Content area
Full Text
Abstract
This article argues that the relation between the biopolitical functions of life and death and the apparatuses of sexuality and race through which they operate is a contingent one. Foucault's Society Must Be Defended lectures and Will to Knowledge are revisited for genealogical clarity regarding the strategic relations underpinning their emergence, and to grasp how they differ tactically despite deploying similar discourses of abnormality and inclusion/exclusion. I suggest that sexuality can also act as an apparatus of death, as exemplified in the early twentieth century shiftof heterosexuality, and more recently homosexuality, from the realm of death to life.
Keywords
Michel Foucault, biopower, difference, apparatus, strategy, tactics, same-sex marriage, psychiatry
The specific pairing of race and death has been taken up recently by a number of Foucauldian thinkers.1 Consequently, it seems more that instead of 'to make live and to let die,'2 modern biopolitics is analysed increasingly in terms of how life can be made to die in order for it to live. In his Society Must Be Defended lectures, Foucault spoke of the 'death function'3 as 'the murderous function of the State.'4 The death function does not refer to crude killing nor to the death instinct in the Freudian psychoanalytical sense, but in a 'strictly historical sense'5 to all forms of 'indirect murder,'6 such as the exposure of someone to a greater risk of death, political death, expulsion, rejection, discrimination and so on. Foucault located the concentration of the death function in modern biopolitics as bound to the discourse of racism. While the newfound emphasis on race and death in Foucauldian scholarship is timely and welcome, it often overlooks the relevance and relationship they have to the biopolitics of sexuality and life. The force of biopolitics is granted to the death function at the expense of life-producing mechanisms in three ways. First, it exaggerates the murderous effects of biopolitics as the primary active force that penetrates and administers life. Second, it reduces biopolitical difference production to death, and finally, it does so at the expense of downplaying the forceful endeavour to reproduce life. Sexuality, as Foucault argued, is not just a technology of truth of the self, but most importantly a discourse produced by biopower to ensure the procreation and optimization of the...