Bioexpectations: Life Technologies as Humanitarian Goods

Abstract

One of the key features marking “failed” states in contemporary political discourse is their incapacity to serve the needs of their respective populations, to govern as well as rule.1 Amid the ruins of bureaucratic infrastructure (which in specific historical terms may have existed only in imagination) lies a sense of moral as well as political duty: a sovereign power that does not foster life loses a basic claim to legitimacy. We expect that people — even small children — will live. Furthermore, as a legacy of the biopolitical welfare provisions, we now attribute responsibility for their wellbeing to their respective nationstates or, failing that, to international agencies. Ordinary existence has become not only a matter of expert concern but also a thoroughly normative one, as taken for granted as the political form of nationstate or the condition of citizenship itself.