Introduction to essay: The modern Democratic State and Capital: acts of exclusion, the creation of ‘bare life’, its identification, and its killing. Martin Blanchard
As a professional I see, and hope for, a very limited role for the Assisted Dying (by suicide) law that’s currently being debated in private-that is, it should only be used in exceptional circumstances where properly provided palliative care services have assessed the situation fully and are unable to provide necessary care. As a citizen, my concern is not just about the individual but also about the history of State power-juridical and sovereign- and the current levels of exclusion in our Democracy. The remnants of sovereign power are too great and used too readily by the State for the benefit of Capital. To create now, a law that permits ‘assisted suicide’ for distressed people-albeit with a notional six months to live-I find worrying because it could act as the basis for further laws, or as a fillip for even greater use of sovereign power, in attempts to solve ‘threats’ to our Nation’s financial existence.
Some major themes in the essay:
This essay tries to understand the use of exclusion and its consequences in our Democracy from work by Foucault, Agamben and a few other modern(ish) European philosophers/political economists.
Throughout his ‘later work’ Foucault uses the term ‘racism’ in a confusingly idiosyncratic way. He uses it in relation to his discourse of ‘race war’ (see footnote 36 from Erlenbusch) which challenges the classical theory of ‘sovereignty’ to reveal its function as a theoretical tool to retroactively justify illegitimate relations of domination. Specifically, the transcriptions of ‘race war’ over the centuries developed into a justification for the use of the ‘sovereign power’ of the ‘right to kill’ in (modern) ‘biopolitical’ societies. It allowed our political system to exercise the ‘function of death’on us.
Agamben’s ‘Homo sacer’ is ‘bare life’ personified- a person included in a society only by their exclusion. Ancient Roman law created an existence where a person was not given the rights and protections of the state (put ‘outside’) but remained ‘inside’ the state purely because they could be killed with impunity by anyone. Modern Democratic states can kill the ‘excluded’…..
Agamben states that modern ‘sovereign power’ has ‘a primary function to establish the law, and to determine that which exceeds the law’; the existence and use of this ‘sovereign power’ is the ‘hidden link’ between Western democracies and totalitarian states. The ‘state of exception’ for Agamben , is ‘the political point at which the juridical stops, and a sovereign unaccountability begins’-it is where the dam of individual liberties breaks, and a society is flooded with the ‘sovereign power’ of the state. Agamben would see the current human slaughter in Gaza as a genocidal ‘state of exception’.
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