Table Of ContentBiopolitics
and the
Philosophy of
Death
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Biopolitics
and the
Philosophy of
Death
PAOLO PALLADINO
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2016
© Paolo Palladino, 2016
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Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 9781474283007
PB: 9781474282994
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction 1
1 Evental figures and questions of method 13
2 Ageing and the molecular way of life 37
3 The evolutionary biology of ageing and death 67
4 Molecularizing the biology of ageing and death 93
5 Forging the future 119
6 Life, death and philosophy 147
7 The arts of living and dying 173
Conclusion 199
Notes 213
Works cited 243
Index 269
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My debt to Mick Dillon, Tiago Moreira, Marcia Pointon, Thomas
Söderqvist and Teresa Young is immeasurable. The argument
advanced in Biopolitics and the Philosophy of Death is the
product of ten and more years of discussion with them on how
best to think about the task of critical reflection upon human
embodied existence. Put simply, without their endless provoca-
tions, Biopolitics and the Philosophy of Death would never have
taken form. I am just as indebted to Howard Caygill, Adrian
Mackenzie, Rob Mitchell, Phillip Thurtle, and the manuscript’s
anonymous readers for helping to forge my responses to these
provocations into something like a disciplined argument at the
intersection of historical, philosophical and sociological modes
of inquiry. As always, any remaining faults are entirely my own.
My debt to Rob Kirk and Karen Rader for the moral support
lent in the many moments of doubt about the merits of the entire
project is equally great. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, without
privileging one disciplinary mode over another, is a very testing
enterprise. I would also like to stop and pause, to remember Paul
Fletcher and John Pickstone, both of whom sadly passed away
before these votes of thanks entered the public domain. Thank you
all. Finally, Biopolitics and the Philosophy of Death is dedicated to
my parents, who also passed away during these years, like two of
the many other singular and irreplaceable older people who haunt
these pages.
Introduction
Genealogy does not pretend to go back in time to
restore an unbroken continuity that operates beyond the
dispersion of forgotten things; its duty … is to maintain
passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to identify
the accidents, the minute deviations – or conversely, the
complete reversals – the errors, the false appraisals, and
the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that
continue to exist and have value for us.
MICHEL FOUCAULT
How is one to make sense of the present moment? If the passage
of time changes everything, transforming that which was once
regarded as a matter of necessity into the accident of historical
transformation, answering this otherwise simple question becomes
a very complicated matter. The central conceit of Biopolitics and
the Philosophy of Death is that to answer this question one needs
to think about death, and to think about death not just as a philo-
sophical concept, but also as a phenomenon of increasing interest
to the biomedical sciences.
Reflecting upon the inevitability of ageing and death has a very
long history that goes back to the founding moments of Judeo-
Christian culture. According to Ecclesiastes, one of the books of
the Old Testament, it seems inevitable that the world should grow
poorer and darker the closer one approaches that moment when
one is no more, so testing one’s faith in the goodness of this world:
‘Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the
evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt
say, I have no pleasure in them’ (Eccl. 12.1). Martin Heidegger
once sought to focus on just this experience to reconstruct the
2 BIOPOLITICS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF DEATH
understanding of an authentic and truthful mode of existence in
the aftermath of the ‘death of God’, this being Friedrich Nietzsche’s
memorable phrase for the modern loss of faith in the possibility of
any transcendent moral compass and source of meaning. Situated
between critical and historical modes of examination, Biopolitics
and the Philosophy of Death will advance the proposition that,
today, this notion that death will one day come to visit us all
can no longer be regarded as so indubitable. As Aubrey de Grey
(2005a), iconoclastic biomedical scientist, has suggested, ‘the first
person to live to be a thousand years old is certainly alive today;
indeed, he or she may be about to turn sixty’. De Grey may well
exaggerate, but there can be little doubt that recent discussions
about the possibility of extending human longevity far beyond the
traditional three score and ten years illustrate very powerfully how
the course of human existence, from birth to death, has come to
matter to the business of governing the contemporary civic polity
and its constituent subjects, and to matter more than ever before.1
At the same time, the task of critical reflection seems wholly at
odds with this historically unprecedented situation. If the biopo-
litical terminology that is mobilized to understand such situations
points to a novel mode of governance, which is organized today
around life and its potential to proliferate beyond all limit, much
of such reflection is underpinned by considerations about the very
negation of life, namely death. This applies not just to Giorgio
Agamben and his writings on the subject, which have done much
to precipitate intense discussions about the place of death within
the biopolitical ordering of the contemporary polity, but also to
Michel Foucault and to all those other cultural critics who work
in Foucault’s wake. The challenge, yet others argue, is to construct
an understanding of biopolitical existence that centres upon life,
not death, and Gilles Deleuze is regarded increasingly as offering
the required alternative perspective. Biopolitics and the Philosophy
of Death focuses on the relationship between Foucauldian and
Deleuzian modes of thought, especially as they touch upon the
relationship between life and death.2 Importantly, as Gil Anidjar
(2011) has observed, contemporary discourse about of the meaning
of life is fraught with difficulty.3 Titian’s ‘The Three Ages of Man’
conveys the nature of this difficulty much better than any words.
Most immediately, Titian’s painting offers a figurative repre-
sentation of the canonical, tripartite division of human, embodied
INTRODUCTION 3
FIGURE 1 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), ‘The Three Ages of Man’, about
1512–14 (NGL 068.46) Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery
(Bridgewater Loan, 1945)
existence by means of the trajectory from the sleeping putti on the
one side of the frame to the two lovers on the other side, then to
the old man in the distant background, who, holding the classic
memento mori in his hand, contemplates his mortality. On the
other hand, as Agamben has observed in The Open (2002), the one
text where he comes closest to discussing the materiality of human,
embodied existence, such a reading overlooks the dying or dead
tree and how it constitutes a visual circuit, which returns from the
old man back to the sleeping putti.4 In so doing, Titian’s painting
could be said to counterpoise two very distinct meanings of life,
namely life as the course of existence from birth to death, and life
as the infinite movement of transformation. It is not clear whether
and how these two meanings can be reconciled, except perhaps
within something like the theological frame that Titian constructs
by depicting a church, which is located in the far background and
yet foregrounded by its casting against the horizon.
The thesis at the heart of Biopolitics and the Philosophy of
Death is that any answer to the question about how one is to make
sense of the present moment must confront this double meaning
of life.
