The “Enigma of Biopolitics”: Antiblackness, Modernity, and Roberto Esposito’s Biopolitics

• Date: 01 October 2018
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591717737474
• Published date: 01 October 2018
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591717737474

Political Theory

2018, Vol. 46(5) 749 –771

© The Author(s) 2017

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591717737474

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Article

The “Enigma

of Biopolitics”:

Antiblackness,

Modernity, and Roberto

Esposito’s Biopolitics

John McMahon1

Abstract

What would it mean to take antiblackness seriously in theories of

biopolitics? How would our understanding of biopolitics change if antiblack

racialization and slavery were understood as the paradigmatic expression

of biopolitical violence? This essay thinks through the significance of black

studies scholarship for disentangling biopolitics’ paradoxes and dilemmas. I

argue that only by situating antiblackness as constitutive of modernity and

of modern biopolitics can we begin to meet the theoretical and political

challenges posed by biopolitics. While Roberto Esposito formulates some of

the most important questions about biopolitics, his responses will always be

insufficient insofar as he engages in no discussion of blackness, antiblackness,

slavery, white supremacy, or the role of sociopolitical processes of

racialization, violence, and domination. I move from a critique of Esposito to

explore the modernity-making processes of the imbrication of antiblackness

and biopolitics. To do so, I analyze the biopolitics of birth and of flesh, and

interrogate the (im)possibility of an affirmative biopolitics. Ultimately, the

essay argues that theories of biopolitics can be genuinely critical only to the

extent that they center antiblackness.

1Department of Political Science, Beloit College, Beloit, WI, USA

Corresponding Author:

John McMahon, Department of Political Science, Beloit College, Box 207, 700 College St.,

Beloit, WI 53511, USA.

Email: mcmahonja@beloit.edu

737474PTXXXX10.1177/0090591717737474Political TheoryMcMahon

research-article2017

750 Political Theory 46(5)

Keywords

biopolitics, Roberto Esposito, race, antiblackness, slavery, modernity

Any historical account of the rise of modern terror needs to address slavery,

which could be considered one of the first instances of biopolitical

experimentation.

Achille Mbembe1

Early on in Roberto Esposito’s sweeping Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy,

he asserts the need to “peer into the black box of biopolitics from a variety of

angles and with a greater breadth of gaze” in order to unravel its “tragic para-

dox” of the politics of life culminating in the “work of death.”2 For Esposito,

biopolitics and its interpretation engulf one in paradox, uncertainty, tension,

uneasiness, indiscernibility, dissatisfaction, conflict, superimposition, irrec-

oncilability, deadlock, oscillation, deconstruction, impasse, indistinction,

antinomy, collapse, and aporetic knots—all ways he characterizes the diffi-

culty of analyzing biopolitics in the first chapter alone. Above all else, this

“enigma of biopolitics” is to be unlocked in the undecidability between “a

politics of life or a politics over life” and between “subjectivization and

death,” tensions where “the category of biopolitics folds in upon itself with-

out disclosing the solution to its own enigma.”3 Consequently, “the category

of biopolitics seems to demand a new horizon of meaning, a different inter-

pretive key that is capable of linking” the politics of life and of death.4 This

article provides a different horizon of meaning from which to approach bio-

politics, one strikingly absent from Esposito’s work: that of antiblackness and

transatlantic slavery, as theorized in recent black studies scholarship.

The objective of this article is to engage in a critique of Esposito—while

retaining the questions he asks about biopolitics—to explore the modernity-

making processes of the imbrication of antiblackness and biopolitics. In other

words, I use Esposito’s own queries about biopolitics in order to generate a

critique of his theorizing and to reconstruct a biopolitical framework from the

standpoint of antiblackness. In my view, Esposito effectively revises and

works through difficulties posed by Agamben’s, and, especially, Foucault’s

analyses of biopolitics, dissecting the conflicts and unresolved questionscre-

ated in their writing. Whereas Foucault, in Esposito’s analysis, cannot ulti-

mately resolve the paradox of why a politics of life so regularly mutates into

a work of death, Esposito endeavors to provide an “operation of excavation”

that can finally ask and answer the “question that is either missing or has been