The Problem of Life: Governing Bodies Before and Beyond Biopolitics
This dissertation argues that biopolitics, as Michel Foucault formulated it, names a historically specific modern configuration of power rather than a universal category for all governance of bodies. It recovers what it calls the problem of life, the foundational political task of producing bodies fit for a regime’s form of rule and shows that this concern both predates and exceeds biopolitics. To make this claim demonstrable, it introduces the wildtype framework as a comparative instrument. Borrowed from genetics, where the wildtype designates a strategically constructed reference organism against which mutations are measured, the framework asks three diagnostic questions of any governing configuration: What body does the regime require? Through what mechanisms does it produce that body? What constitutes the unfit body it must prevent or destroy? The dissertation applies this framework to three historically distinct solutions to the problem of life. Plato’s psychagopolitical wildtype governs bodies through the cultivation of souls, using education, myth, and philosophical oversight to produce the self-mastering citizen Plato’s regime requires. Jean Bodin’s purgation-politique wildtype governs through sovereign command authorized by divine law, identifying and destroying bodies whose demonic corruption threatens the theological-political order. Alexis de Tocqueville’s moeurs-politique wildtype governs through the habits, sentiments, and civic practices that democratic equality inscribes upon bodies. Each configuration operates under its own epistemic conditions and reveals a structurally distinct fragility logic: structural exhaustion in Plato, epistemic displacement in Bodin, and autoimmune degeneration in Tocqueville. The conclusion turns the framework reflexively on the modern biopolitical configuration, using the COVID-19 pandemic as a contemporary diagnostic occasion. It argues that the pandemic exposed phenomena that exceed the biopolitical apparatus’s own epistemic resources, including a global mental health crisis, the digital mediation of social existence, and an infodemic that fractured biological authority. Together, these phenomena mark a threshold at which the problem of life may be shifting from biology to cognition. The dissertation identifies this threshold as a question for future investigation rather than a settled claim, preserving the anti-teleological commitment that governs the project.
Governmentality, Biopolitics, Wildtype, Neuropolitics, Genealogy, Michel Foucault, history of political thought, Political philosophy
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