Exposure to death and biopolitics: An approach from the racism of state and the paradigm of immunization

Abstract

The discussion here proposed aims to analyse the production of death and exposure to death through the lens provided by biopolitics and not under the traditional legal-political bias. It is sought, through analytical methodology, to problematize that an efficient thematization of death requires the displacement in the ways of thinking life/death as purely juridical phenomena to think of them as effects of relations of power belonging to the political modernity logic. From Michel Foucault’s notion of State Racism and Roberto Esposito’s Immune Paradigm, the production of death is placed within the problem of how biopolitics becomes into tanatopolitics. Both authors allow us to conceive in modern biopolitics a circuit between protection and denial of life, which is unfolded by an evaluative split between types of life covered by protection and others sent for the production of death. What is sought with this analysis is the expansion of the debate about the relation of life and death in the contemporary political scenario, by proposing a deviation from the analyses based only on the criterion of the legality or illegality of promoting death. The intention is to question how, within the very working patterns of a modern politics of life, the production of death is called to participate. It is a question of perceiving how the semantics of biopolitics allows the access to a functioning life-protection and production of death that is operant, in the absence of humanistic tonality and the value of human life assumed by modern legal and political discourses. The attention to this logic of power active in the modernity and its functioning mechanisms that produces hierarchical ordering of life and exposure to death is what is sought, minimally, with this analysis.