The Biological Threshold of Modern Politics: Nietzsche, Foucault and the Question of Animal Life

"Examining Thanatopolitics: The Socio-Medical Impact of Intergenerational Racialization"

“…The function of auto-immunitary reactions (as noted by Esposito) is to shift juridical power from ensuring the protection of the entire organism (the collective body of society) to the radical movement of select groups into fortified boundaries -protecting some groups over others while also making some groups live and letting others to die (as noted in biopolitics) [21]. Such circumstances lead to the selfdesignated higher life forms protecting themselves from perceived aggression by putting the lower life forms to death or allowing them to die -actualizing a kind of law-violence-stratification paradigm via thanatopolitical power [22]. Philosopher Jacques Derrida elaborates on this issue in stating that: We are here in a space where all selfprotection of the unscathed, of the safe and sound, of the sacred (heilig, holy) must protect itself against its own protection, its own police, its own power of rejection, in short against its own, which is to say, against its own immunity.…”

“…The integration of science, religion, selection, and death was also embedded in Nietzsche's "great politics." Great politics sought to cultivate humanity through the development and measurement of racial hierarchies based on an individual's (or a population's) perceived future, promise of life, and physiologyeliminating anything or anyone deemed degenerate, unholy, and parasitic [24]. The infrastructure of Nietzsche's great politics and great health -which highlighted the significance of race and racialization Volume 50-Issue 5 DOI: 10.26717/BJSTR.2023.50.008006 as molecular and biological concepts -led many contemporary philosophers to believe that the theories were inherently racist [25].…”

“…According to French anatomist and physiologist Xavier Bichat, however, society must realize that one's biological existence, political existence, and perceived socio-historical attributes evidence social systems that do not act directly upon an individual (causing him or her harm) but rather ignores the needs of particular groups of people as an indirect means of accelerating their deaths -again noting the overlap of biopolitics and thanatopolitics relative to health disparities. Foucault, however, recognized that although the paradox of making live and letting die could first appear as a logical fallacy, the molecularization and biologization of race and racialization divides a population into a continuum -re-instigating and legitimizing the distinction between the Self and the Other and allowing the indirect killing (letting die) of the Other for the supposed protection of society (making live) [33]. This racism, as he called it, is different than the kind overtly articulated in Nietzsche's great politics and great health.…”