Biopolitics Read online

  [30] As to “rights,” moreover, if a woman discovers, via amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling, that she is carrying an abnormal foetus, and wants to fulfill her duty to the community, to her family and to the foetus itself, the only right she has at this stage is that of finding a doctor who does not “object” to the only form of therapy available, and this inside derelict state-owned facilities, among pools of blood, yelling immigrants and feeble-minded prostitutes. If she is beyond the third month of pregnancy she is subjected to the additional humiliation and trouble of having to provide a false certificate that mentions the existence of risks to her physical or mental health, or even to going abroad, if she can afford it.

  [31] See Giorgio Locchi, “La lettura del mito. Lévi-Strauss, il divenire storico e le società umane,” in l’Uomo Libero no. 18.

  [32] Such views are discussed, developed and illustrated more extensively in Stefano Vaj, “La tecnica, l’uomo, il futuro,” in l’Uomo libero no. 20, to which we refer for the more specifically philosophical implications of this viewpoint.

  [33] Arnold Gehlen, Urmensch und Spätkultur, Klostermann 2005. Italian translation: Le Origini dell’Uomo e la Tarda Cultura, Il saggiatore, Milan 1994 p. 62.

  [34] Oswald Spengler, Man and Machine, op. cit. The connection between technology and language is by the way ironically illustrated by the myth of the Tower of Babel, the meaning of which, from a transhumanist point of view, is exemplarily overturned in the film by Fritz Lang Metropolis (Germany 1926, with a scenario written by his wife Thea von Harbou).

  [35] Thus, when Lang in the already mentioned film Metropolis wants to show us the ruling class of the future, he shows it for the first time in a garden, among groves and springs, and not in the futuristic underground city that is reserved for the masses.

  [36] The development of wheat cultivation and of the art of cooking, which makes possible the digestion of its typical products, can be traced back, it would seem, to many centres of autonomous expansion still identifiable through genetic gradients, and corresponding to the zones from where the cultivation of wheat (Middle East, especially Mesopotamia and the Nile Valley), rice (southern China), corn (Central America) have radiated. See Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Genes, Peoples and Languages, recent edition: Penguin, 2001. Italian: Geni, Popoli e Lingue, Adelphi, Milano 1996.

  [37] This, as Locchi illustrates in “La lettura del mito,” op. cit., is the true meaning of a recurring theme inside all Indo-European mythology, that of the “foundation wars” (Aesir against Vanir, Latins against Sabinians, etc.). The victors’ superior magic subjugated and subsumed the productive classes inside a functional tripartite system that is well explained in the work by Georges Dumézil.

  [38] Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics. A Contribution to a Philosophy of Life, op. cit.

  [39] Locchi tends to identify the transition to the “third man” with that which defines “the domestication of matter-energy,” which would arise from the “domestication of living things”. This indubitably corresponds to the influence of “physicalism,” still prevailing in the beginning of the seventies, when the reflections quoted here were first published. Gehlen uses a similar language: “First of all we have the neat impression that the transition to industrial society, the domination of inorganic matter and even of its nuclear powers begin a new chapter in the history of humanity. We have been part of this process for barely two hundred years and already the significance of this ‘cultural turning point’ is comparable only to that of the Neolithic turning point. This means: no sector of culture, no fibre of man, will be spared this transformation, which can be fated to last for many centuries, yet of whose flame it is impossible to foresee what it will burn, what will melt and what will reveal itself capable to resist it”(Urmensch und Spätkultur, op. cit.) Furthermore one would like to ask if it is only a matter of language, given that current biopolitics implies taking charge of the environment, of its organic chemistry and of its genetic lines, as well as its direct physical manipulation. The “machine civilisation,” nuclear energy, microscopes, the great hydraulic constructions, modern technology of materials or calculators based on electric circuits, do indubitably represent one aspect (and one presupposition) of such a revolution, but do certainly not exhaust its impact, which is precisely much more global, and which first of all invests man himself. Also, it has been observed how even the car can be regarded as a “prosthesis” of the driver, and how outdated the rigid distinctions between the organism, the human species, and his environment, or between the craftsman and his tools, have become.

  [40] Giorgio Locchi, “La lettura del mito,” op. cit.

  [41] For a summary that is still reasonably up to date as to what we know about the Indo-European revolution, see Stefano Vaj, “Le radici dell’Europa” in l’Uomo libero no. 9. See also, more extensively, Jean Haudry Les Indo-européens, PUF, Paris 1992 (English translation: The Indo-Europeans, Scott Townsend Pub 1998.) Available in Italian in an updated and expanded edition, with the title Gli Indoeuropei, Edizioni di Ar, Padova 2001, transl. by Fabrizio Sandrelli. Research continues in this domain, specifically at the intersection of data provided by the history of religion and that of linguistics, genetics, glottochronology, paleontology and archeology, with punctual echoes in the popular media: see for instance Adriana Giannini, “Una lunga genealogia. Una recente ricerca sposta al 9000 a.C l’origine delle lingue indoeuropee,” in Le Scienze, Gennaio 2004, no. 425, p. 24.

  [42] The Indo-Arian influence on Chinese culture and, partly via the latter, on Japanese culture has been well studied, as has the complex web of contacts between Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilisations on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the many invasions from central Europe that more than once have come to brush against the Middle East. More “history fiction” are the hypotheses as to possible similar roles played with respect to the pre-Colombian empires (see moreover the Aztec myth of the white god Quetzacoatl which played an important role in Cortes’ victory). Such hypotheses have moreover led a Jacques de Mahieu, although wanting of positively verifiable data, to name a book Drakkars sur l’Amazone. Les Vikings et l’Amérique précolombienne (Editions Copernic, Paris 1977, Spanish translation Drakkares en el Amazonas, Hachette, Buenos Aires 1978). Much more scientific, and shattering for present day public opinion, are the hypotheses of an almost planetary influence by a “hyperborean” Indo-European culture, extremely well documented by Felice Vinci in Omero nel Baltico, Palombi Editore, Rome 1995 and 2003, which in the second edition are given credit by, among others, Rosa Calzecchi Onesti. English translation by Amalia di Francesco: The Baltic Origins of Homer’s Epic Tales: the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Migration of Myth, Inner Traditions Bear and Company, 2005.

  [43] As Guillaume Faye remarks elsewhere, the true alternatives are anyhow not the civilisation of Being and the civilisation of Having, a dialectics that remains entirely inside the contemporary perspective, but between these and the demand for a culture of Becoming, which for him amounts specifically to a “reactivation” of Indo-European spirit and legacy.

  [44] On the contrary the classic example of cultures which are “prey of history,” that Locchi also calls the so-called warm cultures, is Japan, whose history is tragically marked by external influences, which contemporary Japanese culture originally receives, refuses and transfigures, from the penetration of Buddhism in the classical era until the Meiji restoration at the end of the shogunate.

  [45] For a very famous and recent revival (in positive terms) of this idea, exactly in the sense adopted here, see the text by Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, Free Press, San Francisco 1992.

  [46] For two contemporary studies of the religious origins of this refusal, the first positive, the other negative, with tellingly converging conclusions, see: Bernard-Henry Lévy, Le Testament de Dieu, Grasset, Paris 1979 (English translation: The Testament of God, Harper and Row, 1980. Italian translation: Il testamento di Dio, SugarCo, Milan 1979) and Alain de Benoist, Co
mment peut-on être païen? Copernic, Paris 1981 (English translation, On Being a Pagan, Ultra 2002; Italian translation: Come si può essere pagani, Basaia, Rome 1984).

  [47] See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, op. cit., and Guillaume Faye, Le système à tuer les peuples, Copernic, Paris 1982 (Italian translation by Stefano Vaj, Il sistema per uccidere i popoli, Edizioni dell’Uomo libero, Milan 1983; second edition, Edizioni Barbarossa, Milan 2002.) The common references and Nietzschean terminology by the two authors are striking (especially the alternative between “the last man” and the Overman), although they are aligned on diametrically opposite positions.

  [48] Maria Teresa Pansera, L’uomo e i sentieri della tecnica: Heidegger, Gehlen, Marcuse, op. cit. p. 26.

  [49] In the interview with Jacques Rider in Le Monde-Dimanche, 19th August 1982, quoted in Alain de Benoist, Ernst Jünger: La figure du travailleur entre les dieux et les titans, op. cit., p. 99.

  [50] “We find ourselves today at the vertex, where the last act begins. It is the hour of capital decisions. The tragedy is about to end” (Oswald Spengler, Man and Technics, op. cit., p. 110 in the Italian edition).

  [51] Arnold Gehlen, Die Seele im technischen Zeitalter, Rohwolt, Hamburg 1957. English translation: Man in the Age of Technology, Columbia University Press, 1980. Italian translation: L’uomo nell’era della tecnica. Problemi socio-psicologici della società italiana, SugarCo, Milan 1984, p. 146.

  [52] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, I, 3.

  [53] See Stefano Vaj, “L’uomo e l’ambiente,” l’Uomo libero no.7.

  [54] See James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, recent ed: Oxford Paperbacks, 2000, and The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth, recent ed. OUP Oxford, 2000. Italian editions: Gaia. Nuove Idee sull’Ecologia and Le Nuove Età di Gaia, Bollati Boringhieri, Bologna 1981 and 1991. According to this view, the very ecosystem and the planet, including the physical and chemical environment, would be similar, at least in some respects, to a living organism, in such a way that the Darwinian notions of adaptation to the environment and of the struggle for survival could at most complement the metaphors “cooperation” and “cybernetics” used to describe the relations between cells, proteins and hormones inside our body.

  [55] Martin Heidegger, Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra? Harper & Row Publishers Inc, New York 1967.

  [56] See for instance, Jean-Paul Hébert, Race et Intelligence, Copernic, Paris 1977; Yves Christen, L’Heure de la Sociobiologie, Albin Michel, Paris 1979 (Italian translation, L’Ora della Sociobiologia, Armando, Rome 1980); and later, by the same author, Le Dossier Darwin, Copernic, Paris 1982. Nouvelle Ecole, at the time the official quarterly of the movement, published among other things the special issues on L’eugénisme (no. 14, January-February 1971), L’Evolution (no. 18, May-June 1972), Darwinisme et Société (no. 38, summer 1982). Furthermore, when perusing the backlog of the magazine, we find from the beginning and onwards articles on: LSD and the alteration of the hereditary stock (no. 1), race, selection and mental attributes (signed by Alain de Benoist, no. 3), probabilism and contraception (no. 4), demography (same author, no. 5), the endangered biosphere (n. 6), the biology of the racial question and the synthesis of DNA (no. 7), sexual freedom (n. 8), abortion, school integration and racial psychology, organ transplantation (n. 10), “the lessons of modern biology: Monod, Lowoff, Jacob” (no. 15), molecular biology and the theory of evolution (no.18), ethology (nos. 25-26), etc. In addition, the same magazine has published articles by Dawkins and Wilson (no. 38), and had Jensen, Eysenck, Lorenz, Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Ardrey on its “Comité de Patronage”.

  [57] Albert Jacquard, Eloge de la Différence, Seuil, Paris 1981. English: In Praise of Difference: Genetics and Human Affairs, Columbia University Press, 1984. Italian: Elogio Della Differenza, Nuove Universali Capelli, Bologna 1982. The title is paradoxical because the ideas that the author is attacking, such as what he considers to be “racism,” are interpreted as necessarily stemming from a desire of uniformity, reduction and assimilation, while in fact this is nothing other than the distorted and “flawed” reflection of the author’s own ideological standpoint. In reality the very concept of race would imply that not only do differences between races exist, but that these should preserved, even accentuated and certainly not eliminated through a forced generalisation of the characteristics of the allegedly “superior” race. This latter view, contradictory though it may be, is dominant in Anglo-Saxon, especially American, racism, but has little to do with what Jacquard criticises. Even there, however, it is hard to find anyone, other than a handful of lunatic fringe authors or movements, who genuinely advocates for the assimilation or uniformisation of the “inferior races”. This in any case is the conclusion implicit in the position that is intended as “anti-racist,” but that conceives of humanity as homogenous, summoned to converge its ethno-cultural specificities, which may well be mixed, but towards an essentially “Western” lineage.

  [58] Jeremy Rifkin and Ted Howard, Who Should Play God? The Artificial Creation of Life and What it Means for the Future of the Human Race, Dell Publishing Co, New York 1977, translated into Italian with the title Giocare alla divinità, Feltrini, Milan 1980. Although Rifkin is Jewish, he treats the issues from a “secular” point of view, without explicitly referring to monotheistic religious postulates.

  [59] See, for instance Maurizio Minchella, “La demagogia contro la scienza,” and Arthur R. Jensen “Genetica, educabilità e differenze fra le popolazioni,” in l’Uomo libero no. 8. As well as Jean-Paul Hébert, Race et intelligence, op. cit., and Hans Jürgen Eysenck, Race, Intelligence and Education, Library Press, New York 1971.

  [60] On the contrary, a very particular position is the one held by the Radical Party, at first Italian and then trans-national, which, even though it is as permeated with pacifist and anti-Faustian values as the “Greens,” integrated them into an individualistic-hedonistic and libertarian framework, that ipso facto committed it to an anti-prohibitionist stand on most of the issues discussed here, be it abortion, artificial insemination or gene therapies, to the point that its secretary, Luca Coscioni, became a kind of Italian Christopher Reeves, and the symbol of contradictions difficult to overcome between libertarian values and the “bioethical” crusade taking place today. The same environment remained however at the absolute forefront of “political correctness” on other biopolitical topics such as the environment, starvation, zero-growth, animal rights, etc.

  [61] See The Limits to Growth, a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the said Geneva organisation of Aurelio Peccei; a millenarian scenario based on extrapolations of mathematical models that completely ignore the diversification of the panorama under examination and phenomena of retroaction, and has been translated into twelve languages (in Italian by Mondadori, Milan 1972). Such forms of high-level propaganda for the programmed decadence and the demographic and industrial suicide of Europe are still active, even though the association has in the meantime transferred to Hamburg.

  [62] See the book by Roberto Vacca precisely called the Il medioevo prossimo venture, Mondadori, Milan 1971[English title: The Coming Dark Age, Doubleday 1973]. Popular culture did not of course remain outside this phenomenon. From this time dates Holocaust 2000 (Italy 1978), a bad B-movie, which moreover explicitly connects the building of the first nuclear fusion plant with the coming of the Anti-Christ. In any event, such examples, above all in the “nuclear” sub-genre, are countless: see, e.g. The China Syndrome (USA 1979). See also, with regard to pulp fiction: Jane Roberts, The Rebellers, Ace Books 1963 (Italian: Evasione nel caos, Mondadori, Milan 1975) about demographic explosion and the depletion of resources; Pedler Davis, Brainrack, Souvenir Press 1975, about structural gigantism and air pollution (Italian title: L’effetto dinosauro, Mondadori, Milan 1974); Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, False Dawn, Doubleday & Co, New York 1978 (Italian translation: Tra gli orrori del 2000, Mondadori, Milan 1979) about the collapse of the ecosystem and th
e gradual extinction of the human race on a depleted and sterile earth; and so on.

  [63] This above all with the works of Jacob von Uexküll on the “specific environment” (Umwelt). More recently and in a more restricted sense Georges Olivier has proposed that we regard ecology as the study of the morphological, psychological and genetic specificities in their relation with spatial and climatic localisation (L’écologie humaine, PUF, Paris 1975); this demarcation however seems to refer more than any other to the limited field of the so-called self-ecology, that is, the branch that specialises in examining the relations and adaptation of a single species to a given environment.