Play of Shadows

Necropolitics casts shadows on modern biopolitical orders, a darkness in powers of light, death permeating knowledge of life. The necessary antithesis to and stain upon calculations promoting the health, hygiene and vitality of populations, necropolitics arises when life protects itself at any cost (Foucault 1976, 137). Death conditions biopower's emergence, the point at which the sovereign right to take life and let live is displaced in favour of ‘making live and letting die’, an imperative ‘to foster life or disallow it to the point of death’ (Foucault 2003b, 247; 1976, 136–8). Calibrating life in systems of measurement, control, forecasting and demographics, biopower embraces science, politics and society and is ‘an indispensable element in the history of capitalism’ (Foucault 1976, 140–1). Marginalised, death never disappears, becoming ‘something permanent’ that gnaws at life and serves as a justification for the ‘murderous function of the State’ (Foucault 1976, 138; 2003b, 244, 256). Informing decisions on ethics, research, investment and training, biopower inhabits every aspect of modern existence: policing borders and disciplinary norms; activating the sovereign extra-legal powers of a ‘state of exception’ against real and perceived threats of invasion, terror or infection. Shadowy, faceless and even fictionalised enemies sustain the urgency of exceptionality, doubling similarly crepuscular and spectral powers of biopolitical sovereignty (Hardt and Negri 2000, 2; 2006, 7; Mbembe 2019, 70). Distinctions between life and death, biopolitics and necropolitics are neither fixed nor secure: ‘bios’ can readily turn into ‘thanatos’ (Agamben 1999, 82, 131). Some lives have value and can be sacrificed, while others may be killed: ‘bios’ (life rendered meaningful in political and symbolic terms) and ‘zoe’ (‘bare life’ excluded from value and meaning) continually remodulate each other without external or transcendent authority in a ‘zone of indistinction’ that is also a ‘shadow ground’ (Agamben 1998, 2, 105–6).