Politics Unborn: A Thougth Experiement on the (Re)production of a New Political Subject

[Partially in response to this post at the weblog]

Once the category of the “state of exception” is mastered in its formality, such states begin to appear ubiquitous. However, pointing out such instances serves no real political purpose. It is, at most, diagnostic. Similarly, numerous examples of the homo sacer, even beyond the extensive catalogue that Agamben cites, can be named without too much difficulty. But again, the identification of such instances is not the important point – nor, however, is nostalgically working to restore things to the way they were before the emergency or the sovereign decision. The political exigency that follows from the biopolitical predicament, according to Agamben, is to conceive of such “zones of indistinction” as themselves sites of new political possibilities.

Thus, to point out that the “fetus” or the “unborn” represents an exemplary figure of the homo sacer is not to say too much. To point out that a child in utero is neither living nor non-living properly speaking – insofar as the decision on this status is the one constantly in dispute – and that such an existence occupies a “zone of indistinction” between fact and law, by virtue of this undecidability, is not to see in Agamben’s analysis a tacit pro-life agenda.

Of significance, however, are the political consequences of such a realization when it comes to discerning the true political subject. The liberal model understands the political subject, in this case, to be the autonomous individual who is free to deal with the fact of pregnancy in the way that she sees fit – or the way that she sees fit within the realm of available law and technology. The conservative model locates the final say in an unimpregnable male (legislator, priest, doctor, ethicist). But there is yet another assessment of this situation, a third political subject, who becomes available in light of Agamben’s work. The site of resistance to biopolitics is life itself, a zoe that has become its own bios. Life itself becomes both the object of biopolitical capture and the subject of its resistance. Would not the unborn then become the political subject par excellence, insofar as such a life is the one which is inseparable from its form. The question then becomes: how to conceive of an unborn politics?