Forelæsning - Ghassan Hage: From Biopolitics to the Politics of Well-Being: Viability Inside and Outside the Law

Introducing what became his highly influential concept of biopolitics, Foucault argues that ‘life’ only comes to exist when biology came to exist at the end of the eighteenth century. In this presentation I will argue that rather than witnessing the emergence of ‘life’ the late eighteenth century sees its reduction to biology. From an anthropological perspective, we can say that ‘life’ before being about biology was what Marcel Mauss would call a ‘total social fact.’ This reduction of life to biology part and parcel of the modern Western compartmentalisation of the social world into ‘politics’, ‘religion’, ‘economy’, ‘kinship’ etc… Nonetheless, from the practice of holistic medicine to governmental interest in ‘well-being’, we continuously see a re-assertion of life as a ‘total social fact’. In this paper, I will examine this fluctuation between compartementalised and holistic life in the fluctuation between modes of being inside and outside the law.