Right of Death and Power over Life (History Of Life And Sex (Patria…
Right of Death
and Power over Life
History Of Life And Sex
Ancient right of the father to dispose of the life of child and slave.
The father/patriarch/sovereign could indirectly cause the subject's death by 'exposing their life'. They had to defend their state in time of war.
The death penalty gave the sovereign direct control over the subjects life.
From defence to offence
Wars have changed in modern times from a defensive survival to an offensive 'life necessity'.
'One has to be capable of killing to go on living'
Life over death
Capital punishment has become less about punishing individuals who commit specific crimes and more about punishing specific criminals who commit various crimes.
'One had the right to kill those who represented a kind of biological danger to others'
'This power over life evolved in two basic forms; these forms were not antithetical, however; they constituted rather two poles of development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations'
Body & its biological processes
Sovereign power of death replaced by administrative power and management over life.
Body as a machine
Crucial in the development of capitalism
The institutions that emerged out of the industrial revolution worked in the sphere of economics &exercised bio-power as men accumulated capital.
Man had conquered death and was turning his attention towards the human body.
'For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.'
Power came from controlling life rather than the threat of extinguishing life
Because of this, the legal system must interfere more and more in modern lives.
'The judicial institution is increasingly incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses (medical, administrative, and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory.'
Sex and control
Four lines of attack in which the politics of sex advanced
Hysterisation of women
Sex was defined in three ways
That which belongs to men and women.
That which wholly constitutes the woman's body.
That which belongs to men
and hence lacking in women.
Law of economic necessity
Showed sex as a dialectic between pleasure and reality.
Sexualisation of children
Sex was seen as present (anatomy) and absent (physiology)
If the sex of the child remained in to adulthood, sterility, impotence, frigidity, the inability to experience pleasure, and deadening of the sense would follow.
Psychiatrisation of perversions
Sex was understood as anatamo-physiological but also answerable to an underlying instinct.
Through its development this instinct could, according to the objects which it became attached, 'made it possible for the perverse behaviour patterns to arise and made their genesis intelligible'
From a 'symbolics of blood to an analytics of sexuality'
Blood in previous societies held a symbolic function, but sexuality in our society in an 'object or target.'
'Its importance was due less to its rarity or its precariousness than to its insistence, its insidious presence, the fact that it was everywhere an object of excitement and fear at the same time.'
Passage from one to the other did not come about 'without overlapping, interactions, and echoes.'
Sex & Law
Freudian 'laws of alliance, tabooed consanguinity, and the sovereign father.'
Sex and Power
'We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power; on the contrary, one tracks along the course laid out by the general deployment of sexuality.'
Christian mortification of the flesh for centuries made us 'love sex, to make the knowledge of it desirable and everything said about it precious.'
Sex is desirable, each of us desires to 'know it, to reveal its law and power.'
'Sex is worthy dying for'
Through sex an individual gains access to their identity, intelligibility, and physical body.
We receive our identity from what was previously thought of as ' an obscure
and nameless urge.
We receive our intelligibility from 'what was for many centuries thought of as madness.'
We receive the 'plenitude of our body from what was long considered its stigma and likened to a wound.'
Sex became 'rooted in a specific and irreducible urgency which power tries as best it can to dominate.'
'Sex is the most speculative, most ideal, and most internal element in a deployment of sexuality organised by power in its grip on bodies and their materiality, their forces, energies, sensations, and pleasures.'