Philosophy Today

Foucault characterizes the defining feature of modern politics in terms of a new form of power concerned with maximizing life, biopolitics, as opposed to the sovereign right to kill. This characterization becomes problematic, especially when the overwhelming frequency of death and massacres in the twentieth century is considered. The question of how so much death is produced in an economy of power concerned with the maximization of life has stirred considerable debate. This paper argues that there is a death-function internal to biopolitics that should be considered in terms of biopolitical social defense. In making the life of a population its object, biopolitics makes death into an immanent condition of the population. The history of the emergence of this death-function internal to biopolitics is traced out in terms of different figurations of the monstrous: the shift from a juridical conception of monstrosity to a criminal and then medico-normative monstrosity shows that the steeping of death in the life of the population is done by normalizing judgment, through which death becomes an immanent condition of society. Thus, I show that the defense of society against its own monstrosity is done on both the disciplinary and the biopolitical levels.

This paper argues that today the true source of terror in the economico-biopolitically advanced countries of global capitalism lies in biopower’s own constitution as a normative field (the protection of life) that presupposes its exception (the superfluity of life) as its own precondition. At the two extreme poles of this exception we find “terrorism,” and particularly suicide bombing, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or drones), as the pair revealing the core of biopower. However, of the two only “terrorism” is discursively constructed in the “West” as a monstrous act that should incite horror. Linking horror to the psychoanalytic concepts of repression and foreclosure, I argue that the biopolitical function of horror lies in rendering unreadable the message of such “monstrous” acts. Furthermore, insofar as horror’s experience is an affective state of being that can, nevertheless, be incited discursively, affect shifts to the center of the political domain. The affect of horror in particular becomes instrumental to politics as it can provide the criterion for determining the bio-racial break between, in Foucault’s words, “what must live and what must die.”

The paper is organized around two ideas that come out in Steve Crowell’s Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger and that I discuss critically in turn. The first concerns the reach of Crowell’s claim according to which the connection between intentionality, meaning and normativity is necessary in all forms of intentional experience. I make my point by considering the case of imagining experiences, which are—I argue—meaningful, intentional, but not necessarily normative in any relevant sense. The second question is about Crowell’s criticism of the role of bodily self-awareness in Husserl’s phenomenology of perception. While Crowell is right to maintain that the norm of proper functioning relevant to bodily skills can’t be understood as arising from a system of kinaesthetic sensations alone, I argue that bodily self-awareness still has a normative role to play in perception inasmuch as it allows me to cast my own experience in evaluative terms.

Steven Crowell’s new book is a wake-up call for phenomenology in general and for Heidegger studies in particular. This article focuses on Crowell’s robust reinstatement of the phenomenological reduction and the transcendental reduction in Heidegger’s work.

This paper responds to comments by Maxime Doyon and Thomas Sheehan on aspects of my book, Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Among the topics discussed are the relations between phenomenology and analytic philosophy, the difference between a Brentanian and an Husserlian approach to intentional content, the normative structure of the intentional content of noetic states such as thinking and imagining, the implications of taking a phenomenological approach to Heidegger’s concept of “being,” Heidegger’s “correlationism,” and the normative character of Heidegger’s analysis of Angst, death, and conscience.