theorists articulates Marx’s intuition that the process of subjectivation as “authentic” life can only be explained by giving priority to the dimension of species-life (or: zoe) as a or life-in-common. In Negri, this priority of the dimension of species-life is visible in his emphasizing the capacity for creativity contained in living labor, and his focus on the “wealth” of the productive subjects which is generated in their autonomy with respect to the processes of capital accumulation. In Agamben, the priority of the dimension of species-life is visible in his neologism “form-of-life,” where “life” refers to zoe and not bios. In Esposito, the priority of the dimension of species-life is visible in his critique of the immunitary devices that separate the individual from its body and life, as well as from its communal obligations to others. Although this family of theories assign a relative priority of zoe over bios, it would be a mistake to reduce them to forms of vitalism or naturalism as ordinarily conceived. Indeed, my second hypothesis is that all of these theories of biopolitics share the fundamental belief that zoe as species-life is identical to the activity of thinking by an intellect that is never individual or personal but “common” or “general.” In other words, what characterizes Italian biopolitics is a common Averroistic background that offers a way to conceive of power in an affirmative way as the potential or power (dynamis, potentia, potenza) for thought. For Italian biopolitics only a thinking life (zoe) allows subjectivity to discard its Cartesian and attachment to personal identity and become “authentic” in its overcoming of individual self-consciousness thanks to the communitary and communicative dimensions rooted in the power of thought. Negri, Living Labor, and General Intellect
“What is the difference between the labour of the subjected human and the labour of the liberated human… or rather the human in struggle?” () This is perhaps the central question that leads Negri from Marx Beyond Marx to his later work with Hardt on the Empire trilogy. Basing themselves on the published and posthumous work of Foucault on biopolitics as well as on Deleuze’s critical engagement with it, in Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth Negri and Hardt further expand the biopolitical reading of the Grundrisse in order to identify a dialectical tendency in biopower: “Living labor is the fundamental human faculty: the ability to engage the world actively and create social life. Living labor can be corralled by capital…. [but] our innovative and creative capacities are always greater than our productive labor – productive, that is, of capital. At this point we can recognize that this biopolitical production is on the one hand immeasurable, because it cannot be quantified in fixed units of time, and, on the other hand, always excessive with respect to the value that capital can extract from it because capital can never capture all of life” (). The more capital increases its real subsumption of living labor, the more does this labor resist its domination by becoming “immaterial” or “intellectual” labour. As Negri says, immaterial labour is “a becoming-intellectual of labour: in other words, a labour which is mobile in space, flexible in terms of time, often independent in terms of how and where it is carried out” (). The idea of “immaterial labour” in Negri is closely connected to his interpretation of the so-called “chapter on machines” of the Grundrisse where Marx famously yet obscurely gave an argument for his “law of capital,” that is, the tendency for the rate of profit to decrease with the increase in productivity of labour due to technological innovation. Marx’s basic idea is that the more machines take on “work,” the less will workers be needed in the process of production. However, this decrease in living labour also entails that capital’s power to reduce necessary labour time, and thus to increase disposable labour time which is the source of surplus value itself, itself decreases at a rate that is higher than the increase in
call thought the nexus that constitutes the forms of life in an inseparable context as (). Only in “thinking” can one overcome the distinction between zoe and bios. The central claim is this: “only if living and intending and apprehending themselves are at stake each time in what I live and intend and apprehend – only if, in other words, there is thought – only then can a form of life become, in its own factness and thingsness, form-of-life, in which it is never possible to isolate something like naked life” (). Thinking is not “the individual exercise of an organ or a psychic faculty, but rather an experience… that has as its object the potential character of life and human intelligence” (). This idea of thinking turns on the Averroistic interpretation of the “active intellect,” i.e., of thought thinking itself, “a pure power of thinking”(). As his collection of essays Potentialities indicates, a great deal of Agamben’s affirmative biopolitics is dedicated to formulate the meaning of this “pure power of thinking” as the cipher of a happy life. In Homo sacer, Agamben speaks of potentiality not in terms of “logical possibility but rather the effective modes of potentiality’s existence… it is necessary that potentiality be able not to pass over into actuality, that potentiality constitutively be the potentiality not to (do or be), or, as Aristotle says, that potentiality be also im-potentiality”(). One of the main differences between Agamben and Negri with respect to the idea of a general or common intellect consists in their different analysis of potenza (power) in its affirmative sense: whereas Negri understands potenza in Spinozist terms as a constituent power that legal and political forms of legitimate domination, in Agamben potenza denotes what is best called a “destituent” power, i.e., a kind of power that precedes the distinction between constituent and constituted powers (). In Homo sacer Agamben assigns the paternity of this idea of potentiality to a wide array of figures and concepts, like the later Schelling, Nietzsche’s eternal return, Heidegger’s Gelassenheit, and lastly in the formula of Bartleby: “
This distinction between homo and persona problematizes the very idea of rights because it causes rights to fall on the side of the legal persona, which is constructed precisely by separating it from the dimension of homo: the separation falls exactly into the distinction between zoe (tied to homo) and bios (tied to persona). Thus a human being is divided into “a biological body and a site of legal imputation, the first being subjected to the discretionary control of the second…. The person is actually superimposed onto the human being – but also juxtaposed with it – as an artificial product of the very law that defines it as such” (). The hypothesis is that the idea of “person” always serves to separate in the human being a part of itself as a “thing” and a part of itself as a “person”: rights adhere only to the latter; and they all fundamentally relate to life and the body, to embodiment, as if it were a matter of possession of the body-thing and of the body-life. It is in this sense that Esposito agrees with Marx’s early critique in On The Jewish Question that all “rights of Man” had “security” as their fundamental principle. Thus, Esposito’s central claim is that “the essential failure of human rights, their inability to restore the broken connection between rights and life, does not take place in spite of the affirmation of ideology of the person but rather because of it” (). Biopower, according to Esposito, depends on this dualism that is internalized into every individual, separating and reifying the common element of life into the aspect of the “body” from the individualizing element of the “person”: through this dualism, life falls outside of law. Similarly to Agamben’s archeology of subjective rights in the Franciscan polemics against ownership, for Esposito the root of the problem is that “to be the owner of a body, the person cannot be coextensive with it; in fact, the person is specifically defined by the distance that separates it from the body” (). The “person appears to be an artificial screen that separates human beings from their rights, a confirmation that something like ‘human rights’ is impossible” ().