On Biopolitics

An Inquiry into Nature and Language

Marco Piasentier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351067089
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

How do humans fit into the natural world? What are the political consequences of viewing humans as animals? On Biopolitics is the first scholarly attempt to answer these questions, bringing critical thought into dialogue with naturalism.

Effectively demonstrating that biology cannot serve as a measure of societies and that a critical theory cannot ignore the scientific worldview, Marco Piasentier explores two dominant strands of biopolitical theory that interpret nature in opposing ways. The first one reduces every notion of the natural world to a historical invention produced by mechanisms of power, thereby preventing the conceptualisation of humans as animals. The second strand turns nature into a normative principle from which to derive a politics of life itself. Piasentier suggests that it is possible to envision a different biopolitical theory, in which humans are political animals, free from any natural imperative. To this end, he introduces Darwinian naturalism into biopolitical theory, engaging with contemporary debates in the philosophy of science about biological teleology and normativity. Rather than reducing the Darwinian worldview to a historic-political invention, he challenges the anthropomorphic residues that continue to inform it and serve as grounds for normative forms of biopolitics.

On Biopolitics sets a new foundation for biopolitical theory and will become essential reading for humanities and social sciences scholars seeking a new perspective on nature, beyond any form of biologism or linguistic idealism.

1 The Command of Language

In one of his most dense essays dedicated to the question of language – the 1959 lecture The Way to Language – Heidegger writes that human beings can “never step outside it” (Heidegger 2010b, 423), because they are “abandoned [in language] without any final foundation” (Agamben 1999, 45).

The work of Heidegger plays a crucial role in what Agamben once defined as the “Copernican revolution that the thought […] inherits from nihilism” (1999, 45). In the course of this chapter, we shall start to elucidate some of the reasons that make of the Heideggerian “turn” (Kerhe) a fundamental step in the revolution described by Agamben. The effects of this “turn” radiate to the Kantian revolution itself, setting the stage for what we can define as a Copernican revolution into the transcendental revolution itself.

We shall address the Heideggerian linguistic “turn” in relation to the theme of the “voice.” The philosophical–etymological investigation of the term Dichtung will allow us to shed light on some of the decisive moments in the metamorphosis of the Heideggerian notion of the voice. Following the traces that lead from the “voice of conscience” (Stimme des Gewissens) to the “voice of being” (Stimme des Seins), we shall see that the erasure of any “final foundation” exceeding language does not liberate the Copernican revolution of language from any normative injunction. We shall suggest that the passage from the “voice of conscience” to the “voice of being” corresponds to the passage from logocentrism to what we shall define as logomorphism. Whereas logocentrism entails a voice more authentic and originary than everyday language, logomorphism consists of a pure will to signify, which “dictates” the impossibility of stepping outside everyday language.

Towards the “Turn”

1. Heidegger introduces the term “turn” (Kerhe) in a footnote from On the Essence of Truth, an essay written in the 1930s but published only in 1943 (Heidegger 2010b).¹ In our opinion, the partition of Heideggerian thought should not be interpreted in a strictly chronological manner: the turn is, first and foremost, the attempt to articulate a conceptual passage, which does not necessarily coincide with a specific temporal period of his work.² We are not questioning that the 1930s mark the beginning of a profound philosophical transformation, which was to be largely established in the early 1940s. However, as we shall attempt to show in the next chapter, it is possible to identify already in Being and Time constitutive elements of the later writings, as it is possible to distinguish elements conceptually belonging to the early period in the 1950s essays on language.

Heidegger has often pointed out that the turn does not refer to a change in the fundamental inquiry guiding his works – which before and after it remains essentially the question of being – but to a change in the way of posing this question.³ Being and Time opens with a reminder to the reader of the obliteration from western philosophy of the “question of the meaning of being (die Frage nach dem Sinn von Sein)” (Heidegger 2010a, 17).⁴ The philosophical tradition – Heidegger continues – has reduced the question of being to that of the determination of beings or entities, “forgetting” the “ontological difference” (Ontologische Differenz) between being and beings. Hence, the “necessity” and the “priority” of this question, which Heidegger raises starting from that entity being able to pose the question itself. As he states in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology – a lecture course held in Marburg the year of the publication of his 1927 masterpiece – to comprehend being and its distinction from beings means first and foremost “to understand that being to whose ontological constitution the understanding of being belongs, the Dasein” (Heidegger 1988, 227). Inasmuch as it can pose the question of being, “[t]he ontic constitution of Dasein – its determination as entity – lies in the fact that it is ontological” (Heidegger 2010a, 11). Given the ontic-ontological primacy of Dasein, “fundamental ontology,” defined as the source from which all the other ontologies emerge, has to start from what Heidegger calls “existential analytics of Dasein.”

Looking at Being and Time in retrospect, in the well-know 1969 Le Thor seminar, Heidegger was to argue that

[t]he thinking that proceeds from Being and Time, in that it gives up the word “meaning of being” in favor of “truth of being,” henceforth emphasizes the openness of being itself, rather than the openness of Dasein in regard to this openness of being. This signifies “the turn,” in which thinking always more decisively turns to being as being.

(Heidegger 2003a, 47)

If we decide to follow the reading Heidegger himself proposes of his work, then we can claim one of the main elements that characterizes the turn is the “destruction” of that foundation still inhabiting his previous works. “Heidegger – Braver argues – compromised the potential of Being and Time by trying to discover the one deep, true structure of the self” (Braver 2007, 259). This structure – what Agamben (1991, 96) calls the “anthropogenetic patrimony” of Dasein – constitutes an “ontoanthropology” (Braver 2015, 67), which certainly should not be deemed a form of traditional anthropology but “an attempt to answer the question of being by appealing to a particular being” (2015, 67), namely Dasein. Already, his student Hans-Georg Gadamer had pointed out that “Heidegger himself, after the ‘turning,’ abandoned […] Dasein’s understanding of being as the point of departure for posing the question about being” (Gadamer 1981, 104). With the turn, he does not deny the fundamental point proposed in Being and Time, according to which “only as long as Dasein is, does being ‘give’ (gibt es) itself” (Heidegger 1998, 256), but he specifies that “the sentence does not say that being is the product of the human being” (1998, 256).⁵ This amendment is essential for drawing a neat distinction between two ways of intending the relationship between Dasein and being. On the one hand, the question of being is posed starting from the perspective of Dasein; on the other, Dasein is to be “grasped and grounded” within the question of being “as the site that being necessitates for its opening up” (Heidegger 2014b, 219). We can then suggest that this new philosophical perspective entails that the Dasein is no longer the founding moment for the opening of being, but is absorbed into the horizon of the occurrence of being itself.

A pivotal notion to envision a new way of thinking about Dasein and being is that of “event” (Ereignis), as first introduced in the Contributions to Philosophy. Of the Event, a work written between 1936 and 1938, but published only in 1989 (Heidegger 2012). The Contributions can be considered one of the most articulated and comprehensive formulations of Heidegger’s thought after the turn. He maintains that being “appropriates” Dasein so that Dasein exists only as belonging to being; in turn, being “needs” Dasein “in order to occur essentially” (Heidegger 2012, 198). The occurrence of being as appropriation of Dasein is the event. Being and Dasein are not two objectively present poles of a relationship, “to speak in the strict sense of the relation of Dasein to being is misleading, inasmuch as it implies that being essentially occurs ‘for itself’ and that Dasein then takes up a relation to being” (2012, 200). Being and Dasein are not two pre-existing elements that come to meet at a later moment, but are always already consigned to each other. It is, therefore, necessary to resist the idea that their belonging together corresponds to the relationship between subject and object. Dasein “has overcome all subjectivity, and being is never an object, something we set over and against ourselves, something representable” (2012, 199). In Being and Time, being is not an entity and not even a meta-entity that determines all other entities. In the Contributions, Heidegger further elaborates the earlier inquiry, thanks to the notion of event. Being is not something, but it “gives” itself as event. Only by avoiding the obliteration of this distinction is it possible to conceive being as the opening of the horizon where beings become visible. In its self-withdrawing from all quantification and measurement, the event – as the essential occurrence of being – is an “abyssal ground.” The “abyssal character of being” (2012, 193) cannot be explained as a quantitative surplus: its excess is “the self-withdrawing of measuring out” (2012, 196) and this withdrawing – Heidegger is careful to underline – “is also not the ‘beyond’ of a super-sensible” (2012, 196). The occurrence of being is “a preeminent and originary kind of leaving unfulfilled, leaving empty. It is thereby a preeminent kind of opening up” (2012, 300). Because being gives itself without a final closure onto one determinate manifestation, the modes of its occurrence are not accidents or properties, but they constitute its essence. This is the reason why Heidegger will more and more frequently tend to use the term “event” to refer to being.

Such a conception of the event clearly emerges in Identity and Difference – a collection of two lectures given in 1957 – where Heidegger explains that

[t]here is being only in this or that particular historical character: physis, logos, en, idea, energeia, Substantiality, Objectivity, Subjectivity, the Will, the Will to Power, the Will to Will […] The manner in which it, being, gives itself, is itself determined by the way in which it clears itself. This way, however, is a historic, always epochal character.

(Heidegger 1969, 66–67)

If the historical occurrence of being is the only way in which being gives itself, and Dasein exists only as belonging to being, then Dasein loses a permanent anthropological connotation. The turn, then, marks the disappearance of the “absolute” “foundation” exceeding the cobelonging of Dasein and being (cf. Heidegger 1994, 139).

It is precisely the notion of cobelonging elaborated in Identity and Difference which allows Heidegger to enrich the analysis of being and Dasein proposed in the Contributions. In the 1957 lecture dedicated to the principle of identity, he underlines the importance of distinguishing between “belonging together” and “belonging together.” The difference might seem stylistic but, on closer inspection, it plays a fundamental role in clarifying why Dasein and being cannot be understood by resorting to the ordinary notion of relation. In the expression “belonging together,” the meaning of belonging is informed by the word “together.” Belonging, hence, means to be “placed into the order of a ‘together,’ established in the unity of a manifold, combined into the unity of a system” (Heidegger 1969, 29). In the expression “belonging together,” it is no longer the identity, the together to define the belonging, but the together to be “determined by the belonging” (1969, 29). By embracing the second option, Heidegger can claim that it is not the essence of identity to define the event, but it is the belonging of being and Dasein that constitutes the horizon in which the concept of identity can emerge. Being and Dasein have always already reached each other in their belonging together: being appropriates Dasein and therefore the latter belongs to the former, being itself belongs to Dasein, for only with Dasein can being be present as being (cf. 1969, 33).

Dichtung

We can further deepen the inquiry into the belonging together of being and Dasein by analyzing the 1935 essay Heidegger dedicates to art, which was to be published as part of Off the Beaten Track (Holzwege) in 1950. As Heidegger explains in the epigraph of this collection of essays, Holz is an ancient name used to designate the forest. In the forest there are Wege, paths, mostly overgrown, that come to an abrupt stop where the forest is untrodden. These paths “are called Holzwege. Each goes its separate way, though within the same forest” (Heidegger 2002, epigraph). On the Origin of the Work of Art is the first of them, and it has a fundamental role in getting Heidegger’s thought off the beaten track. The essay not only lays the ground for the elaboration of the notion of event (as developed in the Contributions and later writings), but it directs us On the Way to Language. Following this Ariadne’s thread will allow us to trace a connection with the works of the late 50s, where Heidegger fully elaborates the idea of language as “house of being.”

The title should not deceive us: the essay is not a treatise on aesthetics: the reflection on art “is completely and decisively directed solely toward the question of being” (2002, 55). In the opening pages of the text, Heidegger writes: “the artist is the origin of the work. The work is the origin of the artist, neither is without the other” (2002, 1). The work of art and artist are not two separate entities coming together at a later stage but belong together in the same manner in which being and Dasein do. The occurrence of the work as appropriation of the artist coincides with the giving itself of art; such an occurrence of “art is the setting-itself-to-work of truth (Die Kunst ist das Sich-ins-Werk-Setzen der Wahrheit)” (2002, 19). Hence, the occurrence of the event – the belonging together of art and artist – is the foundation (Stiftung) of truth. The notion of truth we encounter in this passage is what Heidegger ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Vestiges of Anthropomorphism
• 1 The Command of Language
• 2 Is the Human Being a Living Creature?
• 3 The Death of Bartleby and the Paradise of Language
• 4 Erring According to Nature
• 5 The Blowing of the Wind and Natural Selection
• 6 The Ends of Nature
• Index