Biopolitics : from tribes to commodity fetishism

As much as it consciously subscribes to the belief in human mortality, the normative subject of secular capitalism in its commodity fetishism stage unconsciously knows that it is immortal. In other words, commodity fetishism enacts a radical redefinition of the human being, which now becomes the immortal living being. Consequently, any living being that is mortal is not human. This, finally, becomes the new “break between what must live and what must die”—that is, the criterion differentiating the superrace of humans from the subrace of nonhumans, those who must die in order for humans to enhance their longevity, heredity, and all the other terms that, in Foucault’s biologically conceived scheme, stand in for the infinite accumulation of means required to redeem an infinite debt—a debt, it does not hurt to stress, that is owed by humanity to humanity itself. Hence, the commodity fetishism stage of secular capitalism gives rise to its own fantasy of bioracial division, our latest configuration of class difference and struggle. Of course, that capitalism today is global does not mean that the epistemology of commodity fetishism is also global. Transcendence is not evenly folded into immanence throughout the world, and commodity fetishism encounters several epistemological rivals, with their own sources of immortality. Our wars today—justified as “wars on terrorism” and other bios-friendly terms—are in effect machines for exporting mortality out of the porous yet more or less identifiable regions of the world that are drenched in commodity fetishism and populated by members of the superrace.