Genocide and modern biopolitics

TOMAS BOROVINSKY

Sarajevo

Conferencia; Responding to Genocide Before It's Too Late: Genocide Studies and Prevention. The Seventh Biennial Meeting of the International Association of Genocide Scholars; 2007

IAGS-University of Sarajevo-Rutgers University

The present paper concerns the interconnection between genocide and modernity, considering the ideas of Michel Foucault and Roberto Esposito, which regard the conceptualization of bio-politics as the government of the human-being and its genocidal potential. To achieve this, we will take into account the original conceptualization, defined by Michel Foucault in the seventies, as well as the last decades’ reconsiderations that Esposito have suggested on the issue, from different points of view and under diverse influences. According to Foucault, bio-politics expresses an innovative technology of power, which comes to intervene and regulate human populations, considering them species, and administering and governing them using modern devices such as medicine, demography, hygiene, urbanism, etc. On one side, this so-called bio-politics enables a collective biological life increase. It strengthens and promotes human life. On the other side, bio-politics permits the uprising of a modern version of genocide; it also increases the genocidal possibilities, functioning as a material-intervention device upon the species, being able to delimit, aknowledge and administer populations. Social eugenics belongs as well to bio-politcs as to modernity. Taking the former into account, we will analyze Roberto Esposito’s contributions to genocide research, studying in depth the strong connection between modernity and genocide. We should bear in mind that this authors inherited the modern and bio-political point of view that characterized Michel Foucault, who coined the term. Roberto Esposito will propose an immunological vision of modernity, where bio-politics will represent a modern immunity dimension. According to the author, genocide will be the outcome of a homeopatic necessity, in which society will bio-politically self-purify, while destroying –giving up- a part of itself. Bio-politics guarantees genocide, but is not its synonym at all. As Zigmunt Baumann used to say that holocaust is part of modernity -without meaning that modernity and holocaust are synonyms-, genocide is bio-political, without every bio-politics meaning genocide. Therefore, genocide is as bio-political as collective vaccination and birth rate control. It is right there where the modernity drama lies: to provide as well the cure as the catastrophe. That is the drama of modernity and it is also our tragedy.