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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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:
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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-
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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
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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
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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
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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-
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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
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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
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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
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