Zizek: how to break with biopolitics

In his introduction to the edited volume of Robespierre's writings, Zizek presents the radical stance of Lenin and Lacan (a stance that does not search for cover for the revolutionary act in the big Other) as the only possibility

that allows us to break with today's predominant mode of politics, post-political biopolitics, which is a politics of fear, formulated as a defense against a potential victimization or harassment. Therein resides the true line of separation between radical emancipatory politics and the politics of the status quo: it is not the difference between two different positive visions, sets of axioms, but, rather, the difference between the politics based on a set of universal axioms and the politics which renounces the very constitutive dimension of the political, since it resorts to fear as its ultimate mobilizing principle: fear of immigrants, fear of crime, fear of godless sexual depravity, fear of the excessive state itself (with its burdensome taxation), fear of ecological catastrophes--such a (post)politics always amounts to a frightening rallying of frightened men.

Questions:

1.   In what sense is biopolitics a politics of fear and in what sense is this a fear of potential victimization? Within a Zizekian frame of the decline of symbolic efficiency, we would have fragile imaginary subjects always competing and never certain and thus always vulnerable. It's not clear to me, though, what (if anything) specifically underlies the notion of biopolitics mentioned here. If we bring Foucault in here, we can fill out the notion of state-phobia. We can also understand these proliferating fears in terms of a project of governmentality that takes making live as its objects.

2.   What does Zizek mean by 'constitutive dimension of the political'? Does he mean fundamental antagonism/class conflict? The friend/enemy distinction? The raising of particular claims to the level of the universal?

3.   What are the repercussions of thinking in terms of an opposition between an axiomatic politics and a non-axiomatic politics? Is the mapping of this opposition onto the distinction between radical-emancipatory and status-quo necessary and, if so, in what sense?

Zizek asks:

How are we to break out of this (post)politics of fear? The biopolitical administration of life is the true content of the global liberal democracy, and this introduces the tension between democratic form and administrative-regulatory content. What, then, would be the opposite of biopolitics.

I'm not sure I understand what he means by 'tension' here. Foucault's discussion suggests not a tension at all, not a parallax, not a problem, but the realization of the democratic form in the administrative-regulatory content: this is what democracy looks like. And this is where I also see the link with Schmitt--democracy as a total state, a vehicle for the introduction of previously separate or distinct realms of life under the domain of the political, their availability for intensification, their becoming-objects-of-politics. Perhaps, "tension" is the word Zizek uses to avoid saying "and this results in the failure of the democratic form insofar as it is realized in its administrative-regulatory content."

Nonetheless, his subsequent suggestion as to what would be the opposite of biopolitics suggests as much:

What if we take the risk of resuscitating the good old 'dictatorship of the proletariat' as the only way to break biopolitics?

He presents dictatorship as a formal determination, as the underlying mode of functioning of any state insofar as it relies on unquestioned/unquestionable suppositions. It seems to me that this is a variation on the theme of law as crime, the irrational injunction, the obscene supplement of power. But, if this is the case, if any state is formally a dictatorship, then how does the dictatorship of the proletariat break with biopolitics/liberal democracy? Presumably because it it forfeits an illusion or abandons the fantasy of some kind of legitimacy. Zizek writes:

The state in its institutional aspect is a massive presence which cannot be accounted for in the terms of the representation of interests--the democratic illusion is that it can . . . one can also put it in Benjaminian terms: while democracy can more or less eliminate constituted violence, it still has to rely continuously on the constitutive violence.

Zizek then turns the dictatorship into the violence of the democratic explosion (primarily via Ranciere and the part of no part). It starts to seem, then, that the break with biopolitics that he has in mind is an aspect of the violent, explosive, 'intrusion of the egalitarian logic' of democracy in contrast to its regulatory dimension (democracy is terror). But this move is then sublated as well; enter Badiou and the Soviet experience circa the 1920. What really matters is institutionalization; these are the decisive moments, the attempts to change every day life in its rituals of marriage and funerals, its organization of factory and apartment life.

It looks like biopolitics. It smells like biopolitics. It moves like biopolitics. It is also likely based on knowledge about the species life of humans. Why isn't it biopolitics? One answer would highlight 'proletarian' dictatorship as a break with biopolitics' neoliberal frame. But this would suggest the impossibility of a socialist biopolitics, a suggestion that is initially unconvincing (although if it were possible it would have to rely on a set of different loci of attachment to society). Zizek's answer (although he doesn't say this directly) seems to be: because it embraces the constitutive dimension of the political rather than relying on fear as a mobilizing principle. 

Why would embracing the constitutive dimension of the political break with biopolitics? It seems clear that it breaks with post-politics: it doesn't take unity as a goal or ideal; it doesn't posit society as a totality as its object of intervention but instead proceeds from the conviction that collective decisions and steering is possible.

Comments

[the vanishing mediator]

From http://vanishingmediator.blogspot.com/

Žižek against both post-politics and biopolitics

(1) From Žižek’s book Virtue and Terror: Maximilien Robespierre (Verso, 2007), p. xxxix:

“[...] what better proof of the ethico-political misery of our epoch whose ultimate mobilizing motif is the mistrust of virtue! Should we not affirm against such opportunist realism the simple faith in the eternal Idea of freedom which persists through all defeats, without which, as was clear to Robespierre, a revolution ‘is just a noisy crime that destroys another crime’, the faith most poignantly expressed in Robespierre’s very last speech on the 8 Thermidor 1794, the day before his arrest and execution:

But there do exist, I can assure you, souls that are feeling and pure; it exists, that tender, imperious and irresistible passion, the torment and delight of magnanimous hearts; that deep horror of tyranny, that compassionate zeal for the oppressed, that sacred love for the homeland, that even more sublime and holy love for humanity, without which a great revolution is just a noisy crime that destroys another crime; it does exist, that generous ambition to establish here on earth the world’s first Republic.”

(2) From Žižek’s book Violence (Picador, 2008), p. 40:

“[...] ‘post-political’ is a politics which claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and instead focus on expert management and administration, while ‘biopolitics’ designates the regulation of the security and welfare of human lives as its primary goal.”

(3) From Žižek’s book Violence (Picador, 2008), p. 202:

“Divine violence should thus be conceived as divine in the precise sense of the old Latin motto vox populi, vox dei: not in the perverse sense of ‘we are doing it as mere instruments of the People’s Will,’ but as the heroic assumption of the solitude of sovereign decision. It is a decision (to kill, to risk or lose one’s life) made in absolute solitude, with no cover in the big Other. If it is extra-moral, it is not ‘immoral,’ it does not give the agent license just to kill with some kind of angelic innocence. When those outside the structured social field strike ‘blindly,’ demanding and enacting immediate justice/revenge, this is divine violence.”

(4) From Žižek’s book In Defense of Lost Causes (Verso, 2008), pp. 460-461:

“But then how are we to counter the threat of ecological catastrophe? It is here that we should return to the four moments of what Badiou calls the ‘eternal Idea’ of revolutionary-egalitarian Justice. What is demanded is:

1. strict egalitarian justice (all people should pay the same price in eventual renunciations [...]);

2. terror (ruthless punishment of all who violate the imposed protective measures, inclusive of severe limitations on liberal ‘freedoms,’ [...]);

3. voluntarism (the only way to confront the threat of ecological catastrophe is by means of large-scale collective decisions which run counter to the ‘spontaneous’ immanent logical of capitalist development);

4. and, last but not least, all this combined with trust in the people [...] One should not be afraid to assert, as a combination of terror and trust in the people, the reactivation of one of the figures of all egalitarian-revolutionary terrors, the ‘informer’ who denounces the culprit to the authorities. (In the case of the Enron scandal, Time magazine rightly celebrated the insiders who tipped off the financial authorities as true public heroes.)

Does, then, the ecological challenge not offer a unique chance to reinvent the ‘eternal Idea’ of egalitarian terror?

(5) From Žižek’s book In Defense of Lost Causes (Verso, 2008), p. 212:

“Gastev ran the Institute of Labor, which carried out experiments to train workers to act like machines. He saw the mechanization of man as the next step in evolution [...]. Is not this dream the first radical formulation of what, today, one usually calls biopolitics? Counterintuitive as this may sound, one can argue that this vision, had it really been imposed, would have been much more terrifying than Stalinism actually was. It was against this threat of full-scale modernist mechanization that Stalinist cultural politics reacted; it not only demanded a return to artistic forms that would be attractive to large crowds, but also—although it may appear cynical—the return to elementary traditional forms of morality. In the Stalinist show trials, the victims were held responsible for certain acts, forced to confess...in short, though it may obscene (and it was), they were treated as autonomous ethical subjects, not as objects of biopolitics.”

(6) From Žižek’s book In Defense of Lost Causes (Verso, 2008), p. 358:

“What is not in Marx, what Negri projects onto Marx’s ‘general intellect,’ is his own central notion of ‘biopolitics’ as the direct production of life itself in its social dimension. [...] This is why, in this Marxian vision, the objects of the production process are precisely not social relations themselves: the ‘administration of things’ (control of and domination over nature) is here separated from the relations between people, it constitutes a domain of the ‘administration of things’ which no longer has to rely on the domination over people.”

I think one way to summarize the insight that unifies all of these quotations from Žižek is to say that Capital today functions as the Real which informs--but is not visible from within--the imaginary-symbolic “reality” addressed by both post-politics and biopolitics. When those who are excluded from, and made abject by, this hegemonic “reality” wrest control away from the capitalists in an ethico-political act, this act (as well as the subsequent institutions that prevent the resurgence of capitalism) is neither post-politics nor biopolitics. Only such an act realizes what Žižek has recently referred to in his lectures as a “politics between fear and trembling.”

[old]

Enjoyed this Jodi. Think you get at it best where you are suggesting he seems to be merely conflating post politics with biopolitics. I'm still needing to catch up on the last few biopolitics posts.

[Jodi]

Hi Old--thanks; my basic thought is that if these are the 'same' then that needs to be explained, particularly since the concepts refer to different things; also, there is a post called Schmitt (or something with Schmitt in the title) that is really about society must be defended; I wrote it with your remarks in mind (although I expect that there are places where you will disagree!)

[old]

I'll be sure to have a look at it soon!