The longest discussion of biopolitics I've located in Zizek's work is in appendix 2 to Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle. Here is a summary with commentary.
Zizek begins withs the upper portion of the discourse of the university (S2-a), viewing it as the formula for biopolitics (the formula is misprinted in the book); one should keep in mind that Zizek also reads university discourse as the formula for bureaucracy and for capitalism). The formula is "that of expert knowledge dealing with its object, which is a--not subjects, but individuals reduced to bare subsistence." The bottom portion of the formula expresses Santner's "crisis of investiture" ("or the impossibility of the subject's relating to S1, of identifying with the Master Signifier, or of assuming a symbolic mandate").
The key point here is that the expert rule of 'biopolitics' is grounded in and conditioned by the crisis of investiture; this crisis generated the 'post-metaphyscial' survivalist stance of the Last Men, which ends up in an anaemic spectacle of life dragging on as its own shadow.
But there is more to the link between university and biopolitics, namely:
The 'object' of the discourse of the University, however, has two aspects which cannot but seem to belong to two opposed ideological spaces: that of the reduction of humans to bare subsistence, to Homo sacer as the disposable object of expert knowledge; and that of respect for the vulnerable Other taken to an extreme, of the attitude of narcissistic subjectivity which experiences itself as vulnerable, constantly exposed to a multitude of 'potential harassments.' Is there a stronger contrast than the one between respect for the Other's vulnerability and the reduction of the Other to 'mere life' regulated by administrative knowledge?
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What the two poles share is precisely the underlying refusal of any higher Causes, the notion of the ultimate goal of our lives is life itself.
The overall structure here, Zizek suggests, is that "of a product containing its own agent of containment" (the source encounters its roots). Homo sacer is the product and respect for the vulnerable Other, its agent of containment (and the other way 'round?).
There are a few technical problems here. One: homo sacer and bare life are not necessarily the same; homo sacer is a specific kind of inclusion/exclusion of bare life in relation to sovereignty. Two: the language of product is misleading because that term sometimes designates the bottom right position in one of Lacan's four discourses. It's unclear, then, how to understand homo sacer as containment its own agent of containment--is this some kind of logical or conceptual claim? a necessary accompaniment or component? Zizek explores the point in terms of the idea of tolerance: today tolerance coincides with extreme intolerance (as that which must be tolerated). But it isn't clear to me that this is well-conceived via homo sacer or biopolitics.
Perhaps the idea is that the discourse of the university, particularly in its humanitarian, multiculturalist form, but also in its scientific and economic forms, addresses bare life; the more bare life is its addressee, the more the subject is remaindered. The completely vulnerable other to be protected and respected is necessarily reduced and administered, reduced and administered to such an extreme that there is life without subjects, life that is a string or dish of cells, a disposable body part, a replaceable component...Where ever one starts, petri dish or exotic culture, one ends up at the other side, an emphasis on the unique value of the life in all its specificity, a specificity that renders it ultimately separate and alien--unique comes to mean utterly alien and to demand from us a kind of enthrallment.
This is not, however, the same as the making of life into the ultimate goal of our lives; it's the making of uniqueness, specificity, partiality into the ultimate cause. A familiar Marxist refrain should come to mind here: and thus we are cut off from our species being.
Zizek goes a different direction:
When one talks about biopolitics . . . one should be careful to note that the category of 'pure (or mere) life" has nothing whatsoever to do with any biological or experiential immediacy--it is thoroughly determined by its symbolic context.
I wonder if this might provide a useful way to think about Foucault's discussion of neoliberalism in the book "about" biopolitics. Zizek, though, considers Agamben (and would be nice to think that an aspect of this consideration would be a return to the idea of the symbolic determination of biopolitics, but that might be direct...).
Giorgio Agamben has developed in detail this theme of how the state of exception (the suspension of the rule of law on behalf of the law itself) generates as its object pure life--in both its aspects. In other words, it gives the sovereign power the right to dispense with the life of its subjects without any limitations, thereby turning states into killing machines, and simultaneously defining 'biopolitics' as the core of politics.
Zizek uses Hitler as an example, bringing out Nazi emphasis on whole wheat bread and a 1933 law aimed at "protecting life"--the like of sacrificial elements. For Zizek, this indicates the coincidence of pure law (S1) and pure life (a). But I don't know where "pure" comes from. The more important claim, though, is tacked on at the end of discussion:
what disappears in this process is simply politics as such, for biopoltics is, at its core, post-politics.
There's a challenge in combining Agamben and Ranciere here: is all politics necessarily post-politics? Agamben renders the biopolitical essence of sovereignty as inseparable from Western ontology. Ranciere's post-politics is a specific diagnosis of changes in contemporary politics. More helpful would be to think of b biopolitics in Foucauldian terms--then, neoliberalism is a post-political formation in the sense Ranciere describes. It would then be important to designate this sense, asking, isn't it just a different formation of politics and its objects, a formation that is itself irreducibly political rather post-political (I've explained here before the reasons I reject the term post-politics as analytically useful)?
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