On the politics of life: Michel Foucault and Georges Canguilhem on life and norms

This thesis investigates the trajectory of the concept of life in Michel Foucault’s work. Foucault famously claims that in the 18th and 19th centuries life became politicised. This politicisation of life, he argues, culminated in the formation of a distinctively modern ‘biopolitical’ paradigm. This thesis develops a new interpretation of Foucault’s politics of life. To do so it shows that we can best interpret Foucault’s politics of life from the perspective of Georges Canguilhem’s philosophically informed histories of science. Foucault repeatedly acknowledged his theoretical, historical and contextual debt to Canguilhem, stressing the latter’s importance in shaping the intellectual and epistemological field in which he situated his own work. Following this lead, the thesis shows how Canguilhem’s historical analysis of medicine, physiology and pathology, especially his conceptions of vital normativity and norms, establish the parameters of Foucault’s analysis of the emergence of the notion of life in modern medicine, science and politics. Second, it argues that Canguilhem’s notions of norm and normativity enable us to connect the different moments of Foucault’s work on the politics of life as a coherent perspective. Third, and importantly, the thesis shows how this new interpretation of Foucault’s politics of life fatally undermines the common criticism that his work suffers from a normative deficit or has a “crypto-normative” character. Through Canguilhem’s concepts of norm and normativity, it demonstrates that the flipside of Foucault’s detailed descriptions of normalising power is a plausible account of normativity. By reading Foucault through the lens of a Canguilhem inspired framework, it reconceptualises normativity as a process of the creation of norms. To articulate a possible notion of normativity present in Foucault’s work, the thesis formulates and develops a concept of ‘alternormativity’. Rather than a type of anti-normativity, it demonstrates that Foucault’s politics of life turns on this notion of alternormativity or the creation of new norms and ways of life in the context of biopolitical governmentality