Cooper_Melinda_2002_THE LIVING and the DEAD- Variations on de Anima

7/29/2019 Cooper_Melinda_2002_THE LIVING and the DEAD- Variations on de Anima

1/25

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

This article was downloaded by: [University of Lancaster]On: 10 September 2009Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 906463971]Publisher RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House,37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

AngelakiPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713405211

THE LIVING AND THE DEAD: variations on de animaMelinda Cooper

Online Publication Date: 01 December 2002

To cite this Article Cooper, Melinda(2002)'THE LIVING AND THE DEAD: variations on de anima',Angelaki,7:3,81 104To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/0969725022000032490URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725022000032490

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf

This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial orsystematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply ordistribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.

The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contentswill be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug dosesshould be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss,actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directlyor indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713405211http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725022000032490http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdfhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725022000032490http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713405211http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf


2/25

Aristotles natural philosophy continues toinform our most basic assumptions aboutbiological life, even while its premises are being

undermined by technological innovations in the

biosciences. The political philosopher Giorgio

Agamben has suggested that what is at issue in

the contemporary politics of life is the produc-

tion of an absolute potentiality. This is a question

he traces back to Aristotles natural and political

philosophy, and which leads him, via Xavier

Bichat, to the ambivalent legal status of the

brain-dead in contemporary biomedical practice.

My own exploration of these issues will take me

on a different tangent, via Marx, to Aristotles

more peripheral reflections on counter-natural

generation. If Agamben locates the defining ges-

ture of modern biopower in the isolation of an

absolutely potential life, I will suggest that recent

regenerative biotechnologies require us to

think through the very different question ofdefinitizedpotentiality.

biopower

Agambens philosophical work, at least since

Means Without Ends, can be read as an extend-

ed reflection on Foucaults theses on biopower.

Foucaults argument, according to which what is

in question in the politics of the modern state is

life itself, assumes that some kind of transforma-tion in the exercise of power must be thought

through if we are to grasp the specific strategies

of this unprecedented power over life. Yet

what is decisive, and perhaps underdeveloped in

Foucaults work, according to Agamben, is the

way in which one understands the sense of this

transformation.1 In another context, he points

out that the concept of life itself remains curi-

ously elusive in Foucaults work.2 In what way

does Foucault understand the bio of biopower

and what kind of articulation between life and

power does it entail? In a series of open-ended

and tentative notes on the subject, spanning all

the seminars of the late 1970s, Foucault seems to

have enunciated a problematics that has become

ever more insistent in contemporary political phi-

losophy, while leaving the limits of life itself in astate of conceptual haziness.

In response to this absence of definition,

Agambens reading of biopower draws on a con-

ceptual distinction that he derives from

Aristotles political philosophy. In the classical

world, Agamben points out, two terms bios and

zoe were available to express what we now des-

ignate by the single word life. Hence, in

Aristotles political philosophy, the contempla-

8 1

melinda cooper

THE LIVING AND THE

DEAD

variations on de anima

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/02/030081-24 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors ofAngelakiDOI: 10.1080/0969725022000032490

ANGELAKIjou rnal of the theor eti cal humanitiesvol ume 7 number 3 december 2002


3/25

living and dead

tive life of the philosopher (bios theoretikos), the

life of pleasure (bios apolaustikos) and the polit-

ical life (bios politikos) could never have been

rendered by the term zoe, for bios always refers

to a qualified life, a form of life that determines

the otherwise bare substance of zoe. Bios canthus be equated with the grammatically qualified

use of the term zoe. In a passage where he

attempts to define the ends of the ideal political

community, Aristotle distinguishes between the

simple fact of living (to zein) and an act of living

that has been qualified in terms of an end (to eu

zein).3 The relation between qualified and

unqualified life, however, is not one of simple

opposition and it is this point that interests

Agamben. In Aristotles political philosophy, he

notes, natural or unqualified life is excluded from

political life and confined to the domestic sphere

of natural reproduction.4 But this constitutive act

of exclusion is at the same time an implication of

natural life in the political sphere, an inclusion

through which it is simultaneously qualified and

subsumed.5 Taking this gesture to be character-

istic of the Western political tradition, the fun-

damental question Agamben raises, albeit in var-

ious historical contexts, bears on the relation

between politics and life, if life presents itself aswhat is included by means of an exclusion

(ibid.).

In modern European languages, Agamben

notes, the distinction between a merely natural

and a qualified form of life has ceased to be oper-

ative. The difference, he argues, has been ren-

dered indistinct to the point that one term

only the opacity of which increases in propor-

tion to the sacralization of its referent designates

that naked presupposed common element that itis always possible to isolate in each of the numer-

ous forms of life.6 In the purely biological life

that was identified by the life sciences of the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Agamben

discovers a vital substance that no longer recog-

nizes the determinations of specific political form,

an indeterminate life that nevertheless seems to

have been wholly politicized in itself.

It is precisely the advent of biological life that

Foucault was exploring in his late seminars and

miscellaneous writings on the theme of biopower.What interested Foucault here was the peculiar

relation that modern capitalism, with its indus-

trialization of the natural and biological sciences,

had come to establish between life and politics.

In an elliptical formulation that appears in the

first volume ofThe History of Sexuality, he too

draws on Aristotles political philosophy in orderto locate the precise transformation of powers at

work in the modern era:

For millennia, man remained what he was for

Aristotle: a living animal with the additional

capacity for political existence; modern man is

an animal whose politics calls his existence as

a living being into question.7

The threshold of biological modernity, he con-

tinues, can be located at the point when biologi-

cal life comes to be included in the politics of thestate. In the seminars that follow, he identifies

this moment with the historical transition leading

from the territorial state-form to the population-

state, arguing that such a radical transformation

in the realm of political constitution necessitates

a profound rethinking of power itself, beyond the

limits of the juridical model of sovereign power.

It is on this point that Agamben questions

Foucaults thesis. For Agamben, biopower should

be interpreted as a kind of historical contortion

internal to the one exemplary political figure

inclusive exclusion rather than a transition in

the order of power which would wholly differen-

tiate the territorial state from the modern popu-

lation-state.8 Life, in his reading, is not the

excluded that only comes to be included in the

realm of the political in the modern era, but

rather that which is at once included and exclud-

ed, determined as form and excluded as sub-

stance, even in classical political philosophy. In

Aristotles political works, for example, zoe asnatural life is both separable from and already

presupposed within the political or philosophical

form of life.9 What perhaps distinguishes the

modern biopolitical state, according to Agamben,

is the fact that it offers something of a revelation

of the most secret foundations of the classical

state-form, through a kind of indetermination of

the opposition between the included and the

excluded:

Placing biological life at the center of its cal-

culations, the modern State therefore does

8 2


4/25

cooper

nothing other than bring to light the secret tie

uniting power and bare life, thereby reaffirm-

ing the bond (derived from a tenacious corre-

spondence between the modern and the archa-

ic which one encounters in the most diverse

spheres) between modern power and the most

immemorial of the arcana imperii.10

Perhaps Agambens most sustained develop-

ment on the exercise of biopower is to be found

in his reading of the modern philosopher of ter-

ritorial state power, Hobbes.11 The Hobbesian

constitution, he notes, is founded on the presup-

position of an absolute life, which must be at

once included and excluded from the realm of

the political. Drawing on the work of Carl

Schmitt, Agamben argues that the conceptual fic-

tion of the state of nature is not to be interpret-ed as that which precedes the political constitu-

tion, but rather as the state of exception that

founds its order. Life, in the state of nature, can

be defined only in terms of an absolute exposure

to violence, the unlimited right to take the life of

another, a right that also translates as an unlim-

ited danger. It is this life of absolute exposure

that the political order is required to represent,

through an act of simultaneous inclusion and

exclusion the subsumption of exposed life with-in the political form of legal personhood is the

price it must pay for protection from absolute

violence. But in this sense also, Agamben insists,

political representation implies an always latent

threat. To the extent that it protects through a

simultaneous movement of inclusion and exclu-

sion, the political order is also capable of revok-

ing or suspending its privilege. Indeed, according

to Agamben, it is the permanent possibility of its

own suspension that founds the legitimacy of

political constitution:

The state of exception, which is what the sov-

ereign each and every time decides, takes place

precisely when naked life which normally

appears rejoined to the multifarious forms of

social life is explicitly put into question and

revoked as the ultimate foundation of political

order. The ultimate subject that needs to be at

once turned into the exception and included in

the city is always naked life.12

If some kind of historical rupture is to be locat-ed in the modern state-form, it lies, according to

Agamben, in the fact that the state of exception

here tends to become the rule. In the medicaliza-

tion of life that begins with the modern bio-

sciences, it is the nude life of the biological

that is exposed to the full glare of the political

sphere and which increasingly threatens toescape the protection of legal personhood. In the

advent of modern biopower, then, Agamben

identifies nothing other than the actualization of

a threat that has always been presupposed in the

constitutive power of the sovereign state, whether

in its classical or modern forms. He therefore

relocates biopower precisely within the conceptu-

al model that Foucault was attempting to escape:

The Foucauldian thesis will then have to be

corrected or, at least, completed, in the sensethat what characterizes modern politics is not

so much the inclusion of zoe in the polis

which is, in itself, absolutely ancient nor sim-

ply the fact that life itself becomes a principal

object of the projections and calculations of

State power. Instead the decisive fact is that,

together with the process by which the excep-

tion everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of

bare life which is originally situated at the

margins of the political order gradually

begins to coincide with the political realm, and

exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside,

bios and zoe, right and fact, enter into a zone

of irreducible indistinction.13

Aristotles political philosophy, with its dis-

tinction between qualified and unqualified life,

bios and zoe, therefore continues to provide a

crucial reference point for Agambens thinking

on biopower even while he is interested in the

political effects of their indistinction.

In this article I will be interested not only inAgambens relation to Aristotles political philos-

ophy but also to his thinking on natural genera-

tion. As the De anima suggests, zoe itself is not

without formal determinations allowing us to dis-

tinguish between the different orders of natural

life vegetative, animal and human. In a recent

text, Absolute Immanence, where he is direct-

ly concerned with the philosophical legacy of

Foucaults biopower, Agamben pursues a more

detailed genealogy of his concept of bare life by

looking at the role of the plant in the De anima.Even within the order of natural life, it would

8 3


5/25

living and dead

seem that something like a bare life is both

included and separable.

bare life nutritive life

Within the history of Western philosophy,Agamben locates a decisive moment in the iden-

tification of a bare life in Aristotles De anima.

This is the moment where Aristotle isolates

amongst the various understandings of the term

to live the most general and most separable of

living substances.14 As Agamben points out,

Aristotles definition of this minimal living

substance follows the method delineated in The

Metaphysics, according to which an indifferent

and common substratum must first be identified

in order for the discrimination of the defining

attributes of a thing to take place. In general,

Aristotle contends here, when we seek a cause

both in the realms of discursive categories and of

nature, we are asking through what thing does

something belong to something else?15 Hence,

in the De anima, Aristotle tells us that it is in

virtue of the nutritive life of the plant, the facul-

ties of growth and decay, nourishment, excretion

and regeneration that all living things have

life.16 Plant life, in other words, is the minimalsubstance to which the higher functions of

animal life (sensation, perception, locomotion)

and human life (cognition) can then be attrib-

uted. It is that something which can be sepa-

rated from the higher animal and human

functions and survive on its own, while necessar-

ily inhering in all other life forms.

Within Aristotles natural philosophy, then,

the nutritive life of the plant functions as the

basis of all predication, leading up to the distinc-tively human life of the political sphere. But in

itself it exists in an unqualified state indifferent

to contradiction. This is first of all an indiffer-

ence to the founding contradiction of animal

life sexual difference. As a substance, the plant

is endowed with the power to preserve and

regenerate itself, but this is a kind of genera-

tion that takes place before the differentiation of

male and female principles, a generation that is

strangely indistinguishable from the act of self-

nourishment.17 The reproduction of animal lifepresupposes sexual difference, Aristotle writes,

but in plants the male and female principles are

undivided, wherefore they generate out of them-

selves, through seed.18 And in the sense that

sexual reproduction presupposes a first kind of

contradiction the material differentiation of

male and female forms animals seem literallyto be like divided plants.19

It is the faculty of sensation, proper to animal

life, that introduces a first level of discrimination

into the order of life forms. In the De anima,

Aristotle defines sensation as a mean that discrim-

inates between two contraries, allowing us to

judge the quality of a sense object in terms of its

deviation from the norm.20 Sensation, as a power

of discrimination at work in the senses, is what

establishes the rule of non-contradiction, accord-

ing to which it is impossible for the same thing

to be present and not be present at the same time

in the same subject.21 Nothing can be hot and

cold, black and white, male and female at the

same time, but only one or the other in potential.

It is this rule that plants ignore in their indivis-

ible, undifferentiated, insentient existence.

Hence, when Aristotle introduces the rule of

non-contradiction in The Metaphysics, he refuses

to provide a positive foundation for its logic, but

rather establishes its validity through an act ofexclusion involving that most indifferent of life

forms the plant. The rule of non-contradiction

is so essential to the categories of discourse,

Aristotle asserts here, that its justification can

simply be established by refuting anyone who

doubts it. If, on the other hand, the other person

refused to speak, the whole enterprise would be

a waste of time since this person would be like

a plant.22

Commenting on this passage, Agamben notesthat:

Insofar as they are founded on a tacit presup-

position (in this case, that someone must

speak), all refutations necessarily leave a

residue in the form of an exclusion. In

Aristotle, the residue is the plant-man, the

man who does not speak.23

In Aristotles philosophy of life, the plant is both

prior to the rule of non-contradiction, indifferent

to its decisions, and yet wholly constitutive of itslogic. It is what is left when the discriminating

8 4


6/25

cooper

power of non-contradiction gives way. When he

turns to the De anima, then, it is in the vegeta-

tive life of the plant that Agamben rediscovers

the figure of included exclusion.

sleepAristotles logic of attribution, while inherently

hierarchical, allows for a certain inclusion of each

of the higher functions in the lower ones, if only

in a dormant state. This is most evident in his

reflections on the intermittent or transient peri-

ods in which the actualized life of the animal

returns to or endures in a state of potential.

Agambens reading of De anima points us to

these intermediate states, although he doesnt

look at the specific cases identified by Aristotle in

his miscellaneous writings in natural philosophy.

One such example can be found in the case of

sleep an intermediate zone that fascinated

Aristotle and that he comes back to again and

again in his natural philosophy, offering conflict-

ing interpretations of its precise location in his

order of life forms. Defining sleep as the privation

of wakefulness and its potentiality, Aristotle

concludes that both states must be recognizable

on the basis of a common criterion perceptionor sensation.24 In the first place, then, he claims

that it would appear impossible for a plant to

sleep, since it cant even feel. At other times,

though, Aristotle seems to define sleep as a

threshold between the perceptual life of the

animal and the nutritive life of the plant, one that

is experienced when sensation exists only in

potentiality. For the animal, he writes, it repre-

sents something like a boundary between living

and not living, between sensation and insen-tience, since the sleeper is neither altogether non-

existent nor yet existent.25 In this sense,

Aristotle appears close to according the sleeping

body the status of nutritive life he points out, in

another context, that most of the nutritive func-

tions of digestion are carried out during sleep.26

It is on the basis of these hesitant distinctions

that Aristotle attempts to assign a place to the

developing foetus. In the first instance, he argues

that if life pertains to wakefulness on account of

sensation, it is possible to consider the first stagesof development as a state of sleep. Yet in another

sense, as the privation of active feeling, sleep can

be experienced only by a being who has first

acquired sensation. In this sense, then, we ought

to consider the original condition [of the foetus]

to be not sleep but only something resembling

sleep, such a condition as we find also in plants,for indeed at this time, animals do actually live

the life of a plant.27 But in the last instance even

this comparison proves to be imprecise, since the

sleep of a plant can never be interrupted,

whereas the foetus exists in a state of dormant

perceptiveness that will gradually awaken or actu-

alize into sense as it grows.

Unfolding the complexities of this argument,

Aristotles successive definitions lead us from the

idea of nutritive life as sleep to something resem-

bling sleep to something that cant be sleep in

any sense of the term, since it precludes all actu-

alization of sensation, all waking up. It is impos-

sible that plants should sleep, for there is no

sleep which cannot be broken, and the condition

in plants which is analogous to sleep cannot be

broken.28 It seems that what Aristotle is trying

to exorcise here, in his attempt to rigorously

distinguish nutritive and animal life even in

sleep, is the possibility of a purely potential or

dormant animal life that, like the plants, mightnever experience wakefulness or never wake up

again while not actually being dead. The

mutual interdependence of the potential and the

actual, of matter and form, in Aristotles philos-

ophy, means that sleep can never be separated

from its functional realization. As a potential

perceptiveness, the sleeping body can exist only

for the sake of an end. It is therefore a strict rule

for Aristotles natural philosophy that all sleep

must be subject to awakening.29

There is perhaps one instance in his work on

natural generation where Aristotle encounters an

animal life existing only in potential, in a kind of

uninterrupted sleep. This is the case of the unfer-

tilized egg, which confronts Aristotle with the

enigma of female parthenogenesis (matter from

matter, potential from potential). He raises the

enigma himself:

And yet the question may be raised why it is

that, if indeed the female possesses the same

soul and if it is the secretion of the female

which is the material of the embryo, she needs

8 5


7/25

living and dead

the male besides instead of generating entirely

from herself.30

Aristotles first response to this question is to

reiterate the generative role of paternal seed in

sexual reproduction. If the sensitive soul is lack-

ing in the reproduction of matter, it is impossi-ble for face, hand, flesh, or any other part to

exist; the matter produced will be still-born and

stunted, no better than a corpse or part of a

corpse.31 Yet the unfertilized egg represents

something of a puzzle. It is neither totally devoid

of life like an egg of wood or stone an artifice

that only has the shape (morphe) of an egg but

not the generative form. Nor is it alive or actual-

izable in the sense that it could develop into a

fully formed, feeling animal. That the unfertil-ized egg participates in some way in lifes

potential is testified to by the fact that it is at

least capable of going bad. In the last instance,

Aristotle accords the unfertilized, rotting egg, the

minimal life of the plant:

It is plain, then, that they have some soul

potentially. What sort of soul will this be? It

must be the lowest surely, and this is the nutri-

tive, for this exists in all animals and plants

alike.

But in his haste to find a solution to the enigma

of the unfertilized egg, it would seem that

Aristotle has underestimated the paradox he has

uncovered here. For although it is like a plant,

the egg is nevertheless produced by an animal.

Here, then, is an example of a purely potential

animal life, existing in a state of sleep that will

never wake up to sensation. Drawing on

Aristotles own terminology, we could define the

existence of the unfertilized egg as an uncookedor raw life in which the potential to actualize-as-

form has not simply been momentarily inter-

rupted but radically suspended. This is not to say

that potentiality as such has been extinguished,

simply that the unfertilized egg materializes a

pure potentiality, capable of preserving itself

independently of any determinate actualization.

brain death

Agambens attempt to isolate a bare nutritive lifein Aristotles philosophy of life is closely

informed by the medical experiments of the late-

eighteenth-century French vitalist Xavier Bichat.

Agamben could be seen as carrying out a kind of

conceptual autopsy following the anatomical inci-

sions traced by Bichat both in his theory and

practice.What is of interest in Bichats work, for

Agambens purposes, is the fact that he remains

within the terms of Aristotles natural philosphy,

while reversing the order of enquiry, as if the

secret of his vitalism were to be found in the dis-

continuous collapse of functions, rather than

their hierarchical accumulation and differentia-

tion into exclusive forms.

Aristotle, as we have seen, uncovers the

insistence of nutritive life within the earliest

stages of animal development the foetus

and the egg and the intermittent state of

sleep. Within his philosophy of natural genera-

tion, the role of this minimal substance is to

provide the substratum to which oppositional

difference can then be attributed. It is a

beginning the condition and starting point

of all predication. Death, on the other hand,

as a final loss of function and vital heat, seems

to hold little explicative power for Aristotle

it is of the order of accident and not ofessence.

What Agamben finds significant in Bichats

work, and representative of a larger shift in

perspective, is his fascination for life at the point

where it subsides into death. For Bichat, who is

reported to have performed an incalculable

number of autopsies, it is precisely the undoing

of organic differentiation, the progressive disso-

lution of functions, which exposes the essential

substance of vitalism. While operating within theterms of Aristotelian philosophy, his method

could be described as a dis-attribution of form,

one that reproduces what he takes to be the

general process of death, whether natural or

violent.

Following Aristotle, he compares the life of

the foetus to a state of sleep that hasnt yet awak-

ened, a nutritive life where the functions of

animal existence are present only in a state of

potential. But for Bichat this is also a state to

which animal life must return before the finalinstance of death:

8 6


8/25

cooper

in the old man external functions are extin-

guished one after another and organic life

continues even after animal life has almost

fully come to an end. From this point of view,

the condition of the living being about to be

annihilated by death resembles the state in

which we find ourselves in the maternal womb,or in the state of vegetation, which lives only

on the inside and is deaf to nature.32

Death, in Bichats philosophy, therefore becomes

a multiple, discontinuous process, as Foucault

had pointed out. Yet it is not so much death itself

that fascinated and horrified Bichat, according to

Agambens reading, but rather the lingering

survival of the nutritive functions even when all

consciousness has disappeared, the breathing,

sweating, unconscious, unfeeling body whichnevertheless isnt a corpse. Bichat rediscovers

Aristotles intermediate zone between sensorimo-

tor and nutritive life, the numb border-land

between living and not-living, but whereas

Aristotles intermediate states are all either inter-

mittent or transient, this is a loss of functions

that endures as pure potential, and can only

subside into death. His vitalist philosophy rede-

fines life as something that survives as long as it

takes to go bad in essence, a rotting egg.For Agamben, Bichats attempt to isolate a

physiological state of survival on the threshold of

death holds more than a simple scientific inter-

est. It clarifies what he takes to be a correlative

reinvention of the political sphere in the modern

liberal state-form. For whereas Aristotle situated

the space of politics at the highest level of an

order of life forms leading from and subsuming

the nutritive life of the plant in the life of the

public sphere, what is at stake in the political

strategies of the modern liberal state, according

to Agamben, is nothing other than the lowest,

most undetermined of life forms, the bare life

that sustains and survives in them all. It is this

bare substance of survival, he argues, which is

now exposed to the full glare of political decision:

In the history of Western science, the isolation

of this bare life constitutes an event that is in

every sense fundamental. When Bichat, in his

Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la

mort, distinguishes animal life, which is

defined by its relation to an external world,

from organic life, which is nothing other

than a habitual succession of assimilation and

excretion, it is still Aristotles nutritive life

that constitutes the background against which

the life of superior animals is separated and on

which the animal living on the outside is

opposed to the animal on the inside. Andwhen, at the end of the eighteenth century, as

Foucault has shown, the State started to

assume the care of life and the population as

one of its essential tasks and politics became

biopolitics, it carried out its new vocation

above all through a progressive generalization

and redefinition of the concept of vegetative or

organic life (which coincides with the biologi-

cal heritage of the nation).33

In recent medical practice, he points out, theintermediate state, which Bichat isolated in his

theoretical studies on death, has been realized as

an actual clinical condition with the help of life-

support and resuscitation technologies, and insti-

tutionalized in legal form via the category of

brain death:

And today, in discussions ofex lege definitions

of new criteria for death, it is a further identi-

fication of this bare life which is now severed

from all cerebral activity and subjects thatstill decides if a particular body will be consid-

ered alive or, instead, abandoned to the

extreme vicissitudes of transplantation.34

Bichat could not have foretold that the time

would come when medical resuscitation tech-

nology and, in addition, biopolitics would

operate on precisely this disjunction between

the organic and the animal, realizing the night-

mare of a vegetative life that indefinitely

survives the life of relation, a non-human life

infinitely separable from human existence.35

It has often been noted that the Western legal

tradition allows for no intermediate zone between

the living and the dead. The distinction between

person and thing, subject and object of right,

assumes that life and death are antinomic states

and that the frontier between the two corre-

sponds to a discontinuous moment in time. Late

twentieth-century biomedical technologies such

as the electroencephalograph, the ventilator,

cardiac defibrillation and feeding tubes, however,have made it possible to sustain the nutritive

8 7


9/25

living and dead

life of the body its heart beat and circulation

for extended periods of time, even after the cessa-

tion of all brain activity. In the clinical context,

this has led to the isolation of a bare vegetative

life in which a body is maintained in a minimal

state of survival for purposes of organ transplan-tation. The right to exploit living organs and

tissues for medical ends, which at first glance

would seem to profoundly contradict the tradi-

tional rights of the person, has been secured via

a redefinition of the legal distinction between the

living and the dead. On the one hand, the under-

standing of life and death as antinomic states has

been upheld in nominal terms, the bodily

integrity of the living person has suffered no

violation. Yet, at the same time, the legally perti-

nent moment of death has been realigned to coin-

cide with brain death rather than the final

cessation of all nutritive functions. This inno-

vation has meant that the intermediate state of

vegetative survival, which allows a body to

outlive its cerebral death for up to a year, is in

effect relegated outside the domain of right and

equated with legal death. Life-support technolo-

gies introduce the brain-dead body into a space

of paradoxical inclusion and exclusion from the

domain of right, where it is at once totally anobject of juridical decision yet still alive in biolog-

ical and clinical terms.36

Here, then, is a lucid illustration of the way in

which the technical production of a minimal life

intersects with and suspends classical legal cate-

gories to reveal a state of exception latent

within the space of right. For in the terms of the

Western legal tradition, the nutritive life of the

body is assumed to coincide with the rights of

personhood, guaranteeing that as long as it livesand dies with the whole person, it will be safe.

But when it becomes technically possible to

sustain the tissues, fluids and functions of the

body long after the death of the person, the

protection offered by this coincidence breaks

down, and the surviving body drifts into an

exceptional zone on the threshold between

personhood and thinghood.37

In this sense, Agamben argues, Foucaults

formula definition for the shift from a sovereign

to a biopolitical exercise of power, needs to berevised:

Foucault defines the difference between

modern biopower and the sovereign power of

the old territorial State through the crossing of

two symmetrical formulae. To make die and to

let live summarizes the procedure of old sover-

eign power, which exerts itself above all as the

right to kill; to make live and to let die is,instead, the insignia of biopower, which has as

its primary objective to transform the care of

life and the biological as such into the concern

of State power [A] third formula can be

said to insinuate itself between the two, a

formula that defines the most specific trait of

twentieth-century biopolitics: no longer either

to make die or to make live, but to make

survive. The decisive activity of biopower in

our time consists in the production not of life

or death, but rather of a mutable and virtuallyinfinite survival. In every case, it is a matter of

dividing animal life from organic life, the

human from the inhuman, the witness from

the Muselmann, conscious life from vegetative

life maintained functional through resuscita-

tion techniques, until a threshold is reached:

an essentially mobile threshold that, like the

borders of geopolitics, moves according to the

progress of scientific and political technolo-

gies. Biopowers supreme ambition is to

produce, in a human body, the absolute sepa-

ration of the living being and the speaking

being, zoe and bios, the inhuman and the

human survival.38

In other words, biopower, as Agamben under-

stands it, works to produce a survival that entails

an extreme dis-attribution of life functions, an

isolation of the minimal substance inherent in

but also separable from all qualified life forms. It

is an exercise of power that seeks to maintain and

preserve the intermediate state of sleep thatAristotle locates on the borders between life

forms, in the moments when the higher functions

of animal life revert to potential. Here, however,

what is at stake is the production of a life

sustained as pure potential, since it has been

definitively separated from the power to actualize

or reawaken into the functional and whole

organic form to which it should rightfully belong.

In brain death, the body is kept alive, even resus-

citated if it suffers a heart attack, but it has been

excluded from the right to reawaken as the juridi-cal person it once coincided with.

8 8


10/25

cooper

absolute potential

In an important essay dating from 1986, entitled

On Potentiality, Agamben attempts to formu-

late the essential preoccupation of his philosophy

in the form of a question:

I could state the subject of my work as an

attempt to understand the meaning of the verb

can [potere]. What do I mean when I say: I

can, I cannot?39

In this essay Agamben presents his miscellaneous

investigations into the fields of literature, linguis-

tics and philosophy in terms of a common reflec-

tion on the Aristotelian concepts of potentiality

and actualization, dynamis and energeia. We are

so used to reading Aristotles work as a theory of

the faculties, Agamben reminds us, that we tend

to obscure the crucial question of the relation

between potentiality and actuality, the more or

less intermediate states of alteration that deter-

mine the coming-to-be of potentialized matter,

within the notion of a faculty. Unlike the

Megarians, who only recognize becoming in act,

Aristotle accords a positive existence to poten-

tiality, such that it can never be simply absorbed

into this or that determinate actualization. It is

this pre-existence of potentiality, Agambensuggests, that might explain what otherwise

appears to be an aporia in Aristotles philosophy

of sensation. In the second book of the De

anima, for example, Aristotle insists on the fact

that there is no sensation of the senses them-

selves, no feeling in the capacity to feel:

But there is a difficulty as to why it is that

there is not also a sense of the senses them-

selves. There is also a difficulty as to why the

senses do not produce sensation without exter-nal bodies, there being in them fire, earth and

other elements, which are objects of sensation

either in themselves or by their accidents. But

it is clear that the perceptive faculty is not in

activity, but only in potentiality and for that

reason does not perceive on its own, just as the

combustible thing is not burnt in itself without

the thing that burns.40

For Aristotle, it would seem, sensibility in act

presupposes a prior state of insentience.

Sensation must be capable of a state of non-contradiction, a logical numbness, before it can

awaken into the principle of non-contradiction

which assigns it into this particular form while

excluding it from another. But Agamben asks

here how can a sensation exist in the

absence of sensation? How can an aisthesis exist

in the state of anesthesia?41

The importantthing to note here, he stresses, is that Aristotelian

potentiality in no way signifies the simple priva-

tion of a function in act. In its dormant state of

insentience, the power-to-feel surpasses, in its

available possibilities, the actualized sensation.

For whereas energeia is committed to a determi-

nate form, potentiality retains the power to

become and not to become, to actualize and not

to actualize. Contrary to energeia, it holds the

power of its own impotence. In Agambens

words:

All potential to be or do something is, for

Aristotle, always also potential not to be or not

to do (dynamis me einai, dynamis me

energein) without which potentiality would

always already have passed into act and be

indistinguishable from it.42

Hence, sensation, as Aristotle conceives it, repre-

sents not so much a faculty but rather an insen-

tience that is capable of persisting in its owndormant state, irreducible to the forms it might

or might not become.

At the same time, however, Aristotle always

in effect couples the power to be and not to be

with its end. While according potentiality an

irreducible existence, he is unwilling to envisage

a potential life that might be sustained in its

bare indetermination, without reference to actu-

alization. As we have seen, Aristotles examples

of potential life are all either intermittent, tran-sient or aborted. As all movement implies rest,

the waking state that actualizes the life of the

animal requires an intermittent return to poten-

tial but this return can never be permanent.

Likewise, the dormant state of the foetus is the

first stage in a movement of progressive actual-

ization into organic form. And the unfertilized

egg only survives long enough to rot. For

Aristotle, sensation can flicker in and out of

anesthesia, but there is no permanent, uninter-

rupted state of numbness unless we count thelimit case of the unfertilized egg. As he himself

8 9


11/25

living and dead

states in very simple terms, there is no sleep

without waking.

Agamben, on the other hand, operates a radi-

cal isolation of that which remains separable but

never in fact separated in Aristotles thinking a

vegetative life of pure potentiality come unstuckfrom all predication.

In the very same movement, he diagnoses the

political gesture that he takes to be characteristic

of modern biopower. In the body on life support

and the preserved body parts of the organ banks,

he discovers a power of sensation that exists in a

state ofanesthesia, a numb potentiality for life

that has been rendered clinically incapable of

resuscitation into the organic form it once actu-

alized.43 Not that the clinical isolation of a vege-

tative life signifies an utter powerlessness or an

exclusion from all possible actualization. It is just

that there is nothing in the bare life of the

donor organ that commits it to this form over

that, this person over another. In the absence of

all exclusive determination, the organ has taken

on what Agamben calls a whatever existence:

For if it is true that whatever being always has

a potential character, it is equally certain that

it is not capable of only this or that specific

act, nor is it therefore simply incapable, lack-ing in power, nor even less is it indifferently

capable of everything, all-powerful: the being

that is properly whatever is able to not-be, it is

capable of its own impotence.44

The organ for transplant acquires the freedom to

reactualize in whatever determination, in what-

ever form, although it is not indifferently

exchangeable it has been expropriated from the

body it rightfully belongs to.

What is involved in the exercise of biopower,as Agamben reads it, is thus a double movement

of dis-attribution of organic form, in which the

various qualified forms of life are stripped back

to reveal their bare substance, and what we might

call an infinite transplantation of functions.

The isolation of an undetermined and unpredi-

cated vital substance is what allows a selective re-

assignation of identities:

a survival separated from the possibility of any

testimony, a kind of absolute biopolitical

substance that, in its isolation, allows for the

attribution of demographic, ethnic, national

and political [and, we might add, organic]

identity.45

It is within the tensions of this double stratagem

that Agamben situates his own investigation. Two

moments might be identified in his philosophy.There is the frozen animation of the intermediate

zone in which he isolates the state ofanesthesia

at the heart of all sensation. But this freeze-

framing is also what allows him to think the free-

dom of substitutability, the transplantation of

potentialities outside the distinction of species

and genus, universal and singular, which is the

subject of his work on community. In this sense,

Agamben situates his philosophical investigation

in the ambivalent tensions of modern biopower,in which the freedom and happiness of human

beings is played out on the very terrain bare

life that marks their subjection to power.46

nutritive life or monstrous life?

If Agamben unsettles Aristotles philosophy of

natural generation, it is to the extent that he is

interested in those moments where the orders of

life subside into each other, become indistinct, go

to sleep. His philosophy of absolute potentialitycryogenizes the organ and liberates it, in

suspended animation, from the constraints of

determinate form. But this is still a way of

remaining within the thresholds defined by the

theory of organic generation even if the point

is no longer to ascend that order, from the

vegetable to the human, but rather to identify the

intermediate zones where inclusion blurs into

exclusion and all higher forms of life collapse

into the simple, self-preservative existence of theplant. Even when he envisages the exchange of

potentialized organs across the limits of form,

Agamben never challenges Aristotles natural

philosophy as a theory of genesis.

Yet there is another dimension in Aristotles

philosophy of natural generation one that is to

be found not so much in the intermediate zones

of his attributive logic but rather in those chance

encounters, eruptions of error and hiccups in the

order of genealogies that he relegates to the

peripheries of his world. At various points in hisnatural and political philosophy, Aristotle comes

9 0


12/25

cooper

up against the problem of counter-natural gener-

ation productions, conceptions and growths

that go counter to the ends of nature, proliferat-

ing outside the limits of finite form. These

biological deformities are of the order of excess

or accident. As such, they constitute a directchallenge to the fundamental postulate of

Aristotelian philosophy, which states that nature

always acts in accordance with an immanent end.

Because of this, he can only register their occur-

rence in the form of an exception to the rule,

random epiphenomena interrupting but never

occasioning the generative process:

For the monstrosity belongs to the class of

things contrary to Nature, not any and every

kind of Nature, but Nature in her usual oper-ations; nothing can happen contrary to Nature

considered as eternal and necessary, but we

speak of things being contrary to her in those

cases where things generally happen in a

certain way but may also happen in another

way.47

To take these phenomena seriously then would

mean straying outside the bounds of Aristotles

natural philosophy, perhaps towards a conception

of nature more akin to that of Lucretius, whobegins where Aristotle stops with the thesis of

the generative role of chance.

counter-natural generation i:krematistike

Nature, according to Aristotle, engenders its

forms in view of an immanent, final causality.48

Within this perspective, a movement can be said

to be natural provided it acts in accordance withan internal principle, a limit that allows it to

move or grow until it arrives at some completion,

whether it be a form or a stopping point.49 In the

order of higher life forms, it is paternal genera-

tion, the reproduction of the father in the son,

that Aristotle takes to be the most natural of

movements. The natural generation of life there-

fore involves a regular transmission of form or

paternal seed from father to son, without excess

or deviation. That is, if nothing interferes.50

For Aristotle doesnt entirely exclude the possi-bility of accidents in the generation of life

forms he simply argues that their rarity

confirms the presence of an otherwise normative

rule. The accident can be defined as what falls

short of an end or what is in excess of an end. In

either case, it is something that disrupts the regu-

lative function of the limit in nature, abolishingmeasure and proportion, and interfering with the

transmission of form. In some cases, Aristotle

concedes, the accident can be generative but

what it engenders is a monster. In the Physics,

for example, he evokes the case of an ox born

with a human head, and in the Generation of

Animals we encounter similar stories of hybrid

births or two-headed animals. These counter-

natural generations, he contends, can only be

explained as the result of some accidental inter-

ference in the transmission of paternal seed, the

corruption of some principle corresponding to

what is now the seed, failures in the purposive

effort.51 Biological monstrosities therefore

belong to the class of things unlike the parent

and can involve both excess or deficiency in

the growth of the body.52 This is as far as he gets

in his natural philosophy.

However, Aristotle does return to the question

of counter-natural generation in the unexpected

context of the Politics, in a passage where he isconcerned with the uses and misuses of economic

exchange, the movement or changing-around

of money. Here again, we encounter the question

of a (re)production that escapes the natural ends

of the domestic sphere. This time, what is at

issue is the economic art of reproduction he calls

krematistike.

To understand the distinction Aristotle is

attempting to make here between a natural and

counter-natural movement of exchange, it is firstnecessary to look at his conception of value one

that underlies Marxs later theory of value in the

first book ofCapital.53

It is in the Nicomachean Ethics that Aristotle

puts forward a rigorous theory of value, even

though, according to Marx, he fails in the last

instance to identify the precise essence of the

value-form and the reason for its exchangeability.

In this particular passage, Aristotle defines value

as what allows us to establish a proportional

equivalence between things (a house and shoesfor example) that arent of themselves commen-

9 1


13/25

living and dead

surable. For if exchange is to take place, the

things which are to be exchanged should in

some way be comparable.54 This equalization of

exchange is what founds the association of free

men in a political community: for neither would

an association of men be possible withoutexchange, nor exchange without equalization, nor

equalization without measurement by the same

unit.55 Money therefore represents the conven-

tional sign of equivalence, the mean or the

measure that is designed to ensure the reciprocal

proportion of exchanges within the political

sphere, and to ward off excess or disproportion:

[coinage] somehow operates as an intermediate

or a mean; for it measures all goods exchanged

and hence both excess and deficiency.56

Ultimately, according to Aristotle, the centripetal

point that allows this movement of measured and

limited changing-around to be established lies

outside the sphere of exchange in the unit of

measurement provided by need:

In reality, this measure is the need which

holds all things together; for if man had no

needs at all or no needs of a similar nature,

there would be no exchange or not this kind

of exchange.57

Provided exchange continues to be governed by

need, then, its movement can be defined as

natural. For as Aristotle explains in Book IV of

the Physics, a natural movement is one that both

measures and is measured by the number or

time.58 In the last instance, all movements in the

lunar and sub-lunar world are circumscribed

within the eternal return of time and the infinite,

circular and continuous movement of the

perpetuum mobile a movement that is perfect,according to Aristotle, because its starting point

perpetually coincides with its finishing point, and

although infinite it is nevertheless limited or

measured in relation to an immobile fulcrum.59

This is a centripetal universe that admits of no

ellipses, a world without expansion. But just as at

certain points in the Physics Aristotle evokes the

problem of unnatural movements that threaten

to unsettle the subordination of number and time

to the immobile motor, he identifies two possible

movements of changing-around in the politicalsphere.

While using the term krematistike to define all

kinds of wealth acquisition, Aristotle distin-

guishes between a good krematistike, which is

the art of accumulating goods for the purposes of

the domestic sphere, and a bad one, whose most

tangible expression is exchange-for-interest orusury.

If the practice of usury represents a danger for

the cohesion of the political sphere, according to

Aristotle, it is because it separates coinage (right-

fully defined as the unit of exchange and its

limit) from the constraints of need.60 Usury

demeasures value by speculating on its future

realization invented as a security for making a

future exchange, money thus becomes an end

unto itself, and exchange is initiated with a view

to accumulating value itselfas other than itself,

value-as-excess or surplus, coinage as interest.61

Such a movement can only be limitless, since it

encounters no external ends in the sphere of

domestic reproduction:

And to the wealth that comes from this mode

of acquiring goods there is in fact no limit

So while in one way it seems that there is

necessarily a limit to wealth, in the event we

observe that the opposite occurs: all those

engaged in acquiring goods go on increasingtheir coin without limit.62

Here we have the exceptional case of a number

(coinage) that returns to itself while no longer

coinciding with itself, of a future (interest) that

realizes a past (loan) in the form of excess, a

movement that is not only limitless in the sense

that it perpetually returns to itself but also

unmeasured and unmeasurable, since at the same

time it never stops exceeding itself, proliferating,expanding. In terms of Aristotles philosophy of

generation, such a movement can only be

described as counter-natural.63

In both cases, Aristotle contends, the art of

exchange can be explained in terms of a preoc-

cupation with life. But whereas the art of house-

hold management is wholly contained within the

ends of the good life, whose satisfaction is not

limitless, the practice of usury is inseparable

from a life of excess the production of sensa-

tion outside the discriminating mean of propor-tion. More precisely, the distinction hinges on the

9 2


14/25

cooper

difference between two ways of getting pleasure.

The good life, as Aristotle defines it, is one

in which the pursuit of sensation is contained

within the domestic sphere and where pleasure is

regulated by the end to which it is assigned by

nature the transmission of paternal seed fromone generation to the next. The art of acquisition,

on the other hand, evokes the dangers of a plea-

sure escaping the ends of paternal reproduction,

a pursuit of pleasure that becomes an end unto

itself and therefore without limit self-accumu-

lating. Following the premise that all vice lies in

excess or default, Aristotle draws a direct analogy

between the excessive pursuit of pleasure and

that other form of reprehensible accumulation

the production of interest from exchange:

The cause of this disposition is preoccupation

with life but not with the good life; so, desire

for the former being unlimited, they also

desire productive things without limit. Those

who do actually aim at the good life seek what

brings the pleasures of the body; so, as this too

appears to lie in property, their whole activity

centres on getting goods; and the second type

of skill in acquiring goods has come about

because of this. For since their pleasure is in

excess, men look for the art which producesthe excess that brings the pleasure. And if they

cannot procure it by means of the skill of

acquiring goods, they attempt to do so by

means of something else that causes it, using

each of their faculties in a manner contrary to

nature.64

What Aristotle denounces in the art of acquisi-

tion is a form of counter-natural generation a

male parthenogenesis. Coinage here becomes

father and son to itself, but no longer respects the

rule of normative transmission that would ensure

a proportional resemblance between generations.

It introduces an excess into the order of gener-

ation and produces a monster the proliferative

offspring of exchange, an interest that never

stops growing (the Greek word for interest,

tokos, means both child and revenue):

For coinage came into being for the sake of

changing-round, whereas interest increases the

amount of the thing itself. That is where it got

its name from: for what resembles a parent is

precisely the offspring, and interest is born as

coinage from coinage. And so, of all ways of

acquiring goods, this one is actually the most

contrary to nature.65

Here is a growth that encounters no limit either

in magnitude or time, the coming to be of a

substance that never perishes and therefore neverenters into the successive time of generation.

This is a substance that is father and son to itself,

and where the son continually calls into being the

father, where the promise of future returns is

what gives value a kind of speculative presence

before it is realized as such.66

counter-natural generation ii:female parthenogenesis

Aristotles comments on the art of chrematistics

can be read in parallel with the discussion of

female parthenogenesis we encountered in the

Generation of Animals. For whereas the counter-

natural generation of number from number and

time from time takes place in the immaterial

sphere of exchange, what he raises in the

Generation of Animals, at least as a question, is

the possibility of a material auto-generation, a

parthenogenesis of potential.

His response to the question is immediatelynegative. It is impossible for the female to gener-

ate from herself, Aristotle states here, because

the male seed is what provides the sensitive soul

or form in conception, whereas the female

menstrual blood provides the matter. Form, he

argues elsewhere, is what congeals the potential-

ized fluid of female menstrual blood into the

organic body with its differentiated parts and

functions. It also acts as an end and limit to

growth, following the rule that of all things thatare put together in nature there is a limit and

formula of their size and growth.67 But at this

point Aristotle eradicates the question of a

growth without limit by simply reiterating the

natural law that without form, surface or organic

ends, there is no life: if the sensitive soul is not

present, either actually or potentially, and either

with or without qualification, it is impossible for

face, hand, flesh or any other part to exist; it will

be no better than a corpse or part of a corpse.68

We have seen that the one (ambiguous) exam-ple of a female parthenogenesis Aristotle can

9 3


15/25

come up with in this context is the case of the

unfertilized egg a potential animal life that only

survives long enough to rot. Its unrealized poten-

tial signifies a dead end in his thinking a full

stop. This is the limit beyond which he refuses to

think the question of material generation.This limit is reiterated in his cosmology in the

form of a general law prohibiting the infinite

expansion of space, matter and bodies. In

general, if it is impossible that there should be an

infinite place, and if every body is in place, there

cannot be an infinite body.69 What is at stake

here is the very centring of movement and time

in the Aristotelian universe. For if matter could

regenerate itself as something always greater than

itself, and if the radius of the universe never

stopped expanding, the circular, measured return

of time would be decentred. The generation of

matter from matter, outside the limits of surface

and form, goes counter not only to Aristotles

natural philosophy but also to the most funda-

mental laws of his cosmological thought.

But following the example of counter-natural

generation identified by Aristotle in the art of

chrematistics, we might at least ask what would

happen if by a freak of nature matter could

reproduce itself outside the limits of form. Whatwould this monstrous generation give birth to?

An at least tentative response to this question can

be found in Aristotles negative formulations on

the question of female parthenogenesis.

The offspring of a material birth without

paternal seed, he tells us, if only in the oblique

form of a radical impossibility, could only be

without face, hand, flesh, or any other part, a

formless, organless matter, something like

uncongealed blood.70

And if we were to pursuethe paradox of female parthenogenesis beyond

the limits of Aristotles thinking, we could also

deduce that this would be a matter without

death immortal in the sense that, in the absence

of form, it would encounter no finitude or limit

to its growth, though neither could it come to life

as an actualized body.

An approximation of such a monstrous birth

can be found in the cases of actual birth defects

that Aristotle enumerates in the Generation of

Animals. These deformities, which can beascribed to a deficiency of form in the organiza-

tion of maternal matter, include the multiplica-

tion or loss of parts problems of magnitude in

other words as well as misplaced organs and

sexual indifferentiation, both of which indicate a

failure of the principle of non-contradiction:

Sometimes animals are born with too manytoes, sometimes with one alone, and so on with

the other parts, for they may be multiplied or

they may be absent. Again, they may have the

generative parts doubled, the one being male

the other female Changes and deficiencies

are found also in the internal parts, animals

either not possessing some at all, or possessing

them in a rudimentary condition, or too

numerous or in the wrong place. No animal,

indeed, has ever been born without a heart,

but they are born without a spleen or twospleens or with one kidney And all these

phenomena have been seen in animals perfect

and alive.71

In the partial absence of form, matter seems to

undergo a definitization in which potentiality

escapes the law of non-contradiction, engender-

ing a hermaphrodite or proliferating into multi-

ple non-exclusive organs and monstrous growths,

or simply not actualizing at all.

marx the immortal life of value

In an early notebook on the De anima, Marx

presents Aristotle as a diviner of springs:

Aristotles depth of spirit digs up the most

speculative questions in the most astonishing

manner. It is the manner of a treasure-hunter.

Wherever shrubs or ravines or whatever

manner of spring surges up, that is where his

divining rod infallibly points.72

Marxs reading suggests that Aristotles philo-

sophical divining-rod is directed towards the

source of generation in all its forms, whether in

his cosmological, natural or political thought.

And it is precisely this question that animates the

first book ofCapital, where Marx is concerned

with pinpointing the source of value, and ulti-

mately of productivity itself, in a polemics

against the operative illusions of capital. It is not

surprising, then, that the language Marx adopts

to resolve what is presented as an essentiallyeconomic problem, constantly draws on the

living and dead

9 4


16/25

cooper

processes of generation life, fertility, sterility,

coming-to-be and passing away that abound in

Aristotles natural philosophy.

What Marx is seeking to divine here, following

Aristotles method, is the source from which

value is generated:

Here a task is set us the task of tracing

the genesis of [the] money-form, of developing

the expression of value implied in the value-

relation of commodities, from its simplest,

almost imperceptible outline, to the dazzling

money-form.73

This is a task that Aristotle initiated in the

Nicomachean Ethics. But here is one instance,

according to Marx, in which Aristotles divining

powers failed him. For while he identifies value

as the expression of a relation of proportionate

equality, Aristotle fails to locate the source of

equalization, the something that is common to

both houses and shoes, to distinct use values. In

the last instance, Aristotle explains the value-rela-

tion as a conventional expression of need. Marx,

on the other hand, contends that the exchange-

ability value finds its material source in the social

organization of production, an insight that was

unavailable to the classical world with its foun-dations in slave labour.74

For Marx, then, the proportional equivalence

of exchange value lies not in need, but in the

communal substance of labour. Its genesis can be

traced to the sphere of production, rather than

the domestic economy of the household.

Moreover, he defines the substance of value in

temporal terms. Labour is a consumable use

value, but one whose consumption can be

measured as an expenditure of time. In themarketplace of exchange, this use value appears

inasmuch as it represents a certain quantum of

exchangeable labour-time the average, social-

ized labour-time required to produce a given

commodity. It is the equalization of time, accord-

ing to Marx, which determines the exchangeabil-

ity of value, as well as all deviations from the

principle of equal exchange. As such, it functions

as a law of equivalence in his theory of the value-

form, a normative reference point which enables

him to establish the genesis of value on the postu-late of equality and to denounce the creation of

surplus value as an extortion of excess-time the

production of an inequality.

As a normative limit to production, Marx situ-

ates the law of equivalence on the border between

the natural and the social it represents, in his

words, both an over-riding law of Nature and asocial measurement that underlies like a hidden

secret the apparent movement of exchange.75

For the value of labour-time is determined on the

one side by the socialized movement of exchange

and on the other by the limits inherent in organic

life. In order to produce exchangeable value, the

labourer whom Marx assumes to be male

must first be able to sustain his organic existence:

Given the individual, the production of labor-

power consists in his reproduction of himselfor his maintenance. For his maintenance he

requires a given quantity of the means of

subsistence. Therefore the labor-time requisite

for the production of labor-power reduces

itself to that necessary for the production of

those means of subsistence.76

The time of organic life the time needed to

preserve and maintain the organic existence of

the worker thus represents the lower limit to

the law of equivalence, the point below which the

time of production can no longer be compressed.

But it is in the sphere of sexual reproduction

that we might posit the ultimate source and limit

of value-production and hence the ultimate refer-

ent of the law of equivalence. For as Marx points

out later on in the same passage, the law of equiv-

alence must include not only the time needed to

maintain and preserve organic life but also the

time of its reproduction a point that is often

overlooked in readings of Marx:

The owner of labor-power is mortal. If then his

appearance in the market is to be continuous,

and the continuous conversion of money into

capital assumes this, the seller of labor-power

must perpetuate himself, in the way that

every living individual perpetuates himself, by

procreation. The labor-power withdrawn from

the market by wear and tear and death, must

be continually replaced by, at the very least, an

equal amount of fresh labor-power. Hence the

sum of the means of subsistence necessary for

the production of labor-power must include

the means necessary for the laborers substi-

9 5


17/25

tutes, ie. his children, in order that this race of

peculiar commodity-owners may perpetuate its

appearance on the market.77

As this passage makes clear, the understanding of

production that informs Marxs theory of value in

the first book of Capital is predicated on a

particular logic of natural generation the finite

life of the organism and the successive time of

sexual reproduction. The time required to repro-

duce mortal, organic life is what determines, in

the last instance, the minimal value of labour. As

such, Marxs theory of value presupposes the

analogical relation between economic production

and sexual reproduction that he had established

as early as the German Ideology.78

Such a thesis implies that the time of repro-duction is that without which all other produc-

tivity would be impossible, the incompressible

lower limit to the creation of value. Here, then,

in the finite time of organic life, lies the full solu-

tion to the genesis of value the source and

measure of all generation, biological or economic.

Marxs attempt to divine the source of value leads

him to a twofold solution, in which the produc-

tion of economic value is inseparable from the

reproduction of organic life.

It is on the basis of this law of equivalence that

Marx distinguishes between two economies of

circulation.

In the movement of simple exchange, C-M-C,

value simply mediates the exchange of commodi-

ties and is extinguished in the consumption of a

use value. The movement of exchange is here

subservient to the ends of organic life, where

desire is consumed within the successive time ofsexual generation, and the life of the organism is

expended in the labour of self-preservation.

On the other hand, the formula for capital, M-

C-M, describes a movement in which value-in-

circulation has no other end but its own return to

itself, where time no longer mediates the

exchange of use values, but enters, as it were,

into private relations with itself.79 In capitalist

circulation, Marx notes, value is never defini-

tively expended or consumed in production, but

simply advanced in view of a future return.Although circular, then, its movement is not

tautological. In the return of value to value, capi-

tal speculates on its own future realization as

something in excess of itself. Value returns to its

point of departure only to depart again as credit,

and anticipated profit. The value originally

advanced not only remains intact while incirculation, but adds to itself a surplus-value or

expands itself.80 The movement of capital can

therefore be described as limitless, Marx

comments, not only in the sense that it inces-

santly returns to itself but also because it never

stops exceeding itself, expanding its future.81 At

this point in his argument, Marx refers to a foot-

note in which he cites the full text of Aristotles

discussion of the krematistike in the Politics in

capitalism, he notes, it is as if the movement of

exchange-for-interest, which represented a

peripheral danger to the economy of the Greek

city, had now become the dominant mode of

exchange to the extent that it even appears to

initiate the process of production.82

And like Aristotle, Marx describes the move-

ment of capital in terms of a counter-natural

power of generation, one that escapes the limited

ends of organic (re)production. This is a life that

never stops growing, where eggs beget eggs, and

money coughs up money, ad infinitum.Because it is value, it has acquired the occult

quality of being able to add value to itself. It

brings forth living offspring, or, at least, lays

golden eggs, M-M, money which begets

money such is the description of Capital from

the mouths of its first interpreters, the

Mercantilists.83

Whereas the organic life of labour cannot live

on the products of the future, what Marx discov-

ers in the logic of capital accumulation isprecisely the speculative animation of value

consuming and re-engendering itself in the

future.84 The consistency of value is here purely

dissipative, without chronological self-presence

it cannot be realized in the here and now, in this

or that determinate use value. If it is to survive

as such it can only be in a future mode, as an

after-life that needs to sustain itself in constant

growth in order to enable production in the

present. Marxs formula for capitalism therefore

points to an inversion of powers between past andfuture, production and profit, in which the after-

living and dead

9 6


18/25

cooper

life of a life that has not yet been lived, the

purely speculative existence of a future profit,

realizes and gives birth to the past of production.

Hence, in a Christianized paraphrasing of

Aristotles notes on interest-from-exchange, Marx

represents the trinity as an unnatural union inwhich the future engenders the past, the son

begets the father, in order to give birth to an

immaculately conceived surplus value:

instead of simply representing the relations of

commodities, [value] enters now, so to say,

into private relations with itself. It differenti-

ates itself as original value from itself as

surplus-value; as the father differentiates

himself from himself qua the son, yet both are

one and of one age: for only by the surplus-

value of 10 pounds does the 100 pounds origi-nally advanced become capital, and so soon as

this takes place, so soon as the son, and by the

son, the father, is begotten, so soon does their

difference vanish, and they again become one,

110 pounds.85

Capital, in other words, appears to become father

and son to itself, through a process of sponta-

neous generation, although its self-generative

movement is inhabited by an excessiveness that

defies the laws of natural reproduction.

Despite the revisions that Marx brings to

Aristotles theory of value, the first book of

Capitalremains within the general categories of

Aristotles political economy, with its distinction

between a limited and limitless movement of

exchange, a natural and counter-natural genera-

tion. Locating the source of exchangeable value

within the time of organic (re)production, Marx

denounces the self-accumulative powers of capi-tal as the effect of an extortion of excess labour-

time. The speculative movement of capital

nevertheless insinuates itself into the time of

production, and seems at least to take on a gener-

ative role in relation to the productive process. It

is this illusion that Marx is precisely interested in

dissipating here, by re-establishing the correct

order of priorities between production and circu-

lation, the successive time of organic life and the

speculative time of capital. This is not to say that

the illusion is inoperative or without materialeffects nor that these material effects can be

simply conjured away. Rather, it is a question for

Marx of a material revolution that would reap-

propriate time itself within the sphere of produc-

tion.

But the extent to which the determination of

the source of generation remains an open, unre-solved question in Marxs thinking is often

underestimated. The differences between Capital

and the Grundrisse notes are illuminating in this

respect. For in the Grundrisse, Marx opens his

discussion of capital circulation with the state-

ment that it is impossible to derive value from

labour, and that to develop the concept of capi-

tal it is necessary to begin not with labor but with

value, and, precisely with exchange value in an

already developed movement of circulation.86

Moreover, the Grundrisse notes predict the even-

tual marginalization of industrial human labour-

time as a limit to value-creation, in a production

process that, according to Marxs historical diag-

nosis, would come to be increasingly integrated

within the movement of circulation and its spec-

ulative temporality. In effect, the critique that

Marx puts forward here, ten years before the

publication of the first book ofCapital, under-

mines the very basis of the law of value or equiv-

alence (and would seem to predict theobsolescence of the theory of human surplus

value).87

What such a critique might allow us to

question although Marx doesnt do the work

himself is the order of priorities between

natural and counter-natural generation, organic

and immortal life, that underlies the theory of

value expounded in the first book ofCapital.

More tentatively, the questioning of the law of

equivalence as a normative rule could perhaps beextended beyond the economic sphere per se to

include the sexual dimension of Marxs theory of

production (here I understand sexual in the

widest sense of the term to include the processes

of life, death, generation, fertility, sterility ). In

effect, it is striking how accurately Marxs

metaphorical formulations on the counter-

natural generation of value seem to articulate

what is at stake in certain forms of contemporary

biotechnological production. What I am inter-

ested in here are those biotechnologies that callinto question the finitude of organic life the

9 7


19/25

limits of form, species, generational time and

sexual difference in the regeneration of the body.

Has the accumulative power of value begun to

invest our biological life? Before we could even

begin to explore this possibility we would have to

interrogate the assumption that the time oforganic life represents an ultimate and incom-

pressible limit to production in general, whether

economic or biological. This is a question that

Marx was unable to entertain but perhaps this

impossibility reflects more on the social condi-

tions of production of the late nineteenth century

rather than the possibilities of capitalism itself.

stem cells parthenogenic life

Such a question could be raised in relation to any

number of recent biotechnologies. But it is

perhaps in the field of stem cell research that it

would seem to hold a particular resonance.

In 1998 embryonic stem cells (ES) were grown

in culture for the first time.88 ES cells are early

universal cells that exist first of all in an undif-

ferentiated state, but have the potential to turn

into almost any somatic cell in the human body.

For this reason, they are considered to be

pluripotent. ES cells derived from an earlyhuman embryo are capable of unlimited, undif-

ferentiated proliferation in vitro. In principle,

such cells can be raised in culture to grow and

divide for ever, in a state that prevents them

from specializing into this or that particular cell.

When these cells are transferred to a nutrient

bath, however, they commence the differentia-

tion process, generating a multitude of specific

cell types.

Research into stem cells, both in the embryoand the adult body, has raised questions about

the experimental possibilities of manipulating the

time of growth. Might it be possible to return the

adult cell to a state of pluripotent dedifferentia-

tion? Would it be feasible to reactivate and

modulate the process of cellular differentiation

using chemical signals? How can the time of

growth be induced and controlled to generate this

or that cell, in specific quantities, and as required

for therapeutic purposes?

Stem cells are of interest as therapeutic agentsbecause of their enormous regenerative powers.

Although the differentiation process remains to

be explored in detail, recent experiments suggest

that such cells might be used in order to produce

regenerative tissue for transplantation and grafts.

It is envisaged, for example, that neurones could

be cultur

Cooper_Melinda_2002_THE LIVING and the DEAD- Variations on de Anima

Documents

Transcript of Cooper_Melinda_2002_THE LIVING and the DEAD- Variations on de Anima