Biopower of Blood: From Immunity to Self-Referentiality and Self-Actualization

Abstract

Through dialogue with Roberto Esposito’s work, I reconceptualize modernity as a historically specific modulation of the transhistorical biopolitical prohibition of incest, that is, the prohibition of (the) self-referentiality (of blood). This specific modulation defining capitalist modernity involves a transition from aristocratic “sanguinity”– where power legitimizes itself on the basis of its past actualized creative power of blood (ancestry) – to bourgeois “sexuality”– whereby power asserts itself on the basis of its future potential of self-actualization (progeny) (Foucault / Spinoza). The modern double prohibition of self-referentiality and self-actualization extends from progeny to the products of any form of labor, as the power to actualize itself (Marx). Further, self-actualization means that each individual (human or not) is produced through affecting and being affected by all other individuals (Deleuze) – in short, each individual is transindividual (Balibar). I conclude by addressing the effects of today’s pandemic on transindividuality.