The Perfect Bio-thanatopolitical Crime

 

The idea of the perfect crime is grounded in the narrative of evil's triumph over humanity.

In this narrative, a perfect crime is defined in relation to the collapse of justice and goodness as evil succeeds in its aims and avoids detection.

In this brief essay, I use Foucault's theoretical work on power to illustrate one imagination of the "perfect crime."

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The Dual Nature of Bio/Thanatopolitical power

In Foucault's work on power, he describes the dual applications of pastoral power, the power rooted in the metaphor of cultivation, that seeks to govern the lifeforces of the population to achieve particular goals, such as security.

The representation and governance of those life forces is biopolitical. Nikolas Rose described biopolitics as the "politics of life itself." (see journal article cited below)

Foucault observed that pastoral biopolitics are usually "productive," in the sense that they are organized around efforts to cultivate life. 

Conversely, deliberate tillings (e.g., eugenics sterilizations; ethnic cleansing), or simply callous, administration of human life forces are not properly pastoral so these forms of administration are called thanatopolitics because they are concerned with killing and letting die, a more passive approach.

R. Esposito, an Italian scholar, has explored how biopolitics inverts as thanatopolitics with amplification of an 'immunological" turning against the "body," of the population body or targeted elements. 

Pastoral biopolitics tips easily into Thanatopolitics. (See also Mbembé& Meintjes; Murray below)

Bio/Thanatopolitical Power and the Perfect Crime

The perfect crime, from a moral perspective that transcends Foucault's materialism, involves the deliberate exploitation of the dual nature of bio/thanatopolitics with destruction in mind.

To avoid detection, the perfect crime is represented as something other than its material effects on targeted populations.

Historically, crimes against human lifeforces have adapted the guises of pastoral benevolence and expertise, as illustrated in the programs of medical police that have been deployed historically ranging from the German medical police through eugenic and experimental denigration and destruction of human life forces, as occurs with medical experimentation (Goliszek, 2003)

In addition to adopting a falsely beneficent pastoral guise, Scapegoating and Gaslighting have historically been used to displace attention from destructive or disciplining forces.

Gaslighting occurs as the Foucauldian "rules of truth" marginalize and stigmatize forbidden or simply subordinated knowledge and experience. The lived experiences of falsehoods and injuries are suppressed entirely or categorically disqualified.

Scapegoating is no doubt one of the oldest tricks for humanity. Other intelligent animals engage in it also. Scapegoating natural hazards affords a sense of control over energies that escape our human disciplines. Scapegoating human failings, particularly thanatopolitical programs designed to exploit and/or subjugate is particularly insidious.

Scapegoating enemies, particularly those who challenge thanatopolitical power, delivers the second requirement of the perfect crime, evasion of accountability for harm.

EXPERIENCE

When I see examples of these perfect crimes I am sickened and saddened. I more often see scapegoating of destruction. Rarely have I ever seen a case until today where those challenging thanatopolitical power are blamed directly for the crimes of the true perpetrators.

SOURCES

Esposito, R. (2008). Bios: Biopolitics and philosophy (T. Campbell, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Foucault, Michel (20140. The politics of health in the eighteenth century. Foucault Studies, No. 18, pp. 113‐127.

Foucault, M. (1979). Discipline and punish (A. Sheridan, Trans.). New York: Vintage Books.

Foucault, M. (1983). The subject and power. In H. L. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow (Eds.), Michel Foucault: Beyond structuralism and hermeneutics (pp. 208-264). Chicago: University of Chicago.

Foucault, M. (1990). The history of sexuality: An introduction (R. Hurley Trans.). New York: Vintage.

Foucault, M. (1994). The order of things: An archeology of the human sciences. New York: Vintage.

Foucault, M. (2007). Security, territory, population (M. Senellart, Ed., G. Burchell, Trans.). Houndsmills: Palgrave.

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979. Trans. G. Burchell. Ed. Michel Senellart. Houndmills: Palgrave, 2008.
 

Goliszek, A. (2003) In the Name of Science: A History of Secret Programs, Medical Research, and Human Experimentation. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 125.

Mbembé, J. Achilleand Meintjes, Libby "Necropolitics," Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11-40. Project MUSE. Web. 29 Aug. 2011. <http://muse.jhu.edu/>,”14.

Murray, Stuart Thanatopolitics http://stuartjmurray.com/thanatopolitics-2/

Nadesan, Majia (2008). Biopower, governmentality and everyday life. New York: Routledge.

Rose, N. (2001). The politics of life itself. Theory, Culture and Society, 18(6), 1-30.

ADDITIONAL READINGS

Creager A (2013) Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

P. Langley (2012) Medicine and the Bomb: Deceptions from Trinity to Maralinga (Aldinga Beach, South Australia: Paul Langley), http://pothi.com/pothi/book/ebook-paul-langley-medicine-and-bomb, date accessed 21 December 2012.

Steven Pokornowski Insecure Lives: Zombies, Global Health, and the Totalitarianism of Generalization. Literature and Medicine Volume 31, Number 2, Fall 2013 pp. 216-234 10.1353/lm.2013.0017
 

ABSTRACT•This article examines how biological and political insecurity have become increasingly imbricated with one another. Building on Priscilla Wald's assertion that contagion reveals the connections of an imagined community, I show how it also reveals disconnections: who is dispossessed by these imagined communities. Through examinations of the Resident Evil franchise, Steven Soderbergh's Contagion, and Max Brooks's World War Z, I demonstrate how through contagion, individuals are marked as biologically and politically threatening, dispossessed of an imagined community, and then subjected to violence. In all of these texts, the globalization of an imbricated health and security complex enacts a generalizing logic that obscures local history and cultural specificity. This logic works to dispossess individuals of imagined communities along racialized, gendered, and classed lines, and makes that dispossession appear apolitical. This article advocates instead for a recognition of the history and relation of the terms and figures that populate the cultural imaginary.