Rethinking “Revolution” Through a Discourse on Biopower: Weaponizing

Philosophy for the Youth

KRISTOFFER A. BOLAÑOS, MADepartment of Humanities and Philosophy

College of Arts and Letters

A Presentation for World Philosophy Dayunder the theme “Youth, Philosophy, Future”

November 27, 2012, ICTC Computer Laboratory 1 Phase 2, NALLRC

Philosophy cannot remain in the ivory tower, it must engage the present situation

The philosopher Socrates made frequent visits to the Piraeus to converse with men and women of all walks of life

To address contemporary problems philosophy must engage also in matters of economics and politics

“The clever combatant imposes his will on the enemy, but does not allow the enemy’s will to be imposed on him…if the enemy is taking his ease, harass him; if quietly encamped, force him to move; if well supplied with food, starve him out. Appear at points that the enemy must hasten to defend; march swiftly to places where you are not expected.” [Sun Tzu, The Art of War, ed. by James Clavell (New York: Dell Publishing, 1983), 25]

Michel Foucault, in History of Sexuality I: An Introduction: there is a shift from the politics of “taking life/letting live” to the politics of “fostering and administering life”[see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, trans. by Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 135-7]

Negri and Hardt in Empire: The need to expand production and the necessity of converting us into docile agentic subjects for the sake of production, now on global scale, is exactly what fuels the biopolitical machine. While the so-called biopolitical empire does not aim to expand the territory of, say, first world nations, it exploits rather by way of a number of strategies: policing, calculative and close surveillance/panopticism, regulation and mapping out populations of its targets. In short, it expands by justifying its apparatuses for the administration of living bodies/populations.

Beyond Marx’s reading of class struggles:

“The industrial working class…has merely lost its hegemonic position and shifted geographically. We [ought to] understand the concept “proletariat,” however, to refer not just to the industrial working class but to all those who are subordinated to, exploited by, and produce under the rule of capital…all forms of labor tend to be proletarianized. [Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000),256]

Milieu of the Event:

What emerges is a new context of things, a milieu of the event, described as “a new milieu of maximum plurality and uncontainable singularization,” and the subsumption of individuals must be understood as “investing not only the economic or only the cultural dimension of society but rather the social bios itself.” [Ibid., 25]

Bellum justum or “justified” war:

“Just war is no longer in any sense an activity of defense or resistance…the enemy, just like the war itself, comes to be at once banalized (reduced to an object of routine police repression) and absolutized (as the Enemy, as an absolute threat to the ethical order).[Hardt and Negri, Empire, 13]

Foucault: wholesale slaughter is the underside of the obsession for administering life.

Militancy/Resistance—What can we do?

• Foucault: Where there is power, there is also freedom

• It is possible to resist even institutionalized injustice, such as the “eternal and infinite debt servicing” imposed by the IMF. Nestor Kirchner of Argentina did it in 2005.

• We can apply similar strategies for our country; we can, for instance, declare a moratorium on foreign debt and collect funds for the enhancement of our economy, industry, agriculture, and energy, instead of remaining prey to the IMF and the bankers.

• We can intervene in areas of economic policy: we can discourse about the lack of progress brought about by excessive liberalization of imports, peso devaluation, and the reduction of our country into a mere “service-oriented” economy.

Info from the website of 21st century Science and Technology magazine/Executive Intelligence Review:

India’s Koodankulam Nuclear Power Plant is the target of an anti-nuclear campaign run by foreign NGOs, who are determined to shut down the Russian-built reactors, and deprive the Indian people of the electric power they so desperately need.

The radical environmentalist group Greenpeace is one of many Western NGOs which are organizing the campaign to close the Koodankulam plant, India.

“We do not lack communication, on the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present.” – G. Deleuze and F. Guattari