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Trevor Parfitt*
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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
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Development as Biopolitics
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:
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
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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
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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:
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:
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
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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
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Notes
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