Sigmoid Flexure Mundus

[Terrance]

David Morris wrote:
> 
> >From: Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
> >Nations are in a measure represented by the States which they have formed;
> >these states, by the governments which administer them. The individual in
> >any given nation has in  war a terrible opportunity to convince himself of
> >what would occasionally strike him in peace-time---that the state has
> >forbidden to the individual the practice of wrong-doing, not because it
> >desired to abolish it, but because it desires to monopolize it...
> 
> Yes.  And they say this is also true, but maybe as an inverse, about Love.
> 
> All is fair?...
> 


This Death that was based on the right of the sovereign is now
manifested as simply the reverse of the right of the social body to
ensure, maintain, or develop its Life. Yet wars were never so bloody as
they have been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal,
never before did regimes visit such holocausts on their own populations.
But this formidable power of death---and this is perhaps what accounts
for part of its force and cynicism with which it has so greatly expanded
its limits---now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that
exerts a positive power on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize,
and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive
regulations. Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who
must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone;
entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter
in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as
managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many
regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be
killed. And through a turn that closes the circle, as the technology of
wars has caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction,
the decision that initiates them and the one that terminates them are in
fact increasingly informed by the naked question of survival. The atomic
situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a
whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an
individual's continued existence. The principle underlying the tactics
of battle--has become the principle that defines the strategy of states.
But the existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of
sovereignty; at stake is the biological existence of a population. If
genocide is indeed the dream of modern powers, this is not because of a
recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power is
situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and
the large-scale phenomena of poulation....This bio-power was without
question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the
latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of
bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the
phenomena of population to economic processes. But this was not all it
requires; it also needed the growth of both these factors, their
reinforcement as well as their availability and docility; it had to have
methods of power capable of optimizing forces, aptitudes, and life in
general without at the same time making them more difficult to govern.
If the development of the great instruments of the state, an
institutions of power, ensured the maintenance of of production
relations, the requirement of anatomo- and biopolitics, created in the
eighteenth century as techniques of power present at every level of the
social body and utilized by very diverse institutions (the family and
the army, schools and the police, individual medicine and the
administration of collective bodies) operated in the sphere of economic
processes, their development, and the forces working to sustain them.
They also acted as forces of segregation and social hierarchiazation,
exerting their influence on the respective forces of both these
movements, guaranteeing relations of domination and effects of hegemony. 

The Right of Death & p0ower Over Life