© Beytulhikme Philosophy Circle

Beytulhikme Int Jour Phil 7 (2) 2017

Research Article: 15-31

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Between Foucault and Agamben: An Overview of the

Problem of Euthanasia in the context of Biopolitics
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Foucault ile Agamben Arasında: Biyopolitika Bağlamında Ötenazi So-

Beytulhikme An International Journal of Philosophy

rununa Bir Bakış

GÜRHAN ÖZPOLAT
Dokuz Eylül University

Received: 07.06.2017Accepted: 18.12.2017

Abstract: In this paper, considering the fact that special forms of dying and kill-
ing are mostly seen in a shadowy zone or blurred boundary between life and
death, I shall attempt to find a compromise between Michel Foucault (bio-
politics) and Giorgio Agamben’s (thanatopolitics) considerations of biopolitics
in the case of euthanasia. In this respect, believing that this article requires a
historical backround, I shall start with a brief history of euthanasia and suicide
in order to understand the present juridico-medico-political complex from
which the sovereign power derives its philosophical underpinnings and theoret-
ical justifications today; and show that the relationship power and death has
always been very problematic. Secondly, I will focus on the meaning(s) of the
disappearance of death in the context of Foucauldian biopolitics and conclude
that, in contrast to Foucault’s consideration, something akin to re-discovery of
death has taken place in the Western world since the mid-twentieth century.
Finally, in the third and last part of the article, I will put forward that Agam-
ben, by introducing the concept life unworthy of being lived, was successful in
completing what is missing, that is the politics of death, in Foucault’s notion of
biopolitics with reference to the problem of euthanasia.

Keywords: Assisted suicide, death, euthanasia, biopolitics, thanatopolitics,

power, sovereignty.

© Özpolat, G. (2017). Between Foucault and Agamben: An Overview of the Problem of Euthanasia in the

context of Biopolitics. Beytulhikme An International Journal of Philosophy, 7 (2), 15-31.

___________________________________________________________
 Gürhan Özpolat, Arş. Gör.
Dokuz Eylül Üniversitesi İİBF Kamu Yönetimi Bölümü
35160, Buca, İzmir, TR[email protected]
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Gürhan Özpolat

Introduction

The concept death has consistently remained a matter of academic

interest and has largely been discussed by many disciplines from philoso-
phy to sociology, anthropology to psychology and literature to theology.
Since death is an inevitable and a common experience not only for human
beings but also all living creatures, its considerable effects on the daily life
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practices can be seen as an explicit social phenomenon in every culture.

Yet, among all living creatures, human kind has a place apart, the final,
extreme place in relation to death. Unlike other living beings, he has a
more fundamental relationship with death since he invented the special
forms of killing and dying, in our case, euthanasia. 1
In this paper, considering the fact that special forms of dying and
killing are mostly seen in a shadowy zone or blurred boundary between life
and death, I am going to attempt to find a compromise between Michel
Foucault (bio-politics) and Giorgio Agamben’s (thanatopolitics) considera-
tions of biopolitics in the case of euthanasia. I believe that euthanasia is a
perfect example of the modern biopolitical dispositif in which, in a Fou-
cauldian sense, the separation between taking life and letting die loses its
meaning and falls into a zone of indistinction. Moreover, the problem of
euthanasia gives us a chance to re-think not only the Foucauldian notion
of biopolitics but also Agamben’s conceptualization. Since euthanasia is
not a radical break from the classical biopolitical dispositif, but rather, it
discloses the function and foundation of modern biopolitics in a more
radical way. Euthanasia signals the point at which the biopolitical disposi-
tif passes beyond a new threshold and turn into thanatopolitics.
I am going start with a brief history of euthanasia and suicide in or-
der to understand the present juridico-medico-political complex from
which the sovereign power2 derives its philosophical underpinnings and

1
I would like to point out that by the term euthanasia, I do not make a difference between
physician-assisted suicide, voluntary euthanasia, non-voluntary euthanasia and active or
passive euthanasia.
2
I am going to use the term sovereignty as a combination of ‘power over life’ and ‘power over
death’ (Foucault, 2003a: 259; Agamben, 1998: 159). However, I do not intend to make a
strict separation between biopolitics and thanatopolitics as if they are totally disconnec-
ted from each other; but rather, my intention is to simplify the relationship between
them in order to show how these concepts can provide theoretical underpinnings in order
to understand the problem of euthanasia. I believe that biopolitics and thanatopolitics

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Between Foucault and Agamben: An Overview of the Problem of Euthanasia…

theoretical justifications today. I believe that it is necessary to examine,

in the first place, the historical conditions in which euthanasia emerged.
It is also necessary to situate the issues of euthanasia and suicide within
their historico-political context by examining the relationship between
power and death; in other words, political power’s attitude toward death 3
and special forms of dying in order to understand which medico-

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historico-political processes caused the present juridico-political dis-
course about euthanasia and suicide in which we live today. Secondly, I
will focus on the meaning(s) of disappearance of death in the context of
Foucauldian biopolitics and conclude that, in contrast to Foucault’s con-
sideration, something akin to re-discovery of death has taken place in the
Western world since the mid-twentieth century. Finally, I am going to
introduce the Agambenian concept life unworthy of being lived in order to
complete what is missing, or, at least, implicit that is the politics of
death, in Foucault’s notion of biopolitics with reference to the problem
of euthanasia.

1. A Brief History of Attitudes toward Euthanasia and Suicide in the West

The problem of euthanasia once again became a matter both in med-

ical, legal and political theories, when the former doctor Maurice Gene-
reux was sentenced to jail for two years in May 1998, and became the first
physician to be convicted of assisted suicide in the history of North
America. Despite the fact that euthanasia started to become legalized in
some of the European countries, such as Switzerland, the Netherlands,
Belgium at the beginning of 2000s (Burkhardt, La Harpe, Harding &
Sobel, 2006: 287-294), the issue of euthanasia is not a contemporary prob-
lem; it has always been a part of human culture and societies since the
beginning (Ryan, Morgan & Lyons, 2011: 44).
In ancient times, euthanasia was defined as a form of suicide in
which a physician allows his patient to die due to their suffering from an
incurable, painful disease or medical condition. It is important to say that
in the ancient sense of euthanasia the main emphasis was not on the act

are not totally different concepts but two sides of the same coin. Death exists as a politi-
cal phenomenon at the point where biopolitics and thanatopolitics meet.
3
Despite the fact that the attitudes toward death varied from the East to the West, in this
paper, merely the Western attitudes toward death and euthanasia will be examined.

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of killing but dying. Similar to the modern form of assisted suicide, the
physician did not kill the patient but prepared the conditions in which he
can commit suicide in antiquity. In this respect, euthanasia can also be
considered as a ‘relation of abandonment’ (Agamben, 1998) or ‘letting die’
(Foucault, 2003a). Therefore, the history of euthanasia is also a part of
the history of the attitudes toward suicide in Western tradition. In this
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respect, it can be said that the relationship between political power and
suicide had always been very problematic since ancient times (Gillon,
1969: 174).
According to Amundsen, in ancient Greece, except suicide of slaves
and soldiers, suicide was defined as a crime requiring a legal sanction by
law (Amundsen, 1978: 934). In addition to this, there were some disre-
spectful cultural implementations in ancient Greece that applied to the
corpse of person who committed suicide. For example, in Attica, it was
common to amputate the right hand of the corpse and bury it in another
place apart from the body (Gillon, 1969: 176). However, this kind of hu-
miliating implementations to the dead body showed the reflections of the
belief system rather than the strength of criminal sanction. Despite the
lack of a powerful central administration and governmental technologies
in ancient Greece, socio-cultural and moral complexes concerning make
live were present. In other words, similar to the Christian era, in ancient
times, the socio-political structure and belief system was built upon a
complex that did not allow people to throw their lives away.
Yet, it is remarkable to say that whatever general attitude was taken
to suicide in the ancient era, it was always acceptable in the cases of in-
curable disease before Christianity. Even those ancient Greek philoso-
phers, such as Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, who radically rejected
suicide, accepted that there was nothing wrong with ending a life which
had become unendurable to live (Gillon, 1969: 174). Moreover, not only
the Greek but also the Roman thinkers had a common understanding of
euthanasia, and accepted suicide in some circumstances. In the light of
this content, it can be concluded that ancients were fairly permissive
about suicide and euthanasia in the cases of incurable and fatal disease. In
spite of the fact that there are some indications that people confronted
few problems finding a physician to provide them with assistance dying,

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it can be said that the majority of requests for euthanasia or assisted sui-
cide were fulfilled in both ancient Greece and Rome (Dowbiggin, 2007:
9-10).
With the rise of Christianity, suicide and euthanasia once again
started to become a matter in the third century. Especially, because of
the neo-Platonist school of Plotinus’s argument, “that it perturbed the

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soul and delayed its passage to the after-life”, against any form of suicide,
finally, caused to prohibition of euthanasia and suicide. Gillon notes that
“over the next few hundred years various ecclesiastical punishments were
prescribed and popular barbarities to the suicide’s body became more
repulsive” (Gillon, 1969: 176-177).
During the long period from the early middle age to the Enlighten-
ment, the attitudes toward suicide and death remained almost same in
the West. As Foucault states, “with the coming of the Enlightenment,
death, [once again] was entitled to the clear light of reason, and became
for the philosophical mind an object and source of knowledge” (Foucault,
2003b: 125). In spite of the fact that the Enlightenment movement could
disentangle “the philosophical consideration of suicide” from the dogma
of theology (Gillon, 1969: 177), it could not prevent ‘life’ from becoming a
victim of a new power technology which emerged in the late eighteenth
century. Yet, developments in modern bio-medical technologies and
invention of life-support machines in the 1950s caused a necessity for re-
defining death (Lamb, 1985: 16-19; Agamben, 1998: 160-161). It is precisely
for this reason that death and special forms of dying have become once
again a controversial juridico-political debate since the mid-twentieth
century.

2. The Meaning of Disappearance of Death in the context of the Foucauld-

ian Biopolitics

Death has mostly been understood as the absence of life but what is
the political meaning of the concept death? Michel Foucault is one of the
pioneer thinkers who attempted to respond this question linking the
concept death with the problem of power in his works. In Society Must Be
Defended, focusing on the historico-political conditions in which life be-
came the concern of governmental technologies in the nineteenth centu-

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ry, he describes the processes and socio-political transformations in

which “the great public ritualization of death” started to disappear (Fou-
cault, 2003a: 247). Foucault claims that in the late eighteenth century
death started to become a phenomenon that must be hidden away in the
public sphere. According to him, thanks to a power technology concern-
ing ‘to make live’, “death was no longer something that suddenly swooped
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down on life [...], death was now something permanent, something that
slips into life, perpetually gnaws at it, diminishes it and weakens it” (Fou-
cault, 2003a: 244). For Foucault, “a concrete manifestation of this power”
was the “disqualification of death” (Foucault, 2003a: 247) and death start-
ed to be considered as a “shameful” and “forbidden” phenomenon during
the nineteenth century (Ariés, 1974: 85). Foucault notes:
I think that the reason why death had become something to be hidden away
is not that anxiety has somehow been displaced or that repressive mecha-
nisms have been modified. What once (and until the end of the eighteenth
century) made death so spectacular and ritualized it so much was the fact
that it was a manifestation of a transition from one power to another. Death
was the moment when we made the transition from one power—that of the
sovereign of this world—to another—that of the sovereign of the next
world. A transition from one power to another (Foucault, 2003a: 247).
Foucault argues that the disappearance of death was a result of the
emergence of biopower in the late eighteenth century. In contrast to the
former power model in which the sovereign has ‘the right to take life or let
live’; with the emergence of biopower, political power started to avoid
taking life and become concerned with ‘mak[ing] live’.4 Foucault puts
forward that throughout this transformation in the power mechanisms,
man has started to be considered as ‘a species’ or ‘living being’ instead of a

4
In The History of Sexuality and Society Must Be Defended, Foucault focuses on the historical
conditions in which life became the concern of political and economic calculations in the
late eighteenth century. According to him, with the emergence of bio-power in this era
‘the biological existence’ (Foucault, 1984: 264) of the human body politicized through a set of
administrative techniques and statistical knowledge concerning “the longevity and pro-
ductivity of life”, “the level of health” and “life expectancy” (Foucault, 1978: 139). For Fou-
cault, this was a sign of a great political transformation in which the old sovereign power
and its basic characteristics were replaced by this new power technology and its biopoliti-
cal rationality. The main thesis Foucault defends is, in contrast to the classical power
model in which the sovereign has “the right to take life or let live”; in the era of biopoli-
tics political power’s function is ‘to make live and let die’ (Foucault, 2003a: 240-41).

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‘legal subject’ for the first time in history (Foucault, 2003a: 240-242):
Power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the
ultimate dominion was death, but with living beings, and the mastery it
would be able to exercise over them would have to be applied at the level of
life itself; it was the taking charge of life, more than the threat of death, that
gave power its access even to the body (Foucault, 2003a: 265).

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In this respect, to Foucault, biopower wants to make live due to the
fact that death is beyond its power. As Arendt draws attention, “nobody
can rule over dead men” (Arendt, 1998: 201). “Death is power's limit, the
moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secret aspect of exist-
ence, the most private” (Foucault, 1984: 261). Death is that absolute
boundary for which there is neither life nor power:
Death is outside the power relationship. Death is beyond the reach of pow-
er, and power has a grip on it only in general, overall, or statistical terms.
Power has no control over death, but it can control mortality. And to that
extent, it is only natural that death should now be privatized, and should be-
come the most private thing of all. In the right of sovereignty, death was the
moment of the most obvious and most spectacular manifestation of the ab-
solute power of the sovereign; death now becomes, in contrast, the moment
when the individual escapes all power, falls back on himself and retreats, so
to speak, into his own privacy. Power no longer recognizes death. Power lit-
erally ignores death (Foucault, 2003a: 247-248).
In fact, Foucault is not the first thinker who problematized the dis-
appearance of death. When he highlighted the processes in which death
started to disappear from the public rituals, the idea of the disappearance
of death had already become a matter of both philosophical and sociolog-
ical interest due to the fact that the scholars, such as Becker (1973) and
Ariés (1974), pointed out ‘the denial of death’ in the nineteenth century.
Similar to Becker and Ariés, Joseph Jacobs (1899) introduced a provoca-
tive article with an aphoristic title The Dying of Death, which appeared in
Fortnightly Review, in which he ascribes the disappearance of feelings and
thoughts about death. According to Jacobs, throughout the nineteenth to
twentieth century, death started to be considered as the object of taboo
in daily life practices.

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However, as is discussed in the first section, these kinds of cultural

and biopolitical considerations toward death, especially, in the case of
suicide, were also a characteristic of classical antiquity. Death has always
been seen as an enemy to be combated in the West. The traces of this
consideration can be seen at the level of the attitudes toward suicide. In
the light of this content, it can be said that Foucault seems to overlook
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the presence of a socio-cultural complex concerning, in a simple sense,

‘make live’ since antiquity. Focusing on the producing of the normality at
the level of power mechanisms and considering biopolitics as a new in-
vention and consequence of modern power technologies, Foucault does
not realize the fact that “biopolitics is something like the secret truth of
all western politics, law and political philosophizing” (Blencowe, 2010:
115). As Agamben argues, the biological existence of the human body,
human as a ‘species’ or ‘living body’ always existed in the West. Sovereign
power’s central concern had been not only life but also death since the
beginning. In light of this, Foucault simply gravitated toward the biopo-
litical discourse of modernity that drove death to “the fringes of culture”
and made it “abnormal” (Bleakley & Bligh: 2009: 379). In contrast to Fou-
cault’s consideration, death was not merely “in the eighteenth-century
medical thought” but was always “the absolute fact and the most relative
of phenomena” (Foucault, 2003b: 140) since the beginning. Therefore,
Foucault was mistaken not only for considering biopolitics as if it is an
invention of modern politics and consequence of modern power mecha-
nisms but also associating Western attitude toward death as if it is merely
a characteristic of modernity.
To sum up, despite the fact that Foucault analyses the rise of mod-
ern medicine in relation to death in The Birth of Clinic and ascribes the
political meaning of death in Society Must Be Defended and The History of
Sexuality; he “does not set out to prospectively consider how medicine
and death are related in an era of ‘high-tech’ possibilities, in which life-
support machinery [...] offers an important extension of a doctor’s practi-
cal skill” (Bleakley & Bligh: 2009: 374). In spite of his awareness of mod-
ern bio-medical technologies that can “keep people alive when, in biolog-
ical terms, they should have been dead long ago” (Foucault, 2003a: 248);
he underestimates the capacity of sovereignty to kill in relation to biopol-

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itics. Moreover, his special interest in the late eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries’ biopolitical dispositif, that emphasizes the political economy of
life, does not allow him to account the importance of the political econ-
omy of death in the context of modern biopolitics. Foucault, in contrast
to Agamben, is more interested in the other side of the coin, ‘life’ rather
than ‘death’. Therefore, as Agamben puts forward, there are “blind

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spot(s)” in the conceptualization of Foucault’s biopolitics, that “have to
be corrected, or, at least, completed” (Agamben, 1998: 6-9). In contrast to
Foucault’s consideration, death is now no longer a taboo; it is even possi-
ble to mention ‘the revival of death’ (Walter, 1994) rather than ‘the denial of
death’ (Freud, 1918: 57; Becker, 1973; Ariés, 1974; Dollimore, 2001). As
Bleakley and Bligh said: “death is now everywhere” (Bleakley & Bligh,
2009: 380).

3. Beyond the Boundaries of the Classical Biopolitics: Euthanasia and

Thanatopolitics

Both political and social theorists, thanks to Foucault, have been fo-
cusing on the administration of life (Foucault, 1978: 138) –the politics of
life itself or the politicization of life (Agamben, 1998: 119-125) – since the
second half of the twentieth century. Concentrating on the socio-
political and historical conditions in which ‘legal subjects’ could gain a
biopolitical existence, Foucault was more interested in the government of
life rather than death or dying practices. Although he problematized the
concept death in relation to biopolitics during his lectures in Collège de
France (Foucault, 2003a: 247-254), to use merely his approach in the con-
text of modern biopolitics might be insufficient to grasp the complete
meaning of the politics of death and different forms of dying such as
abortion, euthanasia, death camps, suicide bombers and so on. Thus, it
can be helpful to make a distinction between power over life and power
over death in order to figure out the juridico-medico-political practices of
sovereign power over both life and death. In contrast to the Foucauldian
consideration of biopower, “the biopolitical dispositif does not replace
sovereignty”, but rather, “it displaces its function and renders the prob-
lem of its foundation even more acute” (Lazzarato, 2002: 104). 5

5
According to Agamben, as opposed to Foucault’s thesis, it is not possible to mention a

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If we give the name ‘politicization of death’ or ‘politicizing death’

(Agamben, 1998: 160-165) to the relationship between political power and
special forms of dying, in our case euthanasia, which represents itself
both in the form of ‘kill[ing] without committing homicide’ (Agamben, 1998)
and ‘letting die’ (Foucault, 2003a), then we should, on the one hand, find
out the answer of the Foucauldian query 6 concerning the condition of
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possibilities of killing and letting die in relation to political power (Fou-

cault, 2003a: 254). On the other hand, we should re-consider Foucault’s
significant questions by taking into account of Agamben’s, Homo Sacer
(1998)7 in order to disclose the ambiguous boundaries of sovereign power

sharp politico-historical shift away from the classical sovereign power to bio-power. Ins-
tead, putting the concept ‘bare life’ into a modern and wider political framework, he cla-
ims that modernity has merely generalized and radicalized the Schmittian concept ‘the
state of exception’ which has been simply there from the beginning (Agamben, 1998: 112;
Mills, 2008: 65, Lemke, 2011: 53). Thus, it can be said that the main difference between
Foucault and Agamben lies in their consideration of biopolitics: whereas Foucault repla-
ces “bio-power” by “old sovereignty”, Agamben combines them together “by equating
Foucault’s ‘control over life’ with Carl Schmitt’s state of exception” (Rancière, 2004: 300).
6
In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault asks the following questions in order to test the
concept of bio-power in the context of death (Foucault, 2003a: 254): “If it is true that the
power of sovereignty is increasingly on the retreat and that disciplinary or regulatory disciplinary
power is on the advance, how will the power to kill and the function of murder operate in this tech-
nology of power, which takes life as both its object and its objective? How can a power such as this
kill, if it is true that its basic function is to improve life, to prolong its duration, to improve its chan-
ces, to avoid accidents, and to compensate for failings? How, under these conditions, is it possible for a
political power to kill, to call for deaths, to demand deaths, to give the order to kill, and to expose not
only its enemies but its own citizens to the risk of death?” Although he lays the foundations for
the discussion of biopower and biopolitics by putting these questions into a game of
truth, he does not have the same success in responding them. As such, it is possible to say
that “Foucault’s concept of biopower sits uneasily astride” (Patton, 2007: 214) with the
concept of death and especially in the case of special forms of dying, such as death camps,
euthanasia, assisted suicide, suicide bombers and so on.
7
In Homo Sacer, Agamben opens by drawing attention to the distinction between “zoē” and
“bios” which defines two different aspects of ‘life’ in ancient Greek. Whereas “zoē expres-
sed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods), and bios,
[…] indicated the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group” (Agamben,
1998: 1). Pointing out the distinction between life as ‘the fact of living’ and ‘the way of life’
(form-of-life), Agamben claims that Foucault was mistaken for considering biopolitics as
if it is an invention of modern political theory and consequence of modern power techno-
logies. In contrast to Foucault, he believes that “biopolitics is something like the secret
truth of all western politics, law and political philosophizing” (Blencowe, 2010: 115). Pla-
cing the biopolitical paradigm at the centre of the Western political tradition, he expli-
citly states that Foucault’s concept of ‘the biological existence of the human body’, human as a
‘species’ or ‘living being’ had already been included the Western politics as “bare life”, which
has been produced by sovereign power- since Ancient Greece. Therefore, he puts forward
the idea that there are ‘blind spot(s)’ in the Foucauldian sense of biopolitcs that ‘have to be
corrected, or, at least, completed’ (Agamben, 1998: 6-9). It is precisely for this reason that, ta-

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Between Foucault and Agamben: An Overview of the Problem of Euthanasia…

in relation to life and death: How can it be possible to kill for a political
power that wants to make live in the case of euthanasia? How does the
power over life and death function in a political order that is built upon
the dogma of the sacredness of life by means of euthanasia?
At this point, in my opinion, Agamben’s relevance8 is clear by intro-
ducing a concept, ‘life unworthy of being lived’. Agamben, responding to the

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questions above in his magnum opus, Homo Sacer, shows how the problem
of euthanasia extends the boundaries of the classical biopolitical dispositif:
The concept of life unworthy of being lived is clearly not an ethical one,
which would involve the expectations and legitimate desires of the individu-
al. It is, rather, a political concept in which what is at issue is the extreme

king the concept of ‘bare life’ or ‘sacred life’ at the centre of his inquiry, he simply attempts
to combine Arendt and Foucault’s points of view. Agamben notes that throughout a pro-
cess of ‘exclusion in the form of inclusion’, ‘naked life’, or, in the Foucauldian sense, the biolo-
gical existence of the human body has long been politically surrounded by sovereign
power. He, even, cites that “the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity
of sovereign power” (Agamben, 1998: 6). In this sense, what modern power does is to pla-
ce the concept ‘naked life’ at the centre of political calculations as well as political strate-
gies in a more radical way.
8
By stating “bare life” has always been “at the heart of sovereign power”, Agamben draws
attention to “a hidden link” between sovereignty and the biological existence of humans
which already exists (Patton, 2007: 213). Moreover, according to Patton (2007), Agamben
believes that he succeeded in “correction” or, at least, “completion” of Foucault, showing
that the production of “bare life” has been a crucial activity of sovereignty its beginnings.
Yet, for Genel (2006: 45), “the synthetic aim of his project does not appear ultimately to
accomplish this task”. From this point of view, Agamben rather than attempting, as he
states, “to correct or, at least, complete” the Foucauldian thesis on biopolitics; so to
speak, completely turns Foucault on his head and goes his own way by claiming that the
Foucauldian term biopolitics, as an “original – if concealed – nucleus of sovereign power”
has long been a crucial aspect of the sovereignty: “production of a biopolitical body is the
original activity of sovereign power” (Agamben, 1998: 9, 6). Agamben by overturning the
Foucauldian consideration of biopolitics in relation to sovereign power builds his own
theory on the Foucauldian term biopolitics; yet, it is important to say that “Agamben’s
analysis is more indebted to Carl Schmitt than to Michel Foucault” (Lemke, 2005: 9).
Moreover, he is more under the influence of the Aristotelian and Heideggerian ontology
as well as Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin’s “theoretical arsenal” rather than Fouca-
ult’s intellectual legacy (Orford, 2007: 208-209; Mills, 2008: 59-60). Agamben, in contrast
to Foucault, is more interested in the other side of the coin, ‘death’ instead of ‘life’: whe-
reas Foucault problematizes the production of norms and ‘normal conditions’ in the context
of biopolitics, Agamben focuses on ‘zones of indistinction’ and ‘the state of exception’ in which
legal norms were suspended by the sovereign power (Lemke, 2011: 60). Thus, Agamben
“is interested not so much in ‘life’ as in its ‘bareness’”, and therefore, “the question of bio-
power” is not a “central concern” of him; but “the body’s capacity to be killed” is what he
concerns (Genel, 2006: 44, Lemke, 2011: 59, Agamben, 1998: 125). Therefore, as opposed
to the Foucauldian consideration of the term, for Agamben, biopolitics is above all poli-
tics of death (Fitzpatrick, 2001: 263-265).

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metamorphosis of sacred life – which may be killed but not sacrificed – on

which sovereign power is founded. If euthanasia lends itself to this ex-
change, it is because in euthanasia one man finds himself in the position of
having to separate zoē and bios in another man, and to isolate in him some-
thing like a bare life that may be killed. From the perspective of modern bi-
opolitics, however, euthanasia is situated at the intersection of the sovereign
Beytulhikme An International Journal of Philosophy

decision on life that may be killed and the assumption of the care of the na-
tions biological body. Euthanasia signals the point at which biopolitics nec-
essarily turns into thanatopolitics (Agamben, 1998: 142).
It is remarkable to say that Agamben takes no ethical position on
the problem of euthanasia: “it is not our intention here to take a position
on the difficult ethical problem of euthanasia, which still today, in certain
countries, occupies a substantial position in medical debates and pro-
vokes disagreement”. What Agamben does is merely, linking the problem
of euthanasia with sovereign power, to point out the zone of indistinction
in which power over life turns to power over death and to explore the
politics of euthanasia as a state policy:
More interesting for our inquiry is the fact that the sovereignty of the living
man over his own life has its immediate counterpart in the determination of
a threshold beyond which life ceases to have any juridical value and can,
therefore, be killed without the commission of a homicide (Agamben, 1998:
139)
It is also important to say that, in this respect, Agamben by the term
euthanasia only considers active euthanasia, in which the physician does
something that causes the patient to die, and refers to a Nazi biopoliti-
cian’s pamphlet which points out, according to Agamben, “the fundamen-
tal biopolitical structure of modernity –the decision on the value (or non-
value) of life–” and signals at the point in which “the decision on life be-
comes a decision on death” (Agamben, 1998: 137, 122). However, either in
the form of assisted dying or in the form of killing, the distinction be-
tween ‘taking life’ and ‘letting die’ losses its meaning politically and the
patient falls into a “zone of indistinction between the animal and the
human” (Agamben, 1998: 107). In a grey zone where life has no value and
thus may be killed, bare life and political life are bound together. In the
case of euthanasia a patient becomes a sacred man, who may be killed and

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Between Foucault and Agamben: An Overview of the Problem of Euthanasia…

yet not sacrificed due to the fact that he does not deserve to live anymore.
Even when euthanasia was forbidden in the manner of law in some of the
Western countries, physicians who help their patient to commit suicide
was not sentenced in some cases (İnceoğlu, 1999). This example clearly
supports Agamben’s claim:
The sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without

Beytulhikme An International Journal of Philosophy

committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred life –
that is, life that may be killed but not sacrificed – is the life that has been
captured in this sphere (Agamben, 1998: 83).
On the other hand, in some cases patients cannot be helped to
commit suicide or killed, even if they desperately want to die, as in the
case of Diane Pretty, who was suffering from an incurable and fatal dis-
ease and wanted her husband to end her life without being prosecuted for
aiding and abetting suicide (Szerletics, 2011: 479-496). At this point, we
confront a power/knowledge complex, a combination of different pow-
er/knowledge regimes, such as law, medicine and politics that decide
which life does deserve to live and which one is unworthy of being lived. In
this respect, sovereign’s decision on life becomes two shapes: who may live
and who must die. Either in the form letting die or killing without commit-
ting homicide, euthanasia points out the capacity of sovereignty to kill.
In the light of this content, not only the integration of medicine and
politics (Agamben, 1998: 143) but also law can be seen as one of the main
characteristics of modern biopolitics. The combination of these three
disciplines is applied both at the level of the individual body and the
whole population by sovereign power.

Conclusion

I have tried to discuss a brief history of euthanasia and suicide in or-

der to figure out the present juridico-medico-political complex from
which the sovereign power derives its philosophical underpinnings and
theoretical justifications and showed the fact that the relationship be-
tween death and political power has always been problematic. Secondly, I
have focused on the meaning(s) of disappearance of death in the context
of Foucauldian biopolitics and attempted to discuss that rather than dis-
appearance or denial of death, something very similar to re-discovery of

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Gürhan Özpolat

death has started to take place in the Western world since the mid-
twentieth century. Finally, I have situated the Agambenian concept ‘life
unworthy of being lived’ (1998: 136-143) in the debate biopolitics in order to
show the zone of indistinction which biopolitics turns to thanatopolitics.
As Agamben puts forward, it is not possible to mention a radical politico-
historical break from the classical sovereign power to biopower. Euthana-
Beytulhikme An International Journal of Philosophy

sia as a political phenomenon signals the shadowy zone where power over
life and power over death meet. Euthanasia is a perfect example of the
modern biopolitical dispositif in which, in a Foucauldian sense, the separa-
tion between ‘taking life’ and ‘letting die’ loses its meaning. As Agamben
realized, not only life but also death is political, and euthanasia can be
considered as an example that discloses the function and foundation of
modern biopolitics maybe in a more acute way. From this point, it is
possible to say that Agamben by introducing a concept, life that does not
deserve to live with reference to the problem of euthanasia, completes
what is missing, or, at least implicit in the Foucauldian sense of biopoli-
tics.

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Burkhardt, S.; La Harpe, L.; Harding, T-W. & Sobel, J. (2006). Euthanasia and
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Between Foucault and Agamben: An Overview of the Problem of Euthanasia…

Öz: Bu yazıda, ölmenin ve öldürmenin özel biçimlerinin yaşam ve ölüm arasın-

daki karanlık bir bölgede veyahut bulanık bir sınırda meydana geldiği gerçeğini
göz önünde bulundurarak, ötenazi olgusu üzerinden, Michel Foucault (yaşam-
politikası) ve Giorgio Agamben’in (ölüm-politikası) biyopolitika
kavramsallaştırmaları arasında bir orta yol bulmayı deneyeceğim. Bu doğrultuda,
tarihsel bir arka plan sunmanın elzem olduğuna inandığım çalışmaya, egemen

Beytulhikme An International Journal of Philosophy

iktidarın bugünkü felsefi temellerini aldığı ve teorik doğrulamalarını sağladığı
mevcut hukuki-tıbbi-siyasi kompleksi anlamak için, ötenazi ve intiharın kısa bir
tarihi ile başlayacak; ve iktidar ile ölüm arasındaki ilişkinin her daim oldukça
sorunlu olduğunu göstereceğim. İkinci olarak, Foucaultcu biyopolitika
bağlamında ölümün ortadan kayboluşunun anlam[lar]ına yoğunlaşacak ve Fou-
cault’nun düşüncesinin aksine, Batı’da yirminci yüzyılın ortalarından itibaren
ölümün yeniden-keşfedilmesine benzer bir durumun gerçekleştiğini öne sü-
receğim. Ve nihayet makalenin üçüncü ve son kısmında, ötenazi sorunundan
hareketle, Agamben’in yaşanmaya değmeyen hayat kavramını takdim ederek,
Foucault’nun biyopolitika düşüncesindeki eksi[kli]ği, yani ölüm politikasını,
tamamladığını ileri süreceğim.

Anahtar Kelimeler: Hekim destekli intihar, ölüm, ötenazi, biyopolitika, ölüm-

politikası, iktidar, egemenlik.

___________________________________________________________
This paper is partially based on my article entitled “Türkiye’de Biyopolitikanın Ölü Doğuşu:
Türkçe Akademik Yazın Alanında Biyopolitika Kavramının Alımlanma Biçimleri” [The Still
Birth of Biopolitics in Turkey: The Reception of the Concept of Biopolitics in the Turkish
Academic Literature], which appeared in Modus Operandi: Journal of Relational Social Sciences,
Issue 2, July 2015.

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