Biopolitical production of life and the «new war»: experience in philosophical interpretation

Abstract

The change in the nature of war has been noted by most researchers over the past seventy years. In the last decade, an attempt has been made to integrate all significant and operating factors — in the concept of a «new war», the analysis and interpretation of which is an urgent research task. The authors of the article analyze the discourse of the «new war» in the horizon of presenting the modern political order in the liberal version of the economic paradigm of the political (J. Agamben’s term) in order to identify substantially new meanings that distinguish it from the concept of «classical war». «Horizon», «border», «meaning» and «representation» as elements of the paradigm can be the subject of exclusively philosophical interpretation. As a result of the conducted research, it has been established: «biopolitical production of life» is the way in which modernity becomes reality. Biopolitics is management, that is, the accomplished removal of the political is depoliticization. The asymmetric war is a biopolitical phenomenon in terms of the composition of actors, mode of conduct, goals; it is presented as «just», «permanent» and «legitimizing» the universal and global political order. The exclusion of a sovereign decision and an «empty space» as the center of the modern political order, the impossibility of drawing the border and the expansion of the «area of anomie» to the entire political space, the nondiscrimination of «external» and «internal», which is fundamental for understanding the specifics of the discourse of the «new war» means total depoliticization. The biopolitical power is opposed by «naked life» — war is presented as a police operation, the purpose of which is considered to pacify and normalize violence and suppress internal enemies. Philosophical interpretation as a method of research leads to a new (and partly inaccessible for disciplinary scientific research) conclusion: the «new war» appears to be a management tool aimed at «normalizing violence» — it is not a modernization of the classical war and is not in any continuity with it , but there is a new biopolitical phenomenon that essentially belongs to modernity. This conclusion, which distinguishes between «classical war» and «new war», allows us to exclude from the calculations the endless contradictions associated with attempts to view the «new war» in the political perspective, and not as governance. Thus, the possibility of disciplinary scientific research of a new war is revealed in the perspective of its representation as a phenomenon of modernity.

Keywords

• new war
• biopolitics
• economic paradigm of the political
• empty space
• «naked life»
• normalization of violence
• governance