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Book by Simona Forti
NEW DEMONS: Rethinking Power and Evil Today
"Simona Forti is one of the most interesting Italian philosophers today. She is known for her studies on Arendt, and lately for her philosophical work on "totalitarian thanatopolitics." Her latest monograph is a challenging and innovative book that is destined to become an unavoidable point of orientation for studies and scholarly investigations on the topic." (Adriana Cavarero Political Theory)
TABLE OF CONTENTS HERE
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FROM CHAPTER 4, "Thanatopolitics & Absolute Victims
The biologistic formulation numbed perception of the crimes and led to the separation between healthy blood and infected blood being represented as routine work, to be carried out in the name of life--for its enhancement and perpetuation. In this change of context, the word "extermination" thus changed meaning by deriving it from a definition of the enemy.
In the tangle of positivism and racism wound tightly together by the force of the new disciplines—from medicine to experimental microbiology, and from anthropology to eugenics—the racist approach received a sort of noble, scientific investiture.
It was thus able to present its own strategies of power as medical planning. In this medical-scientific context, the imaginary was populated by security needs and fantasies of purification.
This is the perspective adopted by studies on the role that doctors and biomedical research played in the Third Reich.
At the heart of the National Socialist ideology, there apparently lay the conviction that the German nation, as a real political body, was suffering from a disease caused by a potentially deadly infection—triggered by infectious agents that, to start with, were identifiable with the Jewish microorganism.
Fascinated by the power of these corporeal fantasies, Hitler and his followers conceived their mission as a sequence of therapeutic phases. After an accurate, but ruthless, diagnosis of the disease, they had to act according to the most rigorous, scientific logic of cause and effect, without shirking the weight of their responsibility for the treatment.
At various points in his speeches and writings, the Fuhrer used the idea of Germany as a real organic body. Dazzled by the power of the metaphor, he continually returned to the relationship between cell and body: it was an inextricable bond that charged every cell with the responsibility for the health of the whole.
We know how powerful this appeal was: rather than treating individual patients, doctors now felt called on to care for the entire German people; their mission was to become “biological soldiers" serving "the great idea of the National Socialist biological state structure."
The growing success of medical and biological sciences, whose discoveries in the last decades of the nineteenth century led to the isolation of many disease-carrying microorganisms, prompted the Nazi imaginary to literalize the metaphor of Germany as a political body. Hitler thus became celebrated as the "Great Physician" of the German nation, the "Robert Koch" of politics. This makes sense of what Rudolf Hess proclaimed about National Socialism in a mass gathering in 1934, when he described it as nothing more than "applied biology."
In a word, Germany expressed its power of death, its absolute thanatopolitics, by fully assuming the identity of a biocracy: the power of life. The result of this contamination of politics and social science by the medical and scientific discourse was a specific political-military therapy.
The two-thousand-year-old biological metaphors, which the political lexicon had always co-opted, were freed from any conceptual mediation and literalized to the point of tearing down any divisions between biology and politics; more specifically, according to some interpreters, this total biopower was marked by a specific specialization of medicine and biology, that of immunology.
According to Richard Koenigsberg, Hitler and his men expected Germany to conform to the law of the immune system, and it did so. In the same way any other organism singled out and recognized cells foreign to it and automatically destroyed them, so did the German body politic.
The view that the unprecedented destructiveness of the Nazi genocide is linked to this sort of immunological strategy is also the guiding force behind Roberto Esposito's interpretation. In his previously mentioned Bios, the analogy between the Nazi regime and the immune system occupies center-stage in his philosophical reading of the historical phenomenon.
Following a hermeneutic paradigm expertly put to the test in previous works, he believes that the category of "immunization" clarifies the link left unresolved in Foucault's work between biopower and its drift into thanatopolitics in the nineteenth century.
The logic inherent in the functioning of the immune system would explain the perverse, but deep, association between the protection of life--a genuine “a priori of Nazi politics"-and the simultaneous negation and destruction of life. The impressive epidemiological repertoire used by the ideologues and functionaries of the Third Reich to depict their enemies and victims displaced their aggression into the sphere of defensive action needed for survival.
In this shifted context, death was therefore understood not as the negation of life but as the immunological strategy required to expunge the infected part. In this frantic process of literalizing the medical metaphor, autoimmune disease is the figure that would explain the double tie between obsession for life and health on the one hand, and continuous extermination on the other.
No longer content with’ attacking and annihilating the supposed "bacilli," "bacteria," "viruses," and "microbes," the immune system of the great body of Germany began to perceive a large part of its own organs as a threat as well. For Esposito, sterilization, "the anticipatory suppression of birth," and the elimination of those who threatened the life of Germany are to be understood as dispositifs of radical immunization.
But what is the premise founding this biopolitical reading of the relationship between life and death in Nazi politics? The texts that Esposito analyzes convince him that Nazism is not, and can never be, a fully developed philosophy, because it is already a fully developed biology.
In other words, the Nazi regime's “vitalistic" vision of the world alongside its biopolitical practices of putting to death mark a sharp break with both modernity and the philosophical tradition. Unlike the aberrations of “real socialism," into which the Nazi crimes are usually assimilated, the thanatopolitics of the Third Reich break with our civilization.
Based on the new a priori provided by the life sciences, this view portrays evil as being reduced entirely to disease, to the pathological dimension that threatens and endangers the health of the body. But in this way, by viewing the extermination as something lying beyond all moralities, does the biopolitical theory not run the risk of lending a hand to the "nihilistic" stance?
I believe that the Third Reich's vision of the world, at least for some of its most influential exponents, should be examined as a morality, indeed, and as hypermorality--primarily because I believe that the "virtuous" intentions of the many perpetrators need to be taken seriously, not just viewed as rhetorical, cynical strategies.
Many actors or protagonists of the scene of evil perceived themselves as the executors of a supreme moral law, which prompted them to act in conformity with that imperative. The famous speech Heinrich Himmler gave to the heads of the SS on October 4, 1943, in Posen (Poznan), exhorting them to be loyal to the Universal, is emblematic.
He invited them to stop placing a particular violation before their ethical duty: "The extermination of the Jewish people" is a duty. In the face of this duty, "along they all come, all the 80 million upright Germans, and each one has his dent Jew." It is not as if Himmler does not understand the unconscious urge of his listeners to be exempted from this tough task.
He knows what it means to look on "when a hundred bodies lie together, when there are five hundred, or when there are a thousand." But this is where "our virtue" lies: to have observed all this and remained decent. "We have the moral duty" to the German people, "to kill this people who would kill us," but "we don't want to get sick and die from the same bacillus that we have exterminated." Himmler is proud to say that "our conscience," our soul, our interiority, have remained intact: "And we have suffered no defect within us, in our soul, or in our character".
As much as National Socialism was applied biology, as much as it ultimately developed into a biocracy, it nevertheless remained powerfully marked by moral choices. What led to mass murder was not the neutrality of value relativism typical of the scientific worldview; rather, it was a hypermoral vision of the world, strongly characterized, like all hypermoralities, by the fundamental distinction between good and evil.
Certainly, dehumanization—which operates through medicalization and animalization--is an effective hermeneutic lens for understanding mass exterminations. But the emphasis placed on the legitimizing and anesthetizing role played by the new life sciences in regard to racism leads to genocide--especially the Nazi genocide--being located in a place "beyond good and evil" that suspended the basic assumptions of our cultural tradition.
What I believe instead is that as much as the racial theories were marked by the "novelty" of the biological and medical sciences, they continued to powerfully convey a sense of the ancient moral distinctions tied to the traditional ontological categories. In fact, far from asserting, as we often read, that in racist discourse the body of the future extermination victim is emptied of human and moral meaning, I believe that on the contrary we should say that the future victim's body is "saturated" with meaning—both human and moral--although the meaning of these terms needs to be clearly specified.
How then are we to interpret the obsession for enhancing life? Could it be that the insistence on purity so easily formulated in the health versus disease opposition has always had to do with a dualistic perception whose sway, in reality, was never broken?
It is a dualism that ultimately responds to the need to separate life from death, identifying life with goodness and death with evil—a dualism that has probably never been defeated, even when the theologians and philosophers believed they had overcome it through the idea of privatio boni, the ontological deficiency, or with the justification provided by theodicies. Saying that death—in other words, evil—does not exist, or that it is mere appearance, has never sufficed to allow life-the good-to eternally be. This, I believe, is why dualism is always quick to make a comeback.
In the racist biocracy, too, more than ever perhaps, the traditional concepts of evil--the dualistic conception and the idea of evil as appearance—continued to reign, savagely pitting against each other the absolute power of life and the disintegrating power of death. This opposition between life and death, whose content and contexts have changed over the course of history, has nevertheless always continued to function according to the structural schema of the struggle between good and evil.
Evil must be fought in order for the good to triumph; death must be defeated so that life can be perpetuated. Thus the antithesis between health and disease, as the fundamental opposition between human and nonhuman, must be conceived along the fundamental lines that have traced the difference between good and evil.
From this perspective, certain tropes of racist discourse prove to be choice places for deciphering the interweaving between the new scientific lexicon, imprinted by the rationality of the medical and biological sciences, and the eternal structure of the moral dichotomy. This supports the fact that antisemitism and Nazi racism in general are not simply a perversion of Darwinian biologism. Rather, they are nurtured by much older cultural legacies that are profoundly rooted in our tradition of thought.
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