Make And Let Die —— Untimely Sovereignties

----- 生死存亡：不合时宜的主权

ISBN: 9780988234048 出版年：2016 页码：259 Biddick, Kathleen punctum books

his collection of essays by one of medieval studies鈥?most brilliant historians argues that the analysis and critique of biopower, as conventionally defined by Michel Foucault and then widely assumed in much contemporary theory of sovereignty, is a sovereign mode of temporalization caught up in the very time-machine it ostensibly seeks to expose and dismantle. For Michel Foucault, biopower (epitomized in his maxim 鈥渢o make live and to let die鈥? is the defining sign of the modern, and he famously argued that the task of political philosophy was to cut off the head of the classical (premodern) sovereign, the one 鈥渨ho made die and let live.鈥?Entrapped by his supersessionary thinking on the question, Foucault argued that the maxim of 鈥渢o make live and let die鈥?of modern sovereignty superseded a premodern sovereignty characterized by the contrasting power 鈥渢o make die and let live.鈥?The essays collected in Biddick book (some reprinted and some published here for the first time) argue that Foucault spoke too soon about the supposed 鈥渢hen鈥?of the classical sovereign and the modern 鈥渘ow,鈥?and this became painfully apparent in his analysis of Nazism in his later lectures, Society Must be Defended. There Foucault groped to articulate an anguishing paradox: How could it be that the Nazis, as the ultimate biopolitical sovereign machine, would insist on an archaic (premodern) mode of sovereignty in their death camps? Here is how he posed the question in that lecture: 鈥淗ow can the power of death, the function of death, be exercised in a political system centered upon biopower?鈥?Foucault left this question hanging.