Body politics and democracy

When raising the question of the role that body politics play in theories of democracy, the answers vary—as always in political theory—depending on the theoretical approach. In liberal political theory we see a paradox: while ever since Aristotle metaphors and politics relating to the body have shaped notions of democracy, the state, and political agency, even today it is still rare to find contributions that unpack the political importance of bodies in liberal political theory and the history of ideas. Liberal political theorists view bodies as naturally given entities, and this naturalization has been (and still is) used to legitimize exclusions from the political realm. By deeming bodies pre-political, liberal political theorists consider them unworthy of systematic investigations, and thus situate body politics outside the canon. It is an entirely different case, however, when we turn to critical political theorists, who refute the assumption of natural bodies and instead scrutinize the body as a key site of politics and as effects of power formations and fundamental to political orders. Feminist, queer, and postcolonial theorists and critical disability scholars (Arneil, 2009; Benhabib, 1996; Dhawan, 2014; Nussbaum, 2006; Pateman, 1989; Phelan, 2001; Simplican, 2015) have shown that, despite the political claims of equality and universality, western democracies constitute bodies hierarchically, thereby making the bodies of certain subjects, such as women, racialized Others, sexual minorities, or people with disabilities, grounds for excluding them from political agency. Even though contemporary western democracies claim to have overcome exclusions based on bodily difference, the ideal of a democratic citizen is still imagined to be a white, male, heteronormative individual void of bodily necessities, dependencies, and relationalities. Moreover, post-structural political theorists, such as Giorgio Agamben, Robert Esposito, and Jacques Rancière, focus on biopolitics from many different angles in their engagements with modern western democracies (see also Campbell, 2011; Prozorov & Rentea, 2017).11 In addition to the above-mentioned authors Alain Badiou, Michael Hardt, Antoni Negri, and Jean-Luc Nancy have also made considerable contributions to this debate. For Agamben, what sets liberal democracies apart from ancient Greek notions of democracy, is not the integration of biological life into the sphere of politics per se, but the fact that biopolitics becomes inseparable from sovereignty in modern democracies. The “production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power” (Agamben, 1998, p. 6). Agamben distinguishes zoe as the negative foundation of bios as the essence of modern politics (Agamben, 1998, p. 7). A crucial aim of Agamben's critical engagement with biopolitical sovereignity is to show the ways in which democracy and totalitarianism converge. Roberto Esposito similarly highlights the fundamental importance of biopolitics in liberal democracies. He views biopolitics as underlying all democracies, because democratic citizens are understood as purely rational individuals, which are per definition separated from their bodies. In modern liberal democracies, personhood equals disembodied subjectivity, which is an effect of biopolitics itself (Esposito, 2012). In its current form, democracy is used on and not in favor of bodies. With this insight, Esposito reveals a fundamental paradox of liberal democracies; namely, that the democratic rights that aim to protect the precarious reality of a human embodied life, rest upon a fiction of legal personhood that is based on disembodiment.22 In Esposito's reflections on forms of biopolitics in light of the current crisis of democracy, he argues that even though it is a fundamental element of democracies that “citizens are continually interpellated or objectively involved with regard to questions that pertain to the preservation of, the limits of, or what is to be excluded from their own bodies” (Esposito, 2008, p. 643), we can still observe a crucial shift: “when the living or dying body becomes the symbolic and material epicenter of the dynamics of politics as well as its conflicts, we move into a dimension that lies not simply, as we sometimes hear, after or beyond democracy but resolutely outside it—not only removed from its procedures but from its language and conceptual apparatus” (Esposito, 2008, p. 643). In our current era, we see that the “bodily dimension becomes the real interlocutor of government, at once subject and object,” which entail a crucial consequence: “what is at stake isn't only the principle of equality but also an entire series of distinctions or oppositions on which the conception of modern politics is based and from which democracy is generated: the distinctions between public and private, artificial and natural, and law [diritto] and theology. This is because at the moment when the body substitutes or ‘restores’ [riempie] the abstract subjectivity of the juridical person it becomes difficult if not impossible to distinguish the concerns of the public sphere from the private as well as what belongs to the natural order and what can be subjected to the intervention of technology” (Esposito, 2008, p. 644). From a different angle, Jacques Rancière's work also applies the premise that biopolitics and democracy are inseparable. Rancière's theory is grounded in the duality of police and politics, whereas the “essence of the police lies neither in repression nor even in control over the living” but “in a certain way of dividing up the sensible” (Rancière, 2010, p. 36). The “‘distribution of the sensible’ ... defines the forms of partaking by first defining the modes of perception in which they are inscribed” (Rancière, 2010, p. 36). Thus, the order of the police always entails a biopolitical dimension. It is an “order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible, and sayable” (Rancière, 1999, p. 29). Based on this premise, Rancière identifies the act of disrupting the existing bodily order as democratic politics. Democracy then is “the system of forms of subjectification through which any order of distribution of bodies into functions is undermined, thrown back on its contingency" (Rancière, 1999, p. 101). Interestingly, Agamben's later work also addresses the question of how biopolitics might be rendered democratic. Crucial to Agamben's conception of democratic politics is both overcoming the use and abuse of bodies by the sovereign biopolitics and the search for forms of empowerment in which bodies are used in the “form-of-life” they choose, and where bare life is not separable from the political subject (Agamben, 2016).33 The attempt to reconceptualize biopolitics in an emancipatory manner is also found in Michael Hardt's work (2010). He distinguishes between governmental biopower as “object of rule” (2010, p. 159) and biopolitics as the “realm, in which we have the freedom to make another life for ourselves, and through that life transform the world” (2010, p. 159). It is certainly no exaggeration to state that all these contributions on the importance of biopolitics within democracies would not have been possible without Michel Foucault's seminal work on biopolitics.44 Agamben (1998) explicitly relates his theory to Foucault's work when aiming to “correct . . ., or at least, complete” Foucault's work on biopolitics by re-articulating what Foucault has disarticulated from each another: sovereignty and modern biopolitics (see also Esposito, 2008, p. 29; Rancière, 2004, p. 300). Foucault's work has become a crucial source of inspiration for theorizing the relation between biopolitics and democracies, despite the fact that he himself has never systematically analyzed modern western democracies. However, it would be short-sighted to interpret Foucault's lack of systematic engagement with democracy as a mere omission. Rather it could be considered an absent presence that is characteristic of Foucault's thinking in general. Foucault's approaches to democracy do, however, reveal his typical maneuver of advancing sideways “like the crawfish” (Foucault, 2008, p. 78), allowing him to reflect on democracy from an uncommon and truly instructive angle. In this article I think further about traces found in some of Foucault's thoughts on the relationship between democracy and biopolitics and use them to deepen Foucault's ideas by considering the role of biopolitics in the genealogy of democracy. For this purpose, I utilize some tools from Foucault's theoretical tool kit to show how biopolitics and body politics are inscribed within the genealogy of Germany's democracy by looking into medical discourses in Germany between 1848 and 1933. Before proceeding with my discourse analyses, I bring together some of the oblique clues that Foucault offers on democracy and biopolitics. The general juridical form that guaranteed a system of rights that were egalitarian in principle was supported by these tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all those systems of micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical that we call the disciplines. (Foucault, 1978b, p. 222) [A]lthough, in a formal way, the representative regime makes it possible, directly or indirectly, with or without relays, for the will of all to form the fundamental authority of sovereignty, the disciplines provide at the base, a guarantee of the submission of forces and bodies. The real corporal disciplines constituted the foundation of the formal, juridical liberties ... . The ‘Enlightenment' which discovered the liberties also invented the disciplines. (Foucault, 1978b, p. 222) allowed the democratization of sovereignty, and the establishment of a public right articulated with collective sovereignty, at the very time when, to the extent that, and because the democratization of sovereignty was heavily ballasted by the mechanisms of disciplinary coercion. (Foucault, 2003, p. 37) dissolve the element of domination in power and to replace that domination, which has to be reduced or masked, with two things: the legitimate rights of sovereignty on the one hand, and the legal obligation to obey on the other. (Foucault, 2003, p. 26) demographic estimates, the calculation of the pyramid of ages, different life expectations and levels of mortality, studies of the reciprocal relations of growth of wealth and growth of population, various measures of incitement to marriage and procreation, the development of forms of education and professional training... . The biological traits of a population become relevant factors for economic management, and it becomes necessary to organize around them an apparatus which will ensure not only their subjection but the constant increase of their utility. (Foucault, 1984, p. 279)55 Foucault's writings can be read as a continuous attempt to broaden the Marxist understanding of power and political economy, as Foucault indicates in his references to Marx, but also in his implicit critique of Louis Althusser's account of power in capitalist societies: “Indeed I wonder whether, before one poses the question of ideology, it wouldn't be more materialist to study first the question of the body and the effects of power on it” (Foucault, 1980, p. 58). In his lectures on governmentality at the Collège de France in 1978, Foucault focused on the emergence of liberal governmentality, which he deemed to be both a condition and an effect of biopolitics. With the emergence of liberal governmentality, a new mode of acting out power emerged that Foucault termed governing. Governing can be described as the “conduct of the conduct” (Foucault, 1982, p. 220); it aims “to shape, guide or affect the conduct of some person or persons” (Gordon, 1991, p. 2). Foucault noted that liberal governmentality addressed subjects as “free” and “responsible” individuals and guided them to partake in a specific form of self-governing (Foucault, 2007, pp. 87). Foucault viewed the specificity of enacting power as governing, in that it aimed at guiding individuals to adopt certain technologies of the self. Liberal governmentality enabled the biopolitical project to unfold fully: it permitted the government of bodies and lives also through technologies of self-governing. It allowed to optimize the lives and bodies of the individual and the population through governmental technologies that invited people to conduct themselves according to hegemonic regimes of knowledge without consciously knowing they were doing so. Through the prism of governmental biopolitics, Foucault's critical engagement of power in modern democracies, on which he had already elaborated upon in Discipline and Punish (1978b) can be taken further. Foucault helps us see that the rise of biopolitical governmentality necessitated a certain freedom that the democratization of sovereignty provided. This is a mode of power that aims at incorporating subjects into power through the use of their bodily, mental, and cognitive self-activities, which requires subjects to consider themselves to be free, self-contained, and autonomous, which Foucault deconstructs and reveals to be the effect of liberal governmentality (Foucault, 1982).66 In his later work, Foucault turns to another aspect of the relation between biopolitics and democracy by interrogating subversive—if not democratizing—elements of Greek parrhesia (Foucault, 2010). However, in this article I do not consider Foucault's reflections on the possibility of an “affirmative biopolitics” (Prozorov, 2017). But what were the historical conditions that allowed this entanglement of democracy and biopolitics to emerge? In line with Foucault, I endeavor to answer this question by going beyond an institutionalist perspective and turn to a key discipline for understanding the modern power-knowledge nexus: medicine. I am clearly also indebted to Foucault, whose work prompted me to explore this field more in depth. Throughout his work, and particularly in The Birth of the Clinic (1975), Foucault repeatedly pointed out that medicine had provided the knowledge for governing subjects in modern western societies. In The Birth of the Clinic Foucault describes how the medical profession gained social prestige and importance by employing a certain kind of scientific knowledge to define reality. By creating categories of diseases, medicine obtained the power to distinguish the “normal” from the “deviant” (Foucault, 2000; see also Jones & Porter, 1994; Osborne, 1997; Turner, 1995). He argued that the medicalization of society in the 19th century extended biopolitics and allowed it to enter into the everyday lives of individuals and the population (Foucault, 1984). Here it is crucial to bear in mind that medicine did not gain power only through coercion or force, but it increased its power by producing the population's desire to incorporate medical knowledge into their everyday practices, bodily experiences, and routines, and to live according to medical ideas of normality (Foucault, 1980). I apply these Foucauldian insights in the following discourse analysis of historical German medical discourses from 1848–1933. I aim to show that medical biopolitics were crucial to the genealogy of democracy. My argument is based on an analysis of monographs and handbooks written by important German medical doctors and scientists,77 Emil Du Bois-Reymond, Alfons Fischer, Adolf Gottstein, Alfred Grotjahn, Salomon Neumann, Julius Moses, Max Pettenkofer, Carl Heinrich Reclam, Alexander Spiess, Georg Varrentrapp, Rudolf Virchow, Ignaz Zadek. along with writings from influential German journals88 Ärztliches Vereinsblatt für Deutschland; Archiv für pathologische Anatomie und Physiologie; Blätter für Volksgesundheitspflege. Gemeinverständliche Zeitschrift; Deutsche medizinische Wochenschrift; Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für öffentliche Gesundheitspflege; Der Kassenarzt; Der sozialistische Arzt; Medicinische Reform. Organ für die gesammten wirtschaftlichen und socialen Interessen der Aerzte Deutschlands; Die medicinische Reform; Archiv für Soziale Medizin und Hygiene; Tageblätter und Berichte der Versammlungen Deutscher Naturforscher und Aerzte. of physiology, public health, hygiene, social hygiene, and policies of the medical professionals between 1848 and 1933.99 All translations from the historical German sources are by the author. In the following, I show how medicine, biopolitics, and body politics are intertwined with democracy by focusing on three specific themes. So the visible diversity of structures no longer emerges from the background of a table of variables, but from the background of a few great functional units capable of being realized and of accomplishing their aims in various ways. (Foucault, 1966, p. 288) This new understanding of life and bodies coincided with new methods of producing medical knowledge. Natural philosophy had been based on speculation and had not engaged in empirical and experimental observations. By contrast, for medicine just as for natural science, valid knowledge could be based only on what could be seen and proven through experiments. In medicine as a natural science, the experiment was considered as the key to ensuring objectivity and truth. Its basic epistemological assumption was that the experiment would enable scientists to distance themselves from any and all environmental biases, so that nothing, no pre-assumption, no belief, no worldview would stand in the way of what could be learned from the experiment. Consequently, medicine as a natural science claimed to have discovered the epistemological instruments that could reveal the inherent truth about the body. The new scientific medicine thus adhered to the ideal of what Loraine Daston and Peter Galison (2007) call mechanical objectivity and is what Foucault described as “modern manner of knowing empiricities” (Foucault, 1966, p. 272). Virchow an understanding of medicine based on an order that bodies and lives as upon a (Foucault, 1966, p. the truth of which could be only with the of natural realized that their new views on life and the body had to be considered valid beyond medicine. was to become the of modern & 1998, p. and it was Virchow who and systematically extended this claim to democracy no medical at this Virchow that was a between scientific medicine and politics. the one hand, he democracy as a form of government by of an the hand, by of he argued for what he to in his own a definition of the essence of Virchow also the of the of medicine and democracy into in his He in the in a in in then a representative in the in was of the in and a of the German from to For Virchow, a democracy could be only on This that in a democracy, politics was more medicine on a p. He based this on the assumption that this new scientific medicine was democratic. as a natural science had any belief, the and the p. so it enabled a kind of without p. 7). For Virchow, the and without any or was an democratic and as it guaranteed freedom and any authority from Consequently, the of the 1848 and the of medicine into a natural science, Virchow that this was no historical but that the two were to one For Virchow political in a democracy was a scientific as it was a based on the and of particular and and He that democratic politics also be with according to mechanical p. For Virchow, mechanical objectivity guide both medicine and politics in a democracy. In politics in a democratic society was the as a politics of truth. would be based upon truth as as all rational and were p. 36). Consequently, could only ever be one form of and right politics. This also Virchow to that the of and to be the essence of democracy The to a in reflections on democracy to a he as politics was not considered scientific politics, democratic politics politics. In his conception of democracy, where politics was more medicine on a he made politics from by politics into a natural Virchow the of medicine and democracy particularly in his work die in on the in Based on a study in 1848 he argued that the of in was the of the population's living conditions p. Virchow the population's and to to was the of and to political about the The population was and and did not consider itself for the and of their and in was and p. He argued for scientific education that would the population by it to become to see their as no and to for their own pp. scientific conception of democracy was not the only between medicine and democracy at the time of the 1848 A medical also emerged at that which medical doctors together to the first professional and which they to their political In and written to the medical and imagined new ways of the medical profession and of making the state more importance to public The the of the state and for more and This medical to an important of medical doctors and as they to view themselves as a professional and the democratization of the medical which would enable them to in policies and forms of by the medical The of the 1848 an to both the medical and In medical doctors the reality that the state would not make any fundamental to the system or to and that the state considered it that its “citizens and the they and in a p. In the of the all medical around 1848 had to I that the of the and the medical did not to the of medical in democratization they in a in the political of medical they had their and their directly with the state the 1848 after this they used a different From the doctors directly society instead of the medical doctors to that as as was an state in the would not be to in but instead to increase the importance of their concerns in important for these in society were the of the Naturforscher und of and that were in a different German each From the medical doctors these into an of the public p. where they as public who a stand on medical and political This in the of the 19th century the to become social and the of and professionals a great of and However, for medicine to become a in a further was the of into a scientific to be understood as a science in the allowed medical doctors to have on society and on the bodily of everyday The of in the of the 19th century doctors to themselves as an in and also permitted another crucial to In to the state that was by the juridical medical police through and a governmental of enacting A crucial in as a science was Max Pettenkofer, the first to the of of in Germany in The of the of into a science increased medical sphere of as they were no longer for the but also for the of is a theory of and that a field that that to and a physical and which we call p. no of society outside the of is important is that we are all of the ideal and real of the of of and that we all of any to questions of general hygiene, and that one of us the to in this p. The thus a new of but it would still some time before they would the right technologies and their aim of so that people would an in the they to their the public system in In Carl Heinrich noted that the of the public in its of a and p. 6). In as a of the general p. 6). to Reclam, the lack of any and the place of in society were the for the state of public In the population a great of freedom to the p. as they a rational calculation according to which individuals and the general public if they live p. the himself well and to the of p. the of the it to on and that these

Agency (philosophy · Democracy · Epistemology · Political culture · Political philosophy · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Law · Philosophy

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