Lebensphilosophie and biopolitics

a discourse of biological forms

pp. 183-210

in: Nitzan Lebovic, The philosophy of life and death, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

Current histories of biopolitics repeat the key importance of Germany in the 1920s. The decade is generally described as the period that saw "the emergence of this biopower that inscribes it in the mechanisms of the State."¹ "Biopower," Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri write, "is a form of power that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and articulating it … As Foucault says, "Life has now become … an object of power.""² What Hardt and Negri imply is that biopolitics can be explained from the perspective of the 1920s as the history and concept of life. For them, German biopolitics was realized with an actual stress on sheer naked power, or what Enrst Jünger coined as the idea of "total mobilization."³ Roberto Esposito, more interested in the history of philosophy, agrees with their estimation in Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy. The 1920s shaped the "nucleus of biopolitical semantics,"⁴ he writes, in "not [just] any state but the German state."⁵ Furthermore, the term biopolitics, he argues, was coined by Rudolf Kjellén in the context of the German discourse of Lebensformen (life-forms) in his 1920 Outline for a Political System: "this tension that is characteristic of life itself … pushed me to denominate such a discipline biopolitics, which is analogous with the science of life, namely, biology."⁶