The Biopolitical Film (A Nietzschean Paradigm)

“It is only in the burning house that the fundamental architectural problem becomes visible for the first time.”

–Giorgio Agamben

“Enmity is the motor of the whole.”

–Michael Haneke

Introduction

 
Let me open with a sweeping statement: Biopolitical cinema, exemplified by Michael Winterbottom, Lars von Trier, Michael Haneke, Alfonso Cuarón, David Cronenberg, Gabriel Range, Roland Emmerich, David Fincher, and others, has questioned the ability of representative democracy to handle a catastrophic situation. Beyond that, biopolitical film has undermined the moral and political legitimacy of the democratic system as a whole, mostly—but not always—criticizing it from a left-wing perspective. The first step we must take to appreciate this is to return to the formative moments of biopolitics as a concept: the creation of the concept and its affirmative use by German post-Nietzscheans of the 1920s and ‘30s, the French critique during the late 1970s, and the current translation of both to a set of post-9/11 images. What unites all three historical moments is, first, the use of a presumed state of emergency or a “cultural crisis” in order to plead for urgent reform, and, second, the use of biopolitics as a critical concept aimed at a false liberal claim to legitimate power and its abuse. The concept of biopolitics identified—from its first moment seventy years ago—the hidden but shared power structure that both liberalism and totalitarianism use in favor of their eukonomia of life. The shared radical legacy has convinced directors of recent biopolitical films to turn back to sources of inspiration from 1920s Germany and to their attempt to ground a fair, simultaneous critique of totalitarianism and democracy. As a hint of the argument that follows, I’ll just say that the current attraction to a distant era has its roots in three phenomena:
 

1. 1.
   Politically: A growing suspicion of democratic politics in its current form.
2. 2.
   Philosophically and culturally: A fascination with biological catastrophes and cultural crises, as it appears in the German Kulturkritik.
3. 3.
   Historically: A renewed interest in the 1920s marked by radical experiments in aesthetics, philosophy, and politics.

In this context, one thinks of Roland Emmerich’s The Day after Tomorrow as a good example of a conservative and authoritarian approach and Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46, Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, or Lars von Trier’s trilogy Dogville, Manderlay, and Melancholia as exemplary of the progressive, anti-authoritarian perspective. Similarly to the radical critique of the 1920s, put forth by radicals from both left and right of the center, contemporary biopolitical film seems to focus on the urgent need to expose and undermine the fallacy of centrism and consensus. From a biopolitical perspective, authority means much more than a democratic norm or a social contract and should not be confused with those.

 
As a distinct strand in current cinema suggests, our political culture sees itself reflected in the dark horizon of 1920s Germany: a state of extreme creativity on the verge of extinction. A catastrophic, dystopian view of Western culture controls the narrative for Winterbottom, Cuarón, Cronenberg, Emmerich, and von Trier. All use the science-fiction genre to question a present process via its futuristic horizon, covered with flames. Other films, like Gabriel Range’s mockumentary Death of a President, research the mechanism of control and power and use biopolitical critique, including the presumed state of emergency (the murder of a president), in order to depict it. Lars von Trier goes the other way, and constructs—similarly to Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitical argumentation in The State of Exception—a narrative that adopts the aesthetic tools of 1920s Germany in order to criticize the American politics of the present. Von Trier’s Zentropa (1991) along with his more recent Dogville (2003), Manderlay (2005), and Melancholia (2011) can be seen as a sequence relying on the same biopolitical logic. The gist of von Trier’s own version of a biopolitical critique owes much to his post-Nietzschean thrust: His attempt to expose a will to power at the heart of liberal ethics revolves around modern democracy’s biopolitical interest in the individual body of the citizen. The implied conclusion is a plea to destroy liberal society for the sake of exposure and correction.

 

 

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Fig. 1.

Still from Dogville (2003)
 

 
Michael Haneke’s Code Unknown (2000), Time of the Wolf (2003), and Caché (2005) end with a similar political statement; the only possible political mechanism that avoids the trap of liberal norms is the one that assumes a horizon of absolute destruction or the end of time. In short, the distance between the dys- and the utopian has been shortened in our time. Haneke himself admits in a recent interview: “[My films describe the state of] all against all. And every one against his/her own self. Only the pain brings people together and back to the self. …The ‘coming Democracy’ is naturally a utopia” (91).

 

 

 
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Fig. 2.

Still from Haneke’s Time of the Wolf (2003)
 

Biopolitical critique is also apparent in commentary about recent political film, though left somewhat underdeveloped: as Slavoj Žižek expresses it in his commentary on Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), the film depicts “a society without history, or, to use another political term, biopolitics. And my god, this film literally is about biopolitics. The basic problem in this society as depicted in the film is literally biopolitics: how to generate, regulate life” (DVD Commentary). In Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, Žižek identifies the philosophical condition for Cuarón’s work: “The infertility Cuaron’s film is about was diagnosed long ago by Friedrich Nietzsche, when he perceived how Western civilization was moving in the direction of the Last Man…. We in the West are the Last Men” (24).
 
As I show in this article, the biopolitical film is not about a society without history nor about the “Last Men” per se, but rather is about a society that sees itself mediated through an historical model of a catastrophe (of “all against all”) and of the regulation and regeneration following it. The lack of history in fact results from the depicted catastrophe, a tool of total critique used by the biopolitical film to distance itself from current conventions of ethics and politics. One should note that this very absence of history has a particular history of its own. For the sake of the argument, I focus on two opposing examples that demonstrate how biopolitical critique is used from both the left and the right to challenge contemporary neoliberal regimes. Before agreeing or disagreeing with the political conclusions of such sites of critique, one should first acknowledge their existence as a phenomenon in the public sphere, and try to decipher its reasoning. Michael Winterbottom’s Code 46, on the one hand, and Roland Emmerich’s The Day after Tomorrow, on the other, are two clear examples of political films that use biopolitical critique. More specifically, they prove to be films that rely on Nietzsche’s critique of liberalism as the starting point for a contemporary political critique. Before I delve into a close reading of the two films, however, a few words about the theoretical and historical logic of “the biopolitical film.”
 

From Nietzsche to Foucault

 
Analyzing in detail representative examples from both “artistic” and “popular” cinema shows that the fascination with “something powerful and dangerous” in general, and with Nietzschean politics in particular, has not faded. As Nietzsche says in Ecce Homo (1888), “I am no man, I am dynamite” (782). Ecce Homo, one should recall, is a Latin translation of Pontius Pilate’s call in the Gospel of John 19:5: “Behold the man.” The end of “man” and the transformation of the human into a dynamite-carrier implies the end of one civilization and the beginning of a new one.
 
A new—albeit strangely familiar—plea to put an end to existing political culture is echoed strongly in recent films, but its first moment of popularization occurred in Germany in the 1920s (Aschheim). Developed by post-Nietzschean philosophers, a daring fusion of aesthetics and politics opened the way to Nietzsche “beyond politics” by using the idea of exception in order to reflect back on politics and norms from the perspective of their negation (Schnädelbach). This line of thinking, sometimes referred to as nihilism, identifies the “philosophy of destruction” and the catastrophic Nietzschean “annihilator par excellence” with Europe’s most “advanced critique of itself, one more radical and open, more serious and penetrating, than [any] foreign critique” (Löwith 206, 175). Affiliating the theme of catastrophe with a form of radical critique has itself a past, as Hans-Joachim Lieber showed; he addresses the political exception and the concept of the Endzeit (end of time) in the post-Nietzscheanism of the 1920s (2).
 
Nietzsche was probably the first to point out the capacity of exceptionalism and to expose destruction as a tool, and, in more concrete political terms, to uncover the democratic-urban culture of secrecy and exception. First he pointed out the finality of the human itself: He used the “present consciousness” of the animal—“the animal lives unhistorically”—to ridicule the humanist: “He who wants to strive for and promote the culture of a people should strive for and promote this higher unity and join in the destruction of modern bogus cultivatedness for the sake of a true culture.” The place of “cultivatedness” is of course the city, where culture is commodified and used to mask both individual helplessness and political illusions:
 

The history of his city becomes for him the history of himself; he reads its walls, its towered gate, its rules and regulations. . . . Here we lived, he says to himself, for here we are living; and here we shall live, for we are tough and not to be ruined overnight. Thus with the aid of this “we” he looks beyond his own individual transitory existence and feels himself to be the spirit of his house, his race, his city.
 

(On the Uses 61, 80)

The result is a renewed emphasis on exceptionalism and an urgent plea to avoid the temptation of urbanism offered by the consensus, a democratic collective offering nothing but a retroactive justification for the exception.

 
Rethinking those same lines in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Michel Foucault returned to the very roots of historical thinking and examined Nietzsche’s impact on it. He translated Nietzsche’s critique in Untimely Meditations into a reformulation of history’s understanding of power: “Humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination. . . . [This is] a history whose perspective on all that precedes it implies the end of time, a completed development” (378–79). The end of time here would also be the end of political action, and as a result of politics as such. In Power/Knowledge Foucault expresses this in explicit terms, describing Nietzsche as not only beyond political convention, but beyond political theory as well: “Nietzsche is the philosopher of power, a philosopher who managed to think power without having to confine himself within a political theory in order to do so” (Gordon 53). Nietzsche, in other words, is an ultimate point of reference, the end of the end, the point of no return.
 
In The History of Sexuality Foucault explains sovereignty through a contemporary notion of power, inverting the Enlightenment idea of a body politic and arguing that the constraints imposed on sexuality for the sake of governmental codification in the eighteenth century became in the twentieth century a more totalizing “biopolitical” intrusion. From a mere codification of normative and non-normative aimed at strengthening the rule of the sovereign, modern sovereignty claims dominion over each and every organ of the body as well as each and every action of the mind that operates it (133–60). Foucault explicitly connects this process with the post-Nietzschean crisis of culture and democratic politics that culminated with the German election of 1933: a principal form of end-of-time, “the peak of power.” It is unsurprising that Foucault’s concept of biopolitics returns to 1920s and ‘30s Germany; the era of totalitarianism is for him the ultimate realization of biopolitical power. Yet the rise of totalitarianism only extended and materialized an embedded potential of power/knowledge that first appeared in the liberal context. As Foucault himself explains in his late lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics, “Liberalism is a word that comes to us from Germany.” And even more specifically: “The [Liberal] German form is linked to the Weimar Republic,” culminating with a model of
 

unlimited growth of the state . . . : Everything presented by the Nazis as the destruction of the bourgeois and capitalist state are in fact supplements of the state, a state in the process of being born, institutions undergoing stratification. A consequence of this, and what enables the ordoliberals to draw a different conclusion, is that there is in fact a necessary link between this economic organization and this growth of the state.

(22, 78, 112–13)

In Security, Territory, Population Foucault continues to ground and substantiate biopolitics as the control of population via “mechanisms of security” “in relation to the desert or desertification due to major human catastrophe” (67) or “the application of an economy…that is to say, supervision and control over inhabitants, wealth, and the conduct of all and each.” (95).” In short, as Judith Revel argues, “for Foucault, the radical essence of the neoliberal agenda is evident in its wide-ranging application,” which is no less radical than its opponents from both left and right (qtd. McNay 59). The power of this analysis lies in its ability to expose “individual autonomy … at the heart of disciplinary control” (McNay 62). Giorgio Agamben brings this logic to its more general, anti-Liberal, conclusion when he argues that “it was during this period that exceptional legislation by executive [governativo] decree (which is now perfectly familiar to us) became a regular practice in the European democracies” (State of Exception 13).

 
In a sense, Foucault (and following him, Agamben) is himself a symptom of our contemporary post-1945 obsession with the post-Nietzschean critique of the 1920s as the first configuration of a secularized end of time. The return of current cinema to 1920s Germany can be understood as a Foucauldian move meant to expose the inherent cultural and political structure of biopower. Identifying the fault of liberalism, still an unresolved issue for the public imagination, seems to stand at the center of contemporary political film from both the left and the right. The key to identifying this fault is the ability to imagine the end of liberalism, and possibly democracy with it.
 
The tight connection between post-Nietzschean critique and a biopolitical critique has drawn infrequent but interesting commentary during the past few years. Pointing to Nietzsche as the first biopolitical critic, Friedrich Balke refers to “Nietzsche’s high regard for the creation of distance” and his absolute rejection of any “zone of normalcy” and “petty politics.” Balke assesses this “[Nietzschean] logic . . . as biopolitical” (706). Nietzsche’s radical critique opened a space wherein critics like Foucault and Agamben could reconstitute modern man, inverting Aristotelianism by referring to man as “an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question” (706). Nietzsche, Balke concludes, “is undoubtedly the philosopher of this modern man and his politics.” His view of “great politics” is one of systematic shifts between poles of screening and extinguishing; these are the “politics of selection (Auslese)” (708). Returning to Nietzsche, and Foucault following him, Agamben speaks of this as the principle “by which it is only in the burning house that the fundamental architectural problem becomes visible for the first time” (Man 115).
 

The Day after Tomorrow (2004): A Conservative Ec(h)o-Film

 
One line of contemporary political film follows a culturally conservative strand. The supposedly subversive character of Emmerich’s The Day after Tomorrow (2004)—the most “Hollywood” and the least critical of the films I’ve mentioned—is interesting precisely because the film says explicitly what it dislikes about current democratic politics and has a simple and clear relation to the three conditions stated above for biopolitical film. The plot is grounded in the predictions of ecological catastrophes so common in 1910s and 1920s Germany, and this Gaia paranoia becomes a means for protesting conventional norms and Enlightenment ideals.
 
The Day after Tomorrow depicts an ecological catastrophe that freezes Manhattan and the subsequent inability of conventional politics to handle the situation (see Figs. 3 and 4 below). The film pursues two storylines, the first of which concerns a father on a mission to save his son, himself a young leader who organizes a small group of survivors in the New York Public Library. The second storyline presents the inability of an old-fashioned democratic and idealist president to decide how to divide his country between those he can save and those he can’t save and whom he must therefore sacrifice. The old, avuncular president, good-hearted but clearly incompetent to lead a nation in a state of emergency, then passively risks the whole nation in favor of avoiding a cruel but necessary decision about selection and recuperation.

 

 
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Fig. 3.

The Statue of Liberty in The Day after Tomorrow (2004)
 

The Nietzschean paradigm is used explicitly to weigh different critiques of democratic politics, suggesting an answer only once an actual state of emergency is declared. Biopolitics strides onto the scene before the state of emergency takes over, at the point where the conventional devices of democratic politics are ridiculed and a more radical gesture aims an explosive bullet at the very heart of power-dispersion. Nietzsche and biopolitics are then joined in the central scene of the film, which takes place midway through the film: terribly cold, the protagonists weigh different ways to warm themselves in the freezing temperature and discuss the selection of books they are carrying to the fire. What lies beneath is weighing the philosophical options of the new era in keeping with Nietzsche’s demand to use history (the canon) to benefit life:

Critics have missed the sarcasm in the exchange along with its philosophical-historical tone as the agent of cultural critique. The dialogue plays like an ironic reworking of Heinrich Heine’s humanistic attack on religious fundamentalists who burned books, and the later iconic value the warning received in anti-totalitarian rhetoric: Emmerich seems to be suggesting that such warnings—representing the standard humanist position—have been turned around and have lost relevance; now, after large sections of humanity are threatened with extinction, it is possible—even recommended—to burn books. But the only one capable of translating the urgent physical need to a political declaration is the black man “from below,” the only one who knows how to locate the center of power, the only “true Nietzschean” or, in our terms, the only biopolitical critic. In other words: only the black man as the “third,” a “homo sacer” of American society, is able to figure out intuitively where the old moral opposition between democratic ethics and totalitarian evil has collapsed. The tax law is, of course, the Leviathan’s immediate tool for supporting his divine rule and controlling his subjects. Viewed against the horrors of progress, democracy is seen as an equal if not worse evil than any medieval sovereign. The only difference lies in how elaborate and sophisticated—hence also how much less transparent—its legal codifications and its system of money collection are. In historical terms, current threats of human catastrophe dwarf the Holocaust in scale and measure, relieving the Enlightened free market of its ethical prestige or burden, depending on one’s perspective. Rather than debating the relevance of the philosophical canon, the film suggests, a new era would turn to a new form of politics, ignorant of historical debates that relate politics to morality. Nietzsche shows us how. The black man who carries his legacy is the only true radical and the only one who is willing to focus on the act rather than on empty slogans.
 
In addition to this sort of amusing dialogue, we should consider the film’s title, an allusion to the famous passage from Beyond Good and Evil in which Nietzsche warns the “Europeans of the day after tomorrow” to consider pessimism their current political horizon; he concludes with a prophetic sentence: “Alas! If only you knew how soon, how very soon, things will be . . . different!”¹ In his most political project, Politics of Friendship (1994), Jacques Derrida quotes Nietzsche’s prophecy, remarking excitedly, “What a sentence!” (31). The close affinity between a declared “state of emergency” and a plea for radical reform is typical of biopolitical film. Other directors—take for example David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999)—portray exactly where this prophecy is realized: in the thin layer that separates the imagination from real life, the “game” from “life,” the body from a control room in a remote corporation; they all give in to a language and logic of “bio-ports.” The Europeans-of-the-day-after-tomorrow would not be able to separate themselves from such total control, unless they decided to “play the game” and take a risk, to turn themselves into “dynamite” and dive into danger. Cronenberg, in his commentary on the film, admits that the existentialist creed is taken from Martin Heidegger and his post-Nietzschean view of life oriented toward danger.
 
In contrast to Cronenberg’s sophisticated net of references, the crude references in Emmerich’s film—as well as its simplistic narratology—indicate a much broader cinematic reception of Nietzschean radicalism, as writers and directors return to the issues of the early 1900s: The president should solve the problem by declaring “a true state of emergency.” His decision—an incarnation of Carl Schmitt’s portrayal of the sovereign as “the one who decides”—must include a political selection between those who will survive and those who will be sent to their deaths. The president has to decide, and fails to decide, about who the state could not evacuate under such exceptional conditions. Emmerich portrays the humanist president as a feeble and incompetent ruler, and glorifies the vice-president, who is more capable of rescuing as well as sacrificing. (A similar structure and opposition between a decayed democratic impotence and capable decisionism recurs in Emmerich’s more recent 2012.) The biopolitical element in the story pops out when the president is called to divide the population between those who deserve help thanks to their attempt to reach the end of the catastrophe zone, and those who failed to do so and are sentenced implicitly to extermination. A critical stand from the left would have used this decisionist moment to criticize the very need in hierarchical systems of the will to power, in favor of a more individual decision-making according to conditions on the ground. For Emmerich, freedom and hope enter the picture when the subplot describes those survivors who make it on their own, in spite of their political abandonment. Emmerich chooses the Schmittian-Heideggerian path rather than the one marked by Brecht and Benjamin, which operates within the same state of emergency and exceptional hermeneutics. For Benjamin, such a situation means employing negative judgments—for example, in his subversive use of Schmitt’s state of exception to describe the “permanent state of emergency” of our time—in order to avoid an affirmative voice and a plea for a stronger sovereignty rather than a revolution. This is—in narratological terms—the reason that Emmerich’s film turns back to the vice-president’s recuperation and the father’s successful mission to save his son. A president de facto, the symbol of sovereignty turns away from a helpless democracy to totalitarian tools of domination; the father turns to his instincts as a hunter; and the son is saved as a symbol of the “remains” of the people, as predicted by the prophecy of destruction in Isaiah and by Paul’s messianic notion of the “remains.” There is no need to burn Nietzsche for now, not as long as he serves the revival of total sovereignty. The burning of legal codes is nothing more than destroying the nomos of the non-functional polis.

 

 
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Fig. 4.

Hollywood freezes over in The Day after Tomorrow (2004)
 

Biopolitical Film Misconceived

 
Movies have recently explored these interpretive routes. This may signal, as Ben Dickenson argues in a recent book, the emergence of a “Hollywood radicalism,” an alliance between radical elements inside and outside Hollywood that use cultural critique to distance themselves from the very idea of legitimate critique. Dickenson points out those “elements” in Hollywood willing to risk their reputations for something adventurous. Known political activists such as actors Tim Robbins and Danny Glover—anarchists by Hollywood standards—have exhibited this courage in their work with foreign and critical directors. As Pierre Sorlin demonstrates in European Cinemas, European Societies: 1939–1990, European writers and directors have long mobilized a subversive system of references, borrowing from Hollywood and forming a dense net of intertextuality that enables them to criticize Hollywood and American politics with the latter’s own tools and images (1). As Jill Forbes and Sarah Street describe it, following David Bordwell, “Classic Hollywood cinema is . . . transparent, easy to read, goal-oriented, and structured around narrative closure. Art cinema, on the other hand, rejects cause and effect and favors narratives motivated by realism and authorial expressivity” (37). Recent directors, however, have done something more radical than adding a few Hollywood radicals to their casts.
 
None of them American, filmmakers such as Haneke, Cuarón, Cronenberg, von Trier, and Winterbottom share a strong political and critical aversion to simple categorizations. They insist on liminal figures—much like the figure of the refugee, or “the third” in the Nietzschean and Schmittian opposition between enemy and friend. Creating an interim entity between the two expected sides of the political equation, neither a true master nor a slave, allows narrators in films such as Haneke’s Caché, Winterbottom’s In This World, von Trier’s Dogville, and Cronenberg’s Signs of Honor to expose a false discourse of freedom and equality. Behind democratic politics, so the narrative seems to offer, there is the same will to power, or the same willing submission to it.
 
In contrast to popular perception, “biopolitics” was not invented by Michel Foucault. In fact, the term biopolitics was an invention of the 1920s and ‘30s, when politics was fused with the absolute power of biological or “organic” images. The term itself was probably first used by Rudolf Kjellén, in his Outline for a Political System (1920), and then adopted by post-Nietzschean thinkers who realized its zoological, anthropological, and political implications. Roberto Esposito briefly describes this semantic shift:
 

What begins to be glimpsed [in Kjellén] is the reference to a natural substrate, to a substantial principle that is resistant and that underlies any abstraction or construction of institutional character.… this process of the naturalization of politics in Kjellén remains inscribed within a historical-cultural apparatus… Baron Jakob von Uexküll [speaks about] not any state but the German state with its peculiar characteristics and vital demands. … Here we can already spot the harbinger of a theoretical weaving—that of the degenerative syndrome and the consequent regenerative program—fated to reach its macabre splendors in the following decades.

(16–17)

Indeed, biopolitics became a theoretical model for anti-statist and anti-Liberal inclination during the following decade. Ernst Lehmann (1888–1957), director of the Botanical Research Institute at Tübingen University, in a celebratory 1932 speech to the congress of biological and botanical researchers used the word to denote the connections among biological categories, the Germanic Lebensraum, and an artistic model for life. Lehmann did not fail to salute the Nazi Minister of the Interior for Thuringia, Wilhelm Frick, and he framed the new method within a wider context of bio-language, using biology in order to define a new approach to the body: “In current literature,” Lehmann stated, “it is always the concept of biology that characterizes different issues of human life. This is the reason we hear of biological economy and biological therapies, as much as about biology in the philosophical fields.” “Everyone knows the numerous sad volumes of the present that attest to the declining number of births, and how our German people (Volk) would fail the plea made by selection theory. Biopolitically speaking, one should consider a much higher birthrate of different people inhabiting our eastern borders” (125, 138).²

The artist works on his artwork by controlling the matter, out of which he shapes the forms. However, the material from which the capable leader (Führer) forms the people, is—to speak again with the land—the biological raw material of our blood. . . . Here the spirit elevates the human above the biological basis. The biologist would never want to believe that the raw material alone could become an artwork. The German biologist continues to see how biology can be used as a weapon in the shaping of our people . . . into a new German life.

(142)

 
Neologistically speaking, Lehmann was not operating alone. In such fields as alternative psychology, popular philosophy, and avant-garde art, the 1920s was a time of theoretical hybridization. For example, Felix Krueger, head of the Leipzig School of Experimental Psychology and the rector of Leipzig University, embraced a Biopsychologie and Biogenetik—both terms he coined (31). Although it is tempting to translate such a discourse into the racial politics of the 1930s, this would amount to crude anachronism. For Krueger, the attempts to apply his Biotheorie to National Socialist psychology were grotesquely Procrustean (Asch 47). Another who was thinking along these lines was the Hungarian biologist Raul Francé. Like other radical thinkers of the time, Francé had been embraced by the ideological leadership of the National Socialist party, only to be cast aside later (Roth 133–41). He argued that the sign of the present—his present—was the fusion of biology and technology, which he considered a mythical response to the world. In the 1920s Francé became the first person to coin such neologisms as Bionik (bionics) and Biotechnik (biotechnology):
 

Such an understanding of the world (Weltverständnis) is, of necessity, drawn to the biotechnology (Biotechnik) formulated during the last few years, and is already producing practical results. This whole thing would never have been possible without the biological logic presented in terms of purely mechanical thoughts. This leads to the biological ethic, which Nietzsche, so keenly intuitive, constructed.

(18)³

Francé’s observations suggest the importance of the Nietzschean view, particularly its relation to technologizing images and technological innovation, for those early-twentieth-century hybrids of biological and social concerns. In spite of what some have said about an “anti-technological” Nietzsche, one finds during the 1920s a sustained discussion of technology’s ability to reproduce primary images of “the mythic” and to help in shaping the politics of selection that lies at the heart of all modern biopolitics (Herf 1984).

Code 46 (2004)

 
Michael Winterbottom and Frank Cottrell Boyce’s sci-fi Code 46 is a reinterpretation of a passage from Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “In one’s friend one shall have one’s best enemy. Thou shalt be closest unto him with thy heart when thou withstand him” (63). The passage is quoted in the movie’s pivotal scene, when the investigator, William Geld (Tim Robbins), meets the investigated, Maria Gonzales (Samantha Morton), and enters her home for the first time, shortly before they make love. In this vision of a dystopian future, where all aspects of life are controlled by a figure known as the Sphinx, who is never seen, the investigator discovers that the object of his desire, as well as of his investigation, is in fact his cloned sister. The implication of this discovery is catastrophic for both protagonists: “code 46,” the paramount law, forbids any “carnalization” between “close sets of genes.” When Geld and Gonzales violate the taboo, the state is in the midst of a campaign, typified by the slogan “The Sphinx knows best,” that involves greater penetration into the realm of everyday life, both in its political and its nonpolitical aspects. Planting everyday reality with a set of biological rules makes total interference possible and allows the Sphinx to control both the bodies and the minds of individual people.

 

 
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Fig. 5.

Still from Code 46 (2004)
 

 

 
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Fig. 6.

Maria Gonzales (Samantha Morton) and William Geld (Tim Robbins) with director Michael Winterbottom in Code 46 (2004)
 

 
William Geld, the investigator, is presented as an extension of the total biopower of the Sphinx. Inoculating himself with a range of bacteria that enhance his empathic (and intrusive) investigative powers, he uses these natural abilities to understand both his friends and his enemies, by reading their souls as well as their acts. His powers enable him to penetrate and investigate not only events, “crimes” according to the Sphinx, but the minds operating behind them. Maria Gonzales, on the other side of the political spectrum, works at a secret laboratory that creates “papelles,” the bioidentifiers each individual needs in order to exit or enter the Zone. (The Zone is the urban center controlled by the Sphinx, surrounded by open deserts filled with refugees. Entering and exiting the Zone is controlled by a system of bio-identifiers and automatic disinfectors.) Maria uses her position to help rebels escape. But she defies the oppositional democratic politics of right and left, domination and freedom: she is less interested in helping rebels against the state than individuals who refuse to accept the rules that limit their personal agency.
 
The Sphinx cannot be called evil, in spite of her total and dictatorial power. Her domination is not “better” or “worse” than any other political system, democratic or not. The biopolitical logic behind the film is driven by the need to expose the very nature of power, going far beyond the usual dichotomy dividing moral democracy from immoral tyranny. This is in keeping with Nietzsche’s dictum:
 

 

To reserve morality to oneself and to accuse one’s neighbor of immorality, since he has to be thought of as ready for aggression and conquest . . . is how all states now confront one another: they presuppose an evil disposition in their neighbor and a benevolent disposition in themselves. This presupposition, however, is a piece of inhumanity as bad as, if not worse than, a war would be.

(The Wanderer 380)

 
Code 46 portrays a politics without moral claims. In a biopolitical age, when the Sphinx enters freely into individual souls, there’s no need for crude totalitarian and terror tools. Such claims make sense only outside the Zone, where barbarism and morality are still linked. Geld—“money” in German and “castrate” in English—symbolizes the simultaneous extension of power and the intuitive rebellion against the illusion of rationalism and control. As Tim Robbins explains in an interview: “He is supposed to be putting this woman in jail and can’t do it. A, because he doesn’t believe in the law anymore, and B, he’s in love with her” (Carson). Geld’s love for his kin illustrates how an individual Dionysian passion could turn out to be the sole rebellious possibility in an age of biopolitical sovereignty. Likewise, it is a blinding force that would finally separate the lovers. The peculiar aspect of this film is that both conditions of the plot—the biological taboo and melodramatic love—are defined by their inherent receptivity and inner resistance to the very principle of sovereignty. In other words, a banal love affair turns into a biological allegory of power and its relation to the individual body. Power simultaneously defines the relation to the friend and to the enemy, breaking all known oppositions by radicalizing them: the friend is the enemy, the enemy is not necessarily an enemy. The boundaries separating good from evil melt away. Biopolitics is in charge, not morality, politics, or structure. The affair between the two siblings unites friendship and enmity in the biopolitics of inclusive community, in Geld’s case, and in the total ban or exclusion, in Maria’s: the Sphinx erases Geld’s memory and exiles Maria, turning her into a nomadic Homo sacer, the incarnation of zoē. But exiling Maria means turning her into the narrator of the story.⁴ The Sphinx’s ability to erase Geld’s memory is a good example of the lack of normative judgments: she does so for his own good and in order to secure his future professional and social success. But the ability of this inhuman entity to control her subjects’ minds and souls represents the moment when choice and chance cease to exist as philosophical tools. Erasing a human being’s memory means extinguishing risk and danger as variables in any moral equation; there is no question of being able to burn the Sphinx’s textbooks or one’s own. In such a world, a criminal cannot even commit a crime: without a memory of the experience, there is no such thing as punishment, and without punishment, crime as we know it cannot exist. A story about crime—one occurring within the Zone—could be narrated then only from outside it.
 
In Code 46, radicalism and tragedy can exist only outside the political sphere. Inside it the body is told how to procreate and is clearly instructed about the biological taboo of code 46. This erasure of the deepest shadows in human personality turns a man or a woman into nothing more than an educated ape.

 

 
Click for larger view
 

Fig. 7.

Maria (Samantha Morton) in exile in Code 46 (2004)
 

As Maria tells us in the movie’s final words, the Sphinx does not bother to erase her memory; no one had any interest in it. Outside the borders of the Sphinx’s territory, in the desert, memory is insignificant. The lack of a sovereign implies the absence of social organization that is necessary for the survival of human myth and memory. Outside the Zone, code 46 is meaningless, as is any distinction between friend and enemy. Those whom the Sphinx imprisons and tortures are forces to be reckoned with; those whom she expels become nothings, members of the living dead. Still, as such, they supply the only hope for a biopolitical critique; they are the only ones capable of adhering to Nietzsche’s plea for the pathos of distance.
 
In biopolitical theory this particular refugee has won the name Homo sacer, and it is from her perspective that we can reconsider current political notions of power (Agamben, Homo Sacer). The refugee cannot be included or excluded, but is nevertheless selected and distinguished. For the Homo sacer, assimilation is not a possibility. As Winterbottom says in an interview,
 

Andrew [Eaton] and I were off making In This World, about two [Afghan] refugees, [when] we got this idea of people having no papers and trying to travel from one place to another and the problems that it creates. And a lot of that world—refugee camps, people in deserts, people outside the system, without papers, excluded—those elements are part of the social fabric of Code 46 as well.

(Mitchell)

 

In Obtaining Cover: Inside Code 46, Winterbottom offers a slightly different chronology: “We started working on Code 46 before we made In This World (2004), and bit by bit things accreted. There’s the same idea of some people living in protected zones and others as outsiders. . . . Quite a lot of elements of In This World crept into Code 46” (Winterbottom). In the filmed interview added to the DVD version of Code 46, Frank Cottrell Boyce, the writer of Code 46 (and of six other Winterbottom films), says that the film treats how “genetics became a new relation to fate”—hence the mythical thread in the film—and points out the biopolitical principle at work: “[The] twenty-first century is going to be the genetics century. The genetics changes a lot. We will probably look different, profoundly different, on the inside of relationships with each other, and that will necessitate all kinds of social changes about where people live and where they are.” In other words Boyce, who has a background in paleontology, explains the unity of the two principles Tim Robbins mentioned: the biopolitical control of the individual body would not end at the general social stratum, but would invade the realm of intimate individual choice, the choice of whom we love and whom we hate—and how we remember such feelings.

 
In the same passage quoted in Code 46, Zarathustra also says, “Let the pity for thy friend be hid under a hard shell; thou shalt bite out a tooth upon it. . . . Art thou a slave? Then thou canst not be a friend” (64–5). As Code 46 shows, current biopolitical film has moved toward a sophisticated understanding—Nietzschean-Schmittian in essence—of the nature of friendship as the mirror image of the political codification and its commitment to a primary and a fundamental enmity. Total power presents itself as no threat to friendship until friendship begins to impinge on the biopolitical definition of life. The only point where individual freedom is fully realized is in the direct attack on the most sacred taboo of political power, sibling love. Nietzsche’s distance and Brecht’s alienation come to serve here as the sole praxis of love and friendship. As Tim Robbins says, “There are always going to be restrictions, and law, and limitations on human behavior. . . . There’s a way to be free in a totally oppressive society, and there’s a way to be a slave in a free society” (Carson). William Geld and Maria Gonzales fall in love and are willing to pay the price of being exiled for good, since such fulfilling of their love, even in exile, would be their victory over the Sphinx. The biological serves as a hermeneutic principle of both texts and bodies, a perspective on power and individual action.
 
Political praxis vanishes here, replaced by a closer look at the essence of the political. Such paradoxes convinced some reviewers that “Winterbottom . . . can’t make this romance come alive” (Turan). Generally, Winterbottom was criticized for a certain “gap” disturbing the storyline, for example, between the love story and the futurist “style”: “In Winterbottom’s hands, lovemaking looks like dismemberment. . . . Winterbottom tries to shore up the film’s weakness by giving it a look that will say ‘hip’ to some viewers . . . but it’s all très fatigué to me” (Verniere).
 
The phrase “code 46” is a double allusion. Most superficially, it is a sly reference to an error message produced by the Microsoft Windows operating system: “Windows cannot gain access to this hardware device because the operating system is in the process of shutting down. (Code 46)” (“Explanation”). In political terms, code 46 alludes to the state of exception where the sovereign has unlimited authority. This is, of course, a clear reference to article 48 of the Weimar constitution, which defined the state of exception and emergency of the democratic regime, giving the state a tyrannical authority when threatened by anti-democratic politics.⁵ Both the failure of the system that is “shutting down” and the political and legal exception to the normal process of democracy offer insights only when the “house is burning”—when it fails, or when it works under “a state of emergency.” In The State of Exception (2005), Giorgio Agamben writes:
 

The history of article 48 of the Weimar Constitution is so tightly woven into the history of Germany between the wars that it is impossible to understand Hitler’s rise to power without first analyzing the uses and abuses of this article in the years between 1919 and 1933. . . . The state of exception in which Germany found itself . . . was justified by Schmitt on a constitutional level by the idea that the president acted as the “guardian of the constitution.” But the end of the Weimar Republic clearly demonstrates that, on the contrary, a “protected democracy” is not a democracy at all, and that the paradigm of constitutional dictatorship functions instead as a transitional phase that leads inevitably to the establishment of a totalitarian regime.

(15)

 
Code 46 offers us no answers, just questions and warnings. A passage from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (1886) is relevant here: “The problem of the value of truth came before us—or was it we who came before the problem? Which of us is Oedipus? Which one is the Sphinx? . . . Is it any wonder . . . that we ourselves are also learning from this Sphinx to pose questions?” (5).
 

Conclusion: Biopolitics and the Death of the Polis

 
Is understanding Nietzsche really necessary for understanding contemporary political practice? Lebenskraft (force of life), we should recall, is a key Nietzschean concept, used and abused by the post-Nietzscheans of the 1920s.⁶
 
Biopolitical critique moved beyond liberalism and democracy, beyond modernism and post-modernism, beyond Derrida’s ethics of deconstruction as well as beyond and against any politics of hope or tragedy. Nevertheless, its call for action is a real one, and carries immediate political implications. Beyond post-Nietzschean perspectivism, it shares values and aims with a growing anti-globalization movement. Agamben linked the dispersion of sovereignty with the suspension of the juridical discourse in the modern state of exception that, he claims, is the basis of modern Western democracy: “From this perspective, World War One and the years following it appear as a laboratory for testing and honing the functional mechanism and apparatuses of the state of exception as a paradigm of government.” Showing that the same thing occurred in other Western democracies, and dwelling on recent events in the U.S., Agamben reaches the conclusion that “at the very moment when it would like to give lessons in democracy to different traditions and cultures, the political culture of the West does not realize that it has entirely lost its canon” (State 7, 18). His definition of biopolitics owes much to its final aim: “an elusive gesture toward a new form-of-life as the ground of a coming politics over and against the bloody nexus of sovereign violence and biopolitics” (Mills 42). Such a gesture enables, even triggers, the destruction of existing institutions. As Samuel Weber demonstrated recently, such a plea for a radical reconsideration can be taken beyond Agamben’s own political-theological (Paulinian) horizon, beyond the hermeneutic circle that starts and ends with transgression and guilt, execution, protection and revival, or rebirth. Biopolitical film has shown how thinking through catastrophe can be an emancipatory power for the reconsideration of norms, whether political, political-theological, or aesthetic. Every one of the biopolitical films mentioned above–by Emmerich, Winterbottom, von Trier, Haneke, Cronenberg, and Fincher–discusses what Cesare Casarino characterizes in a recent essay as
 

the symbiotic relations between, on the one hand, bio-politics understood as a complex assemblage of modern technologies of power for the direct management, organization, and domination of life in all its forms, and, on the other hand, capitalism understood as a complex assemblage of modern technologies of production for the management, organization, and exploitation of labor-power in all of its modalities.

(157–8)

Both Emmerich and Winterbottom explore a life-image or “the image of an era in which life and labor-power are torn apart irreparably from each other” (Casarino 160). The broken city in Emmerich’s film and the controlled city in Winterbottom’s film function as an illustration of the death of a democratic dream about unity and egalitarianism, shared responsibility and individual autonomy. A way out, the directors agree, should adopt radical means, whether they are operated by the absolute sovereign or the radical critic, the president or the sphinx, the rebel or the exile. A post-Nietzschean era of radical thinking, beyond good and evil, is the perfect model for such a cry to life as life-force.

 
Biopolitical film, which has recently taken up political and catastrophic subjects, has internalized the need for a certain distance from the automatic affirmation of democracy, understanding the link that ties the internal and the external enemy, as well as the immediate relevance of catastrophe or the end-time, to our political imagination. None among the directors discussed in this article seems to realize the potential of this thinking better than Michael Haneke. As Haneke admits in different interviews: “The destruction machine has taken on a new meaning in the West” (56). The polis, the democratic city, is falling apart. When an ethics-based politics begins to fail, a decisive distance imposes itself, and men and women turn to destruction, total critique, and radical aesthetics. In other words, such a failure leads to the radical language of the 1920s, one minute before radicalism yielded to the choice between total mobilization and destruction.
 
What still distinguishes the critical directors from Emmerich, the conservative, is not only the opposite ideological conclusion, but the intellectual challenge they put to the viewers in the form of a set of critical tools meant to develop rather than destroy critical thinking. As Haneke puts it: “we are all prisoners of our liberalism, and fear is our daily companion . . . We lie to ourselves willingly, in order to sleep better” (55). The method (for correction) is a post-catastrophic regression to the primary relation between existence, or naked life, and politics. If both biopolitical films—Code 46 and The Day after Tomorrow—criticize liberal democracy as impotent, Haneke, Von Trier, and Winterbottom use catastrophes in a way opposite to Emmerich’s: “I wanted to direct a film without the superfluous spectacularity of a catastrophe movie. For in catastrophe movies there is always the redeemer who solves the problem. Then the world goes back [to normalcy]” (Haneke 60–1). Pointing out where the present sense of crisis and end-time meets with the theory, images and language that stream unacknowledged to us from 1920s Germany, can—in principle—help us bring the crucial issues to the foreground. The biopolitical film as a new form of political film offers us something different from what Hollywood critics know from the past. It offers something that is consciously anti-Hollywood and that is not afraid to ask the questions that cannot be discussed in conventional filmmaking. A return to 1920s Germany, to the heyday of aesthetic and political radicalism and the tight connection between them, only helps sharpen those questions. The question is: Are we ready to deal with them? Are we prepared to rattle that dynamite?