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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
How can we think of life in its dual expression, matter and experience, the living and the lived? Philosophers and, more recently, social scientists have offered multiple answers to this question, often privileging one expression or the other - the biological or the biographical. But is it possible to conceive of them together and thus reconcile naturalist and humanist approaches? Using research conducted on three continents and engaging in critical dialogue with Wittgenstein, Benjamin, and Foucault, Didier Fassin attempts to do so by developing three concepts: forms of life, ethics of life, and politics of life. In the conditions of refugees and asylum seekers, in the light of mortality statistics and death benefits, and via a genealogical and ethnographical inquiry, the moral economy of life reveals troubling tensions in the way contemporary societies treat human beings. Once the pieces of this anthropological composition are assembled, like in Georges Perec's jigsaw puzzle, an image appears: that of unequal lives.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
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Table of Contents
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
Note on the Illustration of the Cover
Preamble
Notes
I: Forms of Life
Notes
II: Ethics of Life
Notes
III: Politics of Life
Notes
Conclusion
Notes
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
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Copyright page
Excerpt from Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot copyright © 1954 by Grove Press, Inc.; Copyright © renewed 1982 by Samuel Beckett. Used in The United States and Canada by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited. Used in the World excluding the United States and Canada by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
First published in German as Das Leben: Eine kritische Gebrauchsanweisung, © Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin, 2017
This English edition © Polity Press, 2018
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2664-2
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2665-9 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Fassin, Didier, author.
Title: Life : a critical user's manual / Didier Fassin.
Other titles: Leben. English
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2018. | Translation of: Das Leben : eine kritische Gebrauchsanweisung. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017048527 (print) | LCCN 2018005185 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509526680 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509526642 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509526659 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Life. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural.
Classification: LCC BD431 (ebook) | LCC BD431 .F2813 2018 (print) | DDC 113/.8–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017048527
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Dedication
For Anne-Claire
in whose company
I have found it possible to envision
a user's manual for life
In isolation, a puzzle piece means nothing – just an impossible question, an opaque challenge. But as soon as you have succeeded in fitting it into one of its neighbors, the piece disappears, ceases to exist as a piece.… The two pieces so miraculously conjoined are henceforth one, which in its turn will be a source of error, hesitation, dismay, and expectation.
Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual, 1987 [1978]
Acknowledgments
The honor conferred on me by the invitation to deliver the Adorno Lectures at the Institut für Sozialforschung at Goethe University, Frankfurt, is the only excuse I can offer to justify the ambitious project suggested by the title of this book. To tell the truth, it was not without some embarrassment that, in the months leading up to these lectures, my response to those who asked what my subject would be was that I would ponder about life. The apparent simplicity of a three-, four- or five-letter word (depending on whether it is uttered in French, English, or German) was undoubtedly deceptive, and my interlocutors' incredulous hesitance following this audacious yet enigmatic declaration forced me to give them something in the way of explanation. So I told them of my desire to think back through a series of primarily ethnographic studies I had undertaken over the last two decades on three continents, and to test a series of philosophical concepts that had both inspired me and left me unsatisfied through those years. I spoke of what had been a permanent quest, in all my various fieldworks, about ways of living and of treating human lives. I spoke of forms of life, of ethics of life, of politics of life. In short, in order to make sense of my empirical and theoretical questioning, I was attempting to provide them with a user's manual.
In part a form of homage to Georges Perec, who declared that “to live is to pass from one space to another, while doing your very best not to bump yourself,” my use of this expression in the title of this book is also a way of bringing my project down to a more modest scale, making it more easily graspable, giving it the appearance of a bricolage, inviting readers to see it as a puzzle to be pieced together as they read. For all that, the subject of this text is indeed as the title states: it deals with life – and with lives. It would be easy, and certainly on one level true, to state that this is the guiding principle of a career that began in medicine and then diverted to anthropology: in turning from the teachings of biology to the gathering of biographies, I have moved from the life of organs to the life of human beings. But there is more to it than the fortunes of a professional trajectory. For my way of scrutinizing life through forms of life, ethics of life, and politics of life is not neutral. It is marked by the theme of inequality – the inequality of lives which, from my childhood in a public housing project to my discovery of non-Western societies through the extreme poverty I encountered in Indian cities, has formed my worldview. In fact this book could, perhaps more explicitly, have been titled “On the inequality of lives.” If all of Perec's work is haunted by an absence – that of his parents, who died in World War II – I would say that my research is inhabited throughout by an awareness: that of unequal lives. Hence the addition of the adjective critical qualifying my user's manual for life.
In reworking these lectures for publication, I have felt it important to retain not only their progression – a triptych in which each part opens with a theoretical exposition that serves as an introduction to the empirical investigation, with the aim of proposing a new synthesis – but also the context – the reference to Adorno at the beginning of the book, and the reminder, in the epilogue to each chapter, of the tragic events that accompanied the elaboration of Minima Moralia. All writing has a history. I wanted to preserve the spirit of these lectures, given in Frankfurt at the institution where one of the most important forms of social critique was born nearly a century ago, and has continued to be practiced and developed since that time.
This of course gives me the opportunity to express my gratitude to Axel Honneth, then the director of the Institut für Sozialforschung, for inviting me, to my surprise, to deliver these lectures and for thus giving me the opportunity to bring together the hitherto scattered pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of life. I would also like to thank all the scholars, whether permanent members of the Institut or occasional visitors, whose comments, questions, and criticisms have helped me to refine my thinking, particularly José Brunner, Thomas Khurana, Thomas Lemke, Yves Sintomer, Sarah Speck, Felix Trautmann, and Peter Wagner, who were joined later, in Paris, by Sandra Laugier, Guillaume Le Blanc, and Marielle Macé. I am also grateful to John Thompson for heartily supporting this book project, to Rachel Gomme for her elegant translation of the preamble and conclusion, and to Célia Chalfoun for her thorough revision of my initial version of the three chapters. Finally, since this book is nourished by several decades of academic research and human experience, I owe an incalculable debt to the many persons, particularly students and colleagues at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, but above all to those I have met in the course of my research, notably in South Africa and in France, who shared fragments of their life with me.
Princeton, February 2017
Note on the Illustration of the Cover
Angelus Novus was painted by Paul Klee in 1920 using an oil transfer technique he had invented. It was purchased the following year by Walter Benjamin, who had it hung in the successive places where he lived and found in it an inspiration for several of his works, writing that having seen it could make the viewer “understand a humanity that proves itself by destruction.” In the ninth thesis of his posthumous essay “on the philosophy of history,” he describes it as the angel who, caught in a storm blowing from Paradise, contemplates the catastrophe of past events while being irresistibly propelled into the future. When he fled Germany in 1933, he brought it with him, but had to leave it in Paris with Georges Bataille, as he continued southwards to reach Spain. Just as he had crossed the border, in 1940, he was arrested and kept in custody in a hotel, where he was found dead the next day. At the end of the war, the artwork was passed with other possessions on to Theodor Adorno, who was at the time writing his Minima Moralia, before ending with Gershom Scholem, whose widow eventually gave it in 1987 to the Israel Museum, in Jerusalem. This “angel of history,” as Benjamin called it, has therefore an intimate and lengthy relationship with the Frankfurt School, in its most tragic period. Coincidentally, the epigraph of the preamble of Georges Perec's Life: A User's Manual is a quotation by Paul Klee, which reads: “The eye follows the paths that have been laid down for it in the work.” Let us, then, follow these paths.
PreambleMinima Theoria
If life fulfilled its vocation directly, it would miss it … Thought waits to be woken one day by the memory of what has been missed, and to be transformed into teaching.
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, 1974 [1951]
In the opening paragraph of his dedication to his friend and colleague Max Horkheimer, of Minima Moralia, the bulk of which was written in exile in the United States during World War II, Theodor Adorno refers, with bitterness and nostalgia, to “what the philosophers once knew as life.”1 In modern societies, he continues, material production has effectively reduced this life “to the rank of appendage,” the sphere of consumption offering no more than an “appearance of life,” or rather, a “caricature of true life.” In these conditions, what he calls the “melancholy science” of the thinkers of his time – an ironic reference to Nietzsche's “gay science” – “relates to a region that from time immemorial was regarded as the true field of philosophy,” but is now “lapsed into intellectual neglect, sententious whimsy and finally oblivion: the teaching of the good life.” It is worth pausing on the fact that the German expression das richtige Leben is translated in French as juste vie: in fact, the term has the dual sense of “good life” and “right life,” illustrating a semantic tension present at the heart of moral philosophy, between the ethical relationship to the self and the ethical relationship to others.
However we interpret the term, this pessimistic observation by Adorno, the most significant figure in the first generation of the Frankfurt School and hence one of the founders of “critical social theory,” sounds the death knell of the full moral life – whether it is said to be true, right, or good. All that remains is an “alienated form,” whose impasses Adorno strives to demonstrate through a series of short, somber meditations on the most mundane facts and the most ordinary objects of the contemporary world. These meditations thus offer what Rahel Jaeggi calls “a critique of capitalism as a form of life,” in other words, not only as unequal relations of production, but also as a degraded mode of existence: according to her, they put forward both “an ethics and a critique of ethics” – the possibility of a different life and the impossibility of bringing it into existence.2 Indeed, Adorno's deliberately fragmentary reflections on the cultural practices of his era pose the question of what social and political preconditions would make it possible to institute “an order more worthy of human beings.” Meanwhile, he acknowledges, we are far from that place, given that “our perspective of life has passed into an ideology which conceals the fact that there is life no longer.” This is the manifestation of a “hopelessness” that is rendered all the more acute for being written in the shadows of the ruins of Nazi Germany.
Since Adorno's text was published, more than six decades have passed, and capitalism, which is now barely even mentioned by name – having been superseded by the ambiguous euphemism “neoliberalism” – seems still more triumphant and less contested than it was when Adorno wrote his essay. At the same time the tragic lessons of World War II and its genocides, which cast a painful shadow over the thinking of Adorno's contemporaries, seem to be fading as a politics of identity comes to the fore and authoritarian tendencies are exposed – the violence and uncertainty of a troubled world serving to legitimize all kinds of exclusion and repression. Worrying signs of a new “age of anxiety” – to borrow the title of W. H. Auden's long poem written during the same postwar period – these vicissitudes of democratic life affect human lives in profoundly differentiated and often unequal ways.3 In other words, Minima Moralia has lost none of its pertinence, even if its analyses need to be adjusted to contemporary reality in order to ponder anew the “damaged life” of the book's subtitle. Here the paradox of Adorno's reflection needs to be emphasized. Faced with the enormity of the catastrophe of World War II and the Nazi regime's project of extermination, he makes what Miguel Abensour calls “the choice of the small,” which “is inherently bound up with a revolt against the world of war and terror.”4 Hence the minimalist title; hence the shift of focus to the singularity of the individual; hence the affirmation of the relevance of philosophy as defense of life – whether true, right, or good.
In this book, I propose a different orientation, resituating individuals both in society and in the world: in society, that is, in the relational space that constitutes them; in the world, that is, in the global space within which they move. Rather than the disruptions of the ethical subject to which Adorno devotes his reflections, I attempt to grasp the tribulations of the political community. In place of the cultural developments he calls into question, I focus on deciphering structural facts. To this end, in place of Adorno's critique of ways of life, I propose a critique of the treatment of life and of lives, and more specifically of those vulnerable and precarious lives to which many human beings are reduced. My question is not: how are we living? Or, how should we live? But rather: what value do we attach to human life as an abstract concept? And how do we evaluate human lives as concrete realities? Any discrepancy or any contradiction between the evaluation of life in general and the devaluing of certain lives in particular then becomes indicative of a moral economy of life in contemporary societies.
By moral economy, I mean the production, circulation, appropriation, and contestation of values as well as affects, around an object, a problem, or more broadly a social fact – in this case, life. This concept borrows both from E. P. Thompson's analysis, in which he explains the eighteenth-century English food riots in terms of the moral economy of agricultural laborers (that is, in terms of the norms and social obligations that govern their expectations and their practices), and from Lorraine Daston's reading in her study of the production of knowledge in the seventeenth century, where she emphasizes the role of the moral economy of science (in other words, the values and affects shared by scientists).5 I depart from these analyses, however, on several key points. Unlike Thompson, I do not restrict the moral economy purely to the domain of goods and services, but extend it to any social configuration that can be drawn on in the description of the moral state of the world: the way life is regarded and the way lives are treated provide the most powerful tools to analyze it. In contrast to Daston, I am interested less in a stable order around which a consensus is established than in the variations in values and affects over time, and how they enter into tension or competition with one another: evolutions and contradictions in the way life is valued in the abstract, and the way concrete lives are evaluated, are at the core of my thesis. Moreover, where Thompson expresses his own moral preferences, my analysis of moral principles and sentiments attempts to reveal and interpret them rather than judge them; and where Daston takes a cultural approach, I strive to grasp the social thinking and the relations of power underlying the production, circulation, appropriation, including the misappropriation, and contestation, even rejection, of values and affects. Moral economy as I conceive of it is not the moral economy of a group or a domain, but the moral economy of what makes sense in a given society at a given moment. In this respect, life, of which Adorno laments the eclipse, has perhaps never before been the focus of so many heterogeneous and contradictory moral investments. It is to the moral economy of life, understood in this sense, that this essay is devoted.
But do we really know what we are talking about, when we talk about life? This is far from certain, and we therefore need to consider the meaning of the word itself.
“Life is a term, none more familiar. And one almost would take it for an affront, to be asked what he meant by it,” writes John Locke. But he immediately adds: “And yet, if it comes in question, whether a plant, that lies ready formed in the seed, have life; whether the embryo of an egg before incubation, or a man in a swoon without sense or motion, be alive, or no? it is easy to perceive, that a clear distinct settled idea does not always accompany the use of so known a word, as that of life is.”6 For Locke, then, the problem is above all that of determining the limits of life: its indistinct beginning in the seed or the egg (around which arguments continue today, in debates about voluntary termination of pregnancy), and its uncertain end in unconsciousness without feeling or movement (questions that would be subsequently raised around the recognition of brain death).
But the attempt to define “life” also raises concerns of a different order, bound up with the multitude of meanings encompassed by the word itself. It denotes at once a property of organized beings, a set of biological phenomena, a time that elapses between birth and death, and a range of events that fill this temporal space, to say nothing of metonymic or metaphorical uses when we refer, for instance, to the lives of great men, or the life of objects. Are we talking about the same thing in each case? Is the life of a human being a fact of the same order as the life of the cells that form the body? To be sure, the common-sense understanding does not tangle itself up in complications, and everyone understands more or less what is meant, amid the multifarious senses of the term, by expressions such as “life sciences,” “life expectancy,” “life in the country,” or the “life of ideas,” in each of which the word has a different meaning. The same cannot be said, however, of philosophers, who appear at an impasse when attempting to consider, for example, life as conceived by a biologist together with life as interpreted by a novelist.
The problem is articulated with clarity by Georges Canguilhem: “Perhaps it is not possible, even today, to go beyond this first notion: any experiential datum that can be described in terms of a history contained between its birth and its death is alive, and is the object of biological knowledge.”7 This seems a simple definition. Yet it brings together quite heterogeneous elements, which highlight a semantic tension. Knowledge and experience, biology and history: this is the great dualism inherent to life. And Hannah Arendt points to a similar duality: “Limited by a beginning and an end, that is, by the two supreme events of appearance and disappearance within the world, it follows a strictly linear movement whose very motion nevertheless is driven by the motor of biological life which man shares with other living things and which forever retains the cyclical movement of nature. The chief characteristic of this specifically human life, whose appearance and disappearance constitute worldly events, is that it is itself always full of events which ultimately can be told as a story, establish a biography.”8 Cyclical movement of nature and worldly events, biology and biography: these are the two series that make life an entity at once overdetermined in its material dimension and indeterminate in its course. In effect, one incorporates humans into a vast community of living beings, on the same level as animals and plants, while the other makes them exceptional living beings by virtue of their capacity for consciousness and language.
Can this binarism be resolved? Is it possible to think of life as biology and life as biography simultaneously? For 2,000 years, philosophers have applied themselves to this question. They have successively considered life as animation of matter, following Aristotle, as a mechanism generating movement, with Descartes, and as a self-maintaining organism, according to Kant. They thus moved from a vitalist representation to a mechanistic interpretation, and finally to an organicist approach, each with a different medium: the soul or breath, then the body and fluids, and finally the organs and the internal milieu. However, the point in each of these various readings was to pursue an interrogation of the relationship between the living and the human, between the infrastructure of the former and the superstructure of the latter, as it were. For Hegel in particular, “ ‘life’ is a transitional concept that relates the realm of nature to the realm of freedom,” as Thomas Khurana puts it,9 since while it is constrained by biological elements it can, through a process of self-organization, produce the autonomy required for the realization of a biographical journey.
In contrast to these earlier attempts to articulate the two dimensions of life, the opposition between the two trends has hardened during the last century, and particularly during recent decades, leading to an apparently irremediable division between the two.
As regards life in the biological sense, it is in the mid-twentieth century that the study of living beings shifted in scale, and hence also in perspective, through the unlikely intervention of quantum mechanics theorist Erwin Schrödinger.10 Henceforth, the physicist turns biologist, his analysis descending to the molecular level, his method borrowing from thermodynamics, and atomic structure becoming a code whose innumerable permutations make possible the diversity of living beings and the creation of order out of entropic chaos. While validating this theory, the discovery of the DNA double helix a few years later constituted the foundation for a new conception of life, now based on information and its replication. And half a century later, the decoding of the human genome has further refined this concept. Even contemporary epigenetics does not fundamentally challenge this paradigm, since the influence of context on genetic inheritance, which it seeks to account for, operates through molecular mechanisms that modify the expression of genes. In other words, biochemistry and biophysics, which are now integral strands of biology, produce theories based on an increasingly intensive molecularization of the living matter, albeit not excluding systemic approaches at a higher level of complexity in microbial populations.11 At the same time, research into the origins of life focuses both on the emergence of living beings on Earth during the Precambrian period and on the possibility of finding signs of life elsewhere in the universe. This research strives to understand how inert molecules were able to transform into organic molecules with the capacity to replicate themselves so as to generate nucleic acids, and seeks to assemble spectral libraries drawn from living terrestrial organisms. On the one hand, microbiologists are searching for the “last universal common ancestor” of all cells, and the environment conducive to its transformation. On the other hand, astrobiologists seek “potential biosignature gases” that would point to the presence of life on the exoplanets of other solar systems.12 In both cases, science comes to meet the imagination of men and women, and the prospect of discovering the ultimate origin of life, or signs of extraterrestrial life, even in the form of molecules rather than identifiable beings, inspires dreams – and drives requests for funding. In short, in the exploration of life as biological phenomenon, the shift from conjecture to experiment, from the macroscopic to the microscopic, and from bodies to molecules, has progressively reduced the understanding of life to its most basic material unit – an assemblage of atoms – while simultaneously expanding it massively in time and space: human beings are, indeed, dissolved in a temporo-spatial network of molecular components of life which appeared several billion years ago and may be present in other parts of the universe.
With life as biography, we find a quite different story – more fragmentary, less cumulative. We can, however, identify certain moments, such as the arrival of the novel in literature, and some features, including an increasingly anxious questioning as to how one should write about life and lives. On the one hand, the novel, as it developed from the eighteenth century onwards, constituted life for the first time not only as an interesting subject but also as a “detachable thing,” as Heather Keenleyside puts it in her discussion of Tristram Shandy.13 It frames life as a more or less linear unfolding of events, through which the subjectivities of the characters are formed, whether in Jane Austen's novels of manners, Goethe's Bildungsroman, or a little later, the great literary projects of Balzac and Zola, who reconstitute a society at a particular time through the life stories of individual characters more or less connected to each other. In its most complete as well as most radical expression, the autobiographical account becomes, with Proust, life itself, a life magnified by the creative labor of writing: this is what he calls true life, the life that, by virtue of convention and habit, we risk passing over, to the extent that one might die without ever having recognized it.14 On the other hand, in the social sciences, from the very beginning, alongside the important developments in theory and methodology by the founders of the discipline, the life story has played a central part, whether it be reconstituting the trajectory of a Polish peasant, in the case of William Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, or recounting the history of a Mexican family, as does Oscar Lewis.15 But it is particularly from the 1980s onwards that, as the reaction against structuralism came together with feminist critique and postcolonial studies, the demand arose, in anthropology as elsewhere, for recognition of individuals, their history, their truth, and their words.16 The narrative turn was also a subjectivist turn. One should no longer speak in the name of subalterns, but rather make their voice heard – with the singular difficulty, particularly for historians, that their lives have often disappeared without leaving a trace in the archives.17 But a few decades later, a contestation of the life story and its identification with real life began to emerge, both in literature, through a deconstruction of the narrative form in Samuel Beckett's work, and in the social sciences, in the form of Pierre Bourdieu's challenge to the biographical illusion.18 Life as a coherent form became an object of suspicion.
Two life lines, then. For the purposes of clarity rather than classification, let us call the first one naturalist, the second humanist. My aim, in attempting this brief description of how they developed, is to point out the existence of two approaches that appear, at least in the first analysis, increasingly irreconcilable. The life studied by the biophysicist no longer bears any relation to that imagined by the novelist, even if some novelists incorporate biological elements into the fabric of their narratives, and some biologists venture, with varying success, into literature. The objects astrobiologists deal with, namely the molecules that indicate a presence of life, bear little relation to the subjects encountered by sociologists, namely individuals who recount the facts of their lives, even if, in the first case, the search for some presence of life is not unconcerned with the search for non-human intelligence, and, in the second, sociologists can make the life-sciences laboratory the focus of their research. We are far from the Aristotelian, Cartesian, Kantian, and Hegelian projects. In fact, the philosophical gesture of Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben, who institute a fundamental distinction between zoë and bios, between the simple fact of being alive and the rich fulfillment of a life, could be interpreted as a way of politically marking the impossibility, and indeed the danger, of binding the two life lines in a single word and a single mode of thinking.19 Both Arendt and Agamben saw, in the contemporary world, a fatal risk that the simple fact of being alive would increasingly supplant the rich fulfillment of a life.
It has to be acknowledged that what was perhaps the last attempt to devise a philosophy of life that could integrate the two dimensions, to wit the German Lebensphilosophie of the early twentieth century, was not unproblematic, either epistemologically or ethically.20
