Foucault Supplement: Mean Green Workshop Nicole/Scotty K Lab 4/7/2020

Mean Green Workshop Nicole/Scotty
K Lab 4/7/2020
Foucault Supplement
Poverty Programs Link......................................................................................................................................................................................2
Rhetoric Link.....................................................................................................................................................................................................3
Food Stamps Link..............................................................................................................................................................................................5
Conditions Link.................................................................................................................................................................................................6
HIV Link...........................................................................................................................................................................................................7
Structural Barriers Link.....................................................................................................................................................................................8
Ethic of Love Link.............................................................................................................................................................................................9
Efficiency Link................................................................................................................................................................................................10
Welfare Mother Link.......................................................................................................................................................................................11
Welfare Government Link...............................................................................................................................................................................12
Nuclear War Link............................................................................................................................................................................................13
Exclusion of Poor Link....................................................................................................................................................................................15
Institutions Link...............................................................................................................................................................................................16
Welfare and Healthcare Link...........................................................................................................................................................................17
Indian Aid Link...............................................................................................................................................................................................19
HealthCare Link..............................................................................................................................................................................................22
Medicine/Disease Link....................................................................................................................................................................................33
Mental Health Link..........................................................................................................................................................................................34
Alienation Link................................................................................................................................................................................................35
Disability Link.................................................................................................................................................................................................36
Barelife Impact................................................................................................................................................................................................39
Sick Impact Card.............................................................................................................................................................................................42
Racism Impact.................................................................................................................................................................................................44
Authoritarianism Impact..................................................................................................................................................................................45
Poverty Impact.................................................................................................................................................................................................46
Militarism Impact............................................................................................................................................................................................47
VTL Impact.....................................................................................................................................................................................................48
Alternative-Exercise Liberty...........................................................................................................................................................................49
Ext-Exercise Liberty Alternative.....................................................................................................................................................................50
Alternative Resistance.....................................................................................................................................................................................51
A2 Fallacy.......................................................................................................................................................................................................52
AT-No Agency................................................................................................................................................................................................53
Ext. – Us/Them Dichotomy.............................................................................................................................................................................54
FYI- What is biopower....................................................................................................................................................................................55
Dependence-> Exclusion.................................................................................................................................................................................57
AT: AGAMBEN.............................................................................................................................................................................................58
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Poverty Programs Link

The extension of social services to the marginalized allows for their identification and
surveillance. Maki 8
( Krystle Maki A thesis submitted to the Department of Sociology In conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts
Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada (May, 2009) Copyright © “GUILTY UNTIL PROVEN ELIGIBLE: WELFARE
SURVEILLANCE OF SINGLE MOTHERS IN ONTARIO” )
Some surveillance scholars increasingly problematize the collection of personal data using sophisticated
computer technology because it is normalized particularly in social service agencies such as welfare (Gilliom
2001, Eubanks 2006, Henman 2004, Kohler-Hausman 2007, Lyon 1994, Pleace 2007). Scholars are therefore
cautioning against the use of these technologies on marginalized populations because classifying people into
categories by socioeconomic status can be exclusionary as ‘risky’ attributes can be flagged 33. Haggerty and
Ericson, note the problematic feature of surveillance technologies, as it “involves the collection and analysis of
information about populations in order to govern their activities” (Haggerty and Ericson 2005:1, Parenti 2003).
They argue that new surveillance technologies are different from other tools used by welfare in the past because they
have invasive consequences, intruding into the lives of recipients in ways that were not possible in the past. For
instance, the ability for databases to store extensive personal information regarding recipients, which can be
accessed and cross-referenced with third party databases, has essentially ‘marked’ marginalized
populations.
Using computers to track welfare recipients has been termed by Roger Clarke (1994) as “ dataveillance”. This concept
refers to the reality that surveillance does not necessarily mean that individuals are being watched by people, but rather
that their personal data is constantly tracked and stored, shared and flagged (Henman and Marston 2008:188,
Parenti 2003, Lyon 2004). Moreover, “computerized ‘dataveillance’ facilitates integration of surveillance
capabilities across institutions and technologies” (Haggerty and Ericson 2005:4). This potentially dangerous aspect
of the new technology was evident in the discussion of the UK surveillance ‘mashups’. Some scholars, particularly
those who research surveillance and crime, have claimed that surveillance technologies “exacerbate social
division, rather than ‘provide security’...affluent citizens attain heightened advantage and mobility while
marginalized groups experience intensified stigmatization and exclusion” (Norris and Wilson 2006: xxiii). If
this is the case, why is there not more research to address the political economy of surveillance?
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Rhetoric Link
The rhetoric of at risk populations for dependence and death has been used by the neoliberal
government to justify the panoptical of the poor.
Finally, I will examine how to merge prominent surveillance claims and those of feminist political economy.
Specifically, how has neoliberalism changed the way that the poor negotiate and interact with welfare and other
social services? What socio-historical and political forces have permitted the increased surveillance of single
mothers on welfare? How have new(er) surveillance technologies categorized socioeconomic status and what
effect has this had on those most marginalized? In Feminism political Economy and the State: Contested
Terrain, Pat Armstrong and Patricia Connelly (1999) argue “... the new [neoliberal] state involves more
regulation of individuals and groups, as well as more intervention, to ensure rights for corporations
making profit and for individuals defined as the fittest” (Armstrong and Connelly 1999:5)36. As
considered below there has been a notable shift in constituting the ‘market citizen’, one that makes ‘good
choices’ and is an active member in the market through their consumption. Those outside this ideal citizen
are perceived as ‘dependent’, ‘criminal’, ‘mad’, ‘lazy’, ‘irresponsible’, ‘dangerous’, ‘undeserving’
and therefore ‘risky’ (Garland 2002:132). The construction of a new subject is highlighted by Laureen Snider
who claims: Neoliberal governance has required the constitution of a new subject, the responsibilized
individual. The goal of governments became not to deliver social justice or full employment, or
guarantee minimum standards of living to those on the bottom, but to enable citizens to become
consumers who can fend for themselves (Snider 2006:336).
One way that government officials (in both the US and Canada) have justified the increased surveillance
and subsequent criminalization of marginal groups is by constructing the discourse of ‘risk’ and
‘effective risk management’. These were catch phrases constructed by neoliberal discourse during
President Reagan’s ‘War on Drugs’37 in the 1980s (Garland 2002:113) which were later reiterated in
Ontario Premier Mike Harris’s 1995 ‘common sense revolution’. Other scholars have noted that the
scientific discourses embedded in “[r]isk rationalities provide a scientific basis for understanding the
differences of individuals and population segments” which in turn justifies unequal policy
implications such as the bureaucratic surveillance of welfare recipients (Henman 2004: 175)38.
Furthermore, building on notions of ‘risk’, Janine Fitzgerald (2004) combines the theoretical insights of
Foucault with the real experiences of single mothers on social assistance, asserting that “ Welfare reform acts
as the Panopticon of the poor, a disciplinary apparatus that places them under intense scrutiny and
compels them to become docile workers (Fitzgerald 2004: 59)39. These literatures suggest that neoliberal
discourses of risk and responsibilization, have categorized welfare recipients as ‘risky populations’,
and legitimated an expansion of surveillance technologies to track and monitor the poor. These
discourses, allied with ‘common sense’ notions about poverty, stigmatization and demonization,
explain how and why this attack on the poor was acceptable.
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The rhetoric describing the plight of the children and women in poverty engages in a
construction that justifies patriarchy and biopower
(Valerie Polakow, is Professor of Education at Eastern Michigan University and author of Living on the Edge: Single Mothers and their
Children, “Lives on the Edge” 1994 <http://books.google.com/books?
hl=en&lr=&id=AFOC_jrdmgEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA5&dq=biopower+%22food+stamps
%22&ots=Z3jtfa8yLV&sig=JfyyBbyQPznhnFAdjgXnDuhRukM>)
What do childhood and motherhood mean to citizens of the other America? What
do they mean to those living in the
America of privilege, who make policies about the other motherhood and the other childhood?l What
are the prevailing historica1 and cultura1 images of childhood. The myths of motherhood and of the family, and, most
significantly, the place of private wealth and public responsibility? In attempting to decode these meanings, visible and invisible,
and to prise apart the assumptions and taken, for, granted practices upon which our own definitions of identity and responsibility
rest, we begin to see how OUT ways of seeing and thinking about the family and child development go to the heart of our own
anthropology of self. To construct a language of women and children in poverty is to speak a shadow
language of patriarchy and domestic ideology, of power and control and privilege, which embeds
histories of discrimination. The profoundly unequal and undemocratic landscape that the
feminization and growing infantilization of poverty have created in the United States has given rise to
another discourse- a discourse of otherness. Those living out there in the unnamed landscapes, are
placeless. inhabiting other lifeworlds. Out of this landscape of otherness we have constituted a discourse
of concealment that fails to name the full face of poverty, that allows the horrors of public
indifference to make possible a -social asphyxia – described by Victor Hugo in 1862, in his preface to Les
Mistrobles, as –the ruin of woman by starvation, and the atrophy of childhood by phYSical andspiritual night."
Poverty has always been with us in the West and the New World. The difference in 1991 is that Western
Europe has largely eradicated the destitution of Single mothers and their children; the United States has not.
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Food Stamps Link

The extension of smart cards are another justification for the surveillance of the “risky”
recipients Maki 8
Virginia Eubank’s (2006) research in the United States shows how technology via ‘smart cards’ or, as
Welfare labels it, ‘electronic benefits transfer’ (EBT) cards, track welfare recipients. EBT cards act
like an ATM card, are administered by welfare in place of cheques and track each purchase the
recipient makes (Eubanks 2006:6). This technology is obviously extremely intrusive and removes the
autonomy of the recipient. Although anyone with an ATM card is essentially ‘tracked’ electronically
through their purchases, they are given the choice to use it or not, whereas the EBT removes any
‘choice’ from welfare recipients. Not only does this technology assume suspicion but it also assumes
that the recipients are ‘risky’ and must therefore be ‘managed’.
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Conditions Link
In another failed attempt to provide adequate social services to those in need, it places moral
conditions allowing the government the right to choose life and take it away Arnold 2k5
(Kathleen Arnold, is an assistant professor of political and feminist theory at the University of Texas, San Antonio, Department of
Political Science. This essay is part of her book manuscript provisionally titled "Neo-liberalism and Prerogative Power: Race, Gender and
Ethnicity in a Biopolitical Age.", “Asceticism in Contemporary Political Theory: Marx, Weber, Nietzsche and Beyond” 2005
<http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v008/8.2arnold.html>)
Nevertheless, President Bill Clinton's welfare reform -- the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation of 1996 passed
in conjunction with the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 35 -- has made any social safety net
for the poor contingent and has simultaneously led to increasingly coercive practices and discourse based on
ascetic values towards welfare or workfare recipients. These changes reflect the view that the poor are
pathological, lazy, and promiscuous (among other things) without taking into account changes in the economy or
availability of affordable housing. In the first place, a great deal of money has been poured into programs encouraging marriage,
two parent families and promoting "family values." Changes included a two-year limit on receiving welfare; family
36
"caps" in various states that put a limit on the number of children a woman can have and still receive
welfare; and stricter eligibility. All of these revisions have a "moral" component to them (for example, the fact
sheet for Temporary Assistance to Needy Families -- TANF -- states that its purposes are: "To reduce dependency by promoting job
preparation, work and marriage; to prevent out-of-wedlock pregnancies; and to encourage the formation and maintenance of two-parent
families.") 37 In this way, TANF seeks to create the mythical two parent families evoked in family values rhetoric.
The greater restrictiveness of welfare in combination with stricter rules based on ascetic values have even
been extended to food stamps and this change has hurt qualified adults and children. Ironically, the constant push
38
for "family values" and the endorsement of marriage on the one hand, and family caps on the other, is that poor women often feel
pressured into staying with an abusive husband on behalf of their children or in having an abortion.39 Alternatively, welfare-to-
work policies do not guarantee poor women's increasing economic autonomy but do ensure a new type of
industrial reserve army.
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HIV Link
Framing the question of aids as an international security threat re-iterates biopolitical
norms and reinforces the modern panopticon of the future: aids is everywhere.
(Stefan Elbe, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK “AIDS, SECURITY, BIOPOLITICS” International Relations Copyright © 2005 SAGE
Publications)
Although these normalizing strategies are not exclusive to the securitization approach, the latter
serves as a powerful new site for globalizing these biopolitical norms and reinforces efforts for
deploying them to the non-Western world through funding HIV/AIDS prevention programmes in
military and civilian populations.
Indeed, the securitization of HIV/AIDS has generated new normalizing mechanisms of its own. UNAIDS, for example, is
particularly keen on promoting the ‘HIV/AIDS Awareness Card’ it recently developed, and which is
now routinely deployed during international peacekeeping operations following requests by the Security
Council to address the problem of peacekeepers spreading HIV/AIDS where and when they are deployed. The card – which
has been produced in ten different languages ranging from the obligatory English all the way through to Kiswahili –
recommends to peacekeepers that ‘condoms should be used for all types of sexual acts’, and urges them
to ‘limit your alcohol intake and stay away from drugs’. The most striking feature of this card, however, is undoubtedly that it
also uses fear to incite peacekeepers to exercise self-discipline over their bodies by reminding them
that ‘[t]he HIV virus can be present anywhere in the world. You do not know who is infected with
HIV.’59 This strategy parallels Jeremy Bentham’s famous Panopticon prison design from 1791 whereby the
impossibility of any prisoner knowing whether or not he was being observed at any given time continuously
induced him to be obedient and to self-discipline his body. Today, the impossibility of knowing whether any
given sexual partner is HIV-positive should similarly induce desired behaviour change amongst UN peacekeepers. The
framing of health as a security concern thus further sanctions attempts to modify the sexual
behaviour and cultural practices of populations, generating a difficult trade-off between health and
autonomy. This danger of normalization must thus be added to the danger of a new biopolitical
racism outlined above when evaluating the consequences of framing the global response to HIV/AIDS in
the language of international security.
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Structural Barriers Link

The affirmatives acting to release the impoverished from the structural barriers of society
ensures the state’s ability to grant life
(Asha Varadharajan, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, “Afterword: The Phenomenology of Violence
and the Politics of Becoming” Vol. 28, No. 1, 2008 doi 10.1215/1089201x-2007-060 © 2008 by Duke University Press)
Foucault attributes the banality of violence to the process by which racism sustains the explosive contradiction of a technology of
power whose “objective is essentially to make live” but which seeks, simultaneously, to exercise “the power of death, the
function of death,” to “let die.”12 Foucault hastens to explain that he is tracing not the invention of racism but its inscription in
“the mechanisms of the State” (254). Racism fractures the field of the biological, the domain of biopower,
introducing a novel inflection in the justification for war, in the relationship that war routinely
establishes between “my life and the death of the other” (255). Racism, in this sense, allows biopower
to eliminate perceived threats to the species, not only, and not necessarily, political adversaries,
except insofar as politics has already become indistinguishable from biopower. Foucault’s aim is to suggest
that “race or racism is the precondition that makes killing acceptable” (256). The modern form of power
produces a concert between two forms of sovereignty, each becoming the other’s supplement. As Foucault observes, “If the
power of normalization wished to exercise the old sovereign right to kill, it must become racist. And if,
conversely, a power of sovereignty, or in other words, a power that has the right of life and death, wishes to
work with the instruments, mechanisms, and technology of normalization, it too must become racist”
(256). The genealogy of violence that Foucault produces is punctuated by “privileged moments . . . when the
right to take life was imperative” (257). But accounting for the genocidal impulses of colonization and its corollary,
evolutionist racism, is insufficient in Foucault’s scheme of things, because it fails to include the
conceptualization of “abnormality” (criminality and madness, for example) in racist terms as well as
the “biological extrapolation from the theme of the political enemy” that justifies the elimination of the
enemy race in order to regenerate the species (257). Biopower, for Foucault, is in excess of sovereign
right. When technologies of discipline and technologies of regularization coalesce, they control both
the individual body and the “biological multiplicity” of populations (253). This moment is responsible
for the terrifying paradox that constitutes biopower: the power that guarantees life is precisely that
which extinguishes it.
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Ethic of Love Link

The attempt to embrace an ethic of love is only another form biopower inherent in the
politics of love
(Matthew Chrulew, member of foucault’s circle “Suspicion and Love: Foucault, Christianity, Critique” February 15-17, 2008)
Thus, towards reintroducing Foucauldian thought into this wider debate, the goal of this paper is to consider Foucault’s
genealogy of biopower as a critique of the politics of love. For one of the striking characteristics of the current
debate is the restoration of love as a political concept. After a long time in the sidelines, partly at the hands of its critique by
postmodern thinkers, love is reemerging as a central category of political thought, one prominent example being in the work of
_i_ek.9 But there is an extent to which the wave of political thought that has emerged after poststructuralism has sought too
quickly to jettison the suspicion of positive political projects for which Derrida, Foucault and the like are notorious. 10 As David
Nirenberg seeks to reminds us, ‘What is startling is that those who prescribe love and its politics are
untroubled by or unaware of its long history of disappointment.’11 Foucault’s work, I will argue, provides key
resources for an assessment of that history. According to Foucault’s analysis – given greater depth by the publication of his
lectures – modern, secular political reason (understood in terms of governmentality and biopolitics) did not
relinquish but rather extended and modified the power-relations developed in the pastorate: a
‘Christianisation-in-depth’. The point is not, of course, to reject outright all attempts to conceive positive (or constituent)
politics, whether in terms of Christian love or otherwise. But neither should we so quickly abandon the
permanent suspicion that Foucault and other philosophers of his generation found necessary in the
aftermath of fascism. For J. Joyce Schuld, considering Foucault’s concept of power alongside Augustine’s concept of love
results in a revitalisation of both.12 In a similar vein, I will argue, Foucault’s genealogy of pastoral power and
modern biopolitics is an essential, critical touchstone for any attempt to rethink the positive politics
of love.
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Efficiency Link
The 1AC’s call for efficiency in the sector of social services legitimizes the use of surveillance
Equipment Maki 8
However, this monitoring by caseworker and welfare recipient is now accompanied by intense technological
surveillance. As chapter 3 will show, there have been new(er) more rigorous, precise and complex
surveillance technologies put in place which can monitor welfare clients in ways that were simply not
possible with older models. ‘Fraud’ has been the primary legitimating rationale for this proliferation
of surveillance in OW. For instance, in OW the new technologies utilize categorizations of risk in order to
determine if a recipient is at risk for fraud. Rhetorics of risk have (re)constituted welfare recipients and
shaped them into different ‘subjects’. Subsequently, the type of surveillance imposed on those on social
assistance is premised on ‘risk’ rationalities, which in turn make it easier to implement more stringent
monitoring and tracking tools. As Henman (2004) claims, technology is pertinent to this
classification/categorization system because “computers are central to the maintenance of the risk-
based reviews by identifying ‘risky’ clients, scheduling review and data-matching client files within
and beyond [my emphasis] the social security organization” (Henman 2004:180). In efforts to
‘rationalize’ and make ‘efficient’ the bureaucracy of social services, governments have installed “a
complex regime of surveillance practices and disciplinary measures in order to maintain eligibility
for benefit” (Henman 2004:182)42. Suppositions of risk are inherent to the construction of new surveillance
technologies and for the most part inseparable from the overarching regime of control utilized by OW. Pleace
(2007:944) who researches the surveillance of the homeless by service agencies in the UK stresses that “Many
academics’ concerns with surveillance powered by ICTs centre on the unprecedented power ICTs give the state
to classify on a massive scale [...and] to socially sort the population using that classification”. Risk,
classification and social sorting are so imperative to the operation of welfare surveillance that
without these classification systems and data programs the welfare surveillance we see today could
not exist.
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Welfare Mother Link

Increasing Social services demands greater surveillance efficiency ensuring mothers don’t
make incapable decisions
Reregulation has resulted in intense monitoring of welfare mothers due to the constant reporting,
eligibility reviews and scrutiny from caseworkers and community members. At the same time that
surveillance has increased, older methods of monitoring such as home visits from caseworkers are still
practiced. These carry assumptions that welfare mothers are incapable of making ‘good’ decisions,
Margaret Little’s research (1994) traces the impact of monitoring of welfare mothers by caseworkers. One
example that stands out are the welfare caseworker’s assumptions of middle class notions of cleanliness; one of
the participants interviewed by Little shared that there were cleanliness lessons and if “residents do not take
these lessons or do not pass the class they can be denied subsidized housing” (Little 1994:243). These
lessons can include a 12-step process in toilet cleaning with picture diagrams (Little 1994:244). Of course this
intense form of scrutiny would lead to single mothers on welfare feeling demoralized and would
therefore subject them to intensive self regulation as caseworkers can drop in at any time for an
inspection of the home.
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Welfare Government Link

The increase of social services fits into the welfare government, increasing modes of power.
Nealon 2008
(Jeffrey T. is Professor of English at Penn State University. Foucault beyond Foucault: Power and its Intensifications since 1984)
Foucault, of course, never could have envisioned, much less analyzed, what we call globalization as a mode
of power. In fact, one could argue that Foucault expended most of his political and theoretical energy
smoking out the hidden indignities of a form of governmental power that has decisively lost hegemony in
the decades since his death: namely, the welfare state. One of the primary upshots of Foucault's mammoth
studies of the madhouse, the prison, and sexuality is to show how the so-called helping hand of the modern
welfare government is in fact a continuation and intensification of another mode of power, the chopping off
of hands and the other modes of torture that so vividly open Discipline and Punish. But here I want to
advance a simple genealogical premise that I gestured toward in the Introduction to this book: whereas
Foucault never had a chance to analyze the mode of power know as contemporary globalization, the work
he left behind offers us a number of crucial tools for thinking through "today"—for diagnosing and
responding to this new mode of power. Many of those tools have been deployed within the context of
contemporary Marxism (or post-Marxism), so I'll take a genealogical swerve through the legacy of
Foucault within that discourse and return at the end of this chapter to the question of today.
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Nuclear War Link

The affirmative’s call for the ballot based in the inherent risk of the status quo causing
nuclear war is the precursor to the biopolitical management of life
((Jeffrey Bussolini, Associate Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies, College of Staten Island, “Nuclear State of Exception:
Reading and Extension of Foucault's Concepts of Biopower and Biopolitics in Agamben and the Nuclear Age” Abstracts: Foucault
Circle 2008)
In Il faut defendre la societé, Foucault begins to elucidate his concept of permanent war (la guerre
perpétuelle) as a model for modern society. According to him this state of permanent war is the backdrop
(or the foreground) for thinking about sovereignty, and it has to do with the fact of invasion, conquest, and
colonization. Through considering the examples of the Norman conquest of England, the Franc conquest of
Gaulle, and, briefly, the example of the European colonization of Native Americans, he describes a
situation of invasion in which permanent antagonism between conqueror and conquered is inevitable, hence
a permanent war. Seen from this point of view, it is not surprising that major nuclear powers including the
United States, France, and the Soviet Union all carried out dangerous nuclear experiments in colonized
territories populated by indigenous peoples—these tests were an active symbol and a continuation of
the conquest. State sovereignty is a mechanism used to legitimize and increase the power of the
conqueror, preventing the outbreak of the dreaded ‘war of all against all’ that Hobbes feared. But, in
another sense, this situation is the war of all against all. According to this line of thinking, the Nuclear
State of Exception is also a special kind of class warfare in which the power of the sovereign state is
increased to maddening levels while the state population is increasingly seen as a conquered group upon
whom the sovereignty must be secured. Certainly, communists in the United States bore an especially
intense brunt of the Nuclear State of Exception. Near the end of this volume Foucault makes the explicit
linkage between the nuclear age and biopolitics as, he says, placing the population under an absolute
risk of death was a necessary precursor and transition to biopolitical management of life. In
Securité, territoire, population, Foucault further elucidates his thinking on sovereignty by
considering the way that it focuses on the need for demonstrable securing of territory and
population. The emphasis on protection of territory in the nuclear age, through extensive radar,
satellites, strategic bombers, missiles, undersea sonar nets, submarines, and the like, is well known.
Especially, Foucault focuses on the need for regulation and guidance of populations to ensure
national vitality (in ascending liberalism). As a result public health campaigns and human government
(governmentality) come to have new importance. He relates this to the augmentation of state sovereignty
through the increasing development of a liberal, laissez-faire system in which subjects and workers must be
fit, self-guiding, and motivated. It is interesting to note that the atomic age/Cold War discourse of the
United States was heavily oriented in this direction in which the integrity of populations and the motivation
of individual citizens was seen as crucial to the overall vitality of the nation—and thus intimately tied to
chances of winning or losing the geopolitical contest. Recall the insane General Ripper from Kubrick’s
masterpiece Dr. Strangelove and his maniacal obsession with ‘Purity of Essence’ on the part of the
American population. In Naissance de la biopolitique Foucault continues his treatment of
liberalism and neoliberalism as modern forms of government, calling liberalism ‘the general frame of
biopolitics’ (‘le cadre general de la biopolitique’). One important aspect of this is the pairing of ‘laissez-
faire’ liberal emphasis on rights with strong sovereign states of overwhelming power. Flowing from this is
a bifurcation (or multiple segmentation) of populations into more and less desirable groups. The agents and
workers of neoliberalism versus those who do not fit within, or who oppose, the liberal model. It is
precisely this aspect of biopolitics that Agamben picks up on in Homo Sacer and the section on ‘la vita
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indigna di essere vessuta’ (‘life that is not worth living’). As we have already seen, the Nuclear State of
Exception bears this out as some parts of the population were selected as vital/productive, while
other parts of the population, especially the colonized and undesirables, were classed as expendable
and subjected to various harms of nuclear technology.
1ac’s classification of failure to do the plan results in nuclear annihilation are the states tools
to justify emergency powers and control over the right to life turning case
(Jeffrey Bussolini, Associate Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies, College of Staten Island, “Nuclear State of Exception:
Reading and Extension of Foucault's Concepts of Biopower and Biopolitics in Agamben and the Nuclear Age” Abstracts: Foucault
Circle 2008)
Near the beginning of Stato de eccezione, Giorgio Agamben includes a very telling quotation from
Rossiter: “Nell’era atomica in cui il mondo sta ora entrando, è probabile che l’uso dei poteri di emergenza
costituzionale divenga la regola e non l’eccezione. (In the atomic era into which the world is now entering, it is
likely that the use of constitutional emergency powers will become the rule rather than the exception).” Studying
the atomic age along these lines, as well as those of the earlier considerations on biopolitics in Agamben’s Homo
Sacer and Michel Foucault’s lecture courses at the College de France from 1976-1979 (including the crucial
concepts of permanent war and the importance of conquest and colonization in contemporary state structures),
bears out Rossiter’s quotation—the advent of nuclear technology has indeed coincided with an augmentation
of biopolitics and continued hostility both between and within states.
By any reckoning nuclear weapons are major artifacts of geopolitics and biopolitics. They are inherently
geopolitical tools that emerged from a history of intense inter-state conflict, and their scope and effects make
any use a geopolitical event (despite repeated attempts to fashion smaller ‘battlefield’ or ‘tactical’ nukes and
come up with scenarios for their employment). The nuclear age is characterized by distrust and hostility
between states as well as suspicion of a state’s own citizens and populations (as foreign agents, active threats, or
as insufficiently disciplined to handle the secrets and necessary actions of security). Lending credence to the notion
that the atomic age is closely linked to a state of exception as nationalist norm, all countries that have developed
nuclear arms have substantial secret institutions devoted to developing them and devising plans for their possible
use. Nuclear secrets are among the most closely guarded of national security matters. In the United States, all
information about nuclear arms is ‘born classified’ and automatically subject to strict controls, the only such
category in U.S. classification. The 1947 Smyth Report on the Manhattan Project and U.S. nuclear science says
that the secrets of the weapons “must remain secret now and for all time.” Clearly these are regarded as central
pillars of geopolitics.
The very real threat of Armageddon from these weapons easily gives way to thinking of expediency and
triage which instrumentalizes certain populations The fate of those at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the
continuing collection of data about them by the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, has been described in
Robert Jay Lifton’s Death in Life. Thousands of soldiers and scientists from different nations have been exposed
in tests and research. Indigenous people from the American southwest to the Pacific Islands, Kazakhstan, and
Algeria have been forcefully relocated to make room for atomic tests, exposed to radiation, or both. Groups such as
prisoners and mental patients have been subjected to radiation experiments against their will or knowledge,
supposedly for the purpose of building up crucial knowledge about nuclear effects, as documented in Eileen
Welsome’s Plutonium Files and Department of Energy reports on Human Radiation Experiments. These
weapons, then, are intimately tied to power over life and death and the management of subject populations.
As such, it seems that the exigency related to nuclear thinking justifies (or is the expression of) significant
sovereign power over bare life. In the histories mentioned here, survival and protection of the population at
large was seen to validate causing death or illness among smaller subsets of that population. One can note
that, given their scale, nuclear weapons force consideration of population-level dynamics, as whole
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populations are placed at risk. In this respect, these arms follow on and accentuate the massive strategic
bombing of World War II in which enemy populations were targeted as vital biopolitical resources.
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Exclusion of Poor Link

Norms are created by discipline and are fit into a lifestyle defined by biopower. These norms
work to separate people and increase surveillance and power. Nealon 2008
For Foucault, normativity is a practice, an exercise (primarily filtered through "the exam"; see D&P 185)
that is created by discipline and fined into a classifying lifestyle template by the rise of biopower. Which to
say that norms, to repeat the Foucaultian mantra, do not primarily “press" anything, but rather introduce a
heightened productivity into the disciplinary apparatus. For example, Foucault takes up a miniature version
of his argument concerning "the author function" within the pages of D&P, pointing out that the rise of
discipline, with its emphasis on the authority of the examination, was the end of a certain kind of textually
based notion of right. With the advent of the examination's practice of norming, "discipline could now
abandon its textual character and take its references not so much from the tradition of author-authorities as
from a domain of objects perpetually offered for examination" (186) Norms introduce a vast and intense
new productivity into the regimes of truth, or what Foucault calls the ways of truth-telling: "The normal
took over from the ancestral," he writes: "from the epic to the novel, from the noble deed to the secret
singularity, from long exiles to the search for childhood, from combats to phantasies" (193). Within such a
continuous system of normative testing and classification, individuality or identity is measured "by 'gaps'
rather than deeds. In a system of discipline, the child is more individualized than the adult, the patient more
than the healthy man, the madman and the delinquent more than the normal the non-delinquent" (D&P
193). Although such highly policed disciplinary identities are of course consistently defined by their
distance from the "norm," such normative discourse doesn't function primarily to "exclude" persons, topics,
or acts; rather, norms do their work precisely by trying to include—which is to say, examine, test, and
classify—as much raw data as possible. As Foucault writes, "Rather than the massive, binary division
between one set of people and another [the power of excluding the leper or quarantining the plague victim],
discipline called for multiple separations, individualizing distributions, an organization in depth of
surveillance and control, an intensification and ramification of power" (198).
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Institutions Link
Biopower uses institutions of social services intensifying their power and increasing their
control over the decision of life. Nealon 2008
Importantly, though, on Foucault's account, the rise of governmental biopower—its intense saturation
throughout the socius—doesn't simply eradicate the techniques or institutions of discipline (the family, the,
factory, the army, the school). Rather, as the Penn State motto shows biopower reorganizes those
institutions around a different set of issue and practices, refocusing them on different targets and concepts.
Like the panopticon, biopower is not a master-paradigm or one-size-fits4 template that is laid over existing
power relations and institutions; on the contrary, biopower (like the panopticism that it harnesses) is a form
o power that infiltrates and intensifies all the others. The techniques of discipline don't disappear under the
regimes of biopower; they are redeployed, in the service of a more general governmental project. In
Foucault's concise words concerning the legacy of the disciplinary family within the governmental regimes
of biopower, the family functions "no longer [as] model, but a segment."31 He continues: “As for
discipline, this is not eliminated either; clearly, its modes of organization all the institutions within which it
had developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—schools, factories, armies, and so on—all this
can be understood on the basis of the development of the great administrative monarchic Nevertheless,
though, discipline was never more important or more valorized than at the moment when it became
important to manage a population . . in its depths and details.... Accordingly, we need to see things not in
terms of the replacement of a society of sovereignty by a disciplinary society and the subsequent
replacement of disciplinary society by a society of government; in reality, one has a triangle, sovereignty-
discipline-government, which has as its primary target the population and its essential mechanism the
apparatuses of security... Three movements—government, population, political economy—constitute from
the eighteenth century onward a solid series, one that even today has assuredly not been dissolved.”
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Welfare and Healthcare Link

Biopower is accesible through the use of programs to keep people alive, as well as to kill
them off. Kelly 2004
(Mark is an Associate Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. Racism, Nationalism, and Biopolitics:
Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended 2003)
When Foucault claims that: “the modern state can scarcely function without becoming involved with
racism at some point, within certain lines and subject to certain conditions...,” he is not talking about
“ordinary racism,” which is to say, the simple hatred of other races, but rather, state racism, biological
racism. The kind of racism that emerges in the nineteenth century is for the first time based on new
paradigms from biology, on ideas of evolutionary competition and the health of the species. The
challenge of this analysis is its application to the contemporary context. Every state does still need to
make a distinction between those it keeps alive (and every state does have a welfare system and
health service which work towards these ends) and those it kills (foreign enemies in war, executed
criminals), together with those it merely allows to be exposed to greater risk of death (the victims of
Third World famines, its own poor and elderly citizens). More than in 1976, however, anti-racism is now
the prevailing orthodoxy. Racist discourse has become taboo — to identify speech as racist is to deny its
validity. The kind of biological discourse which talks about the health of our race has gone by the board. If
state racism was the mechanism by which the distinction between the biopolitical population and its outside
was made, is it still so today?
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Indian Aid Link

The 1ac’s aid crisis is the justification used by the Indian government to relegitimize its
biopolitical power to choose the right to life or death
(Kavita Misra, Yale University, “Politico-moral Transactions in Indian AIDS Service: Confidentiality, Rights and New Modalities of
Governance” Anthropological Quarterly 79.1 (2006) 33-74
<http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/anthropological_quarterly/v079/79.1misra.html>)
The extent to which health in modern societies and polities is perceived as a static condition rather than as experience is exemplified in the articulation of
the WHO, which defines health as "a state of physical, mental and social well-being." In her critical examination of the way we have come to think of
health today, Veena Das (1990) argues that this perception is linked to the idea of disease as located in body populations rather than only in individual
bodies and therefore, that the management of disease and the maintenance of the health of the populus are seen as
the responsibility of the state. The state is implicated in the health of individual bodies and body populations
through its functions of governance, policing, and as parens patriae (Das 1990, Foucault 1972). However, in the way that
modern "governmentality" (Foucault 1991) is deployed, the state seems to fragment, to disappear or to be rendered spectral. A marked
effect of governmentality is this process of depoliticization or the shift towards the invisible presence of the state, through the diffusion of
its disciplinary capacities into institutions that provide technical intervention which, because of their scientific nature are objective and
apolitical (Adams 1998). In this Foucauldian governmental rationality then, the conduct of individuals and societies
is structured by the systematic organization of knowledge and activities built into authoritative agencies [End
Page 35] like medicine, psychology, education and law (Hunt and Wickham 1994). Thus, human life circulates within a
biopolitics constituted through technologies and constellations of knowledge and power that measure,
evaluate, discipline, subject and control persons and populations (Biehl 1999, Foucault 1965,1972, 1973, 1978, Petryna
2002, Rabinow 1989, 1996). "Bio-power," according to Foucault's well-known formulation, brings the realm of life into the realm of
calculations (1978). Calculations characterize modern "risk society" (Beck 1992, Luhmann 1993) where decision-making is based on
informed choices about future losses and benefits and where information and expert knowledge are tied to structures of decision making
and risk taking. In such a political contract, the legitimacy of governments is contingent on the use of scientific knowledge in the
evaluation and management of risk. An event such as an epidemic presents a crisis in legitimacy by pointing to the
failure of the state to perform its duties as an informed decision maker and the preserver of the health of its
subjects. The way that statistics and epidemiological information are deployed by the state, by non-governmental agencies and by international bodies, appears both paradoxical and
instrumental. Numbers are made visible, carefully fashioned into discursive objects that serve to create "viable" crises. On the one hand these numbers seem to betray the ineptitude of the state in the
preservation of the health of its people, this seen as delegitimizing and an indicator of poor government and of a society that falls short of the desired characteristics of modernity. On the other hand,
statistics, figures and surveillance data show how the state possesses the knowledge of its weaknesses and uses techniques and information in order to respond to crises, thereby relegitimizing itself
This cyclical story of problem, obstacle, struggle and triumph is told in
as well as opening up the market for international resources.
many an annual report of government programs. These strategies are not restricted to institutions of the
state. Both government and the non-governmental must continually renew and reaffirm themselves through
the construction and management of crises, which are made visible through an intricate process of focusing the gaze of
authorities, that is, the constellation of expert knowledge, on specific objects borne of a transnational political and moral economy. AIDS
is one such transnationally circulating object. AIDS constitutes a "critical event" (Das 1995) in the life of
modern India.2 Its critical nature lies undoubtedly in the enormity of suffering it causes, but also in how it draws attention to
the role and the legitimacy of the state in its management of health and risk, involves new actors and
relationships in such management, raises questions about cultural and moral codes and ideas of tradition,
[End Page 36]including ideals of marriage and family and notions of sexuality, brings disenfranchised and
marginal groups into the fold of public health and development, produces new communities and political actors, forges links between local and
global communities, and compels discussion on the meanings of citizenship and belonging.3 While it is not possible here to elaborate on the entire spectrum of these processes, in what follows, I
instantiate some of them and signal to others by documenting some of the microdynamics, or the minute, everyday transactions through which organized responses to the epidemic arose. As I have
, confidentiality and the underlying articulation of rights are crucial
pointed out, through the ethnographic moment that opens this article
discursive sites where some of the transformative potential in AIDS work comes to be distilled. The newness
and volatility of AIDS, the unstable nature of knowledge-practices around it and the history of its
representation imply that the domain of AIDS service itself tends to involve a complex configuration of the
political and the moral.4 Its politics lie in how it must constitute itself as a legitimate actor within the social world, and stake a claim within the social imagination and projects of
health and welfare. Its moral nature rests in the fact that its claims are based on experiences of suffering, marginality and questions of ethics and human values. As I see it, in this context, the
political and the moral live an entangled existence, and I refer to this duality as the politico-moral. In the politico-moral, transactions around power and governance, the limits of state and civil
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society, and claims to nodes of authoritative speech are enmeshed with struggles to deal with pain and grief, the reevaluation of networks of kinship, affect, and faith, and the interrogation and
redefinition of tradition, culture, citizenship and social belonging. My observations are based on fieldwork conducted between 2000 and 2001, in an urban North Indian non-governmental
organization (NGO) called Garv that worked on HIV/AIDS care, prevention and advocacy, and sexual health. One of the focal points of my ethnographic work is Garv's role as part of the AIDS
NGO Network, a set of seven organizations that dealt with different aspects of HIV/AIDS and related issues such as sexuality, sexual health, and drug use. 5
Non-Governmental organizations are another vehicle for the state to reassert is control and
ability to instill its moral/social dominance
(Kavita Misra, Yale University, “Politico-moral Transactions in Indian AIDS Service: Confidentiality, Rights and New Modalities of
Governance” Anthropological Quarterly 79.1 (2006) 33-74
<http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/anthropological_quarterly/v079/79.1misra.html>)
While the state continues to be the primary locus where accountability for the health of the population rests, the way in which
practices of surveillance and of the administration of services are organized have been reorganized notably, with the government
delegating large portions of this responsibility to the non-governmental realm. In the case of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the
pressure on the government to work with NGOs comes both from international donors as well as from the recognition on the part
of local state agencies that the situation demands action the government is not equipped to take without multisectoral
collaboration. However, non-governmental AIDS service is not a passive collaborator or arm of state programs; through politico-
moral transactions around justice, equity, and the value of human life, it questions, resists and offers alternative models to the
vision and methods of the state. Nor is it simply an alternative to government; rather, it relies on state structures in order to
conduct its work and forms a site of governmentality and the enactment of biopolitics. At times when the state seems to have
receded from the sphere of service and social justice, it might take its place and simulate it, at other times it might upbraid the
state and remind it of its functions. If the non-governmental mobilizes for social and political change and
thus challenges the state, but at the same time serves as the vehicle for governmental agendas of
development, modernization and governance, if it subverts existing legal structures but puts into
place new ones, if it facilitates the flow of transnational concepts like confidentiality, but seeks
recognition of these by agencies of the government, then dichotomies of state and civil society, or
government and non-government break down.24 What we have instead is the reconfiguration of the sites at which
politics takes place. AIDS service in fact represents the mutation of the political into the politico-moral, where questions [End
Page 64] and struggles of power and those of suffering, shared experience and the value of human life come together
inextricably. The discursive and performative activity that the AIDS crisis has effected makes up a
distinct domain of cultural politics in India. That AIDS service and the new biosociality that it engenders,
particularly in non-governmental spaces challenges the cultural and legal order at every step, and that the work of prevention and
care entails a questioning of the very fundamentals of citizenship and political and social rights, the relationship between the
individual, the family, community and the state, points to its profoundly transformative nature. If the social expression of
resistance, the language in which social actors express discontent, and the spaces in which specific sanctions and action takes
place are to be considered in the analysis of cultural politics (Escobar and Alvarez 1992), then it becomes evident that even the
day to day activities of AIDS service in India can be construed as a battle to reconstitute the
structures of governance within which health is deployed and managed.25 Its very existence is political and
moral as it implies an interrogation of existing norms, in the way that it deploys "arts of resistance" through cultural idioms of
protest, whether they be "hidden transcripts" or public ones (Scott 1990). By evaluating existing laws and demanding the
formulation of new legislation, through symbolic protest against discriminatory practices of the state, of society and of the
medical community against certain groups, especially HIV positive persons, and the creation of spaces where cultural
identities can be nurtured and communities can be formed, such collective formations make up a
quasi movement that represents a variety of marginal groups bound together by virtue of their
vulnerability to AIDS. They are enacting a cultural politics by opening up and defining notions of individual and collective
health, the body, sexuality, tradition and culture itself. They are constituting social practices framed by "rights"—sexual rights,
the right to information, the right to confidentiality and privacy, the right to choose to test or not to test for HIV, the right to
marry, the right to access to medical services and medication, the right to employment and livelihood, the right not to be
discriminated against.26 The theoretical premise in descriptions of new social movements rests on the emergence of a novel,
diffuse and plural social actor as one of the main features of organized bids for social change (Brysk 1994, Escobar and Alvarez
1992). AIDS service embodied in non-governmental spaces should be taken as one such emergent social actor. 27 In this sense,
rather than conceptualize movements for social and political change as having clearly defined
homogenous modes of being, one can imagine them as [End Page 65]fluid entities—sometimes taking
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the shape of a series of sporadic, visible, dramatic events such as marches, public demonstrations,
public interest litigation, media events and other times, a long chain of quiet, mundane activities like
training, information dissemination, sensitization activities, and counseling that nonetheless do the
work of infusing social and political life with the language of rights, and transforming governance
and the meaning of citizenship, if not by violent defiance then by subtle persuasion. 28
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HealthCare Link
The entire process of receiving health-care only re-entrenches the biopolitical heiarchy of
knowledge and domination, the power to let life continue or let it pass
(PAUL MCINTOSH School of Health, Suffolk College, Rope Walk, Ipswich, Suffolk, UK “An Archi-texture of Learning Disability
Services: the use of Michel Foucault” Disability & Society, Vol. 17, No. 1, 2002, pp. 65–79)
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Further analogies of this can be seen in Foucault’s The examination (1991c). First, he
clarifies the term ‘examination’ as techniques of an observing hierarchy and those of a
normalising judgment. The surveillance creates a normalising gaze, which establishes qualification,
classification and a visibility over individuals through which they can be differentiated and judged.
Therefore, as a mechanism of discipline it is highly ritualised and manifests the subjection of those who
are perceived as objects (the examined), and the objectifications of those who are subjected (the
examiners). It is a highly vivid example of the imposition of power and knowledge relations, and one
which exemplifies the potential of regular observation to place the individual in a perpetual state of
examination. The examination also creates an individual and collective archive, placing individuals
in a field of surveillance and situating them in a documentary network of objectification. Nursing and
social work notes, care plans, community care assessments, care programme strategies,
nursing assessments, medical consultations, administrative documentation, memos, letters.
These capture and fix individuals, accompanying the processes of the examination with an intense
registration of the individual through the massed accumulation of documentation. Through this a
number of codes emerge which are signs of the effects of discipline on the body; the medical code of
symptoms, diagnosis and treatment, the ontological code of social work, choice, autonomy,
anti-discrimination, and the nursing code of health, behaviourism and equal opportunity.
The individual becomes ‘a case’, a ‘client’, a ‘service user’, lowering the threshold of describable
individuality and raising the means of control and methods of domination. The methods of fixing, dividing,
and recording are described by Foucault as the simplest, crudest, most concrete and perhaps most
indispensable conditions in the development of how human behaviour has been objectified (1991c).
Through this discussion Foucault creates characterisations for the suppression of the human
body and the control of populations. As much as the NHS and community care reforms were about
consumerism and user participation, they were also about accountability, responsibility and leadership. The
professions of nursing, social work, medicine, psychology and all others related are entangled within this
construct. Consciously or not, these disciplines are contributors to the diagnosis, classification
and politicisation of the human condition of learning disabilities. From whichever
disciplinary perspective, the individual is codified into a set of signs, which may have
recourse to inter-disciplinary conflict with regard to control and domination. The Mental
Deficiency Act (1913) also set the scene for the medicalisation of learning disability and
provided a platform for clinical and psychological research. These ‘technologies’ of medicine
are as relevant now as they were then. Foucault (1993) separates out classification of disease, the
political consciousness of disease location (such as derived from poverty) and the role of clinical
observation, setting the scene for an illustration of Bio-Political will, and linking clearly the domains of
medicine and politics through the concerted usage of the human body. This culminates in his work on
‘Bio-Power’ (Rabinow, 1991a), where amongst other things, he discusses issues of life and death:
‘One might say that the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow
it to the point of death’ (p. 261).
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The over identification of social problems as only treatable through medicine creates
hierarchal structures of biopower
A further and final area for discussion is the notion of medicalisation of the learning disability field. The
medicalisation critique, ascribed to by Foucault and other medical sociologists, contends that social life
and social problems have become more ‘medicalised, or viewed through the gaze of medicine as
diseases’. Ilich (1975) discusses that, rather than improving people’s health, contemporary scientific
medicine undermines it, both through the iatrogenic side effects of medical treatment, and by
reducing an individual’s capacity to advocate and be autonomous in matters of their own health care.
Proponents of the medicalisation critique see doctors as attempting to enhance their own position by
presenting an image of themselves as possessing the exclusive right to define and treat illness, and that this
power has affected socially disempowered groups by deflecting social inequality into the realms of illness
and disease (Lupton, 1997). Foucault (1993) sets out a dialogue for the manner in which medicine has
classified and divided series’ of disease, their dispersion and the localisation of them within the body. From
this perspective, the power of medicine can be viewed as the underlying resource by which diseases
and illnesses are dealt with. This, in turn, forms a context by which medicine is understood not simply
as an objective set of facts, but as a belief system shaped through a series of social and political
relations. The classifications outlined as intellectual and social functioning, and criterion of pathology are
manifestations of the medico-politico relationship and the classification and division of disease.
However, it has to be noted that the exertion of power on the learning disabled group is not one that is
rigorously imposed, it is part of a wider inter-relationship of factors which conjoin at the learning disability
field. There is no central political rationale to the superimposing of these relationships, but what we
know as fact is that medicalisation of learning disability services has affected them in a profound
way.
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Medicine/Disease Link
The over identification of social problems as only treatable through medicine creates
hierarchal structures of biopower
A further and final area for discussion is the notion of medicalisation of the learning disability field. The
medicalisation critique, ascribed to by Foucault and other medical sociologists, contends that social life
and social problems have become more ‘medicalised, or viewed through the gaze of medicine as
diseases’. Ilich (1975) discusses that, rather than improving people’s health, contemporary scientific
medicine undermines it, both through the iatrogenic side effects of medical treatment, and by
reducing an individual’s capacity to advocate and be autonomous in matters of their own health care.
Proponents of the medicalisation critique see doctors as attempting to enhance their own position by
presenting an image of themselves as possessing the exclusive right to define and treat illness, and that this
power has affected socially disempowered groups by deflecting social inequality into the realms of illness
and disease (Lupton, 1997). Foucault (1993) sets out a dialogue for the manner in which medicine has
classified and divided series’ of disease, their dispersion and the localisation of them within the body. From
this perspective, the power of medicine can be viewed as the underlying resource by which diseases
and illnesses are dealt with. This, in turn, forms a context by which medicine is understood not simply
as an objective set of facts, but as a belief system shaped through a series of social and political
relations. The classifications outlined as intellectual and social functioning, and criterion of pathology are
manifestations of the medico-politico relationship and the classification and division of disease.
However, it has to be noted that the exertion of power on the learning disabled group is not one that is
rigorously imposed, it is part of a wider inter-relationship of factors which conjoin at the learning disability
field. There is no central political rationale to the superimposing of these relationships, but what we
know as fact is that medicalisation of learning disability services has affected them in a profound
way.
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Mental Health Link

The government creates a biopolitical environment for the “disabled”, denying them an
equal place creating an ultimate dependence on the government for welfare or dependency
learning.
Bio-power in this sense has a number of strands coming from it. For Foucault, it was an indispensable
element in the development of capitalism, for this would not have been possible without the machinery of
bodies coming together to forge production and economic processes. Within the learning disability field,
individuals have had no productivity value; not only this, but they are costly to the state and labour
intensive in relation to care. Classifications of learning disability based on a medical model have
promoted individual lack of abilities rather than capabilities, rendering many unemployable. The
demands of a high-tech job market also make the transition from welfare to employment difficult.
Power is exerted onto the learning disabled by biological and historical means, trapped in a medical
discourse, and thwarted in their attempts to escape by political and industrial technologies.
Kitchin (1998) argues that disability is socio-spatially constructed. He sees the organisation and writing
of space as expressions of disablist power relationships in society, giving examples such as the poor
design of public transport and availability of provision, or where welfare support is needed, it is
managed to benefit the carer or agency in its application through routine and timetabling, limited to times
and distance. Secondly, the architectural landscape of social spaces provides a set of cultural
signifiers, texts which we are able to read and react to. Lack of disabled facilities, clothes shops so
packed with goods that a wheelchair user cannot move around in them, having to purchase a
particular key to access appropriate toilet facilities; these all reproduce messages and create social
and cultural practices that perpetuate this sense of symbolic interactionism, and are as appropriate to
those with learning disabilities who have sensory and physical impairments as others in the ‘impaired
community’. We read these signs in the way that we read a map:
The ideological messages to disabled people that are inscribed in space through the use of segregationist
planning and inaccessible environments is clear—‘you are out of place’, ‘you are different’. As a result, forms
of oppression and their reproduction within ideologies leads to distinct spatialities within the creation
of landscapes of exclusion, the boundaries of which are reinforced through a combination of the
popularising of cultural representations and the creation of myths. (Kitchin, 1998, p. 351)
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Alienation Link
The alienation of the migrant is one that secures the ultimate form of biopower, the
extermination of the migrant for the health of the body. Inda 2
(Jonathan Xavier Inda “Biopower, Reproduction, and the migrant woman’s body” http://books.google.com/books?id=LNvQp-
IH9AoC&dq=biopower+social+services&lr=&source=gbs_navlinks_s)
The political effects of this sort of rhetoric have not been insignificant, for it has given rise to and
legitimated numerous efforts to exclude the immigrant from the body politic (e.g., fortification of the
border, denial of health care), The logic here is rather simple: since the migrant population threatens the common
good, its exclusion or elimination is seen as necessary in order to guard the well-being of the nation.
The repudiation of the immigrant is thus justified in the name of protecting the welfare of the social body. One way to interpret
these practices of exclusion is in terms of what Michel Foucault called biopower.l This term describes a technology of
power whose main concern is "the welfare of the population, the improvement of its condition, the
increase of its wealth, longevity, health, etc."("Govemmentality": 1001.) The focus of biopower, in other words,
is the control of the species body and its reproduction. It is a regulatory power whose highest
function is to thoroughly inveSt in life in order to produce a healthy and vigorous population. There is
an underside to biopower, however, since it is often the case that "entire populations are mobilized for the purpose
of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity . .. . It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race,
that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed" (History: 1371. Simply put, then,
biopower does not just foster life; it also routinely does away with it in order to preserve it. This means
that the counterpart of the power to secure an individual's continued existence is the power to expose an entire population to
death (or at least to multiplying its risk of death). It is thus possible under regimes of biopower to
simultaneously protect life and to authorize a holocaust.
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Disability Link
The disabled are subject to multiple forms of biopower instituted by the healthcare industry
The development of classification criterion for intellectual and social functioning and for pathology creates
a medicine of learning disability, which has become a total influence on the lives of learning disabled
individuals. This does not mean that the field of learning disability is medicalised in the sense that it is
physician led, but that the notion of classification has a methodology of science and reductionism built
into its mechanisms for usage, and is one of a collection of practices that form a corpus of
medicalisation. In Foucault’s terms, the ‘medicalisation of pathological space’ refers to a raft of
fragmented thinking, captured in the discursive and non-discursive practices that contribute to the
relationships of power that effect a group of individuals. What I have attempted to do is to separate out
a medicine of pathological space, which is primarily based in the confining and classification in the early
part of the twentieth century, from a ‘medicine of social space’, which is primarily grounded in the second
half of the century, where these classifications have moved toward a differing set of principles, but where
the practices have remained much the same, masked by a different set of professional and political
ideologies. Classifications within the medicine of social space can be seen to be similar to that of
pathological space, but are less concerned with pathology and social functioning as matters of physiological
or psychological medicine, and more concerned with matters of support needs, skill mix and physical
resourcing. Similarly, the commissioning services are concerned with the classification of individuals in
their accessing of services through the setting of eligibility criterion, and these have immediate influences
on the classification of the professional groups and their tasks in working with these individuals. The role
of medicine continues to be a considerable influence in the designing and maintaining of these
classifications, particularly in the technical rationalist approach to health and social care delivery,
but in many ways, as the professional groups within the caring professions have become stronger,
this role has become considerably more subservient as these professions begin to take a lead role in
service design and delivery. However, one can see fluctuations dependent on circumstances in the way
that nurses and social workers, for instance, operate within classificatory systems. Access to welfare and
self-disablement is one example, with these professions colluding in this process, whilst operating
within eligibility criterion is another. Whilst there is an abiding interprofessional consensus in the process
of selfcompetence and social image of learning disabled people, we are fixed within the self-disablement
framework, and this operates at a number of levels. First, that of surveillance. Normalisation has
created a second set of practices that form a set of intimate relations in the surveillance of learning disabled
people. It is no longer a neccessarily medical one, but one which examines and judges the lifestyle
needs of individuals within subjective practices and legislative frameworks, both professional and
governmental. They continue to be subjects of objectification. Secondly, that of documentary
archiving. This practice attaches a number of practices and statements to an individual which then
codes them into a particular space within service delivery, losing a sense of individuality for the
person and raising their control and domination. Thirdly, the notion of bio-power. The locating of
people within employment of low skill, which is poorly remunerated or voluntary, the housing of people
in ghettoised urban areas or rural areas that have poor public transport links, and the use of public
space, which limits the social integration of disabled people and unconsciously reinforces
mythological stereotypes. These would seem to indicate a subdivision of discourse within an over-arching
discourse of service delivery. The second subdivision is that of the professional relationship to service
delivery. When one examines these tensions in greater detail, professional activity is located within
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systems of power and unity, where professions enjoy high status and autonomy. The fluctuations in
types of service delivery have been influential in the developments and changes to professional activity and
training, and a powerful relationship between these changes and professional socialisation has emerged. In
summary, the field of learning disability is linked by a number of classifications that combine to place
the client, professional and agency within a particular space of social identity, some of which is linked
to disablist theory. These classifications can be seen as subdivisions of an overall discourse of learning
disability whereby a whole series of power relationships exist to both facilitate the progression of care
to the client group, and at the same time create patterns of resistance, as this progression follows a
particular path which has effect on professionals within the field. Professionals are linked to the
space of social identity and can become marginalised in the way that the client group themselves are,
and this is a final contingent in the discourse.
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Genocide Impact
Biopower moves us to a control based system, where panoptic disciplinary surveillance is in
an even more efficient state. The control society is based on the intensification of the
normalizing apparatus. Nealon 2008
As Foucault puts forth in his work on disciplinary regimes, iron-fisted mechanisms of regulation are both
expensive and inefficient—a lesson that international business learned long before the cold war nation-state
did. Foucault argues that the disciplinary apparatus was born gradually alongside imperialist expansion in
the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, and reached its apex in the twentieth, with the factory
societies of Fordism. By all accounts, however, this kind of Fordist New Deal welfare state has been
systematically dismantled by worldwide conservative political hegemony and the rise of the so-called new
economy—in short, by the intensification of biopower. In a world of cyber-work, e-commerce, distance
education, virtual markets, home health care, and the perpetual retraining of flexibly specialized labor, the
disciplinary world of partitioning and surveillance (the office, the school, the bank, the trading floor, the
mall, the hospital, the factory) seems like it's undergoing, a wholesale transformation. As Deleuze argues,
"We're definitely moving toward 'control' societies that are no longer exact disciplinary... We're moving
toward control societies that no longer operate [primarily] by confining people but through continuous
control and instant communication. . . . In a control-based system, nothing is left alone for long." Deleuze
further elaborates on the Foucaultian distinction between discipline and control: "In disciplinary societies,
you were always starting all over again (as you went from school to barracks, from barracks to factory),
while in control societies you never finish anything—business, training, and military service being
coexisting metastable states of a single modulation, a sort of universal transmutation of power." So,
following the Foucaultian logic of power we've been developing here, as societies of control extend and
intensify the tactics of discipline and biopower (by linking training and surveillance to evermore-minute
realms of everyday life), they also give birth to a whole new form. And this emergence comes about
through what Foucault calls a "swarming [1'essaimage] of disciplinary mechanisms," through the in-
tensification of discipline rather than its exhaustion or dissipation: "The massive, compact disciplines are
broken down into flexible methods of control" (D&P zit). Panoptic disciplinary surveillance in the
contemporary world of "control" has been taken to a new, even more disembodied and therefore efficient
state; your Web browser, your DNA, your bank ATM card, your subway pass, or your credit report all
suggest that you are tracked in ways that make the disciplinary or panoptic warehousing of bodily traces
(like photographs, surveillance tapes, fingerprints, or blood types) seem positively quaint by comparison.
Discipline has been taken to the limit of what it can do, and in this intensive movement, discipline's limit
has become a threshold, inexorably transforming this form of power into a different mode, a lighter and
even more effective style of surveillance that can only accelerate the already lightning-fast spread of that
form of power/knowledge known as globalization. For example, Hardt and Negri build their concept of
"Empire" precisely around this notion of the waning of disciplinary power and the waxing of the society of
control: "The society of control might thus be characterized by an intensification and generalization of the
normalizing apparatuses of disciplinarity that internally animate our common and daily practices, but in
contrast to discipline, this control extends well outside the structured sites of social institutions through
flexible and fluctuating networks." Hardt and Negri suggest, in classical Foucaultian form, that we are
witnessing not so much the end of imperialist or disciplinary power, but its intensification and
transmutation into another kind of power: control. At its point of phase transition, one might say that the
disciplinary power of imperialism doesn't merely halt; it is forced to work differently, to develop another
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modus operandi. As Hardt and Negri argue, the present-day Empire of transnational capital comprises
"something altogether . different from [what's traditionally known as] 'imperialism."
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Barelife Impact
Reducing individuals is the first step in the destruction of wholesale populations.
Dean 2001 (Mitchell, Professor at the Center for Social Inclusion, “States of Imagination” ed. Hansen and Stepputat, p. 53-56)
Consider again the contrastive terms in which it is possible to view biopolitics and sovereignty. The final chapter
in the first volume of the History of Satiably that contrasts sovereignty and biopolitics is titled "Right of Death and
Power over Life." The initial terms of the contrast between the two registers of government is thus between one that
could employ power to put subjects to death, even if this right to kill was conditioned by the defense of the
sovereign, and one that was concerned with the fostering of life. Nevertheless, each pan of the contrast can be
further broken down. The right of death can also be understood as the right to take life or In live: the power over
life as the power "to foster life or disallow it." Sovereign power is a power that distinguishes between political
life (bias) and mere existence or bare life (zne). Bare life is included in the constitution of sovereign power by its
very exclusion from political life. In contrast. biopolitics might be thought to include toe in Dios: stripped down
mere existence becomes a matter of political reality. Thus, the contrast between biopolitics and sovereignty is not
MX of a power of life versus a power of death but concerns the way the different forms of power treat matters of
life and death and entail different conceptions of life. Thus, biopolitics reinscribes the earlier right of death and power
over life and places it within a new and different form that attempts to include what had earlier been sacred and
taboo, bare life, in political existence. It is no longer so much the right of the sovereign to put to death his enemies
but to disqualify the life—the mere existence—of those who are a threat to the life of the population. to disallow
those deemed "unworthy of life." those whose bare life is nor worth living.
This allows us, first, to consider what might be thought of as the dark side of biopolitics (Foucault tons: t;6–;7).
In Foucault's account, biopolitics do not put an end to the practice of war: it provides it with new and more
sophisticated killing machine". These machines allow killing itself to be reposed at the level of entire populations.
Wars become genocidal in the twentieth century. The same stare that takes on the duty to enhance the life of the
population also exercises the power of death over whole populations. Atomic weapons are the key weapons of this process
of the power to put whole populations to death. We might also consider here the aptly turned biological and chemical
weapons that seek an extermination of populations by visiting plagues upon them or polluting the biosphere in which
they live to the point at which bare life is no longer sustainable . Nor does the birth of biopolitics put an end to the
killing of one's own populations. Rather, it intensifies that killing—whether by an "ethnic cleansing" that visits holocausts
upon whole groups or by the mass slaughters of classes and groups conducted in the name of the utopia to be
achieved.
There is a certain restraint in sovereign power. The right of death is only occasionally exercised as the right to kill
and then often in a ritual fashion that suggests a relation to the sacred. Mort often, sovereign power is manifest in the
terming from the right to kill. The biopolitical imperative knows no such restraint. Power is exercised at the level of
populations and hence wars will be waged at that level, on behalf of everyone and their lives. This point brings us to the
heart of Foucault's provocative thesis about biopolitics: that there is an intimate connection between the exercise of a
life-administering power and the commission of genocide: "If genocide is indeed the dream of modem powers, this is
not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill: it is because power is situated and exercised at the level of life,
the species, the MR, and the large-scale phenomena of population" 0979a: 1371. Foucault completes this same passage
with an expression that deserves more notice: "massacres become vital."
There is thus a kind of perverse homogeneity between the power over life and the power to take life characteristic
of bloomer. The emergence of a biopolitical racism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be approached as a
trajectory in which this homogeneity always threatened to tip over into a dreadful necessity. This racism can be
approached as a fundamental mechanism of power that is inscribed in the biopolitical domain (Stoler 1995:84-85). For
Foucault, the primary function of this form of racism is to establish a division between those who must live and those
who must die, and to distinguish the superior from the inferior, the fit from the unfit. The notion and techniques of
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population had given rise, at the end of the nine
( Dean 01 continued)
teenth century, to a new linkage among population. the internal organization of states, and the competition between
states. Darwinism, as an imperial social and political program, would plot the ranking of individuals, populations,
and nations along the common gradient of fimess and thus measure dimity.• However, the series "population,
evolution. and race" is not simply a way of thinking about the superiority of the "white races" or of justifying
colonialism. but also of thinking about how to treat the degenerates and the abnormals in one's own population and
prevent the funkier degeneration of the race.
The second and most important function for Foucault of this biopolitical racism in the nineteenth century is that
"it establishes a positive relation between the right to kill and the assurance of life" (Biota. am: U. The life of the
population. its vigor. its health, its capacities to survive, becomes neces sarily linked to the elimination of internal and
external threats. This power to disallow life is perhaps best encapsulated in the injunctions of the eugenic project:
identify those who are degenerate, abnormal, feeble-minded, or of an inferior race and subject them to forced
sterilization: encourage those who are superior, fit, and intelligent to propagate. Identify those whose life is but mere
existence and disqualify their propagation: encourage those who can partake of a sovereign existence and of moral
and political life. But this last example does not necessarily establish a positive justification for the right to kill,
only the right to disallow life.
If we are to begin to understand the type of racism engaged in by Nazism. however, we need ro rake into account
another kind of denouement between the biopolitical management of population and the exercise of sovereignty.
This version of sovereignty is no longer the transformed and democratized form founded on the liberty of the
juridical subject, as it is for liberalism, but a sovereignty that takes up and transforms a further clement of
sovereignty. its "symbolics of blood" (Foucault lona: 481.
For Foucault. sovereignty is grounded in blood—as a reality and as a symbol—just as one might say that sexuality
becomes the key field on which biopolitical management of populations is articulated. When power is exercised
through repression and deduction. through a law over which hangs the sword, when it is exercised on the scaffold by
the torturer and the executioner, and when relations between households and families were forged through alliance,
"blood was a reality with a symbolic function." By contrast. for biopolitics with its themes of health, vigor, fitness,
vitality, progeny, survival, and race, "power spoke of sexuality and to sexuality" (Foucault ig7oa: 47). For Foucault
(1979a: 149-5o), the novelty of National Socialism was the way it articulated "the oneiric exalution of blood," of
fatherland, and of the triumph of the race in an immense, cynical and naive fashion, with the paroxysms of a disciplinary
and biopolitical power concerned with the detailed administration of the life of the population and the regulation of
sexuality, family, marriage, and education.' Nazism generalized biopower without the limit-critique posed by the
juridical subject of right, but it could not do away with sovereign,. Instead, it established a set of permanent
interventions into the conduct of the individual within the population and articulated this with the "mythical concern for
blood and the triumph of the race." Thus, the shepherd-flock game and the city-citizen game are transmuted into the
eugenic ordering of biological existence (of mere living and subsistence) and articulated on the themes of the purity of
blood and the myth of the fatherland.
In such an articulation of these elements of sovereign and biopolitical forms of power, the relation between the
administration of life and the right to kill entire populations is no longer simply one of a dreadful homogeneity. It has
become a necessary relation. The administration of life comes to require a bloodbath. It is not simply that power, and
therefore war, will be exercised at the level of an entity population. It is that the act of disqualifying the right to life of
other races becomes necessary for the fostering of the life of the race. Moreover, the elimination of other races is only
one face of the purification of one, own race (Foucault zgq7b: zzil. The other part is to expose the latter to a universal
and absolute danger, to expose it to the risk of death and total destruction. For Foucault, with the Nazi state we have an
"absolutely racist state, an absolutely murderous state and an absolutely suicidal state" (232), all of which are
superimposed and converge on the Final Solution. With the Final Solution, the state tries to eliminate, through the lews,
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all the other races, for whom the Jews were the symbol and the manifestation. This includes, in one of Hider's last acts,
the order to des, the bases of bare life for the German people itself. "Final Solution for other races, the absolute suicide
of the German race" is inscribed, according to Foucault, in the functioning of the modem St. (23 2).
(Dean 01 continued and finally concluded)
Foucault's analysis of the political rationality of National Socialism finds confirmation in the work of recent German
historians on at least one point.
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Sick Impact Card

The plans promotion of poverty relating programs is the state’s newest and most dangerous
form of biopolitical control. We can no longer know what it means to be free until we
interrogate the government’s humanitarian action and see how it is a tool to rein over the
process of life and death. Dillon 8
(use for micro political actions alt)

Without the intervention of the population the government will use the notion of freedom to
justify the self immolation of society Dillon and Guerrero 8
(MICHAEL DILLON, is Professor of Politics at the University of Lancaster. AND LUIS LOBO-GUERRERO, studied Political Science
at Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Colombia. Having worked as political risk analyst in the Andean region and following two years as
international editorial adviser for a worldwide group of press and communications agencies, he read for an M.A. in Defence and Security
Analysis at Lancaster University. His Ph.D., also from Lancaster, is a genealogy of insurance as a biopolitical security technology. He
theorises insurance as resulting from a dual process of the ‘governmentalisation of the state’ and the ‘privatisation of security’. He argues
that insurance products are ‘emerging securities’ that promote and protect a liberal way of life as ‘species’ life. His wider research
revolves around the emerging problem-space of ‘special risks’ that results from correlating a ‘biopolitics of security’ and the relationships
obtained between ‘security, technologies of risk, and the political’. He co-edits a double-special issue for Security Dialogue with Claudia
Aradau and Rens van Munster in this last area (2008, 39: 3-4). He is also the coordinator of the Biopolitics of Security Research
Network., “Biopolitics of security in the 21st century: an introduction” Review of International Studies (2008), 34, 265–292 Copyright _
British International Studies Association)
A complex pact was therefore struck between security, knowledge and freedom in the modern age. The modern political
imaginary has been circumscribed by the complex permutations through which that pact has mutated. Hitherto, our
understanding of the pact has largely been dominated by the political discourse of the subject, of
possessive individualism, and the political bond said to be contracted between the political subject
and the modern state. But there are many ways in which the modern understands and promotes freedom, not least because
the genealogy of freedom upon which the modern relies is as rich in Epicurean as it is, for example, in Cartesian, Hobbesian or
Kantian motifs. Thus, the natural philosophy of early-modern Europe found in Lucretius’s De Rerum natura, for example, an
argument allowing the association of an inexplicable and unpredictable or uncaused swerve in the flow of originary matter (the
clinamen) with the possibility of free will.73 Foucault also observed that modern accounts of freedom in the 17th and 18th
centuries were not only conceived in terms of natural rights, or the rights of the citizen and the subject. They were also conceived
in terms of what might be called the developmental freedom of its biopolitics.74
What follows for freedom similarly also follows for security. Modern conceptions of security have never
been confined to the discourse of a subject presumed to exist prior to the power/knowledge relations that
constitute it as the subject that it is; however that subject is conceived and at whatever level, individual or
collective, it is presumed to operate. As he teaches us about the heterogeneity and problematicity of
discourses of modern power, so also Foucault teaches us about the heterogeneity and problematicity of
modern accounts of security and freedom; which teaching requires us in response to the provocation of
Foucault not simply to apply Foucault but to go beyond Foucault in relation especially to
power/knowledge, freedom and security. Foucault thereby not only extended the register of what such
practices meant and did. In the process he also alerted us to how the changing experiences of the real
which characterised the diverse complex of heterogeneous power relations characteristic of modern
power relations were also deeply implicated in the detailed regulation of life locally and globally.
Foucault therefore identified a different correlation of security and freedom than that which characterises
the West’s traditional politics of security, founded as it is on an allied politics of the subject.75 There could
be no more central question for politics, therefore, than that of the relation of freedom and security. While
the very mythos of the modern state is founded in its claim to be a security provider, and the
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modern’s commitment to life is founded in the promotion of life, their respective security
mechanisms seem nonetheless fated to threaten the very ideal of political order and the very
valuation of life which they are supposed to advance. What is well understood now in relation to the
geopolitics of state security is evident also in the biopolitics of security. Consistently hailed as part of the
solution to the problematic of politics, freedom and justice, modern practices of security have
consistently proved themselves to be part of the problem instead. This applies as much to biopolitics
as to geopolitics.
In order to promote life, biopolitical security practices must of course come to know life. But they do
not simply insist on rendering life transparent to certain forms of knowing; such life which is in
whatever way resistant to being known begins to pose a security problem to biopolitics. Their
purpose is in addition of course to weigh life – to conduct a continuous assay of life – in order to
determine which life is capable of self-regulating itself in the cause of its self-improvement,
adaptation and change; and which forms of life have most to teach about these processes offering a
kind of best practice of living and preferred forms of life. Different life forms display differing capacities
in this respect. It therefore follows that some forms of life may be less capable or incapable, and even
hostile or resistant, to self-regulating themselves in the cause of their self-improvement and
adaptation. All life in some degree or another may have to be coached in its biopolitical self-governance
and some life may have to be subject to more than coaching. Recalcitrant and intransigent forms of life may
require punishment and correction. Ultimately some life forms may be regarded as inimical to life itself
and these will have to be eliminated. Foucault explores this logic and illustrates its operation in the
account that he gives of race war (SMD).Others have illustrated it by reference to poverty
programmes.76 ‘Making life live’ is as violent in its way as power over death.
The problematic of modern politics is therefore subtly misconceived when freedom and security are
construed exclusively as contending values locked in a zero-sum game in which the one is advanced or lost
at the expense of the other. Security is not opposed to freedom when freedom is understood as the
contingent developmental freedom of biological existence. In its biological contingency, security does not
possibilise freedom and freedom is not designed to constrain security. Here, instead, security becomes a set
of mechanisms self-governing the very contingent properties of the freedom which biological entities are
said to display; aspiring to autopoietic and complex adaptive systemic forms of freedom generically
implicated in varying accounts of becoming, and of the continuous individuation of form. In the process,
freedom becomes the principal mechanism by which biopolitical security is secured.
Free to make life live freely, biopolitics of security will and do enforce that project violently. Through
the regulation and enactment of the very aleatory character of species existence, modern freedom is the mechanism by
which security is forcefully biopoliticised in the name of promoting the life and potentiality of the
species. It does so, according to Foucault, to the point of its self-immolation. In Volume 1 of The History of
Sexuality, he observes how a certain threshold of modernity is reached when it comes to wager the life of the species on its own
(bio) political strategies. Only when the interrogation of security acknowledges that it must become an
interrogation of the intimate operational correlation of security and freedom in the biopolitics of
security will it begin to engage the aporia of security which threatens the very project of political
modernity itself; that in seeking to secure the promotion of human being as species being, modern
security practices threaten its very existence. Making live is a lethal business. Paradoxically, freedom from it
may be required if species life is in fact to out-live its grip.
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Racism Impact
Biopolitcs allows for the killing of people through state racism. Kelly 2004
The right to kill is problematized in the movement that founds biopolitics, in that the government which
uses biopolitics adopts the aim of keeping its people alive. This comes to be conceived as the proper end of
all government. Foucault refers to the emergence of contractarian theories of government, in which the
sovereign gains legitimacy precisely by being necessary to protect the lives and well-being of the people—
hence, the state cannot legitimately harm them, since that would violate the contract. Moreover, the
biopolitical society is premised on internal homeostasis—violence can serve to shatter this stability if it is
itself unregulated. Certainly, the use of violent control by despots followed a pattern of insurrection and
repression. Yet the coexistence of biopolitics and the sovereign right to kill is a fact. Hence there needs to
be a way in which this killing can be squared with biopolitics. This is where state racism comes in. Our
society is identified as a race which is threatened by racial enemies without and within; the population with
which biopolitics is concerned is demarcated from the enemies of the population, with whom the sovereign
power to kill is concerned. “What in fact is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the
domain of life that is under power's control: the break between what must live and what must die.” State
racism allows for the identification of enemies as being outside of the population, whether they are to be
found inside or outside the boundaries of the state, and thus licenses the killing of these people, or simply
letting them die, since part of the biopolitical technology, at least in its more developed form, is trying to
keep people alive. Foucault refers to this as “indirect murder,” in which, for instance, some people are
exposed to greater risks to which the body of the population would not normally be exposed.
State racism uses biopolitics to eliminate threats to the population. Kelly 2004
In the context of Foucault’s final lecture of 1976 then, we can define state racism as whatever
“justifies the death-functions in the economy of biopower by appealing to the principle that the death
of others makes one biologically stronger insofar as one is a member of a race or population.” The
word ‘biological’ in this definition is (I think) used rather loosely, such that there is no implication
that the discourse of the strength of the population needs to be couched in explicitly biological terms
to be biologically racist – there simply needs to be an understanding of the population as something
that is threatened by internal and external agents, and which can grow stronger by the elimination of
those threats.
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Authoritarianism Impact
The power to let die is the ultimate manifestation of authoritarian power Giroux 2006
(Henry is the Waterbury Chair of Secondary education at Pennsylvania State University. “Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and
the Biopolitics of Disposability,” College Literature, Vol. 33, No. 3)
In the current historical moment, as Catherine Mills points out,“all subjects are at least potentially if not actually abandoned by
the law and exposed to violence as a constitutive condition of political existence” (2004, 47). Nicholas Mirzoeff has observed
that all over the world there is a growing resentment of immigrants and refugees, matched by the emergence of detain-and-deport
strategies and coupled with the rise of the camp as the key institution and social model of the new millennium.The “empire of
camps,” according to Mirzoeff, has become the “exemplary institution of a system of global capitalism that supports the West in
its high consumption, low-price consumer lifestyle” (2005, 145). Zygmunt Bauman calls such camps “garrisons of
extraterritoriality” and argues that they have become “the dumping grounds for the indisposed of and as yet unrecycled waste of
the global frontier- land” (2003, 109).The regime of the camp has increasingly become a key index of modernity and the new
world order.The connections among disposability, violence, and death have become common under modernity in those countries
where the order of power has become necropolitical. For example, Rosa Linda Fregoso analyzes feminicide as a local expression
of global violence against women in the region of the U.S./Mexico border where over one thousand women have been either
murdered or disappeared, constituting what amounts to a “politics of gender extermination” (2006, 109).The politics of
disposability and necropolitics not only generate widespread violence and ever expanding “garrisons of extraterritoriality” but
also have taken on a powerful new significance as a foundation for political sovereignty. Biopolitical commitments to “let die”
by abandoning citizens appear increasingly credible in light of the growing authoritarianism in the United States under the Bush
administration (Giroux 2005).
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Poverty Impact
Biopolitics justify impending fascist policies and practices of disposability towards people in
poverty Giroux 2006
Till's body allowed the racism that destroyed it to be made visible, to speak to the systemic character of American racial
injustice. The bodies of the Katrina victims could not speak with the same directness to the state of American racist violence but
they did reveal and shatter the conservative fiction of living in a color-blind society. The bodies of the Katrina victims laid bare
the racial and class fault lines that mark an increasingly damaged and withering democracy and revealed the emergence of a new
kind of politics, one in which entire populations are now considered disposable, an unnecessary burden on state coffers, and
consigned to fend for themselves. At the same time, what happened in New Orleans also revealed some frightening signposts of
those repressive features in American society, demanding that artists, public intellectuals, scholars, and other cultural workers
take seriously what Angela Davis insists "are very clear signs of . . . impending fascist policies and practices," which not only
construct an imaginary social environment for all of those populations rendered disposable but also exemplify a site and space
"where democracy has lost its claims" (2005, 122, 124). Soon after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast, the consequences of the
long legacy of attacking big government and bleeding the social and public service sectors of the state became glaringly evident
as did a government that displayed a "staggering indifference to human suffering" (Herbert 2005). Hurricane Katrina made it
abundantly clear that only the government had the power, resources, and authority to address complex undertakings such as
dealing with the totality of the economic, environmental, cultural, [End Page 174] and social destruction that impacted the Gulf
Coast.
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Militarism Impact
Biopolitics legitimate the creation of a military state. Giroux 2006
In one of the most blatant displays of racism underscoring the biopolitical "live free or die" agenda in Bush's America, the
dominant media increasingly framed the events that unfolded during and immediately after the hurricane by focusing on acts of
crime, looting, rape, and murder, allegedly perpetrated by the black residents of New Orleans. In predictable fashion, politicians
such as Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco issued an order allowing soldiers to shoot to kill looters in an effort to restore calm.
Later inquiries revealed that almost all of these crimes did not take place. The philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, argued that "what
motivated these stories were not facts, but racist prejudices, the satisfaction felt by those who would be able to say: 'You see,
Blacks really are like that, violent barbarians under the thin layer of civilization!'" (2005). It must be noted that there is more at
stake here than the resurgence of old-style racism; there is the recognition that some groups have the power to protect themselves
from such stereotypes and others do not, and [End Page 176] for those who do not—especially poor blacks—racist myths have a
way of producing precise, if not deadly, material consequences. Given the public's preoccupation with violence and safety, crime
and terror merge in the all-too-familiar equation of black culture with the culture of criminality, and images of poor blacks are
made indistinguishable from images of crime and violence. Criminalizing black behavior and relying on punitive measures to
solve social problems do more than legitimate a biopolitics defined increasingly by the authority of an expanding national
security state under George W. Bush. They also legitimize a state in which the police and military, often operating behind closed
doors, take on public functions that are not subject to public scrutiny (Bleifuss 2005, 22).3 This becomes particularly dangerous
in a democracy when paramilitary or military organisations gain their legitimacy increasingly from an appeal to fear and terror,
prompted largely by the presence of those racialized and class-specific groups considered both dangerous and disposable. Within
a few days after Katrina struck, New Orleans was under martial law occupied by nearly 65,000 U.S. military personnel. Cries of
desperation and help were quickly redefined as the pleas of "refugees," a designation that suggested an alien population lacking
both citizenship and legal rights had inhabited the Gulf Coast. Images of thousands of desperate and poor blacks gave way to
pictures of combat-ready troops and soldiers with mounted bayonets canvassing houses in order to remove stranded civilians.
Embedded journalists now travelled with soldiers on Humvees, armoured carriers, and military helicopters in downtown USA.
What had begun as a botched rescue operation by the federal government was transformed into a military operation. Given the
government's propensity to view those who are poor and black with contempt, it was not surprising that the transformation of
New Orleans and the Gulf Coast from disaster area to war zone occurred without any audible dissent from either the general
public or the dominant media. New Orleans increasingly came to look like a city in Iraq as scores of private soldiers appeared on
the scene—either on contract with the Department of Homeland Security or hired by wealthy elites to protect their private estates
and businesses. Much like Iraq, the Gulf Coast became another recipient of deregulated market capitalism as soon as the flood
waters began to recede. The fruits of privatization and an utter disregard for public values were all too visible in the use of
private mercenaries and security companies hired to guard federal projects, often indulging in acts of violence that constituted a
clear-cut case of vigilantism.
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VTL Impact
Biopolitics allow state-sanctioned violence and marginalize people to a status of living dead
and social homelessness. We must reexamine how biopower functions within the global
economic framework especially following the havoc of Hurricane Katrina. Giroux 2006
(Henry is the Waterbury Chair of Secondary education at Pennsylvania State University. “Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race,
Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability,” College Literature, Vol. 33, No. 3)
I want to further this position by arguing that neoliberalism, privatization, and militarism have become the dominant biopolitics
of the mid-twentieth-century social state and that the coupling of a market fundamentalism and contemporary forms of
subjugation of life to the power of capital accumulation, violence, and disposability, especially under the Bush administration,
has produced a new and dangerous version of biopolitics.4 While the murder of Emmett Till suggests that a biopolitics structured
around the intersection of race and class inequalities, on the one hand, and state violence, on the other, has long existed, the new
version of biopolitics adds a distinctively different and more dangerous register. The new biopolitics not only includes state-
sanctioned violence but also relegates entire populations to spaces of invisibility and disposability. As William DiFazio points
out, "the state has been so weakened over decades of privatization that it . . . increasingly [End Page 181] fails to provide health
care, housing, retirement benefits and education to a massive percentage of its population" (2006, 87). While the social contract
has been suspended in varying degrees since the 1970s, under the Bush Administration it has been virtually abandoned. Under
such circumstances, the state no longer feels obligated to take measures that prevent hardship, suffering, and death. The state no
longer protects its own disadvantaged citizens—they are already seen as dead within a transnational economic and political
framework. Specific populations now occupy a globalized space of ruthless politics in which the categories of "citizen" and
"democratic representation," once integral to national politics, are no longer recognized. In the past, people who were
marginalized by class and race could at least expect a modicum of support from the government, either because of the
persistence of a drastically reduced social contract or because they still had some value as part of a reserve army of unemployed
labour. That is no longer true. This new form of biopolitics is conditioned by a permanent state of class and racial exception in
which "vast populations are subject to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead" (Mbembe 2003, 40),
largely invisible in the global media, or, when disruptively present, defined as redundant, pathological, and dangerous. Within
this wasteland of death and disposability, whole populations are relegated to what Zygmunt Bauman calls "social homelessness"
(2004, 13). While the rich and middle classes in the United States maintain lifestyles produced through vast inequalities of
symbolic and material capital, the "free market" provides neither social protection and security nor hope to those who are poor,
sick, elderly, and marginalized by race and class. Given the increasing perilous state of the those who are poor and dispossessed
in America, it is crucial to reexamine how biopower functions within global neoliberalism and the simultaneous rise of security
states organized around cultural (and racial) homogeneity. This task is made all the more urgent by the destruction, politics, and
death that followed Hurricane Katrina.
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Alternative-Exercise Liberty
In order for power to emerge there must first be resistance, the alternative is to exercise
liberty. Nealon 2008
In a force-on-force logic of power, one can plausibly—though a bit misleadingly—deploy the slogan,
"Resistance comes first," precisely because in Foucault, the power relation literally emerges through
antagonism or struggle.' Power implies and produces resistance, so the easiest way to get a handle on power
is to examine those sites at which resistance is or should be most intense: if you want to know what reason
is, take a look at madness—and not so much in order to denounce madness's exclusion from the realm of
the reasonable, but precisely to examine the ways that madness has been included (as "other") in the
normative procedures of reason. In the norm-process, resistance comes first quite literally; resistance is
what power works on and through. To say that resistance comes first is, then, only to insist again that
power works "on" potentials, on other acts, remaking rather than simply deforming or dominating the
nouns, the stuff that's "already" there. The force relations (what can it do?) parse the things (what can it
be?), rather than vice versa. So the first thing that you'd have to say about resistance is that it’s not a quality
of subjects (“authenticity”), nor a property of certain privileged practices (yoga, S&M, making your life a
work of art). Rather, resistance exists as what Foucault calls a kind of "chemical catalyst" for diagnosing
acts or forces (which can of course be deployed by subjects and obviously do exist in greater intensities in
some practices than in others). As Foucault insists, "Liberty is a practice. So there may, in fact, always be a
certain number of projects whose aim is to modify some constraints, to loosen, or even break them, but
none of those projects can, simply by its nature, assure that people will have liberty automatically, that it
will be established by the project itself . . . Liberty is what must be exercised”
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Ext-Exercise Liberty Alternative

Resistance is an endpoint. Instead we have to respond to these issues in the present and come
up with something other than a judgment or condemnation. Nealon 2008
In the end, perhaps this Foucaultian emphasis on irreducible experimental struggle, rather than a binary
skeleton of power versus resistance, is merely to suggest that the diagnostic project of responding to
"power is ongoing, collective, and emerging at myriad discontinuous sites, are the collective processes of
constructing ways to hack the "dangerous” (rather than "bad") contemporary world of accelerated
capitalism. However, in the service of that project, the theme of "resistance" can often name a stopping
point rather than a rallying cry — a moral condemnation or judgment rather than an ethical provocation or
map. As Foucault insists, the critical project is not one where individual intellectuals judge problems, but a
more collective procedure organized around naming and responding to the problems themselves: “I concern
myself with determining problems, unleashing them, revealing them within the framework of such
complexity as to shut the mouths of prophets and legislators: all those who speak for other and above
others. It is at that moment that the complexity of the problem will be able to appear in its connection with
people’s lives; and consequently, the legitimacy of a common enterprise will be able to appear through
concrete questions, difficult cases, revolutionary movements, reflections, and evidence…It is all a social
enterprise.” In other words, it seems that if one is to take Foucault’s emphasis on social force seriously,
then one has to start where one is, with the provocation to respond to “today,” a particular set of problems,
and one is forced to end with something other than a condemnation or judgment – the tautological
conclusion that X or Y is “dominating,” “bad,” or “false.” Let’s give credit where credit is due: it’s really
not a matter of whether anyone believes the bullshit served up by her boss or his elected officials, or
whether this bullshit is really true or not. Those binary questions of hermeneutic depth aside, we are
nevertheless left with the forceful fact this bullshit certainly does produce effects: we certainly do have to
respond – outside the economies of representation, assured failure, moralizing judgment, and meaning.
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Alternative Resistance
Only by engaging in micropolitics are we able to exploit spaces loosening the noose of
biopower Thomas 5
(Robyn Thomas, Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, UK, and Annette Davies, Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, UK,
“Theorizing the Micro-politics of Resistance: New Public Management and Managerial Identities in the UK Public Services”
Organization Studies 2005; 26; 683 < http://oss.sagepub.com>)
The study also suggests the need to move away from a meta-theory of resistance. This has two implications for our theorizing on
resistance. Firstly, we recognize that the nature and form of resistance are discursively produced within specific
contexts and will take different forms and emphases for different social groups. Within this context, the normative
orientation of NPM operates in conjunction with the professional identities of public service managers. Here, an appreciation of
resistance at the level of meanings and subjectivities draws attention to forms of disruption that might be
overlooked with a focus on a more overt, collective and monolithic definition. Furthermore, within the context of
NPM and its emphasis as an identity project, resistance at the micro-political level is heightened. Thus, it is argued that different
focuses of power require different focuses of resistance. Secondly, our conceptualization of resistance may be
more appropriate when studying managerial and professional groups, given that their access to the challenging and
rewriting of organizational discourse might be greater than that of shop floor workers. In other words, our conceptualizing of
resistance here may not be so appropriate in settings where there is a less apparent political contestation over meanings and in situations
where there is less agency for actors in contesting meanings. It may be suggested that our conception of resistance, which reinforces as
well as challenges meanings and subjectivities, is politically naïve and nihilistic. However, we would argue that by emphasizing the
micro-level of experience, we offer a ‘broad-based political resistance’ (Hekman 1990: 186), focusing on struggle
and tension and on the everyday forms of maintenance and control, without recourse to meta-narratives of
emancipation. Thus we can conceptualize resistance as an exploiting of the ‘tactical polyvalence of discourses’ (Sawicki 1994)
through the chipping away at the micro-politics of power, at the minutiae of disciplinary technologies that constitute individual
subjectivity. The effects of such resistance are low levels of disturbance, leading to the destabilizing, weakening
and greater incoherence of dominant discourses, such as NPM, and in turn creating greater looseness and
opportunity to exploit spaces. It is these spaces that enable the construction of alternative identities and
meanings within forms of domination. This paper, in focusing on the discursive and multidirectional nature of resistance,
provides empirical illustrations of the way that contestation over meanings can quietly challenge power relations. We question the
need for a utopian narrative of emancipation, valuing the small pockets of resistance that sound a liberatory
note (Bartky 1988) and make a difference to how people live their lives and live with themselves.
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A2 Fallacy
Foucaults refusal to take a stance on the question of biopower good/bad allows him to bypass
your fallacy argument Koopman 8
(Colin Koopman, Ph.D. , “Genealogy as Problematization: Why Foucault’s Genealogy Does Not Commit the Genetic Fallacy” Abstracts:
Foucault Circle 2008)
In the second part of the paper, I address a serious and common objection to Foucault’s unique combination
of historical description and philosophical critique. I show that Foucault’s concept of problematization
enabled him to fashion genealogy as an effective form of critical inquiry without committing what
many philosophers (especially those considering Foucault from analytic and critical theoretic
perspectives) argue is a crucial error in genealogy: namely, the charge that genealogy commits the
genetic fallacy. I show that genealogy as problematization differs from forms of philosophical critique
developed by two other prominent philosophers who also referred to their work under the banner of
genealogy: Friedrich Nietzsche and Bernard Williams. While Nietzsche and Williams both attempted to use
genealogy to reach fairly decisive normative conclusions (a denunciation of modern morality in Nietzsche’s
case and a vindication of modern truthfulness in Williams’s case) I show that Foucault’s critical use of
genealogy was far more subtle. Genealogy as problematization is not straightforwardly normative in that
Foucault did not use it to show that we should be either “for or against” certain practices (a point he
is explicit on in his late “What is Enlightenment?” paper). Foucault characterized his use of genealogy in
explicit opposition to this sort of straightforward normative criticism: “My point is not that everything is
bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is
dangerous, then we always have something to do.” Genealogy as problematization is best described as
using genealogy to show how certain practices came to be dangerous or fraught and so in need of
reconstructive response. Differentiating genealogical problematization from straightforward
normative uses of genealogy in this way enables us to understand how genealogy need not commit the
genetic fallacy. This point is crucial for historicist forms of critique such as genealogy.
In the third and final part of the paper I turn to reflections on how we might effectively wield genealogy as one
part of a broader apparatus of critical inquiry. While Nietzsche’s denunciation and Williams’s vindication establish
evaluative conceptions of genealogy which seek to yield normative conclusions, critical problematization is by contrast simply a
call for more work. Genealogy for Foucault functions to show how practices are problematic and
dangerous (not just that a practice is good or bad) in such a way as to provide us with the materials we need
to begin the difficult work of addressing ourselves to these problems. It is in this sense that
problematization (and Foucault’s inheritance of this concept from Deleuze is here important) has rightly been
referred to by many commentators as an invitation to pragmatism if not an outright exemplification
of pragmatist inquiry. According to this account, genealogy helps us recognize ways in which our practices
may be deeply problematic so that we can more effectively engage in the difficult work of
reconstructing these practices where they are most deficient.
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AT-No Agency
Foucaultian genealogy is nothing but agency because Foucault studied the way agents did
things. Nealon 2008
I'll have to admit to finding myself completely flummoxed when colleagues, people at conferences, or
students ask about the "problem of agency' in Foucault, by which I initially assumed they meant that
agency is somehow a scarce commodity or a rare thing in Foucault's thinking, at least in the work on
power. Saying that there is no or very little room for agency in Foucault's genealogical work is, to my
mind, a bit like saying there's very little room for dialectic in Hegel, or there's not enough Aristotle in
Aquinas. Agency in Foucault, like dialectic in Hegel or Aristotle Aquinas, is hardly scarce; in fact, it's
virtually all there is. Foucault studies practices, agents doing things, plain and simple (and recall it’s
actually agency that he studies, insofar as it’s the actions that make the agents, rather than vice versa). A
factory, a panopticon, or a sexual identity is nothing other than a series of interlocking practices: insofar as
these things don't exist as rigid abstract templates or as top-down exoskeletal positions of a dominant
capital-P Power, in Foucault's work there's quite literally nothing but agency. There are in fact many more
forms of "agency" than there are "agents." Sexuality, surveillance, resistance: these things are verbs or
deployments of force, or at least that's what they are before they become attached to nouns, subjects, or
states of being.
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Ext. – Us/Them Dichotomy

Biopower produces more subjectivities and targets life inside and outside of disciplinary
power. It targets lifestyles outside of the norms. Nealon 2008
Biopower sutures the seeming gap between the "wholesale" and "retail" functioning of disciplinary power
through its intensification and redeployment of the disciplinary "norm." In other words, while biopower
emerges on the other side of a certain phase transition or tipping point of discipline, biopower is
nevertheless born from the intensification of a particular strand of panoptic disciplinary power, the
normative medical or rehabilitative gaze that seeks to "understand" the causes of crime and criminality.
Under a regime of biopower, the political task becomes less training people to be docile, and more a matter
of producing and classifying ever-more kinds of subjectivities. So far as biopower is concerned, the
functioning of power becomes less invested in regulating behavior through panoptic, institutionally based
training exercises, and more invested in directly targeting life and lifestyles—inside and outside the factory,
the army, or the school, those recognizable sites of disciplinary power. For the mutation from discipline to
biopower, the linchpin figure remains an "abnormal" subject, but the basis on which that abnormality is
diagnosed or discovered changes radically. In short, punitive discourse comes to pivot on the (biopolitical)
delinquent subject rather than the (disciplinary) criminal act: "The delinquent is to be distinguished from
the offender by the fact that it is not so much his act as his life that is relevant in characterizing him.... The
legal punishment bears upon an act; the punitive technique on a life" (D&P 251-52). Again we see the
mutation of dominant forms of power following out the general formula for power's intensification:
abstract, shift targets to ever-more virtual or mobile ones, expand the domain of power's reach, invent
"lighter" and more intense concepts and procedures. The criminal act remains within a fairly well-defined
disciplinary realm, with a more-or-less binary system of "guilt": in the end, you are or you aren't guilty of a
crime. Biopower, then, further multiplies the concepts and practices of potential guilt by its invention of a
species or life form lurking behind the acts of criminality: the delinquent, the monster, the homosexual, the
pervert. These are subjects who may or may not have done anything illegal or transgressive, but their lives
are nonetheless outside the slippery slope of biopolitical normativity. As Foucault insists, biopolitical
"delinquency must be specified in terms not so much of the law as of the norm" (253). In short, the
disciplinary criminal is known through her transgressive deeds, while biopower's delinquent is known
through his abnormal personality. On Foucault's account, this nineteenth-century emergence of subject-
centered biopower becomes the gateway to the present, to the fetishization of subjectivities that
characterizes today's even more highly intensified biopolitical society: “At this point one enters the
‘ciminological' labyrinth from which we have certainly not yet emerged" (D&P 252).As a concrete
example of such biopolitical production of subjectivities, and its mutation from the strictly speaking
disciplinary investment in subject production, one could note here that the "homosexual" is the
paradigmatic "delinquent" in Foucault, the subject whose conduct is most obviously saturated and
explained by his or her "life": "The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case
history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology" (HS 1:43). In
the intense morphing from discipline to biopower (from power targeting the act to targeting the life), the
emergence of modern homosexuality is paradigmatic insofar as homosexuality in the nineteenth century
becomes understood "less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature" (1:43). In short, homosexuality "was
transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul"
(1:43; my emphasis), from an occasional and discontinuous set of actions into the continuous manifestation
of a personality defect.
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FYI- What is biopower

Biopower controls the changes in life directly by making them fit outside of the norm.
Nealon 2008
In his 1975-76 lectures at the College de France (delivered during the brief interval between the publication
of Deaf and The History of Sexuality, volume I), Foucault explains that "biopower" constitutes, “a new
technology of power, but this time it is not disciplinary. This technology of power does not exclude the
former, does not exclude disciplinary technology, but it does dovetail into it, integrate it, modify it to some
extent, and above all, use it by sort of infiltrating it, embedding itself in existing disciplinary techniques.
This new technique does not simply do away with the disciplinary technique, because it exists on another
level, on a different scale, and because it has a different bearing area, and makes use of very different
instruments. Unlike discipline, which is addressed to bodies, the new nondisciplinary power is applied not
to man-as-body but to the living man, to man-as-living-being.” Unlike Foucaultian "discipline," whose
work on bodies is primarily realized through institutional training and the exercise, "biopower" is an even
more intense and saturated form of power that works throughout entire populations and takes on its target,
"life," quite directly (as opposed to discipline's necessarily mediated, institutional character). To use a
Foucaultian economic figure, the sovereign power of the king was a very inefficient "wholesale" mode of
power's distribution to the socius (early modern spectacles of execution and torture were expensive and not
particularly effective in keeping royal order). Discipline, by contrast, discovered and deployed a much
more economical and & fective "retail" power over individual bodies at particular, transversally linked sites
of training (the family, the school, the clinic, the factory, the army). Biopower, then, goes one step beyond
discipline in the intensification of power, working on individuals "really and directly" ('Rellement et
directement"; not words that Foucault throws around lightly)." For Foucault, biopower is the ascendant type
of power at work in modern societies—a very efficient mode of power that infuses each individual at a
nearly ubiquitous number of actual and virtual sites, rather than working primarily on specific bodies at
particular sites of training (hospital, school, army, factory, store). It's a form of power "centered not upon
the body," Foucault writes, "but upon life." Another way of putting this might be that biopower forges an
enabling link between the seemingly "universal" categories of population or demography and the
"individual" idiosyncrasies of everyday life. And the proper name for that link is the norm.
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Panopticism is the most intense form of discipline and it creates biopower by infiltrating all
forms of discipline Nealon 2008
In the parlance of D&P, "panopticism" names the most intense form of disciplinary power—its lightest,
most saturated, effective, and mobile mode. The panopticon is the "dream building" of disciplinary power,
not because it somehow becomes a metaphor, representation, or referent for where we all live, but because
it is the place of discipline's greatest intensity or saturation: panopticism names "an unceasing discipline”
(236), the mode of power through or in relation to which all other techniques of power must orient
themselves. The disciplinary mode can be said to be "dominant" at this historical Juncture "not because the
disciplinary modality of power has replaced all the others; but because it has infiltrated all the others" (216)
—undermining some practices of sovereign and social power, strengthening and mutating others by forging
links that weren't previously available. Just as, historically speaking discipline is a modality of power born
from the intensification of social and sovereign practices, panopticism is the most intense form of
disciplinary practice. As the most saturated relay point for disciplinary power ( the mode of panopticism
"carries to their greatest intensity all the procedures to be found in the other disciplinary mechanisms" (236;
my emphasis). Of course, the highly mobile and effective relays of practice that comprise the panopticon
do not simply arrive out of the historical blue; rather, the panoptic mode was brought about through the
slow intensification of hundreds of years of disparate practices whose emergences are painstakingly charted
out in D&P. As Foucault reminds us in the closing pages of D&P, "The prison does not at all represent the
unleashing of a different kind of power, but simply an additional degree in the intensity of a mechanism
that has continued to operate since the earliest forms legal punishment" (302; my emphasis). In D&P, then,
Foucault names nineteenth-century panopticism as the most intense form of discipline, its most highly
effective, saturated, and differentiated form—disciplinary power taken to the limit of what it can do. At the
panoptic limit of disciplinary power, however, Foucault's continued mapping of power's intensification—in
the closing pages of D&P, into The History of Sexuality and beyond—suggests that the dominant mode of
power in the mid- to late nineteenth century likewise underwent a subtle transformation: discipline's
mutation into what Foucault calls "biopower." Which brings us back to our chart, now in need of some
updating.
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Dependence-> Exclusion
Govermental discourse of the “dependence” has reframed the debate about social services to
one of damaged or flawed. This creates a no work no voice exclusion.
SURVEILLANCE OF SINGLE MOTHERS IN ONTARIO”)
As mentioned earlier there has been a notable shift in what constitutes citizenship in Canada in the last two
decades, which created a ‘new subject’ under neoliberal governance. The development of the ‘market citizen’
has, as Fudge and Cossman argue, been constructed out of the discourse of ‘self reliance’ versus dependence
(2002:16). Neoliberal discourses were then utilized by politicians and policy makers to construct
‘dependency’ as a negative personal attribute and therefore undesirable. Therefore applying for
social assistance denotes ‘dependency’ and an inability to self regulate, which increases the stigma
surrounding welfare recipients (Swanson 2001, Fudge and Cossman 2002, Caragata 2003, Pleace 2007).
Brodie (2002) explains the market citizen, unlike the ‘dependent’ welfare recipient, as one “‘who recognizes the
limits and liabilities of state provisions and embraces her obligation to...become more self-reliant’” (Brodie
cited in Fudge and Cossman 2002:16). Moreover, individuals are made responsible for their ‘choices’ and
if they are ‘bad’ choices, the state sees fit to classify them as ‘risky’ populations, such as welfare
mothers, youth, drug addicts and criminals (Garland in Balfour and Comack 2006:45, Fitzgerald 2004:59).
This (re)framing of the market citizen by social service agencies and other public officials has
constituted welfare mothers as poor (or damaged/flawed) market citizens, because they are
‘dependent’ on state supports and cannot participate in the market economy. As well, collecting
welfare is perceived as a deterrent to becoming self-sufficient and a proper market citizen (Mosher
and Hermer 2005:20). In addition to reconstituting welfare mothers (and other marginalized groups) as
‘dependent’ subjects, there is also the assumption inherent in neoliberal ideology/reform that
individuals can only be ‘responsible’ and proper ‘market citizens’ if they secure paid work and are
active in the economy as consumers (Pleace 2007: 947, Snider 2006). In order to correct welfare mothers’
inability to be ‘full’ citizens (i.e. consumers), Workfare polices were introduced, ostensibly to instil
independence and self-sufficiency. According to Caragata, the consequences of not fulfilling full market
citizen status can result in an exclusion from the ‘public’ sphere, as “labour force ties in determining
access to/ and or engagement with the public” (Caragata 2003:574). In other words, Caragata asserts that
one’s relationship to paid labour has become the key to accessing the public realm in terms of engaging
with politics and having a ‘say’ or getting one’s voice ‘heard’.
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AT: AGAMBEN
Agamben’s fundamental thesis is that we have entered into a zone of indistinction
Jean-Philippe Deranty 2004
(educated in France (Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris IV-Sorbonne). He teaches French and German Philosophy at Macquarie University,
Borderlands EJournal, Volume 3 Number 1, 2004,
http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm)
8. Agamben’s conception of the task of thinking is deeply Heideggerian. It can be summarized in this way:
the thinker isolates ontological essences in which the common ground of apparently different, or even
opposite, empirical and historical phenomena is revealed. The constantly reoccurring conceptual gesture in
Agamben’s writings is that of indistinction. Political power is the instigation of an indistinction between the
state of exception and the normal legal order, between fact and law, nature and norm, animality and
humanity, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion. It must be noted that, paradoxically, this recurrent
movement of indistinction that effaces conceptual and empirical differences runs counter to the
Foucauldian distinctions and discontinuities.
9. Consistent with this foundationalist essentialism, Agamben does not restrict indistinction to the
conceptual or structural level, but extends it to empirical, historical phenomena. The archaic State is not
substantially different from the modern one. There is no essential difference between democracy before
Auschwitz, the totalitarian States themselves, and democracy after Auschwitz between liberal democracies
and dictatorships (Agamben 1998:10). In Auschwitz, there is no difference between victim and executioner
(Agamben 1999a: 21). No distinction between the sacred priest, the criminal banned from the archaic
community and the modern citizen; no distinction between the bodies in Auschwitz and the bodies of
victims of car accidents in modern Europe (1998: 114); no distinction between the Muselmann in the
extermination camp and the immigrant locked up by police in a hotel at Charles de Gaulle Airport (1998:
174), or between the Muselmann and the overcomatose person (1999a: 156); no distinction between the
Nazi extermination camps and the camps established in the former Yugoslavia.
Agamben’s zone of indistinction effaces difference

10. On a general, philosophical level, the essentialist method that leads to general indistinguishability would be
questioned by other traditions of thought. The strongest critique would probably come from the Hegelian tradition,
for which the essence is to be found nowhere but in its modes of appearance, identity in differences. The
conceptual imperative that ensues is the task of thinking precisely what appears as different, and not look for a
transcendent "thing-in-itself" in which all differences are swallowed. If indeed there are historiographical
differences between democracy and fascism (1998: 10), then perhaps it should bear more weight in the theory, and
not be blurred into indistinction. From a Hegelian perspective, Agamben’s conceptuality looks very much like a
Schellingian night where all cows are black.
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(also at: Agamben K of human rights)
Agamben’s kritik conflates democracy and totalitarianism—this dooms any progressive and
emancipatory politics and sweeps the rug out from under groups struggling for social change
11. In the case of empirical examples, the erasure of difference between phenomena seems particularly counter-
intuitive in the case of dissimilar modes of internment. From a practical point of view, it seems counter-productive
to claim that there is no substantial difference between archaic communities and modern communities provided
with the language of rights, between the lawlessness of war times and democratic discourse. There must be a way
of problematising the ideological mantra of Western freedom, of modernity’s moral superiority, that does not
simply equate it with Nazi propaganda (Ogilvie 2001). Habermas and Honneth probably have a point when they
highlight the advances made by modernity in the entrenchment of rights. If the ethical task is that of testimony,
then our testimony should go also to all the individual lives that were freed from alienation by the establishment of
legal barriers against arbitrariness and exclusion. We should heed Honneth’s reminder that struggles for social and
political emancipation have often privileged the language of rights over any other discourse (Fraser, Honneth
2003). To reject the language of human rights altogether could be a costly gesture in understanding past political
struggles in their relevance for future ones, and a serious strategic, political loss for accompanying present
struggles. We want to criticise the ideology of human rights, but not at the cost of renouncing the resources that
rights provide. Otherwise, critical theory would be in the odd position of casting aspersions upon the very people it
purports to speak for, and of depriving itself of a major weapon in the struggle against oppression.
Even if the state is founded on violence, this does not mean that it is violent always
Jean-Philippe Deranty 2004 (educated in France (Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris IV-Sorbonne). He teaches French and German
Philosophy at Macquarie University, Borderlands EJournal, Volume 3 Number 1, 2004,
28. All this explains why Agamben chooses to focus on the decisionistic tradition (Hobbes, Heidegger, Schmitt).
With it, he wants to isolate the pure essences of all juridical orders and thus highlight the essential violence
structuring traditional politics. Since the law essentially appears as a production and capture of bare life, the
political order that enunciates and maintains the law is essentially violent, always threatening the bare life it has
produced with total annihilation. Auschwitz is the real outcome of all normative orders.
29. The problem with this strategic use of the decisionistic tradition is that it does not do justice to the complex
relationship that these authors establish between violence and normativity, that is, in the end the very normative
nature of their theories. In brief, they are not saying that all law is violent, in essence or in its core, rather that law
is dependent upon a form of violence for its foundation. Violence can found the law, without the law itself being
violent. In Hobbes, the social contract, despite the absolute nature of the sovereign it creates, also enables
individual rights to flourish on the basis of the inalienable right to life (see Barret-Kriegel 2003: 86).
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State is key to rights—without governments, rights and human dignity are merely empty
abstractions
(educated in France (Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris IV-Sorbonne). He teaches French and German Philosophy at Macquarie University, Borderlands EJournal, Volume 3
Number 1, 2004,
13. I want to consider this rejection of the principle of human rights from the angle of the emergence of
biopolitics at the time of the declarations of human rights. Agamben accepts the well-established distinction
between ancient natural law, natural law under absolutism, and modern natural law (Strauss 1953). His
narrative, however, runs counter to the usual one:
It is almost as if, starting from a certain point, every decisive political event were double-sided: the spaces,
the liberties, and the rights won by individuals in their conflicts with central powers always simultaneously
prepared a tacit but increasing inscription of individuals’ lives with the state order, thus offering a new and
more dreadful foundation for the very sovereign power from which they wanted to liberate themselves
(Agamben 1998: 121).
14. This is a kind of dialectic of Enlightenment: the more individuals liberate themselves legally from the
shackles of authority, the more they subject themselves to power biopolitically. This dialectic enables
Agamben to postulate a continuous line running from the first formulation of the Habeas Corpus, through
the Bill of Rights, to the 1933 Nuremberg eugenic laws: along this line we find the body of the individual
directly exposed to the state of exception. In the different Declarations of Human Rights that signal the
historical birth of modernity, the subject becomes citizen that is bearer of sovereignty, solely on account of
his birth, his natio, or nationality. Behind the citizen, man as bare life is hidden. This bare life exposed to
sovereign power is precisely the pure substance that the Nazi regime attempted to produce, which justifies
the perception of continuity between modern democracy and the totalitarian State.
15. This reading of the French Revolution and of the Declarations of Human Rights used as preambles to
the different constitutions of the République is problematic. First of all, in the American Revolution, which
in many senses was the model for the French, it would be difficult to find the figure of homo sacer. The
American declaration of independence, influenced by Locke’s theory of natural law, places the origin of the
rights of men in divine laws. Political power does not apply to individuals considered from the point of
view of their birth, their natio or nationality, but to individuals fully endowed with natural rights, as
creatures of God (Kervégan 1995: 660).
16. Agamben is greatly inspired by Hannah Arendt. She is the one that explicitly makes the "internment
camp" a central figure of modern times (Arendt 1966: 276). In her, he finds a strong counter-objection to
the remark above. In both the "American formula" that relies on the authority of God, and the "French
formula" that relies on philosophical justifications of natural law, the fiction of a universal essence of man
is denounced by the factual helplessness of all the refugees and stateless people created by the turmoils of
the 20th century.
17. Agamben quotes Arendt’s critical conclusion: ‘the conception of human rights, based upon the assumed
existence of a human being as such, broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe
in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific
relationships – except that they were still human’ (Arendt 1966: 299; Agamben 1998: 126). But he fails to
quote the very next line, which makes all the difference: "The world found nothing sacred in the abstract
nakedness of the human being" (Arendt 1966: 299).
18. What Arendt means is that only when they are realised in a political "commonwealth" do human rights
have any meaning. They are an abstraction otherwise. More important than the right to freedom or the right
to justice is "the right to have rights", that is, to be the member of a political community. Arendt therefore
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asserts the opposite of what Agamben wants to say: she believes that the political solution lies in what he
considers to be a fiction, namely the citizen. Her point is that when man and citizen come apart, we realise
that man never really existed as a subject of rights. This is the exact opposite of Agamben for whom the
citizen is just a travesty.
19. Despite this opposition, Agamben borrows Arendt’s critical interpretation of the French revolution and
modernity in general, even though this interpretation itself is not beyond doubt. The French declaration
makes it clear that human rights lose all significance if they are not reinscribed within a political
community that transforms them into constitutional principles, and the American constitution also
defines a clear link between individual freedom and a political order whose goal is freedom’s protection.
Yet, Agamben reads the first article of the Declaration of 1789, "all men are born and remain free and equal
in rights" as proof that modern sovereign power applies to bare life, here in the form of birth (Agamben
1995: 128). But this seems disingenuous. Birth here refers not to nationality, but simply to the fundamental
fact of the equality of all human beings in right. The term effectuates the radical break with ancient and
absolutist natural law, a break that is synonymous with legal modernity. In ancient natural law, rights were
associated with the social position or the notion of a perfect cosmic order underpinned by God.
20. This emphasis on the rupture that the declarations consummate leads to the question of historical
continuity. The Habeas Corpus is not necessarily a precursor of modern declarations as it uses a non-
egalitarian definition of freedom, reserved for the elite. It lacks the fundamental notion that is the mark of
modernity, the universal equality of all.
21. Agamben does not emphasise equality, but it could be argued that, above all others, even above the
notion of right, it is this category that gives modernity its actual normative content. Modern man is
therefore not first and foremost the national, but a universal being liberated from the particularisms of
traditional society. This amounts only to an empty universalism if no political project realises freedom and
equality, but this is precisely a mistake that the American and French revolutions, for all their ambiguities,
did not commit. Agamben refuses to consider basic legal equality as the true content of declarations of
human rights and instead focuses on the national aspect. In this he is faithful to Schmitt who rejects the
republican conception of popular sovereignty.
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Turn—Agamben disables resistance

Agamben’s account of biopower overlooks the insights of Foucault—power enables
resistance—this is a reason that we should struggle for rights based on our inclusion in the
biopolitical order rather than rejecting this order outright
(educated in France (Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris IV-Sorbonne). He teaches French and German Philosophy at Macquarie University, Borderlands
EJournal, Volume 3 Number 1, 2004, http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/vol3no1_2004/deranty_agambnschall.htm)
48. One can acknowledge the descriptive appeal of the biopower hypothesis without renouncing the
antagonistic definition of politics. As Rancière remarks, Foucault’s late hypothesis is more about power
than it is about politics (Rancière 2002). This is quite clear in the 1976 lectures (Society must be defended)
where the term that is mostly used is that of "biopower". As Rancière suggests, when the "biopower"
hypothesis is transformed into a "biopolitical" thesis, the very possibility of politics becomes problematic.
There is a way of articulating modern disciplinary power and the imperative of politics that is not
disjunctive. The power that subjects and excludes socially can also empower politically simply because the
exclusion is already a form of address which unwittingly provides implicit recognition. Power includes by
excluding, but in a way that might be different from a ban. This insight is precisely the one that Foucault
was developing in his last writings, in his definition of freedom as "agonism" (Foucault 1983: 208-228):
"Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free" (221). The hierarchical,
exclusionary essence of social structures demands as a condition of its possibility an equivalent implicit
recognition of all, even in the mode of exclusion. It is on the basis of this recognition that politics can
sometimes arise as the vindication of equality and the challenge to exclusion.
49. This proposal rests on a logic that challenges Agamben’s reduction of the overcoming of the classical
conceptualisation of potentiality and actuality to the single Heideggerian alternative. Instead of collapsing
or dualistically separating potentiality and actuality, one would find in Hegel’s modal logic a way to
articulate their negative, or reflexive, unity, in the notion of contingency. Contingency is precisely the
potential as existing, a potential that exists yet does not exclude the possibility of its opposite (Hegel 1969:
541-554). Hegel can lead the way towards an ontology of contingency that recognises the place of
contingency at the core of necessity, instead of opposing them. The fact that the impossible became real
vindicates Hegel’s claim that the impossible should not be opposed to the actual. Instead, the possible and
the impossible are only reflected images of each other and, as actual, are both simply the contingent.
Auschwitz should not be called absolute necessity (Agamben 1999a: 148), but absolute contingency. The
absolute historical necessity of Auschwitz is not "the radical negation" of contingency, which, if true,
would indeed necessitate a flight out of history to conjure up its threat. Its absolute necessity in fact
harbours an indelible core of contingency, the locus where political intervention could have changed things,
where politics can happen. Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of modernity and his theory about the place and
relevance of the Holocaust in modernity have given sociological and contemporary relevance to this
alternative historical-political logic of contingency (Bauman 1989).
50. In the social and historical fields, politics is only the name of the contingency that strikes at the heart of
systemic necessity. An ontology of contingency provides the model with which to think together both the
possibility, and the possibility of the repetition of, catastrophe, as the one heritage of modernity, and the
contingency of catastrophe as logically entailing the possibility of its opposite. Modernity is ambiguous
because it provides the normative resources to combat the apparent necessity of possible systemic
catastrophes. Politics is the name of the struggle drawing on those resources.
51. This ontology enables us also to rethink the relationship of modern subjects to rights. Modern subjects
are able to consider themselves autonomous subjects because legal recognition signals to them that they are
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recognised as full members of the community, endowed with the full capacity to judge. This account of
rights in modernity is precious because it provides an adequate framework to understand real political
struggles, as fights for rights. We can see now how this account needs to be complemented by the notion of
contingency that undermines the apparent necessity of the progress of modernity. Modern subjects know
that their rights are granted only contingently, that the possibility of the impossible is always actual. This is
why rights should not be taken for granted. But this does not imply that they should be rejected as illusion,
on the grounds that they were disclosed as contingent in the horrors of the 20th century. Instead, their
contingency should be the reason for constant political vigilance.52. By questioning the rejection of
modern rights, one is undoubtedly unfaithful to the letter of Benjamin. Yet, if one accepts that one of the
great weaknesses of the Marxist philosophy of revolution was its inability to constructively engage with the
question of rights and the State, then it might be the case that the politics that define themselves as the
articulation of demands born in the struggles against injustice are better able to bear witness to the
"tradition of the oppressed" than their messianic counterparts.
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Agamben reduces politics to questions of ontology—this obliterates the space for progressive
politics AND his argument makes no sense outside of the context of Europe
Seri 2k5 (Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Florida)
http://aspen.conncoll.edu/politicsandculture/page.cfm?key=409
All in all, Agamben's radicalism appears post-political and for moments apolitical. For those of us who
appropriate the political as the possibility of collectively imagining and advancing new worlds, this work
by Agamben may appear problematic. Is the political for Agamben biopolitics only? Are there not any
other possibilities of being political outside the Aristotelian "scale of being"?
Furthermore, for all of those whose subjectivities are rooted somewhere across the Americas, despite our
differences we may share a feeling of strangeness before the absoluteness of the metaphysics questioned by
Agamben. Whether occupying the place of the future, or being dismissed as peoples without history by
Hegel, Western metaphysics never recognized us as full members of the club. Retrieved in The Open,
Kojeve's argument on the animality of the "American way of life" follows the same logic, since it is not
consumerism nor capitalism, but something about "americanness" that gets disqualified. Similarly, it may
be hard for our subjectivities to understand why in his previous work Agamben privileges Auschwitz as the
ontological location of horror over too many others. Certainly, it is not a question of engaging in a
competition to see whose history entails more terror. But there is a point at which Agamben's critique
(incomprehensibly) seems to be just addressed to Europeans.
In fact, strictly read, the reign of metaphysics is European only. The hierarchical arrangement of forms of
life already present in Aristotle and thoroughly disclosed by Agamben expose the complicity of Western
philosophy with annihilations and holocausts. And The Open advances in a necessary opposite direction
towards conceptually dismantling such a perverse mechanism of production of humanity at the expense of
the many. Still, if throughout the Americas we have been giving ourselves historical tasks and engaging in
political action without ever waiting for anyone's metaphysical recognition, how can we tell whether ours is
an attempt to overcome the human or just imposture?
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AT: Agamben K of human rights

Agamben overlooks the progressive potential of human rights—his politics disables
strategies for social emancipation
Volker Heins may 2005(Visiting Professor of Political Science, Concordia University, Montreal, and Senior Fellow at the Institute for Social
Research, Frankfurt, Germany,german law journal no. 5 http://www.germanlawjournal.com/article.php?id=598)
Human rights are also frequently invoked when they cannot be guaranteed within the customary
purviewofasovereign state. But this does not imply that the implementation record of international human
rights is as weak as that of humanitarian law. In Germany, the European Convention on Human Rights and
the decisions of the European Court for Human Rights have the status of federal laws and serve as a
resource for the interpretation of constitutional law.[11]Similarly, the European Charter on fundamental
rights, incorporated in the draft Treaty establishing the Constitution for Europe, is already being referred to
by public interest groups and EU lawyers, although the draft Treaty is still in the process of ratification by
the Member States.In the United States, the Alien Tort Claims Act (ATCA) of 1789 gives foreigners the
right to seek redress in US federal courts for human rights violations that have occurred anywhere in the
world, if they were "committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States."[12]
Although for a long time considered an obscure provision of the United States Code, courts have inferred
from it a right to action on behalf of aliens to enforce non-ratified human rights treaties or even non-
binding resolutions of the United Nations General Assembly. In a case involving a citizen of Paraguay
residing in the United States who had sued a former official of Paraguay for alleged torture of his brother,
the court declared that in favor of the plaintiff that "the torturer has become—like the pirate and slave
trader before him—hostis humani generis, an enemy of all mankind".[13] In a number of similar cases,
federal courts in the United States have decided on civil suits alleging human rights violations abroad.[14]
The U.S. Supreme Court has so far rejected attempts by lobbyists and politicians to abolish the statute
which can be invoked in cases of genocide, extra-judicial killing, torture, war crimes, slavery and extreme
arbitrary detention.[15] These examples illustrate that there is more at stake in human rights than well-
meaning declarations of intent. Even in the case of distant civil wars or other disasters, it would be wrong
to see public kind-heartedness as the only source of recognition for human rights. Even where the
observance of human rights norms cannot be directly enforced, they may still convey behavior-changing
messages that can lead in different ways to an effective transformation of the respective situation. National
or regional anti-discrimination laws are a good example of norms that have an impact not only through
what they do, but through what they signal. Thus, European anti-discrimination policy explicitly refers to
standards of socially acceptable or unacceptable behavior to be strengthened by specific legislative
measures.[16] Similarly, international human rights norms have an expressive quality that affects the social
conduct of groups and organizations independent of measures of judicial enforcement.[17] It is this
expressive component that provides concrete behavioral incentives and encourages the articulation of forms
of public denunciation or collective anger in appropriate ways. The infringement of widely held norms
often causes anger and protest, and sometimes this anger and protest triggers a cycle of positive legal
consolidation of these norms. One of the best researched examples of this kind of "proto-juridical
emergence of norms"[18] in international politics are the human rights laid down in the Helsinki Accords,
which were negotiated by the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) in the mid-late
1970s. Despite their apparent toothlessness, these documents achieved two goals: they provided a crucial
symbol to an evolving "Helsinki network" of human rights groups in Eastern Europe, and they helped to
curb the appetite for repression among communist government leaders vis-à-vis these groups.[19]
In a comparable process, even transnational corporations have recently committed themselves to the
observance of human rights standards in their respective fields of operation without being directly coerced
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into such commitments. In order to avoid any potential damage to their reputations, they have also allowed
third parties to monitor their behavior.In the near future, norms relating to basic human rights as well as to
consumer and environmental protection are likely to be used as benchmarks for procurement requirements
for the U.N. and many other agencies. Various reporting mechanisms are being discussed with the goal of
putting pressure on corporate accomplices in human rights abuses.[20] The anxiety to avoid reputational
losses and the "naming and shaming" by public interest groups has also affected the credit-granting
procedures of the World Bank as well as some industrial sitting decisions of global firms.[21] The signaling
effect of human rights has gone so far in recent years as to mobilize citizens in favor of military
intervention on behalf of distant populations threatened by or suffering under ethnic hatred and genocide.
[22] These cases are remarkable because they illustrate a significant transformation of the semantics of
human rights: while historically human rights functioned exclusively as a defense mechanism against the
state, today they are increasingly being invoked to make claims for protection against third parties—claims
which are addressed either to one's own state or to foreign states constituting the "international
community". In contrast to the times of Hannah Arendt, human rights have thus literally become "a fighting
creed, a call to arms."[23] All of this escapes Agamben who assumes in a positivistic manner that human
rights norms are essentially empty and possess little or no validity if they are not backed by national laws.
At the same time, he misjudges the fundamental differences between humanitarian and human rights
organizations as well as the more recent convergences between both forms of moral engagement. The
humanitarian impulse did not initially arise from the idea of human rights, but from the Christian ideal of
love that implies the self-abnegation of the high-ranking person for the lowly one, the healthy for the sick,
the passerby for the roadside victim—a gesture that is not motivated by any rights of the lowly, the sick or
the victims.[24]
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Agamben ignores the political nature of Nongovernmental humanitarian interventions

Volker Heins may 2005(Visiting Professor of Political Science, Concordia University, Montreal, and Senior Fellow at the Institute for
Social Research, Frankfurt, Germany,german law journal no. 5 http://www.germanlawjournal.com/article.php?id=598)
Empirical evidence shows that religious aid organizations are still very much aware of their uniqueness in
relation to human rights groups and sometimes actively distance themselves from the latter. Human rights
groups are seen as too "political," which in the older humanitarian discourse means vain and ineffective.
[25] Since the late 1960s, however, some aid organizations have begun to question both the ideal of
neutrality that formerly characterized the humanitarian movement and the premise of state immunity. In the
early 1990s, humanitarian NGOs in the United States contributed not only to humanitarian intervention in
Somalia, but also to the first President Bush's decision to ignore the sovereignty of Iraq in favor of the
security of the Kurds. In a similar fashion, French groups have repeatedly advocated interventions
particularly in Africa.[26] The concept of humanitarian action has thus undergone an important
transformation. The "new humanitarianism"[27] of a younger generation of aid organizations no longer
defines the measure of the human person solely in terms of survival needs, but rather in terms of subjective
rights which include a right to humanitarian assistance guaranteed by democratic nations ready to coerce
recalcitrant states. In this way, humanitarian and human rights groups become a potential avant-garde for
the expansion of jus cogens norms in international law.[28] Inlightofsuch anaspiration, exemplary network
organizations like Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) have replaced the ideal of aiding victims in silence with
the concept of bearing witness (témoignage), which combines the provision of emergency aid with
documentary work about the war settings in which the aid workers operate. In April 1998, for instance,
doctors of MSF at the Connaught Hospital in Freetown, Sierra Leone, suddenly had to care for numerous
traumatized, severely bleeding men and women whose arms or forearms had been violently dismembered.
The organization documented dozens of such mutilations that we now know were deliberately inflicted by a
local "liberation army." Later on, these data were probably passed on to the ad hoc war crimes tribunal for
Sierra Leone—in defiance of the Red Cross "privilege not to testify."[29] These examples illustrate that
humanitarianism is now deeply enmeshed in political conflicts, although it "still wants to be outside of
power."[30] Ironically, instead of effectively criticizing international humanitarian law or the modern aid
business, Agamben accepts and fosters their own self-illusion of being "separated" from politics.
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Human rights has nothing to do with bare life but with moral agency—Agamben fails to
consider the object of rights
In relation to the modern nation state, the "moral entrepreneurs"[31] who founded the International
Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) had a simple deal in mind, one that has continued to provide the
foundation for the political/humanitarian divide until today. They argued that in the course of events, the
assistance given to the wounded, sick and captured neither affects the outcome of battles nor interferes in
any other way with the pursuit of victory by warring states; taking care of those whose suffering was
senseless even from the point of view of the states themselves. The neutrality of the victims (their
irrelevance for the outcome of power struggles) was to be tightly coupled with the neutrality of those
providing assistance (their nonpartisanship with respect to the combatants).[32] According to this basic
Principle of Distinction, modern humanitarian action is directed towards those who are caught up in violent
conflicts without possessing any strategic value for the respective warring parties. Does this imply that
classic humanitarianism and its legal expressions reduce the lives of noncombatants to the "bare life" of
nameless individuals beyond the protection of any legal order? I would rather argue that humanitarianism is
itself an order-making activity. Its goal is not the preservation of life reduced to a bare natural fact, but
conversely the protection of civilians and thereby the protection of elementary standards of civilization
which prevent the exclusion of individuals from any legal and moral order. The same holds true for human
rights, of course. Agamben fails to appreciate the fact that human rights laws are not about some cadaveric
"bare life", but about the protection of moral agency.[33]
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Agamben ignores that norms do effect the exercise of sovereign violence

His sweeping critique also lacks any sense for essential distinctions. It may be legitimate to see "bare life"
as a juridical fiction nurtured by the modern state, which claims the right to derogate from otherwise
binding norms in times of war and emergency, and to kill individuals, if necessary, outside the law in a
mode of "effective factuality."[34] Agamben asserts that sovereignty understood in this manner continues
to function in the same way since the seventeenth century and regardless of the democratic or dictatorial
structure of the state in question. This claim remains unilluminated by the wealth of evidence that shows
how the humanitarian motive not only shapes the mandate of a host state and nonstate agencies, but also
serves to restrict the operational freedom of military commanders in democracies, who cannot act with
impunity and who do not wage war in a lawless state of nature.[35]
Agamben ignores the politics of treating victims differently—not all victims of state violence
are treated the same, and Agamben’s ethics cannot account for the privileging of some
victims over others
Furthermore, Agamben ignores the crisis of humanitarianism that emerged as a result of the totalitarian
degeneration of modern states in the twentieth century. States cannot always be assumed to follow a
rational self-interest which informs them that there is no point in killing others indiscriminately. The Nazi
episode in European history has shown that sometimes leaders do not spare the weak and the sick, but take
extra care not to let them escape, even if they are handicapped, very old or very young. Classic
humanitarianism depends on the existence of an international society whose members feel bound by a basic
set of rules regarding the use of violence—rules which the ICRC itself helped to institutionalize.
Conversely, classic humanitarianism becomes dysfunctional when states place no value at all on their
international reputation and see harming the lives of defenseless individuals not as useless and cruel, but as
part of their very mission.[36]
The founders of the ICRC defined war as an anthropological constant that produced a continuous stream of
new victims with the predictable regularity and unavoidability of floods or volcanic eruptions. Newer
organizations, by contrast, have framed conditions of massive social suffering as a consequence of largely
avoidable political mistakes. The humanitarian movement becomes political, to paraphrase Carl Schmitt,
[37] in so far as it orients itself to humanitarian states of emergency, the causes of which are located no
longer in nature, but in society and politics. Consequently, the founding generation of the new humanitarian
organizations have freed themselves from the ideals of apolitical philanthropy and chosen as their new
models historical figures like the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who saved thousands of Jews
during the Second World War.[38]
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Agamben is wrong about humanitarianism—it aims not to protect bare life but to
rehabilitate the lived life—conflating the position of oppressor and oppressed ignores the
very real distinctions of violence that constitute suffering and oppression
In a different fashion than Agamben imagines, the primary concern in the field of humanitarian
intervention and human rights politics today is not the protection of bare life, but rather the rehabilitation of
the lived life of citizens who suffer, for instance, from conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder. At
the same time, there is a field of activity emerging beneath the threshold of the bare life. In the United
States, in particular, pathologists working in conjunction with human rights organizations have discovered
the importance of corpses and corporal remains now that it is possible to identify reliable evidence for war
crimes from exhumed bodies.[39]
The expansion of the radius and the reach of humanitarian organizations sensitized to human rights
concerns accelerated the disintegration of the historically tight connection between the strategic irrelevance
of civilian victims and the taboo surrounding armed attacks on humanitarian aid workers. We now see that
aid workers used to protect civilians must themselves be protected against militant groups who do not even
shrink from killing members of the ICRC.[40] In some conflicts today not even the barest attempt is made
to preserve even a semblance of respect for international humanitarian law.
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Turn—inside the camp—Agamben conflates the positions of violence within the camp so
that guards and prisoners are the same form of bare life—this conflation allowed violence to
continue in the situation in Rwanda—conflating positions within the camp actually enables
genocidal violence
Sometimes it only requires a small shift in perspective to see those who bear the suffering of catastrophes
not as endangered and thus worthy of protection, but instead as dangerous and worthy of containment or
rollback. Ironically, aid organizations themselves may inadvertently contribute to such a gestalt switch.
This is precisely what happened when, in the summer of 2004, the German aid organization Cap Anamur
rescued African refugees in the Mediterranean Sea only to use them as anonymous extras in a spectacle that
was perceived by many as an unfortunate attempt to advertise the organization itself.[41] Individuals from
Nigeria, Niger und Ghana, who had hoped to reach the European coast in the still of the night and then
quickly disband found themselves transformed into captives of a media event that, in the end, made the
lives of Africans willing to flee their continent even more dangerous: first, because it signaled to other
Africans that when in distress at sea they could count on being rescued by such selfless friends of
humanity; and second, because a false impression was created in the media that Europe is being flooded by
immigrants from Africa, whereas in reality only a tiny number ever actually undertake such a practically
hopeless voyage. By inciting false hopes where warnings would have been warranted and by creating
anxieties where accurate information was necessary, the aid organization arguably contributed to a net
increase in human suffering. In this light, the claim that humanitarian organizations, "despite themselves,
maintain a secret solidarity with the very powers they ought to fight,"[42] is vague, but not completely off
the mark. Yet the question is whether the separation of narrow humanitarian concerns from politics can be
held responsible for such misdirection. In my view, the problem lies rather in the paradoxes inherent to
humanitarian action—paradoxes that have less to do with the illusions of those who provide assistance than
with the structure of the field in which they operate. In many crises, international aid does not benefit those
in need, but instead the very local authorities who are responsible for the fact that external assistance is
needed in the first place. The following prominent example illustrates this point. In the summer of 1994,
one and a half million Hutus fled Rwanda for Tanzania and eastern Zaire. Among them were thousands
who were responsible for the genocide of the Tutsis committed in April of that same year, but who were
now forced to flee as the political tides had turned. The refugee camp in the area around Goma, Zaire, in
particular, which filled up with over 800,000 individuals in a breathtakingly short amount of time, landed in
the headlines and became the focal point of one of the most comprehensive emergency relief efforts in
recent memory. Motivated not least by international aid that totalled US $1.4 billion for the year 1994
alone, countless organizations undertook the task of saving the lives of the refugees. Aid organizations
quickly realized, however, that the political structures of the Hutu community were reconstituting
themselves and preparations were being made for a renewed assault on the new regime in neighbouring
Rwanda. The dominance of a well-functioning leadership among the camp population led to a sinister
redefinition of international aid organizations, which were to a large extent used as logistical supply units
for genocidal militias and were also accused as such by human rights organizations. "Goma" has since
become a symbol epitomizing the loss of innocence of humanitarianism. It also shows, incidentally, that
Agamben's morbid fascination for "bare life" mystifies the complexity of life and survival inside modern
camp structures.[43] After Goma, many groups have begun to makeaidcontingenton behavioral changes in
target regions, thereby narrowing the gap between the humanitarian and the political.[44] This recent trend,
however, has placed humanitarian organizations in some conflict settings before the tragic choice of either
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abandoning populations in need altogether or providing aid in a manner that will contribute to more
suffering by fuelling civil wars or by legitimizing warlords.[45]
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Turn—humanitarianism
Humanitarianism requires the distinction between political and non-political in order to stop
suffering--Agamben’s conflation of politics makes effective humanitarianism impossible
E. Conclusion
The distinction between politics and humanitarianism and its corollary of neutral, impartial assistance to
victims of disasters and wars are in no way historical constants, but rather subject to considerable change.
Even intellectuals close to the Red Cross movement have identified such a distinction as itself politically
grounded and hence negotiable.[46] Agamben's premise that humanitarian action is directed towards a
single and carefully demarcated field of a "bare life" stripped of attributes is thus highly debatable. In
reality, humanitarianism is not a distinct field at all, but rather a point of view from which intricate political
crises can be assessed and judged. In this sense, humanitarian organizations will periodically engage in
making sure that certain crises that are largely being interpreted as "humanitarian" are also understood and
treated as "political." Western governments, on the other hand, are inclined to judge the human suffering
produced by strategically insignificant regimes in faraway regions from a "humanitarian" point of view in
order to delegate responsibility to private or international aid agencies. While we should refrain from
objectifying the political/humanitarian divide as distinct fields of real world phenomena, we should
nonetheless accept it as a methodological principle of investigation that identifies and makes visible the
human costs of otherwise legal political or military endeavors. Agamben is not interested in such
weighingofcosts and benefits because he assumes from the outset that taking care of the survival needs of
people in distress is simply the reverse side of the modern inclination to ignore precisely those needs and
turn life itself into a tool and object of power politics. By way of conclusion, I will indicate briefly how his
view differs from two other, often no less shattering critiques of modern humanitarianism. Martti
Koskenniemi warned that humanitarian demands and human rights are in danger of degenerating into
"mere talk."[47] The recent crisis in Darfur, Sudan, can be cited as an example for a situation in which the
repeated invocation of human rights standards and jus cogens norms, like those articulated in the Genocide
Convention, might ultimately damage those norms themselves if states are unwilling to act on them.[48]
This criticism implies that human rights should be taken seriously and applied in a reasonable manner.
Both David Kennedy and Oona Hathaway have gone one step further by taking issue even with those who
proved to be serious by joining treaties or engaging in advocacy. In a controversial quantitative study,
Hathaway contended that the ratification of human rights treaties by sets of given countries not only did not
improve human rights conditions on the ground, but actually correlated with increasing violations.[49] In a
similar vein, David Kennedy radicalized Koskenniemi's point by arguing that human rights regimes and
humanitarian law are rather part of the problem than part of solution, because they "justify" and "excuse"
too much.[50] To some extent, this is an effect of the logic of legal reasoning: marking a line between
noncombatants and combatants increases the legitimacy of attacking the latter, granting privileges to lawful
combatants delegitimizes unlawful belligerents and dramatically worsens their status. On the whole,
Kennedy is more concerned about the dangers of leaving human rights to international legal elites and a
professional culture which is blind for the mismatch between lofty ideals and textual articulations on the
one side, and real people and problems on the other side.[51] Whereas these authors reveal the "dark sides"
of overly relying on human rights talk and treaties, the moral fervor of activists or the routines of the legal
profession, Agamben claims that something is wrong with human rights as such, and that recent history has
demonstrated a deep affinity between the protection and the infringement of these rights. Considered in this
light, the effort of the British aid organization Save the Children, for instance, to help children in need both
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in Britain and abroad after World War I —faithful to George Bernard Shaw's saying, "I have no enemies
under seven"—is only the flip side of a trend to declare total war on others regardless of their age and
situation. This assertion clearly goes far beyond the voices of other pessimists.
Agamben's work is understandable only against the backdrop of an entirely familiar mistrust of liberal
democracy and its ability to cultivate nonpartisan moral and legal perspectives. According to Agamben,
democracy does not threaten to turn into totalitarianism, but rather both regimes smoothly cross over into
one another since they ultimately rest on the same foundation of a political interpretation of life itself.[52]
Like Carl Schmitt, Agamben sees the invocation of human rights by democratic governments as well as the
"humanitarian concept of humanity"[53] as deceptive manouvers or, at least, as acts of self-deception on
the part of the liberal bourgeois subject. The difference between Agamben and Schmitt lies in the fact that
Schmitt fought liberal democracy in the name of the authoritarian state, while Agamben sees democracy
and dictatorship as two equally unappealing twins. Very much unlike Schmitt, the Italian philosopher
confronts us with a mode of thinking in vaguely felt resemblances in lieu of distinctly perceived
differences. Ultimately, he offers a version of Schmitt's theory of sovereignty that changes its political
valence and downplays the difference between liberal democracy and totalitarian dictatorship—a difference
about which Adorno once said that it "is a total difference. And I would say," he added, "that it would be
abstract and in a problematic way fanatical if one were to ignore this difference."[54]
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Agamben conflates all biopower with the power of the state—the reality is that not all state
action entails power over life and not all power over life is state power (there is no strict
relation of the power over life to the state)
RABINOW 2003
(Paul,”thoughts on the concept of biopower today” www.lse.ac.uk/collections/sociology/pdf/rabinowandrose-biopowertoday03.pdf
Homo Sacer
Giorgio Agamben, in a series of haunting books, identifies the Holocaust as the ultimate exemplar of
biopower; and biopower as the hidden meaning of all forms of power from the ancient world to the present.
He seeks to use this concept to analyze the profound trauma of European history. We feel much sympathy
with this work: like him, we consider that Holocaust is not an exceptional moment of throwback to a
singular barbarianism, but an enduring possibility intrinsic to the very project of civilization and the law.
For Agamben, all power rests ultimately on the ability of one to take the life of another, a phenomenon that
he analyses through the metaphor of homo sacer ‘ the enigmatic figure in Roman law whose crimes made
his sacrifice impossible but who could be killed with impunity. Like this figure, reduced from bios ‘
crudely, the way of life proper to an individual or group in a polity ‘ to zöe - ‘bare life’ he suggests that the
birth of biopower in modernity marks the point at which the biological life of subjects enters politics and
belongs to the State. Following Carl Schmitt, Agamben believe that it is the right of the Sovereign State to
declare ‘a state of exception’ that guarantees modern rule. The concentration camps, labor camps and death
camps of the Nazi’s are a materialization of this state of exception, and form, for him, the ‘nomos’ of
modernity ‘ a fourth space added to that of state, nation and land, in which inhabitants are stripped of
everything but their bare life, which is placed without recourse in the hands of power ‘This is why the camp
is the very paradigm of political space at the point at which politics becomes biopolitics and homo sacer is
virtually confused with the citizen.’ (Agamben, 1998: 171) Agamben takes seriously Adorno’s challenge ‘
how is it possible to think after Auschwitz’7 But for that very reason, it is to trivialize Auschwitz to apply
Schmitt’s concept of ‘the state of exception’ and Foucault’s analysis of biopower to every instance where
living beings enter the scope of regulation, control and government. The power to command under threat of
death is exercised by States and their surrogates in multiple instances, in micro forms and in geopolitical
relations. But this is not to say that this form of power ‘ commands backed up by the ultimate threat of
death ‘ is the guarantee or underpinning principle of all forms of biopower in contemporary liberal
societies. Unlike Agamben, we do not think that : ‘the jurist’ the doctor, the scientist, the expert, the priest’
depend for their power over life upon an alliance with the State (1998: 122). Nor is it useful to use this
single diagram to analyze every contemporary instance of thanato-politics ‘ from Rwanda to the epidemic
of AIDS deaths across Africa. Surely the essence of critical thought must be its capacity to make
distinctions that can facilitate judgment and action. 8 Holocaust is undoubtedly one configuration that
modern biopower can take. Racisms allows power to sub-divide a population into subspecies known as
races, to fragment it, and to allow a relationship in which the death of the other, of the inferior race, can be
seen as something that will make life in general healthier and purer: as Foucault put it in 1976 ‘racism
justifies the death-function in the economy of biopower by appealing to the principle that the death of
others makes one biologically stronger insofar as ones is a member of a race or a population (2003: 258). It
is true that in this lecture he suggests that it is ‘the emergence of biopower that inscribes [racism] in the
mechanisms of the State ‘ as the basic mechanism of power, as it is exercised in modern States. (2003:
254). But the Nazi regime was, in his view, exceptional ‘ ‘a paroxysmal development’: ‘We have, then, in
Nazi society something that is really quite extraordinary: this is a society which has generalized biopower
in an absolute sense, but which has also generalized the sovereign right to kill’ to kill anyone, meaning not
only other people but also its own people’ a coincidence between a generalized biopower and a dictatorship
that was at once absolute and retransmitted throughout the entire social body’ (2003: 260). ). Biopower in
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the form it took under National Socialism was a complex mix of the politics of life and the politics of death
‘ as Robert Proctor points out, Nazi doctors and health activists waged war on tobacco, sought to curb
exposure to asbestos, worried about the over use of medication and X-rays, stressed the importance of a
diet for of petrochemical dies and preservatives, campaigned for whole-grain bread and foods high in
vitamins and fiber, and many were vegetarians (Proctor, 1999). But within this complex, the path to the
death camps was dependent upon a host of other historical, moral, political and technical conditions.
Holocaust is neither exemplary of thanato-politics, nor the hidden dark truth of biopower.
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