Foucault’s ‘biopower’ sheds light on suicide dilemma
Suicide is one of the most vexing political questions facing humanity. It is at the centre of the intractable problem that gave the world US President Donald Trump, Brexit and the rise of the European right: salafist terror, which uses the most effective smart weapon of mass destruction yet devised — the suicide bomber.
At the other end of the spectrum is assisted suicide — a topic raised again in SA after the death of one of the country’s greatest writers, Karel Schoeman. At this stage, it is only suspected that his death was an assisted suicide; it is possible that he starved himself, two years after he had tried to do so and failed, according to his suicide letter.
Suicide bombing has been declared a crime against humanity, to no avail, since there does not seem to be any reduction in the supply and training of willing recruits. Adolescent angst and exploitation of the youth play a role, and Israel’s jails are full of Palestinian teenagers who had the sense to chicken out, but it remains a puzzle for outsiders why most such acts end in the killing of fellow Muslims.
Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower might help to discover a way to understand the puzzle of assisted suicide, and why authorities around the world find it so difficult to legalise it. Biopower is a set of ideas on what Foucault saw as a sea change between an old order in which the sovereign royal had the right over life and death, and the new bourgeois, capitalist order in which power is demonstrated not by having traitors drawn and quartered, but by the ability to order and regulate, but especially facilitate and promote human life.
It was marked by the outlawing of the death penalty in favour of rehabilitation, an extension of which is the criminalising of suicide as murder of the self.
Biopower is suffused with paradox. In the endeavour to promote human life and imbue it with ever-greater material quality, the ecological conditions necessary to maintain it are being destroyed. Humankind has only recently, as scientists discover the limits of science, come to realise control over nature and ecology is impossible; ways have to be found to let it be.
Another paradox, said Foucault, was that biopower had become racialised in the 20th century. Whereas in the previous order, it was accepted that a sovereign could throw his subjects at the enemy ramparts if his reign or his life depended on it, now such readiness to kill only applied when a certain formation of biopower was in danger.
And so the world had Nazi and Japanese biopower arraigned against the various “lesser” European and Asian races. The most people yet were massacred.
The winners of this contest understood biopower better and the need it has for basic human freedoms: the Japanese went too far in their demand for self-sacrifice from citizens, culminating in the suicide bombings of the kamikaze pilots. Likewise, it was expected of Nazi youths to surrender their individuality for the collective hysteria displayed at Hitler’s rallies — and it was entirely in character for him to commit suicide in the end.
Today, biopower has become globalised and serves a shrinking elite, the 10% or so who can afford the products of ever advancing high technology. Its mark is President Robert Mugabe being kept alive by the latest medical procedures in the hospitals of the New East.
Schoeman was a hermitic writer. He never learnt to drive and once told the singer Philip de Vos, who gave him lifts, he had to understand he was only friends with him because he had a car.
He died in an ascetic’s cabin at an old-age home in Bloemfontein, and in pieces written in memoriam, his shyness and snubbing ways were often mentioned.
These personality traits were reflected to some extent in his work. He produced 140 works, mainly historical research. Many of his 19 novels can be seen as anti-apartheid works, of which the best known is Na die Geliefde Land, about postapartheid Afrikaner society, recently filmed as Promised Land.
In practically all his novels, the main characters are introverted, passive loners ill at ease with the world. Not much happens, a lack of action that Schoeman once gave as reason for the low readership figures he attracted.
And yet his writing is universally described as mesmerising “once you get into it”, taking the reader on an inward journey, towards a destination of greater selfawareness. Author Cas Wepener has written perceptively about his main characters always dying, and how assisting people to come to terms with death — which biopower goes to great lengths to hide from everyday life — is often the key part of this process. Indeed, Schoeman worked at a hospice in Britain in his youth.
In one masterpiece, Uur van die Engel (Hour of the Angel) the key character, whose life is being researched half-heartedly by a contemporary filmmaker, is one of those repressed, Calvinist, half-dead Afrikaner pillars of the community from the 1930s, the era that gave rise to apartheid. He is trying to get his bad poetry published and chances on signs of rhymes written a century before, and which could have been the very first poetry in Afrikaans.
As he is sidelined through the petty small-town politics, where the best that can happen are visits to his collection of historical artefacts, the centrepiece of which is a skull that no one can identify as animal or human, we are gradually exposed to the heavily censored history of land grabs that underlay the utterly dull Afrikaner culture of our poet and his ilk.
Still later, Schoeman gives a glimpse into the life of the coloured man who had written a set of lively songs sung at happy religious gatherings and wild parties in a community that was much more vital, but which was destroyed by colonialism.
In terms of biopower, Schoeman shows how deadening colonialism’s drive to ensure a quality life for a minority of whites was, at the expense of much more vital communities, the same ones that engendered Afrikaans as the opposite of the propaganda tool used by teachers and preachers (and which many Afrikaans-speakers see as having been liberated in 1994).
There is a set of logics behind suicide bombing. An eye for an eye is one, murder can be justified if you yourself die in the process. Another could be a rejection of biopower’s ethics of life as the absolute good, a wrenching back of the right to kill and die in the name of a God.
It is affirmation of death as part of life. Assisted suicide creates ethical problems around the helper being an accessory to murder. But if you starve yourself to death, you avoid these charges, and make the statement that death is natural, that we have to let nature be. And perhaps, using the clues from Schoeman’s novels, we need to wrest control over life and death from colonial biopower.