생명관념의 기초적 고찰-기든스, 푸코, 아감벤의 정치철학적 논점을 중심으로-

Abstract

Life politics and biopolitics have become the interesting topics in recent years. In Giddensian sense life politics is a politics of self-actualisation in a late modern environment, where the reflexivity links self and body to global systems. It is related not only to the increased abilities of individuals to make choices about their way of life, but also to the increasingly intrusive medical and genetic technologies which affect them directly. Life politics creates new interdependence in the meaning of new sociability and it can increase the individual reflexivity or self-realization. On the contrary to this late modern liberal concept, biopolitics in Foucault’s analysis is not based on the individual reflexivity, but on the modern technology of governmentality that use multiple dispositifs. The new biopolitical dispositifs are born once economy and politics became imbricated with one another. On the one hand the new biopowers are interested in the human bodies and their potential, on the other they seize life and body as the object of its exercise. Biopolitics, as new process of political creativity, is concerned with the manner of managing individual/population in use of the modern methodology of discipline and regulation. Above all the Foucault’s genealogy of the modern subject reveals the interaction between the techniques of domination and techniques of self. Agamben’s analysis of modern biopolitics can be read as a radical variation of Foucault’s. On the basis of the ancient distinction between ‘zoe’ and ‘bios’ he insists that the introduction of the zoe into the sphere of bios is the decisive signal of modernity. The modern sovereign power makes bare lives(zoe) included in the political/juridical system through the exclusion of them. Both Foucault’s biopower and Agamben’s sovereign power leave no room for the autonomy of self and body of modern individuals. The difference of these three concepts lies not only in their macro-prospect of modernity, but also in the micro-analysis of the interaction between modern body, self, and power.