当代生命政治的困境与超越——费赫尔与赫勒对生命政治的批判

Predicament and Transcending of Contemporary Biopolitics:Féher and Heller′s Critique of Biopolitics

东欧新马克思主义理论家、布达佩斯学派代表人物费赫尔和赫勒在20世纪90年代针对美国新社会民主运动提出的生命政治理论为生命政治分析贡献了新的内容。在他们看来,作为“身体政治化”的生命政治,是现代性进程中生命(身体)与自由(精神)两种力量动态地相互作用的产物,在当代表现为身体与精神的对立和斗争。通过对堕胎、女权主义、健康、种族主义、环境保护主义等具体生命政治运动的分析,他们得出结论,一旦生命政治将生命与自由截然对立起来,并排斥性地选择生命为唯一的价值,它便容易走向极权主义,而要消除这种危险,就必须超越生命政治所构建的自我封闭的政治,走向基于差异的对话的政治。尽管费赫尔和赫勒的生命政治理论具有分析模式化、简单化、抽象化的局限,但其提出的生命与自由冲突的解释框架无疑为反思当代生命政治提供了一个新的视角。

The biopolitics theory proposed by the Eastern European Neo-Marxist theorists and representatives of the Budapest School, Féher and Heller in the 1990 s against the new social democratic movement in the United States, has contributed new contents to a set of different positions on biopolitics. In their view, biopolitics as ″the politicization of the body″ is the product of the dynamic interplay between the forces of life(body) and freedom(spirit) in the process of modernity, which is manifested in contemporary times as the conflict and struggle between body and spirit. By analyzing specific biopolitics movements such as abortion, feminism, health, racism, and environmentalism, they conclude that once biopolitics diametrically opposes life and freedom and exclusively chooses life as the only value, it is prone to totalitarianism, and to eliminate this danger, and it is necessary to go beyond the politics of self-closure and construct a politics of dialogue based on difference. Although Féher and Heller′s biopolitics theory has the limitations of analytical schematization, simplification, and abstraction, the explanatory framework of the conflict between life and freedom it proposes certainly provides a new perspective for reflecting on contemporary biopolitics.