Butler’s Biopolitics:Precarious CommunityJanell Watson ( bio )

Beginning with her earliest formulations of performativity and up through her more recent theory of precarity, Judith Butler offers a sustained reflection on the constitution, production, and reproduction of marginality. While the concern with marginality has remained constant, her emphasis has shifted from exclusions based on normative gender and sexuality to exclusions based on the norms of Western liberal democracy. Consequently, her critique expands from the psycho-social scene of interpellation to the world stage of global geopolitics, as evidenced especially in Precarious Life   (2006)  and Frames of War   (2010) . Butler’s work on gender has always compared the plight of sexual minorities to that of gender and racial minorities, but she has been careful to avoid proposing a universal theory of oppression through marginalization and exclusion, for fear of effacing the historical specificity of diverse social movements. Nonetheless, her recent work does extend her philosophy of subjectivity to include many types of socio-political marginalization. Rather than relying on her theory of performativity to explain the ways in which liberal norms establish poor, non-Western, or medicalized bodies as abject or less than human, in her writing of the 2000s Butler develops her own theory of precarity. She defines precarity and precariousness in terms of life and death, mentioning economic and labor precarity only insofar as these are necessary to sustaining a viable life.1 It is perhaps not surprising that questions of life and death come to the forefront in Precarious Lives and Frames of War, both of which develop the notion of the precarious in response to the US-led war on terror. Butler makes a careful distinction between “precariousness”—the corporeal vulnerability shared by all mortals including the privileged, and “precarity”—the particular vulnerability imposed on the poor, the disenfranchised, and those endangered by war or natural disaster. Corporeal fragility both equalizes and differentiates: all bodies are menaced by suffering, injury, and death (precariousness), but some bodies are more protected and others more exposed (precarity). Precariousness is shared by all; precarity is “distributed unequally” (Butler   2010 , xvii, xxv, 25). Butler’s egalitarian remedy to the social ills of unequally imposed precarity? Precariousness for all. Vulnerability will serve as the basis for a new kind of community. Precariousness will save the world from precarity. These are Butler’s precarious propositions.

Rather than seeking to empower the weak—those who are living in precarity—Butler instead insists on the vulnerability of those who deny their own precariousness. She reasons that since precarity is imposed on others by those who refuse to acknowledge their own mortality, precariousness must be avowed and recognized by slave and master alike. She claims that avowing precariousness is a social act because precariousness is “not simply an existential condition of individuals, but rather a social condition from which certain clearpolitical demands and principles emerge” (2010, xxv). This raises “the question of how a collective deals with its vulnerability to violence” (Butler   2004 , 231). Disavowing vulnerability creates political inequalities resulting in precarity because violence results when the national subject tries to “immunize itself against the thought of its own precariousness” by asserting “its own righteous destructiveness” (Butler 2010 , 48). Immunization takes the form of violence directed at the perceived threat. Facing up to shared vulnerability will circumvent the violent immune response: “Mindfulness of this vulnerability can become the basis of claims for non-military political solutions,” she claims. Conversely, “denial of this vulnerability through a fantasy of mastery… can fuel the instruments of war” (Butler   2006 , 29).

Butler’s politics of shared vulnerability thus recalls Roberto Esposito’s theory of immunization, as developed in his recently translated trilogyCommunitas, Immunitas, and Bíos. Esposito describes the shared vulnerability that Butler calls precariousness: “What men have in common, what makes them more like each other than anything else, is their generalized capacity to be killed: the fact that anyone can be killed by anyone else” (Esposito 2010a, 13). This provokes what he calls the immunization response: “Life is sacrificed to the preservation of life. In this convergence of the

preservation of life and its capacity to be sacrificed, modern immunization reaches the height of its own destructive power” (2010, 14). For Esposito, the immune paradigm underlies modern political philosophy at least since Hobbes. Building on Foucault and Agamben, Esposito takes Nazi biopolitics, especially its camps, to be paradigmatic of modern liberal regimes which protect the life of the political body by expelling any internal threat. This strain of biopolitics thus addresses the conundrum posed by modern liberalism: the preservation of life tends to take the form of allowing, threatening, or imposing death (Dillon 2011). The immunitary paradigm turns especially deadly when it takes the form of autoimmunity. For Esposito, “preventive war”—such as the US-led war on terror—”constitutes the most acute point of this autoimmunitary turn of contemporary biopolitics” (Esposito 2008, 147).2 Esposito calls for an affirmative biopolitics which would overturn the immunitary paradigm in favor of a community that avows its fundamental vulnerability. Rather than conceiving of itself in terms of discrete bodies which together form a social body, such a community would conceive itself as part of the pre-individuated, de-personalized flesh of the world. Esposito’s too is a political philosophy predicated on mortal vulnerability.

At least two prominent political theorists have questioned the political efficacy of Butler’s call for vulnerability. Julian Reid points out that liberal security states—such as the USA—legitimize their power by appealing to their populations’ vulnerability. Reid asks how this same vulnerability can provide the basis for political resistance if it is already a tool of the surreptitiously oppressive security apparatus (2011). Jodi Dean also worries that Butler’s politics of vulnerability ultimately contributes to the advance of neoliberalism. For her, Butlerexemplifies an American intellectual left which has disempowered itself because it is uncomfortable with power, accepting of capitalism, and unwilling to pronounce the “we” of political solidarity (2009, 10, 16). “Left political conviction ends up a casualty of friendly fire” because of Butler’s unwillingness to condemn and denounce, writes Dean (2009, 123–124). She argues that Butler relies on a constrained understanding of sovereignty such that Butler’s “politics based on making sure that nobody is offended” winds up targeting “fantastic returns of the master” rather than exposing the complex intricacies of sovereignty today. These are politically serious matters, and I share the concerns of Reid and Dean. I would add that, as will be argued in this paper, Butler’s politics of vulnerability is bound up with an aversion to the collective. I find Esposito’s notion of communitas instructive in this regard. Both thinkers provide moving accounts of vulnerability, but stop short of offering concrete remedies for unequally imposed precarity. Tying their ambivalent portrayal of the collective to their dismantling of selves and bodies, I demonstrate how, perhaps despite their good intentions, not only Butler but also Esposito remain “captured… within the biopolitical limits of liberal discourse” (Reid 2011, 776).

Butler contributes to the wider conversation on biopolitics from the perspective of suffering subjects marginalized and excluded by the current world order. Interestingly, Butler herself associates biopolitics with the life sciences, implying that she herself is not engaging in this field (2010, 16–18). However, her focus on life and death corresponds to the Foucauldian definition of biopolitics: the emergence of life as the central concern of the modern political order.3 She is sometimes cited by others commentators on Foucauldian biopolitics(Campbell 2008;Reid 2011).Her title Precarious Life and subtitle When is Life Grievable? use the term “life” as defined by Foucault: not only biological existence but also mankind’s “basic needs,” “concrete essence,” and the realization of human “potential” (1986, 266–267); or according to Giorgio Agamben’s formulation: both zoē (bare life) and bios (socio-political life). Butler asks how and why this politics of life differentiates among various populations, protecting some and threatening others, according to complex distinctions not necessarily imposed by sovereign decree or juridical judgment, but more often created and upheld by social norms and indirect rule through governmentality (2006, 67–68).

Biopolitics is characterized by its contradictory functions of preservation and destruction. Esposito defines a negative biopolitics of death and a positive biopolitics of life, observing that Foucault himself hesitated between these two alternatives (2008, 32–33). Similarly, Foucauldian biopolitical critique can, observes Thomas Lemke, be divided into two tendencies: a positive politics of life (e.g. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri) and a negative politics of death (e.g. Agamben). For Hardt and Negri, exemplars of the positive view of biopolitics, the life of the

contemporary service-sector (or knowledge) worker provides the vitality for a new, post-subjective revolutionary collective: the multitude. For Agamben, exemplar of the negative view, the prison camp provides the matrix for modern biopolitics. Lemke finds Agamben’s analysis overly juridical and legalistic, leaving out the important dimension of subjectivation deployed as political technology (Lemke 2005, 4). Except for a passing reference, Lemke does not include Butler in his new introduction to biopolitics, even though she remains one of the most prolific analysts of subjectivity and its relationship to the politics of life and death (Lemke 2011). Her notion of precarious life offers a more subtly detailed analysis of suffering subjects than does Agamben’s one-dimensional figure of the homo sacer. She is much more wary of collectivities than Hardt and Negri, who are in turn wary of the subject. However, she falls into neither of Lemke’s camps, since her analysis of biopolitics is neither positive nor negative, but double-edged like Esposito’s, recognizing both a politics of death (immunization) and a politics of life (the community of shared precariousness). Butler and Esposito both seek to reverse the immunitary self-defensive reaction to shared vulnerability, resulting in what Esposito calls affirmative biopolitics. For both, an affirmativebiopolitics would take the form of a kind of community yet to come, a community that (for Esposito) affirms life in its fleshly multiplicity and (for Butler) promotes life because it mourns all death. They argue that this positive form of community can only be grounded in a fundamental vulnerability and lack. The suffering subjects of the affirmative community share nothing but their own mortality and their inability to coincide with themselves or to cohere into an organic body politic. Based on this ambivalence toward community, the two thinkers advance a critique of liberalism that denounces individualism but which directs the bulk of its critical energies against negative forms of the collective. Their proposed solutions pay little heed to the state, production, or the economy, inadvertently leaving the backdoor open to laissez-faire liberalism’s weakening of the state, precaritizing of production, and financializing of economies.

Community Trouble

Butler’s ambivalence toward the collective manifests itself in her confusing array of conceptual registers and lexical choices. Prominent among her theoretical slippages is a tendency to revert to the subjective register even when discussing the social in general. This might be attributed to what many critics find to be her thin theory of the social (Lloyd 2008), but I suspect that these slippages also signal her general mistrust of the collective. Her discussions of community often boil down to accounts of subject trouble, sliding from collective to subjective entities. Subjective figures in her work include subjects, selves, individuals, persons, bodies, lives, citizens, the stateless, non-subjects, the living dead, the humanized, the dehumanized, and so forth. Such subjective figures appear prominently in her book titles: Subjects of Desire,Bodies That Matter, Giving an Account of Oneself, Precarious Life. Two of these titles feature nouns in the plural—subjects, bodies—but Butler does not conceptualize these as collectivities; they remain pluralities. All of these subjective figures are shown to be menaced by ominous collective entities and their surreptitious dispositifs: communities, nations, states, sovereigns, governments, agencies, courts, disciplines, institutions, laws, rights, treaties, the media, discourse, narratives, images, frames, interpellation, recognition, interpretation, sovereignty, discipline, and governmentality.

Like any oppositional leftist political and cultural theorist, Butler calls into question dominant powers, but for her the collective tends to appear as the oppressor, as the vehicle of powerful norms and discourses which hierarchize and exclude. Her poststructuralist subjects are under constant threat of interpellation from a whispering shadowy collective. She recommends resistance by way of subversive discursive iteration, an oppositional strategy that does not feature the traditional leftist figure of collective mass resistance. Although she does acknowledge and endorse social movements which resist oppressive laws, policies, and exclusions (2010, 147), she hesitates to promote any kind of mass resistance movement because to do so would risk subsuming disparate social movements into a homogenizing collectivity. As a result of her emphasis on the subjective at the expense of the collective, many leftist academics code her work as a-political identity politics or mere culturalism (Butler   1997 ).

Butler’s call for community in Precarious Life is therefore striking, given her general reticence regarding collectivities. She proposes “reimagining the possibility of community on the basis of vulnerability and loss” (2006, 20). Such a community would grieve the loss of any life, rather than limiting mourning to members of a bounded group. She claims that grief “furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order” (2006, 22). Vulnerability, loss, and mourning seem compatible with Butler’s ongoing concern for the marginalized and excluded, but in her larger body of writing Butler treats the very concept of community with ambivalence. She denounces the “community of belonging” based on nation, territory, language, or culture, demonstrating how such communities maintain boundaries through the interplay of identity and recognition, upholding exclusionary norms which in turn constitute the very recognizability by which members belong or do not belong. One’s responsibility to this exclusionary community is predicated on membership, and entails protecting the members even if this means exiling or harming non-members (Butler   2010 , 36). In contrast, she shows sympathy to minority “communities” in the context of their oppression or marginalization by the norm-imposing majority. However, she deliberately avoids evoking a homosexual community. Instead, loose coalition is her preferred collective form of resistance, as in her example of “global networks” which have coalesced to form “political coalitions” around such problems as AIDS, the sans papiers, Muslim gays/lesbians, et cetera. These transnational politicalcoalitions “are bound together less by matters of ‘identity’ or commonly accepted terms of recognition than by forms of political opposition to certain state and other regulatory policies that effect exclusions, abjections, partially or fully suspended citizenship, subordination, debasement, and the like” (Butler   2010 , 147). These coalitions share common injuries and common causes, not common qualities or attributes. They are not, however, as inclusive as the community of vulnerability which Butler has recently set as her political goal.

Esposito’s work answers the call to imagine community on the basis of vulnerability and validates Butler’s rejection of the exclusionary community of belonging. The problem with communities is that, as Esposito demonstrates at length in his trilogy, they so often appear in their negative form. Communities in the negative protect themselves by excluding, threatening, or killing others. They resort to violence in the name of protecting life. Esposito calls this negative pole of biopolitics immunitas, the community’s tendency to protect itself by expelling or destroying what it perceives to be a threat. Butler also exposes this dark side of the community of belonging predicated on recognition: misrecognition leads to the abjection of that which is other. Abjection in this context corresponds to Esposito’s immune response. Achieving the positive version of community necessitates accepting the shared precariousness of all beings, life’s vulnerability to finitude and death, and the mourning that results.

Paradoxically, for both Butler and Esposito an originary lack—a negation, a void—lies at the heart of the affirmative community. ForButler, the void is grievable loss. For Esposito, playing on the etymology of communitas, the void is an obligation, a debt, a gift that will never be reciprocated (2010a, 6). The common, for him, is not a set of attributes possessed by the members of community. On the contrary, “Common is only lack and not possession, property, or appropriation” (2010a, 139). Likewise for Butler the common experience of vulnerability and loss foregrounds “the relational ties that have implications for theorizing fundamental dependency and ethical responsibility” (2006, 22; see also 19–49). This dependency can lead in the negative direction of the immunitary community, or in the positive direction of the affirmative community which accepts its “fundamental dependency” and takes on the “ethical responsibility” of the one-way gift—the originary debt to the other. Affirmative biopolitics requires that both subjects and communities affirm their fundamental ontological dependency on the other and therefore, claims Butler, “We need to think beyond or against” groups and communities which function as ‘unified subjects’” (2010, 145). Esposito agrees, explaining that “If the community always consists of others and never of itself,” then the community “is constitutively inhabited by an absence of subjectivity, of identity, of property” (2010a, 138). No property because that which is one’s own cannot be common. Common is the opposite of possession. No possession. No identity. No subjects (Esposito 2008, 63–69).

The problem of the collective thus quickly morphs into the poststructuralist problem of the subject, a typically Butlerian slippage shared by Esposito. According to him the affirmative community is incompatible with the individual autonomous subject. The subject of knowledge belongs to the age of the very liberalism that goes hand in hand with modern biopolitics and its perpetual violence carried out in the name of life (Evans 2011, 753). Liberalism’s modern individuals, who are by definition protected by a social contract, cannot partake in an affirmative community because said contract exonerates them from their debt to the other. “Modern individuals truly become that, the perfectly individual, the ‘absolute’ individual, bordered in such a way that they are isolated and protected, but only if they are freed in advance from the ‘debt’ that binds them one to the other.” The social contract shields modern individuals from the social contact that “threatens” their identity, “exposing them to possible conflict with their neighbor, exposing them to the contagion of the relation with others” (Esposito 2010a, 13). The modern immunitary paradigm constitutes the other as contagion. Its subjects, bodies, and communities close in upon themselves for self-protection. Self-identity relies on exclusionary immunitary boundaries.

Paradoxically, while the negative community offers protection, the affirmative community exposes everyone to risk. Esposito makes it clear that communitas—the affirmative community—”doesn’t protect us.” Unlike the self-protective immunity promised by the exclusionary proprietary community, the community of affirmative biopolitics instead exposes its members “to the most extreme of risks: that of losing, along with our individuality, the borders that guarantee its inviolability with respect to the other” (2010a, 140). As a result, the affirmative community’s members “are no longer identical with themselves but are constitutively exposed to a propensity that forces them to open their own individual boundaries in order to appear as what is ‘outside’ themselves” (2010a, 138). Community “is the relation that makes them no longer individual subjects because it closes them off from their identity” (2010a, 139).

Similarly, Butler locates an “ethical violence” in the demand for “self-identity” and “complete coherence,” which is to say the demand “that we manifest and maintain self-identity at all times and require others to do the same” (2005, 42). Self-identity is violent because it only becomes possible with the destruction of that which exceeds the bounds of the subject, since for Butler “a subject only emerges through a process of abjection, jettisoning those dimensions of oneself that fail to conform to the discrete figures yielded by the norm of the human subject” (2010, 141). The excess which is jettisoned exceeds the subject but remains in relation with it, making it impossible for the subject to coincide with itself. Given that, as Butler points out, the subject can only exist in relation to others, the subject’s very being exceeds itself because it depends on a constitutive outside consisting not only of its own detritus but also of its social ties to others.

Esposito’s call for a community predicated on an absence of individuated subjects would seem to contradict Butler’s campaign for equal access to subject-hood. However, although it may appear that her solution to global inequalities would be to restructure the world such that everyone can be recognized as a subject, her position is not that simple. The question of the subject is not, for Butler, “a problem of identity or even of the subject” but is instead “a question of how power forms the field in which subjects become possible at all or, rather, how they become impossible” (2010, 163). This might suggest that by forming the field differently, subjectivity for all would become possible. This is not the case either because the subject is always already impossible if by subject one understands an entity that is autonomous and self-identical.

Both liberal norms and multiculturalism, notes Butler, rely on “an ontology of discrete identity” for both subjects and communities. She opposes multiculturalism because “multiculturalism tends to presuppose already constituted communities, already established subjects.” These “already constituted communities” would be of the exclusionary, identitarian, negative, immunitary sort. Their discrete identity is of course a fantasy, obscuring identity’s need to jettison whatever exceeds the boundaries that identity itself constructs then imposes. Multiculturalism is, according to this argument, predicated on an exclusionary politics of discrete communities and can only account for bounded, individualized, recognized entities. This paradigm of self-identity is especially ill-adapted

to the current global political situation: not everyone counts as a subject, and not everyone belongs to a viable community. Multiculturalism and liberal subjectivity are not able to deal with “communities not quite recognized as such, subjects who are living, but not yet regarded as ‘lives’” (Butler   2010 , 31–32). What is to be done for these unrecognized communities, subjects, and lives? Butler’s strategy resembles Esposito’s: disable the fantasy of self-identity that enables the immunitary response of abjection.

Completing the demolition of the identity-subject-property triad that upholds negative community, Esposito’s affirmative community would abolish the social contract that protects property at the expense of the common. As Butler concludes Giving an Account of Oneself, “our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish to be sure, but also a chance… to vacate the self-sufficient ‘I’ as a kind of possession” (2005, 136). The autonomous self is a possession to be discarded. This dispossession, which results in a fundamental lack, lies at the heart of affirmative community. To be human, thus enabling the affirmative community of constitutive vulnerability, is to be a subject in pieces. For Butler, grieving and mourning for strangers make manifest the non-coincidence of the subject with itself, “of a mode of dispossession that is fundamental to who I am” (Butler   2006 , 28). To become affirmatively dispossessed is to dissolve a property relation. Self-possession necessitates immunization. Letting go of possessions enables affirmative biopolitical community that no longer needs immunization because there is no more outside.

Instead of cohering into an identifiable body politic, the affirmative community is itself stripped of subjective self-identity. It is equally problematic for a state to assume the form of a bounded collective subject. Butler cites the example of the United States post-2001 which, she says, constituted itself as

… a sovereign and extra-legal subject, a violent and self-centered subject. . . . It shores itself up, seeks to reconstitute its imagined wholeness, but only at the price of denying its own vulnerability, its dependency, its exposure, where it exploits those very features in others, thereby making those features “other to” itself

(2006, 41).

This passage suggests that denying vulnerability leads to a blatant disregard for the lives of others. Mourning the loss of its sense of entitlement to the world, argues Butler, is a necessary step for the United States if there is to be hope for establishing a worldwide democratic political culture (2006, 40). In other words, since the United States has denied its own vulnerability, it is condemned not only to securitize itself, but also to magnify and exploit the other’s vulnerability. Precariousness (disavowed by the USA) versus precarity (imposed on the others by the USA).

The impossibility of self-identity, for an individual or for a collective, makes immunity susceptible to escalation into destructive auto-immunity. Esposito notes that medicine speaks of an immunological self. Immunization works by separating out the non-self from the self. This leads to a contradiction. “If, as is generally believed, the fundamental task of the immune system is to reject what is other than self, we must necessarily exclude the possibility that it can be aimed directly at itself. From an immunological standpoint, the ‘self’ is defined only negatively, based on what it is not” (Esposito 2011a, 175). However, adds Esposito, things are not so straightforward if one examines the “grammatical paradox” of the third person reflexive pronoun. Adding “the” to “self” nominalizes the term. “The self” is both pronoun and noun. Furthermore, the third person pronoun functions very differently than the first- and second-person pronouns. I, me, we, us, and you designate nothing outside of the act of utterance, outside of the presence of the interlocutors. Conversely, the third person pronouns he, she, one, they, them, et cetera, by definition designate someone who is absent. This makes the third-person pronoun impersonal (2011a, 176). “We” is the most dangerous pronoun of all, claims Esposito. It’s better that “I” become “one” (Campbell 2010, 149). “One” epitomizes the impersonal.

Butler’s lexical choices play on the ambiguous status of the third person pronoun in a key statement on collective violence, part of which I’ve already cited. Halfway through the paragraph, she shifts tellingly shift from the noun “collective” to the impersonal personal pronoun “one.” Elaborating on “the question of how a collective deals with its vulnerability to violence,” she suggests a few lines later that “perhaps there is some other way to live in such a way that one is neither fearing death, becoming socially dead from fear of being killed, or becoming violent, and killing others, or subjecting them to live a life of social death predicated upon the fear of literal death” (2004, 231, my emphasis). In speaking of the relation to others, Butler could have used any of a number of terms—self, subject, human being, person, and so on. That she did not indicates the inadequacy of any of these terms to denote all who are exposed to precariousness—an exposure shared by all living beings. The impersonal, claims Esposito, serves the lexical purpose of indicating a universal individuation which is neither subject nor self nor liberal individual. The impersonal includes even those excluded by claims of human rights because they are not recognized as human. “One” can belong to the affirmative community without being recognized as a person or as a human. Butler’s discussion of the nonhuman human, which preoccupies her throughout Precarious Lives and Frames of War, resonates with Esposito’s theory that the notion of the person operates as deadly dispositif.

One is not born a person, as Roman law made clear, notes Esposito. In more recent times, the concept of the person has been promoted as a conceptual instrument of peace, he explains. He recalls that the category of the person was adopted with enthusiasm after World War II, with the hope that as opposed to the nationalistic concept of the citizen, a “potentially universal” notion “such as that of person would allow for the strengthening and expanding of the fundamental rights of every human being.” Given that the Nazis had wanted to crush human identity into mere biology, “it seemed that only the idea of a person could reconstitute the broken link between human being and citizen, spirit and body, right and life.” Unfortunately, bemoans Esposito, the category of the person actually widens the gaping hole between rights and humanity. He traces the person dispositif back to Aristotle’s definition of man as a rational animal (2010b 124, 128). He elaborates:

For some to be awarded the label of person, a difference needs to be identified from those that are no longer persons, are not yet persons, or are not persons in any way. The dispositif of the person . . . superimposes and juxtaposes humanity on human beings and animality on human beings; or that distinguishes the part of humanity that is truly human from another that is bestial, that is enslaved to the first

(2010b, 128–129; see also Esposito 2011b).

In this way, the category of the person divides and separates persons from nonpersons, humans from the inhuman, zoē from bios, the immune from the common (Campbell 2010, 149). In this sense, the person dispositif separates “life from itself.” Given its ability to divide and separate life from life, “the dispositif of the person is also the conceptual instrument through which one can put some part of the person to death” (2010b, 128–129).4

Just as the category of the person implies nonpersons, the category of the human, observes Butler, produces “a host of ‘unlivable lives’ whose legal and political status is suspended” (2006, xv). This suspension of life, its reduction to bare life or zoē, works within the dispositif of the person, functioning as the conceptual instrument through which some part of the human can be put to death, to paraphrase Esposito (2010b, 129). Butler describes the “exclusionary process” which consists in imposing the categorical distinction of human versus non-human according to the “normative conceptions of the human” (Butler   2006 , xv). This makes possible a process of “dehumanization” which “becomes the condition for the production of the human to the extent that a ‘Western’ civilization defines itself over and against a population understood as, by definition, illegitimate, if not dubiously human” (Butler   2006 , 91). As evidenced by the term “population” in this sentence, desubjectivation, dehumanization, and de-personalization operate not only at the level of the subject, but in the modern period also at the level of the population.

In discussing dehumanization Butler slips back and forth between subjects and populations. Population becomes the new subject of modern sovereignty’s security apparatuses, claims Foucault (Foucault 2007, 42, 79). Although the population may lack subjectivity and personhood, it is not impersonal in Esposito’s sense because it was created as a unit by the security state’s forces of governmentality. A population is no mere compilation of individual subjects, but rather an entity created by modern governments, disciplines, or institutions. A collective does not become a population until the emergence of modern techniques of aggregation: “comprehensive measures, statistical assessments, and interventions aimed at the entire social body or at groups taken as a whole” (Foucault 1986, 267). Population is a sort of Butlerian performative, creating the collective entity that it names. Following Foucault, Butler defines governmentality as “the management of populations,” and declares that the US government is “‘managing’ a population” when it constitutes various collectives as “humanly unrecognizable,” as it has done repeatedly during the war on terror (Butler   2006 , 98). These collective entities can then be mobilized toward various ends. “In targeting populations, war seeks to manage and form populations, distinguishing those lives to be preserved from those whose lives are dispensable” (Butler   2010 , xviii–xix). Precarity is, according to Butler, a form of governmentality, which is to say “the maintenance and control of bodies and persons, the production and regulation of persons and populations, and the circulation of goods insofar as they maintain and restrict the life of the population” (2006, 52). Subjects and populations suffer precarity imposed by the menacing collective. As Foucault put it, “The power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual’s continued existence” (cited in Reid 2006, 28).

As Butler explains, in waging its war on terror, one of the ways in which the US government manages populations is to constitute them as less than human and therefore as not entitled to human rights (Butler   2006 , 98). For her as for Agamben, those prisoners indefinitely detained by the United States at Guantanamo prison were neither living nor dead, but existed in a state of bare life (Butler   2006 , 67–68; Agamben 1998, 1; Agamben 2005, 4). The war on terror deploys ethnic, racial, and cultural difference in order to produce a normative definition of the human which justifies its differential treatment of those deemed less than human. Butler offers extreme examples: when a person’s body becomes an instrument of war, as in the case of suicide bombers or civilians acting as human shields, that person does not count as a living being but is one of the undead, deprived of life before being killed (2010, xvii–xxx). The discourse and imagery which frame the war on terror have cast Muslims in general as inhuman (Butler   2010 ). Muslims have been reinvented by the US security apparatus as a population to be contained.

Antigone as Political Zombie

Butler’s slippages between subject and population become especially apparent in her choice of Antigone as a figure for analyzing modern democracy. Antigone’s Claim (Butler   2000 ) presents the figure of the living dead as a single subject of an ancient monarchial regime. Frames of War (Butler   2010 ) recounts the trials and travails of modern populations rendered less than human. At one point she compares ancient Antigone to modern oppressed populations, even though the latter are manipulated in a different dimension, on a different scale, and using different logics. Foucault clearly delineates between subject and population in relation to sovereign rule, explaining that with the emergence of the security state, “The multiplicity of individuals is no longer pertinent, the population is” (2007, 42). As Foucault convincingly demonstrates, “The population as a political subject, as a new collective subject absolutely foreign to the juridical and politicalthought of earlier centuries is appearing here in its complexity, with its caesuras” (2007, 42).

Antigone suffers from the king’s imposition of exile and loss of citizenship. The king’s sovereign decree performatively transforms her into a political zombie: she is not immediately killed, but condemned to a life which is not a life (Butler   2000 , 23). Antigone’s brother had been killed in a regicidal war against her uncle the king, who in revenge forbade his proper burial. The dead brother was thus condemned to an undead status, and she joined him; the dead yet undead brother and the corporeally living but socially dead sister. The king’s decree makes Antigone a victim of

Esposito’s dispositif of the person: banishment renders her a non-person. Although she is killed as a person, she retains her animal life at least for a while. Antigone allegorizes the fragile subject downtrodden by a hegemonic collective, for even when non-subjects like her are not the victims of genocide, “neither are they being entered into the life of the legitimate community” (Butler 2000 , 81). The “legitimate community” here is a negative collective of the type that secures its self-coherence through violent exclusion. The negative community legitimizes its immunitary expulsions based on “standards of recognition [that] permit for an attainment of humanness.” Once again, Butler has staged a collective playing the bad guy: the “community” in its negative form. Antigone dwells “in the sphere of the excluded, not negated, not dead, perhaps slowing dying, yes, surely dying from a lack of recognition” (2000, 81). Exiled Antigone is dying, socially and corporeally, from lack of recognition by the others who have banded together as a negative community which expelled her as a threat to its working order, just as the immune system deals with disease.5

The living dead Antigone thus prefigures Butler’s subsequent discussions of subjects who are not subjects, who are “neither alive nor dead, neither fully constituted as a subject nor fully deconstituted in death” (2006, 98). Several years after the publication of Antigone’s Claim   (2000) and in the midst of the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in an interview Butler compares stateless and desubjectivated Antigone not only with war prisoners extra-legally deprived of Geneva Convention protection, but also with many twenty-first-century populations, including “new immigrants, the sans-papiers, those who are without health insurance, those who are differentially affected by the global economy, questions of poverty, of illiteracy, religious minorities, and the physically challenged” (in Antonello and Farnetti, 2009). Ancient Antigone’s condition of socially dead non-person is certainly shared by members of these downtrodden populations of the twenty-first century. There are, however, crucial differences. Antigone is a single subject oppressed directly by a single sovereign’s decree, whereas most of her contemporary counterparts suffer primarily under the inequalities inflicted indirectly by tactics of what Butler loosely calls governmentality—social norms, media coverage, economic globalization, inadequate infrastructures, various policies which may be only indirectly imposed by states, and so on.6

In the same interview, Butler recasts Antigone as “a war critic who opposes the arbitrary and violent force of sovereignty” (in Antonello and Farnetti, 2009). However, in comparing Antigone to the enemy combatant prisoners and civilian victims of a modern liberal state, Butlerjuxtaposes two different figurations of the political subject: the subject of right in direct relation to a sovereign and the population-as-subject governed by a modern security state (Foucault 2007, 79). Consequently she also conflates various types of sovereignty. Jodi Dean has taken Butler to task for her limited account of sovereignty (2009, 124–136). To Dean’s examples, I would add Butler’s comparison of Antigone to contemporary suffering populations. In her fixation on their shared status of political zombie, Butler ignores the very different forms that sovereignty takes across the millennia. To be fair, it must be said that Butler deliberately slips registers, intentionally but unconvincingly blurring the distinction between ancient sovereignty with modern governmentality. She tries to move beyond Foucault in positing an interpenetration of sovereignty and governmentality as the US has waged its war on terror. She argues that George W. Bush acted as a sole sovereign when he suspended the law in order to impose invasive security measures on the civilian population, to establish the Guantanamo Bay prison as an extra-judicial zone, and to declare the Guantanamo Bay prisoners non-enemy combatants not protected by the Geneva Convention. Summing up the Bush administrations tactics, Butler writes that “sovereignty comes to operate on the very field of governmentality: the management of populations” (2006, 98). Conceding that even for Foucault governmentality and sovereignty can coexist, she says that nonetheless Foucault could not have imagined that sovereignty would, in its suspension of the rule of law in the name of the war on terror, “reemerge in the context of governmentality with the vengeance of an anachronism that refuses to die” (2006, 53–54).

I agree with Dean that “the U.S. president is in no way a sovereign,” and underscore her point by adding the example of Antigone (2009, 134). Even though Bush, Cheney, and Rove claimed

executive powers only available to them under a state of emergency, the executive branch of the U.S. government is hardly comparable to ancient King Creon. Even as the U.S. president assumed wartime powers, the administration had to operate in concert with a powerful legislature and legal system. They also found it necessary to manipulate public opinion, as Butler herself argues in Frames of War. In order to create and manipulate various populations, the Bush administration relied on the governmentality tactics that Butler includes in her notion of the frame: images, narratives, videos, memorials, and so on. Oddly, she claims that “sovereignty” deploys frames and manipulates populations, stating that sovereignty “functions differentially,” targeting and managing certain populations, denying the humanity of some subjects, “differentiating populations on the basis of ethnicity and race,” extending its claims through “the systematic management and derealization of populations” (Butler   2006 , 68). King Creon did not need the public relations machinations of the modern security state, nor did he need to create Foucauldian populations; he merely issued direct decrees to his subjects. In contrast, the Bush administration had to use sophisticated frames to turn Afghani and Iraqi civilians into faceless populations of political zombies.

The primary war function of frames, according to Butler, is to create a sort of negative community of grief, a community that mourns only for its own and thereby relegates others to social death (2006 (2010). Butler was perplexed that, given the understandable outpouring of grief for 9/11 victims and for American casualties from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, in contrast, few Americans showed any remorse for the many innocent Afghani and Iraqi victims who died in even greater numbers. She demonstrates at length that Washington DC deployed “frames” to foster this nationalistic one-sided mourning on the part of Americans. It is in trying to explain this widespread public indifference to the suffering of Muslim civilians that she calls for a community of mourning. The death of someone who has been dehumanized “cannot be mourned because they are always already lost or, rather, never ‘were,’ and they must be killed, since they seem to live on, stubbornly, in this state of deadness” (Butler   2006 , 34). According to this Western liberal logic, social death makes corporeal death ungrievable.

Whether or not one accepts Butler’s theory of impossible grief as an explanation for unevenly imposed precarity, this globally unequal imposition of precarity is certainly a political concern for leftists, and Butler portrays it touchingly. However, she is less convincing when she promotes vulnerability for all as an oppositional politics. For her, Antigone commits a political act of defiance when she declares to King Creon that she will bury her brother. Butler opens Antigone’s Claim by asking what happened to feminist defiance of the state, complaining that contemporary feminists turn to the state to seek juridical redress for injuries inflicted by that same state (2000, 1).7 Antigone instead defiantly refuses to seek justice from the abusive state. She turns her back on the state even though exile from it means certain death. Abandoning the leftist tradition of collective uprising against the sovereign, Butler portrays a single woman who accepts banishment without actually trying to change the way the sovereign oppressor wields power. This backing away from power is why Dean quite rightly characterizes Butler’s recent work as an ethics without a politics. Antigone takes a moral stance, but does not try to intervene in the regime that victimized her.

Bad Bodies

While promoting his own problematic politics of vulnerability, Christopher Peterson points out yet another conceptual slippage in Butler: a conflation of corporeal and social death. Butler uses the terms “spectral” and “spectrality” to denote social death, the bare life lived by those upon whom precarity has been imposed by a declaration of their inhumanity. In contrast, for Jacques Derrida spectrality refers not to social death but to “a process of originary mourning that animates corporeal life” (Peterson 2006, 155). Derrida’s spectrality thus corresponds to what Butler calls precariousness. Peterson demonstrates that in Precarious Life Butler conflates social and corporeal death, and appears to neglect the existential experience of finitude—Derrida’s spectrality. Peterson finds Butler too corporeal because she ties social death directly to the threat of actual biological death (AIDS, lynching, war, et cetera). The same could be said of Antigone’s Claim, which shows social death directly leading toward corporeal death. When Butler talks about mourning, she tends

to talk about mourning corporeal death, unlike Derrida who is more interested in mourning mortal finitude. However, Peterson writes before Frames of War, in which Butler introduced the distinction between precariousness (finitude) and precarity (social death). Peterson’s conclusion remains relevant, despite Butler’s emendation of precariousness with precarity. He is right that Butler fixates on corporeal threat (reversing the common criticism that Butler neglects the body). Peterson proposes that, following Derrida’s version of spectrality, “The abjection that sexual and racial minorities endure” is “a mode ofredoubled ghostliness” that displaces onto these same minorities “the spectrality [precariousness] inherent to all life” (155–156). Peterson’s point is that the social death inflicted on the abjected minority reassures the majority by allowing the latter to overlook their own finitude—their shared precariousness. Socially dead minorities help the majority deny their own vulnerability (Derrida’s spectrality, Butler’s precariousness). Peterson argues that queer politics would do well to shift its attention from social death to the shared but disavowed condition of spectrality (precariousness). He recommends insisting on finitude, the precarious condition shared by all mortals, in order to expose “how the social death of racial and sexual others is produced in and through the disavowal of the spectral” (156). He concludes that the ultimate act of queer politics would be “to resist the racist and heterosexist disavowal of spectrality” that motivates the abjection of certain populations (173). In short, like Butler and Esposito, Peterson proposes the avowal of shared finitude as a political strategy. Vulnerability for all.

Butler’s conflation of social and corporeal death is, however, deliberate. The body’s vulnerability is not merely physical. Bodies are socially vulnerable because from before its birth, the body is dependent on and threatened by others; sociality is the body’s condition of survival and of its peril (Butler   2006 , 20; 2010, 54). Butler thereby redefines the body as sociality—just as in her earlier work she redefined sex as gender. The bounded individual body dissolves into social dependency, just as individual sexual organs disappear under the weight of socially normative gender. Slipping from bodies to lives, she writes that “we are, from the start and by virtue of being a bodily being, already given over, beyond ourselves, implicated in lives that are not our own” (Butler   2006 , 28, my emphasis). She insists that the subject (bios) and the body (zoē) can never coincide, that our bodies “are not quite ever our own” given the body’s “invariably public dimension” (2006, 26). Biological vitality is not Butler’s primary concern because, she argues, for humans there is no viable biological life without social life insofar as “life requires various social and economic conditions to be met in order to be sustained as a life” (2010, 14). Whether in the shared situation of precariousness or the unevenly allocated situation of precarity, “the body finds its survivability in social space and time.” Corporeal vulnerability amounts to “this exposure or dispossession” given that “attachment is crucial to survival” (Butler   2010 , 55; 2006, 45). In short, “bodies are bound up with others through material needs, through touch, through language, through a set of relations without which we cannot survive” (Butler   2010 , 61). Butler thusly describes the body’s inherent sociality in order to counter the liberal myth of the body’s bounded individuality.

Despite her concern with corporeal death, Butler always proceeds with caution when dealing with the biological dimension of biopolitics. She rejects vitalism in stating that “a postulated internal drive to live” will not sustain the socially dependent body (2010, 21), but she does note that the injured body lives on, breathes, responds, formulates affect, and she adds that life is stubborn (2010, 61, 62). This is as far as she goes in acknowledging the vitality of life. This is where Butler and Esposito begin to diverge. Esposito pushes the biological dimension much further. He observes that life’s biological materiality had been almost entirely absent from the sphere of political philosophy prior to Foucault. Butler’s characteristic slippages from biology to sociality are perhaps as much a symptoms of political philosophy as of her well-known aversion to the body. Despite their different stances in regard to biology, both thinkers make the point that the old philosophy of the unified, bounded, subjectified body presupposed individuation. Butler dissolves the body into sociality, in the hopes that de-individualized vulnerability will enable the sharing of grief. Esposito dissolves the body into the vulnerability of shared flesh.

Just as Esposito recommends abandoning the concept of the person, so he advocates dispensing with the concept of the body. He argues in favor of a fleshly politics (2008, 150–154).

The political philosophy of the subject of knowledge was predicated on the notion of the body but had little or nothing to say about flesh (Esposito 2008, 166–167). For example, Hobbes’s monstrous but organistic body politic is devoid of flesh. 8 The discrete identities of liberalism are based on an outdated organistic model which conceives the individual and the social bodies as bordered, bounded, self-sufficient organisms. Organism is in fact an abstraction, an overly simplified theory which ignores the body’s facticity by instead imposing a schematic grid of mechanistic systems (respiratory, nervous, muscular, and et cetera). This organistic model assumes that every member’s fully individuated body is in turn unified in a political body closed in on and coinciding with itself (Esposito 2008, 158). The immunitary paradigm operates according to the organistic model, which allows for the presumption that inferior bodies have to be expelled or destroyed lest they infect the social body, the extreme manifestation of this model being the Nazis’ negative biopolitics. The organistic, unified political body always produces “an immunitary short-circuit” (Esposito 2008, 158). To overcome the political body’s deadly auto-immune responses, Esposito proposes a politics of the flesh which, he claims, has been made possible by the eclipse of the organistic body in political philosophy after its twentieth-century experiences with totalitarianism.

Esposito contrasts the organistic body’s presumed unity against the multiplicity of the flesh. He writes that flesh is “naturally plural,” citing Merleau-Ponty (2008, 164). Life emerges out of multiplicity; individuation is secondary, he explains, quoting Gilbert Simondon (Esposito 2008, 179–180). A new politics of the un-individuated flesh would overcome the immunitarian tendencies of the old organistic body by recognizing that individuation is only one moment of life. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. New possibilities open up now that “for the first time the politicization of life doesn’t pass necessarily through a semantics of the body (because it refers to a world material that is antecedent to or that follows the constitution of the subject of law)” (2008, 166). Instead of a theological notion of the flesh, Esposito is talking about “the flesh as such: a being that is both singular and communal, generic and specific, and undifferentiated and different, not only devoid of spirit, but a flesh that doesn’t even have a body” (2008, 167). The old liberal subject of the Hobbesian body politic dissolves into the flesh of the world. Life is no longer conceived in terms of individual bodies, but as a world flesh. All living things must be included in the unity of life. Accordingly, no part can be destroyed in favor of another (2008: 194). If all the world were apprehended as one flesh, there would be no foreign bodies. This would necessitate a new concept of social health, since immunity would no longer make sense if there were only flesh and no bodies.

Conclusion: Liberal Logic?

As appealing as I find Esposito’s shared world flesh, I remain concerned that his analysis overlooks the immense differentiations imposed by the unequal distribution of precarity, the uneven exposure to the vicissitudes of the global economy. To state the obvious, some bodies suffer much more than others. Will the recognition that all share the same world flesh actually help those who suffer? Will those who routinely enjoy the pleasures of the flesh really care about others who endure chronic fleshly pain? At least Butler theorizes the inequalities of vulnerability in its actually existing manifestations. However, neither Butler nor Esposito address problems of production, distribution, and governance. Both write movingly about the violence dissimulated by the liberal state, offering a critique that is worthwhile and insightful. However, celebrating universal mortality hardly seems the basis for a viable leftist politics, which I would task with finding ways to address precarity. It seems to me necessary to imagine a different kind of state. Otherwise, instead of merely sharing precariousness, we’ll all share precarity as well. Without some sort of state, means of production, and mechanism of distribution, there can only be precarity for all. That to me would not be an improvement on the present untenable situation.

The neglect of the state and of the economy is perhaps less a problem that the disturbingly laissez-faire quality to Butler’s and Esposito’s politics of vulnerability haunted by the specter of death. Even if it manages to launch a politics of life, the politics of precariousness risks falling into the same systemic naturalism championed by neoliberalism. Liberalism organizes society so that it appears to function on its own—much like Butler’s shadowy figures of discourse-wielding power.

The situation comes to seem naturalized—as when Butler claims that the subject cannot destroy the interpellating powers that brought it into being. Foucault explains that security tries to get “the components of reality to work in relation to each other” (2007, 47). This is why neoliberalism can advocate non-interference even while maintaining an effective security apparatus. “The game of liberalism—not interfering, allowing free movement, letting things follow their course; laisser-faire, passer et aller—basically and fundamentally means acting so that reality develops, goes its way, and follows its own course according to the laws, principles, and mechanisms of reality itself” (Foucault 2007, 48). Even as Butler shuns the state, as when championing Antigone in exile, she advocates foregrounding the reality of social dependency and corporeal mortality rather than attempting to modify the machinations of the state. She therefore falls into the security state’s own strategy of turning her reality to itspolitical advantage.

The social sciences contribute to liberal naturalization, transforming the social sphere into so many self-perpetuating systems that can be studied like the weather. For Reid, twenty-first-century liberal regimes’ state of permanent mobilization against terror is rooted in the organization of society according to the needs of war, and therefore its strategies for indirectly managing populations derive from military science (2006, 17–18). In contrast, for Butler the economic sciences provide the logic of population management. She is still following Foucault in this regard, since governmentality’s principal form of knowledge is political economy (Foucault cited in Dean 2008, 110).Butler’s shift in emphasis from disciplined subjects to managed populations is reflected in her economic vocabulary. Although for her the economic is only one dimension of precarity, she relies on several economic concepts in describing the world’s vulnerable populations. She writes that “Lives are supported and maintained differently, and there are radically different ways in which human physical vulnerability is distributed across the globe” (Butler   2006 , 32). Distribution is an economic phenomenon related to several others. For example, she writes that “war is precisely an effort to minimize precariousness for some and to maximize it for others” (2010, 54). Minimizing and maximizing are economic concepts. Lives that matter are lives with “worth,” with “value,” that “count”—to cite some of the other economic vocabulary scattered throughout Precarious Lives and Frames of War. While Butler’s primary concern may be with inequality and herpolitical aim “a more radical and effective form of egalitarianism” (2010, xxii), her analysis relies on the economic notion of distribution. Precariousness is distributed equally among all living beings, while “Precarity is distributed unequally or, at least, strategies to implement that unequal distribution are precisely what is at work in war and in the differential treatment of catastrophes such as famine and earthquakes” (2010, xvii). Precariousness “establishes a certain equality of exposure,” but current global political conditions deny this equality “in favor of a differential distribution of precarity” (2010, xxv). Butler is describing a biopolitical economy of corporeally vulnerable lives. I am defining economy broadly to include not only the exchange of goods, resources, or money, but also and especially distribution and valuation in an economy which manages populations by regulating life and death, withholding or conferring the biopolitical power to protect. Her economics of vulnerability seems to operate as a perpetual motion machine watched over by an invisible hand. This makes it hard to reimagine a more nurturing state and a more just economy. These were the dreams of communism and socialism, and despite the failures of the communisms and socialisms that have actually existed, I think that it would be politically fatal if the left gives up the quest for better means of governing, producing, and distributing. Precarity is the problem, but precariousness is not the solution.

Janell Watson  

Janell Watson is Associate Professor of French at Virginia Tech and Editor of the minnesota review. She is the author of Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust and Guattari’s Diagrammatic Thought: Writing between Lacan and Deleuze. Her current research project explores the thought of Michel Serres in relation to biopolitics and eco philosophy. Janell may be contacted at rjwatson@vt.edu

Notes

1.    On precarity as political cause, see Neilson and Rossiter 2008. For an excellent elaboration on Butler’s use of precarity as well as on many other possible uses of precarity beyond economics narrowly defined, see Ettlinger 2007.

2.    Julian Reid calls the contemporary war on terror “a biopolitical war” because it destroys life in the name of protecting life (Reid 2006, 62). Brad Evans concedes that contemporary wars are not all alike, but like Reid he identifies a twenty-first-century biopolitical warfare waged in the name of the liberal defense of peace, human rights, and justice (Evans 2011). Modern liberal politics wages war in the name of peace.

3.    There are of course numerous non-Foucauldian approaches to biopolitics. Of these, many directly involve the biological sciences, focusing on issues such as eugenics, biotechnology, medical ethics, the environment, or animal-human relations (for an overview see Lemke 2011).

I would add that Butler becomes biopolitical as she and other feminists move from the early Foucault of discipline to the final Foucault of biopolitics and biopower (Taylor and Vintges, 2004).

4.    Rather than making everyone a person, Esposito advocates altogether eradicating the regime of the person (2010b, 122–124). He would replace the person with the impersonal because the impersonal “blocks the mechanism of distinction and separation” that creates the categories of “those who are not yet persons, who are no longer persons, or who have never been declared persons” (2010b, 130–131). Rights should be impersonal, he suggests, because only the impersonal applies to everyone.

5.    Nancy Fraser claims that the lack of recognition by the other corresponds to mere social recognition, although according to Butler such recognition is as political as it is socio-cultural. This is because social norms of recognition are intimately bound up with administrative, legal, governmental, and even economic practices. Moreover, lack of recognition can lead to suffering and death, a point that Butler attempts to dramatize through Antigone. See their debate in Butler   1997  and Fraser 1997. For a commentary on the debate see Smith 2008.

6.    It seems to me that Butler superimposes governmentality onto ideological state apparatuses.

7.    In the 1990s Wendy Brown expressed concern about the political consequences of Foucauldian feminism at that time because, she argued, many of Foucault’s disciples had neglected to study “the bureaucratic state and the organization of the social order by capital” as the sites of power that they are (Brown 1995, 16). This, she says, led to a neglect of the state and of political economy. She explains that, reacting against the dominant Marxian structuralism of his time, Foucault had wanted to account for the decentering of the state and of political economy in the modern constitution of power, and so he explicitly advocated that research turn away from state apparatuses and their supporting ideologies. Although he developed the notion of governmentality in his late writing, for Brown his political map remains inadequate because he still largely ignores the state and the economy (Brown 2006, 79–83). Paying attention to the state and to political economy is important because, again according to Brown, the ideology of liberalism obscures their function. Butler has more to say about the state than about political economy (although she sometimes alludes to economic precarity, she does not explicitly discuss economic issues).

8.    Esposito presumes a body politic that looks very much like the one on the cover of Leviathan. Eugene Thacker provides a more nuanced history of the notion that includes the possibility of monstrous, mystical, or multiplicitous bodies (2011).

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