The indeterminacy of the human of biopower : competing problematics of human security / Suvi Alt.

Abstract

This study examines the concept of human security from two different biopolitical perspectives. Although the works of both Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben offer ground for reading the discourse of human security as limiting the life lived by its subjects, this study will not seek to conflate their works - as is often done in contemporary social sciences and International Relations - but instead seeks to differentiate between a Foucauldian and an Agambenite critique of human security, and between a Foucauldian and an Agambenite account of biopolitics and biopower. Importantly, this study examines also the implications of the different problematics of human security that emerge from Agamben and Foucault's accounts of biopolitics in terms of a discussion of the different accounts of the possibility of political agency that they entail. The empirical material used in this study consists mainly of the 2003 Human Security Now report by the Commission on Human Security, Survival, Livelyhood and Dignity.

Through Agamben's work, the discourse of human security can be read as constituting 'bare life'; the human of which is essentially a desubjectified subject. For Agamben, the human has been captured by (bio)sovereign power, and the discourse of human security can be read as contributing to this (bio)sovereign subjection. A Foucauldian problematic of human security, in contrast, offers an account of the human of human security as both the object and subject of power. Human security can be seen as working through various techniques of power both on the level of the individual and on the level of the population. The framework for the deployment of the techniques of the self and techniques of domination is provided by (neo)liberalism. Whereas Foucault understands resistance as being internal to power, Agamben deems it necessary to escape the power that captures life. Agamben's work entails a rethinking of both politics and ontology as his understanding of political liberation is based on a rethinking of the concept of potentiality.

Whereas Foucault's account of power offers a more detailed and differentiated critique of human security, Agamben's metaphysical account of power sees human security as part of the transhistorical workings of power that pervade our whole understanding of life and politics. While Foucault allows for the strategic use of the discourse of rights, Agamben rejects all normative discourse. A Foucauldian critique of human security recognises that the discourse of human security can be reshaped through problematisation and competition between different discourses. An Agambenite critique of human security does not consider it possible to reshape the discourse of human security as it is predicated on the same concepts - the human, the citizen, rights, law, identity - that mark the subjection of life by power. Whereas Foucault's understanding of political agency is grounded on the conditions of the contemporary world, Agamben gestures towards rethinking 'the human' beyond those conditions.