduced to a state analogous to that of bare life.
Yet can Agamben’s approach properly be applied to those generally
thought of as the third world poor, for example the billion or so peo-
ple who subsist on less than a dollar a day. Agamben is very clear in stat-
ing that it can in the following terms: “Today’s democratico-capitalist
project of eliminating the poor classes through development not only
reproduces within itself the people that is excluded but also trans-
forms the entire population of the Third World into bare life.”3 Con-
sequently this article seeks to examine what insights his analysis can
offer to the study of development, paying particular attention to such
core concepts as biopolitics, the state of exception, and bare life.

Foucault and Biopolitics

Michel Foucault is often identified as the first analyst to systematically


examine the linkages between sovereignty and biopolitics. He ob-
serves that traditionally a central characteristic of sovereign power is
the right to decide life and death. In the premodern era, this con-
sisted of having the right to decide whether to kill or spare those sub-
ject to sovereign power. However this situation was transformed in the
modern era with the application of technology and the development
of medicine, which allowed sovereign power to extend its control from
mere adjudication over the death sentence to control over life itself.
The application of science enables the sovereign to engage in plan-
ning and administering the lives of its subjects. As Foucault puts it,
the power over life and death “has tended to be no longer the major
form of power but merely one element among others, working to in-
cite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize and organize the forces
under it.”4 It is at this point, when sovereign power takes responsibil-
ity for the administration and organization of life, that it becomes
biopower, directly involving itself in the biological life of its subjects.
Foucault argues that biopower takes two basic forms. The first con-
sists of the disciplining of individual bodies in order to render them
docile and maximize their capacity and utility to sovereign power. Such
institutions as school, workshops, and clinics subjectivize (socializa-
tion is a fundamental element of subjectivization) individuals so that
they can be incorporated into the institutions of society in the most
efficient and utile way. The second form of biopower focuses on the
alt-parfitt-fin.qxd 6/10/09 4:37 PM Page 44

44 Are the Third World Poor Homines Sacri?

collective, seeking to organize the population as a whole with a view


to its serving sovereign power with maximum efficiency. Foucault
notes that the development of this aspect of biopower involved “the
emergence in the field of political practices and economic observa-
tion, of the problems of birth rate, longevity, public health, housing,
and migration.”5 Supervision of the population “was effected through
an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a bio-politics of
the population.”6 For Foucault, the growth of state institutions of power
tasked with regulation and organization of the general populace and
with disciplining of the individual is one of the central markers of the
point at which biopower becomes biopolitics.
He goes on to argue that without biopower, capitalism could not
have developed. The disciplining of individual bodies enabled inser-
tion of those bodies into the productive process, while the regulatory
activities of the state were essential to the maintenance of production
relations in society. As Foucault puts it:

The adjustment of the accumulation of men to that of capital, the


joining of the growth of human groups to the expansion of the pro-
ductive forces and the differential allocation of profit, was made
possible in part by the exercise of bio-power in its many forms and
modes of application. The investment of the body, its valorization,
and the distributive management of its forces were at the time in-
dispensable.7

This account also demonstrates how biopower might be regarded as


central to development in that any development intervention must
necessarily involve the administration and mobilization of the indi-
vidual and the collective populace.

Agamben and the Modern Biopolitical Project

Prior to further consideration of how biopower/biopolitics might


throw light on the analysis of development, we must examine how
Agamben explicates the concepts of state of exception and bare life
in his account of modern biopolitics. By contrast with Foucault,
Agamben locates the origins of biopower and biopolitics much ear-
lier than the advent of modernity, arguing that sovereign power has
always been addressed to controlling life and not just to the question
of adjudicating between life and death. He attributes this to a tension
between conceptions of the good life and bare life that can be traced
back to classical Greek philosophy. For example, Aristotle draws a dis-
tinction between bare life, or zoe, which is “the simple fact of living com-
mon to all living beings,”8 and a good life that is lived in accordance
alt-parfitt-fin.qxd 6/10/09 4:37 PM Page 45

Trevor Parfitt 45

with the Logos and justice. This good life is the proper objective of
politics (the polis). It can be seen that the political project proposed
here is addressed to moving beyond bare animal life to a good life in
which the human community organizes and administers itself justly.
This concern with the organization of life in the community is in
essence biopolitical. Thus, for Agamben biopolitics goes back at least
as far as Aristotle.
It might also be noted that in deconstructivist terms this repre-
sents a formulation that is typical in the philosophical canon, in that
it opposes two contradictory terms, one of which is accorded greater
value (often a foundational value) than the other. The good life clearly
represents the foundational term in this formulation because it is
identified as the proper objective of politics. Bare life is the inferior
term in this dyarchy in that it is the condition that the good life must
supersede or overcome. As Derrida points out, in many contexts such
formulations are unstable because the foundational term is in some
way dependent on or derived from the supposedly inferior term. In
this instance it should be self-evident that the good life is dependent
on bare life. Without bare life, how are we supposed to achieve the
good life?
Andrew Norris explores the instability at the heart of the bare-
life/good-life formulation in a commentary on Agamben’s Homo Sacer.
He cites Socrates’s statement in The Crito to the effect that “the really
important thing is not to live, but to live well,”’9 noting that this state-
ment was central to Socrates’s justification of his participation in his
own execution. This is an instance where bare life is sacrificed due to
the priority accorded to the good life. Norris also cites Socrates’s dis-
cussion of how the just city is to be created, observing that it will en-
tail an “art of judging” that will result in a decision to “let die the ones
whose bodies are [corrupt], and the ones whose souls have bad na-
tures and are incurable, they themselves will kill.”10 Thus it can be seen
that the social engineering of the just city involves not only a biopoli-
tics, but also a thanatopolitics. Those who are identified as being un-
able to make the transition from bare life to the just life are to be
forcibly disposed of. Bare life is to be terminated.
Agamben further develops his examination of the instability of
the bare-life/good-life dyarchy by introducing his conception of sov-
ereignty, which is closely based on Carl Schmitt’s definition of the sov-
ereign as the one who decides on the exception. This means that the
sovereign has the legal right to decide who is to be made the excep-
tion to the law, that is who is to be removed from the purview of the
law. The sovereign may do this by declaration of a state of exception
(such as a state of martial law or a state of emergency). The state of ex-
ception is supposed to be caused by the collapse of the normal legal
alt-parfitt-fin.qxd 6/10/09 4:37 PM Page 46

46 Are the Third World Poor Homines Sacri?

order. However the presence or absence of normality is decided


solely on the basis of sovereign decision, which consequently defines
what falls within the legal norm and what is excluded. As Agamben
puts it “the sovereign decision of the exception is the originary ju-
ridico-political structure on the basis of which what is included in the
juridical order and what is excluded from it acquire their meaning.”11
This is indicative that the supposed legal norm lacks originary status
and that norm and exception play a mutual role in defining each
other. In making the decision on what constitutes an exception the
sovereign is also defining what constitutes the norm. Furthermore, the
apparent necessity for the sovereign to make a decision on the excep-
tion also casts the law into doubt since it shows that the legal norm gives
rise to exceptions for which it is unable to adjudicate. Thus norm and
exception cannot clearly be distinguished, and this casts radical doubt
on the possibility of distinguishing between what is lawful and unlaw-
ful, and who should be included and who should be excluded.
This discussion of the biopolitical project identified by Agamben
should be indicative that it is fraught with the most serious risks. The
progress from bare life to the good life lived in accordance with the
Logos and juridical order is to be the product of a process of social
engineering based on an art of judging vested in sovereign power.
However, Agamben’s examination of the sovereign decision on the
state of exception shows that there are no clear lines between juridical
order and disorder. Indeed, the state of exception is the device through
which the sovereign abandons the normal working of the law so mea-
sures that would normally be considered unlawful can be employed
in restoring “order.” Guantanamo is created so that suspected terror-
ists who threaten the US order can be interrogated without any wor-
ries about the ramifications of US law. Given that the lines are unclear
between juridical order, the polis, and the Logos on the one hand and
disorder and zoe on the other hand, it is far from clear how politics is
supposed to effect the transition from bare life to the good life. Dis-
order seems a far from unlikely outcome given these circumstances.
What does seem clear is that when the sovereign decides to combat
such disorder by declaring a state of exception, thus removing the pro-
tection of the law from those subject to that state of exception, it
reduces them to a condition of bare life. It is in this sense that the bio-
political project of moving from bare life to the good life is prone to
deconstructing itself.
For Agamben, the modern period is characterized by a progres-
sive breakdown of the borders between zoe and the polis. He illustrates
this through a brief genealogical analysis of that intrinsically modern
phenomenon, the people. He points out that there has never been a
unitary “people.” All “peoples” have been characterized by internal
alt-parfitt-fin.qxd 6/10/09 4:37 PM Page 47

Trevor Parfitt 47

divisions, notably between rich and poor. However, in societies such as


that of Rome, these divisions were at least partially ameliorated by the
fact that they were judicially sanctioned. However, Agamben notes
that “starting with the French Revolution, when it becomes the sole
depositary of sovereignty, the people is transformed into an embar-
rassing presence, and misery and exclusion appear for the first time
as an altogether intolerable scandal.”12 He goes on to observe that con-
sequently “our age is nothing but the implacable and methodical at-
tempt to overcome the division dividing the people, to eliminate
radically the people that is excluded.”13 This enterprise is in radical
contradiction with a modernity that itself generates inequality and di-
vision as in the case of a capitalist system that causes variant patterns of
unequal development both nationally and internationally. Neverthe-
less the biopolitical project to effect a transformation from bare life
to the good life, must necessarily effect this transformation for the
whole of the people without any exceptions. If necessary those who
continue to constitute an exception must be radically eliminated. This
leads Agamben to the view that (w)here there is a People, there will
be bare life.” The creation of a People will necessarily entail the gen-
eration of an excluded group who must be eliminated and are re-
duced to bare life. At the extreme this can involve such events as the
Nazi elimination of the Jews in the concentration camps, or other forms
of ethnic cleansing. However, Agamben also states that the “obsession
with development is as effective as it is in our time because it coin-
cides with the biopolitical project to produce an undivided people.”14
And as we have seen, he views the modern democratico-capitalist de-
velopment project as excluding the poor and reducing them to bare
life.

Development as Biopolitics

Indeed, it could be argued that numerous development interventions


have left the poor worse off, if not condemned to bare life. For ex-
ample, dam projects are notorious for displacing people who often
lose their livelihoods when their land is flooded. The Narmada Dam
in India evoked massive opposition at least in part because of evi-
dence that it would displace many tribal hunter-gatherer peoples
(adivasai). It is well known that such groups tend to be ill prepared
for a life in the modern sector. Often they end up among the poorest
of the urban poor. Yet government support (backed by various aid
agencies, including for a time the World Bank) for the dam remained
vigorous based on a rhetoric of industrialization and modernization.
It was argued that the dam would provide power for industries and
alt-parfitt-fin.qxd 6/10/09 4:37 PM Page 48

48 Are the Third World Poor Homines Sacri?

irrigation for farmers, arguments that the dam’s detractors felt were
much exaggerated and which took no account of the adivasai.15 This
is clearly an example where the rhetoric of modernization elides over
the danger of a marginal group being reduced to bare life. The only
offense attributable to the adivasai is that they did not obviously fit
into the sovereign power’s vision of a developed India. The Narmada
Dam is by no means an exceptional case. The Bakolori Dam completed
on the Sokoto River in Nigeria in 1978 resettled 12,000 people on in-
ferior land without consulting them, a situation that led to protests by
the aggrieved, which were met by violently repressive police action.16
Indeed, a study by Lightfoot indicates that “most reservoir resettle-
ments have been badly planned and inadequately financed, and that
most evacuees have become at least temporarily and in many cases
permanently worse off as a result, both economically and socially.”17
It seems clear that development projects can indeed have exclusion-
ary effects on weak and marginalized groups.
However, the democratico-capitalist project that Agamben iden-
tifies as reducing third world people to bare life clearly refers to the
neoliberal policies embodied in the Washington Consensus. The cen-
tral agencies associated with the Washington Consensus—the Inter-
national Monetary Fund and the World Bank—have often been
accused of undermining and even usurping the sovereignty of legiti-
mate governing institutions in their attempts to push market-oriented
policies onto third world states. Olivia McDonald of Christian Aid ar-
gues that:

An effective legislature is essential in ensuring the success of national


development strategies. However, influence—and in many cases au-
thority—over these strategies has shifted to the international level
while mechanisms for participation and holding decision-makers to
account remain firmly rooted at the national level.18

McDonald provides a number of examples to illustrate how the IMF


and the Bank have taken over authority for decisions that properly be-
longed with the legislature. In 2003 the Ghanaian parliament ap-
proved tariffs on rice and poultry designed to assist farmers who were
unable to compete with subsidized imports. However, the government
lacked special dispensation from the IMF to implement the tariff in-
creases. In the wake of meetings with IMF staff, it countermanded the
increases in direct contravention of the Ghanaian constitution. An-
other example from the same year in Malawi concerns the state agri-
cultural marketing board, which had been a long-term World Bank
target for privatization. Legislation to start the privatization was rushed
through parliament during the Christmas holidays of 2003 with such
alt-parfitt-fin.qxd 6/10/09 4:37 PM Page 49

Trevor Parfitt 49

speed that many Malawian MPs thought that meaningful debate was
being deliberately avoided. This impression was reinforced when it
emerged that a poverty and social impact assessment commissioned
by the Bank showing that privatization could have a negative effect on
the poor had been held back until after the vote was taken. So it
would appear that in Ghana the IMF had a hand in encouraging the
government to violate its own constitution, its aim being to circum-
vent relief being given to poor farmers. By the same token, the Bank
apparently encouraged the Malawian government to engage in a pri-
vatization exercise that was likely to hurt the poor while deliberately
holding back information to that effect.19 In both instances, the sov-
ereignty of the legislature was undermined (with the collusion of the
executive branch of government) so that the Bretton Woods institu-
tions (BWIs) could get the results they deemed desirable, results that
threatened to further impoverish already marginalized groups.
These are just two examples among many that illustrate how the
BWIs are usurping sovereign powers from national authorities in pur-
suit of their project to marketize the world. Certainly, the policies pro-
pounded by the BWIs, including privatization, elimination of subsidies,
fiscal discipline, and getting prices right (that is, in line with the mar-
ket), can be seen as biopolitical strategies of disciplining and subjec-
tivizing people in the attempt to make them individualist rational
maximizers of utilities. Such measures as reducing or ending subsidies
and privatizing state services and utilities are meant to render third
world people subject to market forces through making them pay mar-
ket prices for such services as health and education and utilities such
as water and electricity. In having to deal with market discipline they
will have to become efficient producers in the market. All of this over-
looks the immediate effect of this sudden introduction of increased
market prices, which is to impoverish the vulnerable and plunge the
poor into even greater poverty. Those who already had difficulties in
affording education and health care find themselves further margin-
alized and consequently even less able to compete in the market.
Thus the BWIs’ project to reconfigure the third world and its people
in line with their market vision ends by relegating large numbers to
bare life.
The above examples suggest that Agamben’s analysis of sover-
eignty as a biopolitical project that reduces people to bare life can be
usefully applied in the examination of development interventions,
both at the micro and macro levels. It can be seen how individual pro-
jects such as dams can marginalize communities such as the adivasai
of India in the attempt to deliver industrial and agricultural develop-
ment. Similarly, Agamben’s categories are very persuasive when ap-
plied to the BWIs’ global attempts to impose market disciplines and
alt-parfitt-fin.qxd 6/10/09 4:37 PM Page 50

50 Are the Third World Poor Homines Sacri?

socially engineer the world populace to become market-orientated ra-


tional maximizers of utilities. As market disciplines are enforced on
groups that are unable to cope with them, marginalization and im-
poverishment are reinforced. The democratico-capitalist project, as
Agamben calls it, actually does reduce more and more of the third
world poor to homines sacri.

Ambiguities of Sovereignty and Biopolitics

However, Agamben’s account of the rise of homo sacer is not unchal-


lenged, and it is worth our while to examine some of the critiques
aimed at his thesis to assess how far they modify its apparent applica-
bility to development issues. A number of criticisms are leveled by An-
dreas Kalyvas that focus on Agamben’s conception of history and a
rigidly negative analysis of sovereignty that obviates the identification
of any solution to the problem of the biopolitical creation of increas-
ing numbers of homines sacri. Firstly, Kalyvas questions Agamben’s
contention that since the ancient Greeks the tension between bare
life and the good life has been the motor of historical development
manifesting itself through the sovereign decision. Kalyvas points out
that “where Arendt discerns discontinuities and breaks [in history],
Agamben finds long-term temporal continuities.”20 As Kalyvas puts it,
Agamben presents “a representation of time—the time of sovereignty—
as uniform, one-directional, and rectilinear.”21 This runs counter to
Agamben’s prior critique of Western thought as being characterized
by “the vulgar representation of time as a precise and homogenous
continuum.”22 Kalyvas argues that this account is permeated with a
teleology in which sovereign biopolitics is seen as making an inevitable
progress from its origins in the classical conception of the just city,
where the unjust were to be let die, to its full manifestation in the con-
centration camps. He goes on to relate this teleological aspect of Agam-
ben’s work to a problem concerning the analysis (or lack of analysis) of
agency:

Lacking from this highly abstract historical and conceptual recon-


struction is an account of the reasons, forces, interests, struggles,
movements, strategies, and actors that were and still are involved in
the unfolding of bio-sovereign politics.23

Kalyvas points out that there is little or no account of the agents in-
volved in the history of sovereignty with little space given to the move-
ments that have opposed and attempted to limit sovereign power.
Instead, biopolitical sovereign power is seen as moving from one victory
alt-parfitt-fin.qxd 6/10/09 4:37 PM Page 51

Trevor Parfitt 51

to another in a way that is suggestive of teleological inevitability.


Clearly, this is hardly a satisfactory account of history that pays little if
any attention to the specifics of the various forces that have wielded
sovereign power at different stages in history, and that elides over any
opposition to the biopolitical project, thus presenting an impression
of history as an inevitable unfolding of biopolitical power.
This rigid and reductionist account of history sets Agamben par-
ticular problems in attempting to identify any corrective to the biopo-
litical sovereign project despite his call for an “irrevocable exodus
from any sovereignty.”24 Kalyvas points out that Agamben wishes to heal
the fracture between bare life (zoe) and the good life in the body politic
(polis, or bios) that leads to the sovereign creation of bare life. However,
there are serious problems with Agamben’s attempt to resolve this con-
tradiction, which Kalyvas explicates as follows:

Sometimes he alludes to a different relationship between political


and naked life and sometimes he hints at a politics beyond naked
life as such. Thus, on the one hand, he recognizes that “just as the
biopolitical body of the West cannot simply be given back to its nat-
ural life…so it cannot be overcome in a passage to a new body—a
technical body or a wholly political or glorious body—in which a dif-
ferent economy of pleasures and vital functions would once and for
all resolve the interlacement of zoe and bios . . . This biological body
that is bare life must instead itself be transformed into the site for
the constitution and installation of a form of life that is wholly ex-
hausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own zoe.” On the other
hand, he maintains that it is this “form-of-life, that, abandoning
naked life to ‘Man’ and to the ‘Citizen,’ who clothe it temporally
and represent it with their ‘rights’, must become the guiding con-
cept and the unitary center of the coming politics.”25

The first option is suggestive of a form of life that accomplishes a com-


plete reconciliation between zoe and bios in which bios has no claims to
be anything more than zoe, and so there is no longer any need for bios
to forcibly overcome or eliminate zoe. Essentially this seems to be a
Hegelian aufhebung in which both moments of the contradiction are
reconciled and exhaust themselves in each other. However, the second
option is suggestive that far from representing the synthesis that re-
solves the fracture between zoe and bios, said form of life abandons
naked life to become the basis for a coming politics. This is at best con-
fusing and at worst self-contradictory as well.
Kalyvas also argues that Agamben’s account “does not differentiate
among various forms and modalities of political power and overlooks
instances of mediation.”26 It should be clear that there is a difference
between democratic forms of sovereignty in which the citizens have
some rights of redress against the sovereign and authoritarian regimes
alt-parfitt-fin.qxd 6/10/09 4:37 PM Page 52

52 Are the Third World Poor Homines Sacri?

where such rights are unknown. However, Agamben denies the sig-
nificance of rights, regarding them as one of the sovereign power’s
biopolitical techniques of subjectivization, only to implicitly contra-
dict himself by noting that the denial of rights was central to the
process in which the Nazis reduced the inmates of concentration
camps to a state of bare life. Kalyvas argues that by disregarding dif-
ferent types of political power Agamben reduces politics “to a single,
pejorative vision of sovereign power and state authority.”27 It follows
from this that a more benign form of state sovereignty is possible, and
Kalyvas seeks to demonstrate this by reference to Plato’s comparison
of the sovereign to a weaver. The process of weaving involves blending
and mixing a plurality of disparate elements so that they constitute a
unity. Whereas Agamben’s sovereign enforces unity by exclusion “the
Platonic sovereign-weaver creates actual bonds of unity among a great
plurality of differences.”28
Just as it can be argued that sovereignty need not necessarily be
seen in such a negative light, biopolitics can also be seen as having a
positive aspect. Malcolm Bull illustrates this by contrasting Agam-
ben’s work with capability theory as developed by Amartya Sen and
Martha Nussbaum. On Bull’s account, Sen argued that:

Individual circumstances and life-achievements might be consid-


ered as functionings that could be combined into a “functioning
vector.” A person’s potential functioning vectors would then consti-
tute a capability set, which could provide a context-sensitive basis for
comparison of standards of living and interpersonal equality.29

Bull goes on to observe that Nussbaum identified an Aristotelian text


that allows for combination of Sen’s capability theory with a theory of
the role of the state:

It is evident that the best politeia is that arrangement according to


which anyone whatsoever might do best and live a flourishing life.30

By interpreting “arrangement” as a theory of distributive justice, “any-


one whatsoever” as every member of the community, and “a flourishing
life” as the functions and capabilities needed for a full life, Nussbaum
interpreted this text as “an Aristotelian conception of the proper func-
tion of government, according to which its task is to make available to
each and every member of the community the basic necessary condi-
tions of the capability to choose and live a fully good human life, with
respect to each of the major functions included in that fully good
life.”31 Thus capability theory is an intrinsically biopolitical project in
alt-parfitt-fin.qxd 6/10/09 4:37 PM Page 53

Trevor Parfitt 53

which the role of the state is to make it possible for members of the
community to maximize their capabilities so that they may enjoy a
good life.
Bull compares the variant approaches to biopolitics adopted by
Agamben and Nussbaum in terms of the different vectors they ad-
umbrate between bare life and the good life. Whereas Agamben sees
the sovereign biopolitical project as increasingly exclusionary, reduc-
ing ever more people to bare life, Nussbaum identifies a biopolitical
role for the state in assisting all members of the community to move
from bare life to the good life. As Bull puts it, “if, for Agamben, bare
life is the hopeless destination toward which the logic of modernity
points, for Nussbaum it is the base from which capabilities are ex-
panded and joyfully transformed into functionings.”32 In examining
the variant paths that both analysts follow between zoe and the polis,
Bull pays attention to the differential vectors they describe between
certain variables that define both bare life and the good life. One of
these variables consists in the axis between the private and the social,
while the other is that between voice and the logos. For Aristotle, the
private is associated with zoe because it deals with the animal questions
of individual survival, whilst the social is associated with the polis
since it is only through the social collectivity that the polis can set
about organizing the good life. Voice is associated with zoe since it in-
cludes the animal capacity for the otherwise meaningless expression
of pain or pleasure, while the Logos is central to the polis because ex-
pression in accordance with the Logos must involve the exercise of
reason. Agamben sees the modern biopolitical project as reducing
humans to animal bare life through exclusion from the community
and deprivation of a voice. Nussbaum on the other hand starts from
Rousseau’s position that “All are born naked and poor. All are subject
to the miseries of life,” and proceeds to argue that everybody is enti-
tled to a good life.33 As Bull puts it:

Because man is political, acquiring human dignity involves project-


ing the alienated, the private and the ungregarious into the public
realm, and because man is an animal this means that his animal
needs and animal dignity find their satisfaction in the public realm
as well.34

Whereas Agamben sees biopolitics as inevitably moving humanity


away from the Logos and the polis to animal bare life, Nussbaum
identifies a biopolitical project that involves including the private in
the community and giving it a voice in the public realm. Whilst Agam-
ben presents us with a sovereign biopolitics that seems inevitably to
alt-parfitt-fin.qxd 6/10/09 4:37 PM Page 54

54 Are the Third World Poor Homines Sacri?

lead to bare life, Nussbaum provides a vision of biopolitics in which


the sovereign polis is the site of a biopolitical project to lift humanity
from bare life so that it can achieve dignity and the good life.
It is also worth remembering that Foucault did not share the un-
remittingly bleak view of biopolitics espoused by Agamben. Foucault
analyzed power, and therefore biopower, as being Janus-faced in the
sense that it both constitutive and repressive. While many of his stud-
ies concentrated on the repressive aspects of biopolitical discipline
and subjectivization, he also recognized that: “Power produces; it pro-
duces reality, it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.”35
He goes on to note that power produces people: “Discipline ‘makes’
individuals.”36 Indeed, if one thinks back to our earlier account of
Foucauldian biopolitics we find that state disciplinary activities were
concerned with public health and longevity, among other functions.
To be sure, such interest was conceived as part of a project to render
the populace more efficient for the utility of the sovereign power.
However, activities to enhance the health and lifespan of the popu-
lace cannot be seen as simply, or entirely, repressive. Indeed, Foucault
declared himself to be broadly in support of the French welfare state
of the 1980s while maintaining reservations about the disciplinary as-
pects of its activities.37 Thus, Foucault sees biopolitics as having both
a repressive aspect, but also a productive aspect.

Conclusion

What has the argument thus far shown us about the utility of Agam-
ben’s theory for development analysis and more generally what has it
indicated about the utility of a biopolitical approach to development?
Agamben’s account is persuasive, at least in certain respects, as the ex-
amples discussed above have shown. One can certainly see how the
Washington Consensus (Agamben’s democratico-capitalist project)
can be seen as reducing substantial numbers of people to bare life.
However, the critiques leveled at him lead one to question how far it
is a universally applicable analysis of the effects of biopolitical sover-
eignty. Kalyvas and Nussbaum clearly show that a more benign ac-
count of sovereignty is feasible. It also seems clear that Agamben’s
account leads to a pessimistic account of modernity in which there is
no obvious or coherent corrective to the exclusionary logic of sover-
eign biopolitics.
It might be argued in Agamben’s defense that the inclusive pro-
jects proposed by Kalyvas and Nussbaum could be vulnerable to his
critique. It is worth remembering that Agamben arrives at his analy-
sis on the basis of a critique of projects that sought to improve the lot
of general humanity in an inclusive manner. The examination of the
alt-parfitt-fin.qxd 6/10/09 4:37 PM Page 55

Trevor Parfitt 55

Socratic account of the just city shows how the enterprise of con-
structing the polis inevitably ends by excluding those who cannot be
included in this project. Similarly, Agamben’s genealogy of the term,
“the people” shows how projects aimed at uplifting the people to the
good life ends by excluding some who are consequently consigned to
bare life. It might well be argued that Kalyvas’s sovereign weaver could
be equally capable of excluding certain groups despite apparent com-
mitment to an inclusive model of sovereignty. By the same token, it is
not inconceivable that Nussbaum’s capability-based project might ex-
clude or marginalize groups whose capabilities are unrecognized or
not valued by the sovereign authority concerned.
All of this is suggestive that the Foucauldian approach to sovereign
biopolitics is most credible in its recognition that any such manifes-
tation of power has both a creative and a destructive aspect. Modern-
ist biopolitics inheres both the possibility for progress and the seeds
of potential destruction. For development analysts this means that
biopolitical interventions in the lives of the third world poor must be
viewed critically with an eye to weighing their prospects for a positive
contribution to the lives of people at the grass roots against their risks
for excluding or harming those same people. This might well entail
an analysis along the lines of James Ferguson’s examination of the
Thaba-Tseka Development Project in Lesotho. Ferguson’s analysis
clearly shows how the project succeeded in enhancing state presence
and control in the Thaba-Tseka Region despite the fact that it failed
in achieving its planned targets.38 As in the case of Ferguson’s study,
an examination of development interventions informed by biopoli-
tics would entail addressing such issues as how far the project under
analysis primarily had an effect of disciplining and subjectivizing the
target group as against enhancing the capabilities of such groups and
their positive inclusion in the polis. Attention would also have to be
paid to the question of how far the interests of certain groups had
been ignored by and might be threatened by proposed interventions.
This brings us back to the criticism made by Kalyvas to the effect
that Agamben’s theory is lacking an “account of the reasons, forces,
interests, struggles, movements, strategies, and actors that were and
still are involved in the unfolding of bio-sovereign politics.” We have
seen that Foucault asserted that biopolitics was essential to the devel-
opment of capitalism. However, Foucault is also largely lacking an ac-
count of the socioeconomic interests involved in the development of
the closely related sovereign biopolitical and capitalist projects. In-
deed, Ferguson deliberately demotes “intentionality” of the planners
(whether conceived as technocrats or as imperialist conspirators) as
playing a role in determining the outcomes of the development
interventions they plan. He goes on to note that the planners are im-
portant, “but only as part of a larger ‘machine,’ an anonymous set of
alt-parfitt-fin.qxd 6/10/09 4:37 PM Page 56

56 Are the Third World Poor Homines Sacri?

interrelations that only ends up having a kind of retrospective coher-


ence.”39 We might agree that the intentionality or agency of a partic-
ular elite group is mediated through a complex set of interrelations
and so effect does not necessarily proceed in any direct way from the
causality of that group’s intentions. But why are the interrelations
necessarily anonymous and why must outcomes only be amenable to
retrospective analysis? Surely, it is possible to develop an account of the
differential interests and other variables (even if it is not complete) in-
volved in a given situation and provide some thoughts as to likely out-
comes on the basis of this account.
Ferguson’s analysis is suggestive that the biopolitical approach is
limited in the sense that it seems to complicate the role of agency to
the point of obfuscation (only a retrospective coherence can be im-
posed on events). Perhaps this is why, for Agamben, power is vested
in a sovereign power that remains largely undefined. All this is sug-
gestive that a biopolitical approach needs to be combined with an un-
derstanding of political economy if it is to be of any substantial use in
development analysis. Biopolitical categories such as subjectivisation
and disciplinarity may well throw light on various aspects of develop-
ment, but an understanding of why certain sovereign powers embrace
particular policies, how groupings at the grass roots might effectively
respond to them, and the variables that affect those policies demands
an analysis of the interests of differential groups, their respective sit-
uations (inclusive of variables that affect these situations) and the bal-
ance of power relations between them. It can be seen how a political
economy approach such as that of Marx is better able to throw light
on the specifics of these interests and power relations than a broader
biopolitical approach that does not (explicitly) deal with differential
economic and class interests and modes of production. The task of fu-
ture research on these issues might well start from the Foucauldian
observation (quoted above) on the “adjustment of the accumulation
of men to that of capital” and its necessity to the growth of capitalism
with a view to exploring how biopolitics and political economy might
be combined to throw light on the interests, goals, and strategies of
sovereign powers and subject groups taking into account the socioe-
conomic circumstances that affect their capacity for action. This may
help to show how sovereigns endeavor to organize humanity in accor-
dance with the logic of their biopolitical and capitalist projects and the
strategies available for subject groups to resist them.

Notes

1. See, for example, Jean-Claude Paye, Global War on Liberty, translated by


James H. Membrez (New York: Telos Press, 2007).
alt-parfitt-fin.qxd 6/10/09 4:37 PM Page 57

Trevor Parfitt 57

2. Elizabeth Povinelli, “Ordinary Poverty and Sores,” paper given at


Charles Darwin University’s workshop “Indigenous policy reform in the NT:
An extraordinary debate for extraordinary times,” 20 July 2007 at http://
archive.blogsome.com/2007/07/31/povinelli-exception.
3. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans-
lated by Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p.
180.
4. Michel Foucault, “Right of Death and Power over Life,” in The Fou-
cault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 259.
5. Ibid., p. 262.
6. Ibid., italics in original.
7. Ibid., p. 263.
8. Agamben, Homo Sacer, note 3, p. 1.
9. Andrew Norris, “Introduction: Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of
the Living Dead,” in Andrew Norris, ed., Politics, Metaphysics and Death: Essays
on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (London: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 6.
10. Ibid., p. 8.
11. Agamben, Homo Sacer, note 3, pp. 18–19.
12. Ibid., pp. 178–179.
13. Ibid., pp. 179.
14. Ibid.
15. See http://www.narmada.org/introduction.html
16. W. M. Adams, “Rural Protest, Land Policy and the Planning Process
on the Bakolori Project, Nigeria,” Africa, 58: 31–336.
17. R. P. Lightfoot, “The Costs of Resettling Reservoir Evacuees in NE
Thailand,” Journal of Tropical Geography 47: 63.
18. Olivia McDonald, “Kept in the Dark: The World Bank, the IMF and
Parliaments,” www.brettonwoodsproject.org/art-183338
19. Ibid.
20. Andreas Kalyvas, “The Sovereign Weaver: Beyond the Camp,” in An-
drew Norris, ed., Politics, Metaphysics and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s
Homo Sacer (London: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 110.
21. Ibid., p. 111.
22. Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (Minnesota: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 91.
23. Kalyvas, note 20, p. 112.
24. Agamben, Homo Sacer, note 3, pp. 187–188.
25. Kalyvas, note 20, p. 114.
26. Ibid., p. 115.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., p. 125.
29. Malcolm Bull, “Vectors of the Biopolitical,” New Left Review 45,
May/June 2007 at http://www.newleftreview.org/A2667
30. Ibid.
31. Martha Nussbaum, “Human Capabilities, Female Human Beings,” in
Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover, eds., Women, Culture and Development: A Study
of Human Capabilities (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 265.
32. Bull, note 29.
33. Nussbaum, note 31, p. 63.
34. Bull, note 29.
35. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans-
lated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 194.
36. Ibid., p. 170.
alt-parfitt-fin.qxd 6/10/09 4:37 PM Page 58

58 Are the Third World Poor Homines Sacri?

37. Michel Foucault, “The Risks of Security,” in James D. Faubion, ed.,


Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–84, vol. 3, translated by Robert Hurley,
et al. (London: Penguin, 2002).
38. James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticiza-
tion, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1994).
39. Ibid., p. 275.

You might also like