The Biopolitics of Catastrophe, or How to Avert the Past and Regulate the Future

The South Atlantic Quarterly 115:2, doi 10.1215/00382876-3488398 © 2016 Duke University Press A catastrophe is a disastrous interruption that Published by Duke University Press South Atlantic Quarterly 248 The South Atlantic Quarterly our daily reality. Apocalypse turns into an accident and accident into apocalypse. Thus catastrophe loses its character both of partial discontinuity and of relative continuity. We experience a kind of meltdown of the categories of continuity and discontinuity: insofar as the apocalypse could happen to us at any time, catastrophe does not only define a fact or an event but a crazy relation with the world. This crazy relation can be defined as a relation of continuity grounded on a permanent discontinuity. I argue that no political analysis of contemporary societies is possible without a description of this continuous exacerbated sensitivity to risks. I call biopolitics of catastrophe the new form of governance shaped by this sensitivity and reinforcing it. I borrow Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics because in a risk society, life is in question. These two last words refer to his famous statement in The History of Sexuality: "For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question" (Foucault 1978: 143). Be it "in question" or "en question" in the French original text, the phrase offers two interpretations. First, a soft one in which in question means that the intensification and organization of life now occupies the core of politics. This certainly is the signification that Foucault wanted to give when he coined the concept of biopolitics. But I would like to propose another interpretation whose effect is to plunge the Foucauldian conceptual system into the field of environmental issues: en question might also mean that life...