Preparation
Balibar on Arendt and Foucault, excerpted from “Difference, Otherness, Exclusion”, Parallax, 34 (2005) [paragraph breaks inserted]:
[…] What is strikingly similar in Arendt and Foucault (and probably not by chance, although Foucault carefully avoids any reference to Arendt, even when he is commenting on the ’same’ historical sequences), is the fact that neither of them belives that processes of mass extermination, or more generally elimination, ever were possible in history, especially in Modern history, and especially from within States and Societies, without their victims being so to speak prepared for elimination, ie., progressively and institutionally marked as potential, future victims, and collectively pushed into a social symbolic corner where they acquired the status of ‘living corpses’, or masses of individuals who are neither completely ‘alive’ nor yet, already ‘dead’.
This is certainly the most shocking and embarassing aspect of the process of extermination and elimination that characterize Modernity, because it takes place within the realm and the time of legality and normality, because it is associated with the forms of rationality that we believe are inseperable from civilization, and because it is open to repetition. Both Foucault and Arendt agree that this preparation for elimination, we might also say, anticipating its philosophical diversity, this process of election of the victim and selection of its properties, is associated with Modern Europe (during the 19th and the 20th centuries) with the use of the category of ‘race’, although they don’t define ‘race’ in the same way, or they don’t choose the same aspect in the racist discursive formation to explain how individuals and groups are separated from the community or singled out within the society:
in Arendt it is the antagonistic scheme of the ‘war of the races’, concentrated on the figure of the antagonism between Semites (practically: Jews) and Aryans by political Anti-Semitism, that is prevalent, leading to a definition of the marked victim as ’superfluous person’; in Foucault it is the medical and disciplinary scheme of of ‘degeneracy’ and the alleged threat against the ‘quality’ of the population, its reproductive capacities, its moral and mental strength, whose generalized application from bourgeouis societies to socialist totalitarian regimes leads to the continuation of the category of the ‘abnormal’, or the physiologically and socially dangerous individual, where the criminal, psychiatrist and social-political categorizations typically merge.
Both Arendt and Foucault, who write in their own manner long genealogies ‘ending’ with singular events, insist on the fact that a preparation, which can be explained or at least interpreted in a causal manner, is not an acting out, and actual process of elimination, or mass elimination, which requires a political supplement, a mutation of the political. Without preparation, you cannot have elimination, but with preparation, you still don’t have the elimination itself, only its conditions of possibility.
Where Arendt and Foucault differ, of course, is about the kind of ‘totality’ within which and from which social aliens or interior enemies are internally excluded, and therefore also about the phenomenology of the exclusion, which indicates its institutional modality and the identification of its targets. Arendt, as we know, locates this process mainly at the level of the State, insisting on the transformation of the historical Nation-State into an imperialist State, and on the creation of ‘Stateless individuals’ who can then become the victims within the European States themselves of the kind of exterminationist techniques which, initially, were invented and developed in the outer space, in the course of the expansion of the colonial powers, after they have been deprived of their ‘right to have rights’, or their institutional access to the Human Condition.
Whereas Foucault locates this process in the definition of anthropological norms of sociability, even micro-sociability, which involve not only moral and sexual conformity, but more generally the whole control of the social construction of the body, and whose reverse side are the daily practices of suppression and enclosure of deviant behaviours, the ‘micro-fascisms’ of the total institutions, as Deleuze would have it, in which certain circumstances can gather together and become concentrated in the very practice of governmentality or social regulation.
We could elaborate at length on the complementarity and possible cross-over of these two models, which not by chance, certainly reproduce a classical antithesis of political community and social normativity, Vergemeinschaftung and Vergesellschaftung, Weber and Durkheim, sovereign exclusion and anomy, etc. But I think that, for our present purposes, it is more interesting to emphasize the fact that they have gneralized the idea of ‘racist discrimination leading to extermination’ by distinguishing two significantly distinct and disturbingly parallel patterns of the logic of collective identification, which implies that the individual can become ‘identified’ to others within the ‘totality’ of the community or the society, can become part of a symbolic ‘us’ or an anonymous ‘one’, only if another part, represented at the same time as an essential and inexistent, or threatening and unecessary, is eliminated, either physically or socially or both. And, ultimately, if this ‘part’ which is also a ‘non-part’, which we can call the ‘alien’, is also hunted and chased within each individual self, so that individual subjects become indiscernible from their collective identities.
These processes, I repeat, are strikingly similar at a formal level, but they are entirely dissimilar in their causes, their rhythms and legal procedures, their modes of execution, and they do not require from the governments and the public opinions the same kind of representations of the alien part of humankind, or the same education. There remains a tension, which can also means that, if we take these analyses as models to interpret the coming phenomenoa of internal exclusion within the global sphere, call it Empire or otherwise, we have different possibilities. I am not sure if this is more reassuring.
[…]
