Right of Death and Power over Life

An extremely interesting and rich chapter concerning the primary problem Foucault identifies with the new system of bio-power that governs moder day populaces. The part that particularly struck me was Foucault's identification of one of the core reasons why we always look to the sovereign state as the lcoation for change/protection and continually neglect the disciplines of society (schools, churches, the military, the family, etc.). The fear of death, Foucault says, has taken over the way we live our lives as the dominant system around us continually tells us what it measn to trully live, thereby enabling its mechanisms of normalization, control, and domination over us. The war in Iraq provides the perfect example of what Foucault's talking about. The Bush administration forstalled criticism for invading Iraq by overexaggerating the threat of biological weapons. In denying opponents' claims of his interest in expanding the U.S. empire, Bush repetedly insisted that the "liberation" of Iraq and the larger war on terror were crucial to the survival of the planet at large. This is exaclty what Foucault is talking about when he says "wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone." And, the implications are built right into the line that follows: "entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital." It is true that criticism regarding the Bsuh administration's military decisions has reached unprecedented levels of support accross the country, but the point about mobilization still holds. Recall, for example, the massive riots that occured against those individuals who protested the war in Iraq. Slanderous labels like "un-american," "unpatriotic," and other exclusionary titles were spit-out without hesitance. This example also addresses Foucault's analysis of the transformation of power later on, when he describes the shift from using the power of death to producing a certain type of life based on normalization of behaviors and the subsequent exclusion of those outside of the decided norm.

Finally, I'd just liek to briefly comment on the beginning of Foucault's critique of the law. Far from creating open-ended freedom for individualized prosperity, the democratic legal structures throughout the modern world are "the forms that made an essentially normalizing power acceptable." Foucault's anger or dissatisfaction with appeals to legal regulation are reasonable, given that they force us back into the vicious cycle of life-dependency upon the sovereign state and its disciplines. The only question that remains, then, is what is there to do? How do we break this cycle and create a life for ourselves devoid of dependence upon the larger institution of power relations?