Biopolitics and the Infected Community: Foucault, Sartre, Esposito, and Butler

When Michel Foucault enumerated the various ways that bio-politics emerges he pinpointed it as an outgrowth of patria potestas or the paternalistic power over life.It was the father in Roman Society who had the ability to "dispose" of the lives of slaves and children.Theorists have reacted to Foucault's insights with the most important extension of this work done by Roberto Esposito and Giorgio Agamben.Agamben locates the origins of biopolitics in Ancient Roman Law, and his thesis is that every life must remain sacred in order to counter-act the degradation of "disposable" life.Early on in Foucault's career in his "experience book" History of Madness he was writing in direct response to the existentialist politics of Jean-Paul Sartre expressed so eloquently in Being and Nothingness.Foucault's immediate political engagements were in direct response to the notion that agency could only be construed by utilizing a Cartesian conception of the Subject.A critique of Sartre was still very much in his mind later on in his life when he began to unravel bio-politics later on in his work on sexuality.Michel Foucault's praxis is a non-totalizing theory that must be placed in conversation with his entire oeuvre.If philosophers take biopolitics to its conclusion and "cut off the head of the king" as Foucault said had never been done in political theory, it becomes a powerful rebuttal to the tiresome political theory of the "philosopher kings" who want nothing more than to whisper sweet nothings into the ear of the sovereign.Can political theory be something more than a simplistic love/hate relationship with the state?Can it be something other than the dysfunction of party hacks filling the proletariat with fear of this or that pseudo-controversy; caught between the pettiness of the petit-bourgeoisie, and the boorishness of the proletariat there needs to be a different way to understand political discourse.Can there be a community where its telos is something else besides a fantasy that ends with everyone becoming millionaires at the end.Can there be an understanding that liberalism as it currently stands also messes with the working class; in reading the full quote from Deleuze in Anti-Oedipus; "Why do people fight for their servitude as if it were their salvation, crying more taxes less bread" is not a cry for social-democracy and liberal party politics but full anarcho-communism.There is no "essence" to be revealed beneath the surface level of false consciousness and faulty ideas.One major concern with this line of thought is that it can be Occidentalist in nature.Did the Aztecs experience sacred life in the same way as the Romans?Does the Japanese Emperor have the same sacred meaning for the Japanese people as the Pope for the followers of the Catholic Church?These are major concerns and to think that all states operate the same way is to have a homogenized view of history.Can there be a multi-cultural pluralistic method to uncover a universalist ground to ontology?It seems that this is the major impasse of leftist political theory over the last forty to fifty years.Every time a political theorist discovers what amounts to a universal principle of the "being of beings" one is immediately labelled a Eurocentric, or Masculinist, or limiting the question to being merely a homogenous totality.One begins to discern from this impasse that totalities are akin to state power that place limitations on the plurality of differences and thereby territorialize the being of beings.Can theorists think in other terms?We can think of the thing in itself but only as an abstraction because our approach is always muddled.As human beings we have emotions, impulses, and our attention tends to be distracted.Prolonged research over lengthy periods of time is a luxury of a few scholars and Biopolitics and the Infected Community: Foucault, Sartre, Esposito, and Butler