The Defeat of Biopolitics

“Man is Nature becoming conscious of itself,” the French geographer Elisée Reclus once wrote.^[1] Political perceptions are intimately linked to the configurations which unite history, collective autonomy, and the objective conditions of their deployment. At the interface of personal desires and humankind's future, politics is central to what has been coined “the Anthropocene”. Indeed, if human economic activities are responsible for the fast and brutal transformation of our environment, human actions are required to untie this destructive dynamic. Even though the lines of responsibility follow those of capitalist production,^[2] the centrality of human action remains.^[3]

Politics is thus key to both the Anthropocene's problems and solutions. If—as it appears sometimes destined—contemporary structures of production do not evolve, humankind would be in a paradoxical situation wherein collective awareness of the necessity to implement a massive, global, and complex shift does not meet political, economic and social dynamics at all. As Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann put it, “this may seem paradoxical, but history is replete with illustrations of highly unequal and apparently contradictory social-political orders ruled by elites who remained hegemonic for a considerable duration (typically with violent consequences), despite lacking answers to fundamental problems. As Gramsci, writing between the world wars, stated: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”^[4]

This morbidity, as well as its contrary, are precisely the objects of the following pages. The Anthropocene encourages discussions about the fundamental question of our species survival, and beyond our species of the milieux surrounding us.^[5] Indeed, the “morbid symptoms” at stake here are not only linked to the possible resurgence of fascism or the deepening of authoritarian liberalism: they are fundamentally plugged to the issue of survival.^[6] Politicizing the issue of survival implies refusing the fatalism which would only play the Cassandra—as if we were already dead—and to look for the crucial reasons why the apparent paradox raised in this introduction works as a power mechanism, reproducing the destructive dynamics which make both climate change and biodiversity loss huge threats in an already initiated century.^[7]

This chapter is a prolongation of Foucault’s biopolitics through the lens of the Anthropocene. What has become of biopolitics in the age of the Anthropocene?

First, it is necessary to return to the intimate link between life and the very concept of biopolitics. Then, we formulate the thesis that biopolitics is twisted by the Anthropocene. This is precisely what leads us to our core concept, ecopower as the new form of power, succeeding and completing Biopower, one point where life politics meet death politics. ^[8]

Life as the Key to Biopolitics

Our path must begin with a little detour through the prior links and interrelations between Anthropocene and Biopolitics. Biopolitics, as a major and widely discussed concept, is anterior to the Anthropocene. It has been coined and defined by Michel Foucault in his lecture “Security, Territory, Population” given at the Collège de France in 1977-1978.

Why are we interested in biopolitics? The way Michel Foucault invents and defines this concept is of first interest for environmental theory. Biopolitics is the politics moved by Biopower as a radically new form of power, opposed to sovereign power, and born later as well. Biopower, to put it bluntly, is the power over life.

In the Will to Knowledge, Foucault already sketches such an opposition between sovereign power and what would become, in his later works, Biopower. “The right which was formulated as the ‘power of life and death’ was in reality the right to take life or let live. Its symbol, after all, was the sword.”^[9] The evolution is depicted by the philosopher in the direct aftermath of this definition of sovereign power: “One might say that the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death. This is perhaps what explains the disqualification of death which marks the recent wane of the rituals that accompanied it. That death is so carefully evaded is linked less to a new anxiety which makes death unbearable for our societies than to the fact that the procedures of power have not ceased to turn away from death.”

Biopower, in its early formulation, is described as a power to foster life, which implies both a transversal and statistical management of population, and a rejection of death as a non-political procedure, which differs a lot from the sovereign use of power by the King for instance. The sociological mystery of suicide is, in this perspective, a scandal for “a society in which political power had assigned itself the task of administering life.”^[10] The object of this Biopower is life itself, which is the core argument present in Foucault’s works: life, in all its dimensions, whether it serves public interest or manifests private intimacy, life in its great variety becomes the central object of power.

This power over life directly deals with non-human dimensions. Life is not only men and women, but rather what provides them with the conditions of their reproduction. The first lesson of Sécurité, territoire, population at the Collège de France is quite enlightening regarding this dimension:

The sovereign is no longer someone who exercises his power over a territory on the basis of a geographical localization of his political sovereignty. The sovereign deals with a nature, or rather with the perpetual conjunction, the perpetual intrication of a geographical, climatic, and physical milieu with the human species insofar as it has a body and a soul, a physical and a moral existence; and the sovereign will be someone who will have to exercise power at the point of connection where nature, in the sense of physical elements, interferes with nature in the sense of the nature of the human species, at the point of articulation where the milieu becomes the determining factor of nature. This is where the sovereign will have to intervene, and if he wants to change the human species, Moheau says, it will be acting on the milieu. I think we have here one of the axes, one of the fundamental elements in this deployment of mechanisms of security, that is to say not yet the appearance of a notion of milieu, but the appearance of a project, a political technique that will be addressed to the milieu.^[11]

The milieu is central in the conceptual construction of this new form of power coined as Biopower. Governing life is not only equivalent to the statistical management of populations, as it also gathers very conditions to transform the milieux where these populations are meant to live. Indeed, this paragraph might sound quite abstract to the student or auditor listening to this lecture on the 11th of January 1978. As for a contemporary specialist of environmental matters, it rather sounds as a definition of the Anthropocene. Indeed, this redefinition of sovereignty under a Biopower regime is precisely located at the interface between the changes physical milieux cause to societies, and societies to physical milieux. Sovereign is who attempts to master this infinite complexity, in “this point of interconnection.” It is particularly difficult, as social sciences and even governments, are currently used to separating humans from their milieux, to draw all the conclusions implied by this new sovereign. Let us consider that this definition of sovereignty makes quite obsolete the discussion about whether the Anthropocene is a self-human-centered concept or, on the contrary, a concept which would imply a non-human point of departure. It is, necessarily, both at the same time. Such an interpretation of Foucault at the light of contemporary debates seems to fit the invitation formulated by Timothy Morton to adopt an “ecological thought” in which strong and definitive differentiations would no longer work to understand the dynamics our societies are engaged with.^[12] In this perspective, bodies, and their relation to their milieux, are central to the reproduction of power mechanisms.

Reading Foucault this way is an invitation to nuance the conceptual newness of the Anthropocene. Indeed, the position of humans regarding their milieux, the relation between economy and political power and the possibility for the people to change one or the other are not new. Paradigms can change, as some dominated paradigm can, for a long historical period, coexist with a dominating one before replacing it. ^[13] The emergence of the Anthropocene as a paradigm can be the sign of self-consciousness about the object of sovereignty, this “point of articulation where the milieu becomes the determining factor of nature.” ^[14]

This nature is understood both as human condition and Nature in its physical dimensions: the Anthropocene implies, indeed, one and the other.

History and Duration of the Anthropocene

Biopolitics could then work as a conceptual anticipation, as far as political theory is concerned, of what the Anthropocene implies. This point is even more striking if we consider the historical dimensions of both concepts. As indicators of paradigm changes, they are not neutral about history, even though their relation to history can be neutralized. However, it is clear that dating the beginning of the Anthropocene is an object of intense debates, not only within the geologists’ community, but also among the vast social scientists’ community. ^[15]

Foucault clearly explained the historical roots of Biopolitics, defined in Dits et écrits (Words and Writings), as “the way by which rationalization of problems, addressed to governmental practice by phenomenon characteristic of living beings constituted in population, has been attempted since the eighteenth century: health, hygiene, nationality, longevity, races”.^[16] Biopower is then definitely situated as a historical phenomenon. Is it even a concept which basically addresses new historical problems, such as the demographic expense and the unprecedented densification of populations over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Biopower offers this opportunity to be both a philosophical and a historical concept, which is aligned to the Deleuzian definition: a concept addresses specific problems raised by specific historical conditions, which is particularly the case of biopolitics according to Gilles Deleuze.^[17] The Anthropocene also has such characteristics, as it specifically points out the necessity to both understand and potentially act on the destructive processes which affect our milieux.

The recent work by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher give an important echo to such a thesis which would unite Foucauldian Biopolitics and the Anthropocene. In their latest book, Les révoltés du ciel (The Revolt of the Sky), they basically argue that the very idea of governing the climate in order to improve conditions of life—harvests and the general welfare of the populations-emerged by the end of the eighteenth century, which is coherent with the possible beginnings of the Anthropocene in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries.^[18] Governing climate is a historically rooted idea, and as such perfectly fits the dynamics of Biopolitics as defined by Michel Foucault. As stated by Fressoz and Locher, “men of the eighteenth century live in an Anthropocene: for them, Earth and social temporalities are one.The human climate action is one modality of this intertwinement, a clue of this time concordance”.^[19] The Anthropocene and Biopolitics share the same historical origins, whether they are scientific, economic, political or even religious. The poltiics of the Anthropocene is Biopolitics.

As for one or the other, some suggest earlier beginnings. The Anthropocene could have started with the disappearance of large mammals, and large impacts humans have gained over their environment, which is basically one of the underlying thesis defended by James Scott in his famous Against the Grain.^[20] Similarly, Giorgio Agamben clearly advocates for a temporal extension of Biopolitics whose judicial and political roots can be analyzed from the Antique Roman practice of the sacred man who can be killed by anyone after being declared so.^[21] However, this temporal extension of both concepts likely leads to their historical dilution. The simultaneity of capitalist expansion, government techniques widely applied to vast populations and the attempt to govern climate dynamics is a sufficient correlation to stick to the historical dimensions suggested by Michel Foucault, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher.

Forms of Power Matter

The historiographical debate is far from being the most important one regarding the links between Anthropocene and Biopolitics. What matters most is the theoretical value of Foucault’s reading of power dynamics, which implies the creation of new forms of power as well as their possible concomitance. The invention of Biopolitics does not necessarily imply the abolition of sovereign power. There is a crucial importance not to neglect this complementarity between forms of power. Indeed, Biopolitics can work without suppressing the possibility of a direct exercise of sovereign power, as it is depicted in the Will to Knowledge. Marc Abélès makes this statement, as the historical dimension of Biopolitics produces the risk of a diachronic analysis of power. Forms of power function, on contrary, in synchrony.^[22] He then crosses the path of Gilles Deleuze, who was considering the possibility of a disciplinary society, inherited from one dimension of Biopolitics, to coexist with a control society, both of which were and are fundamental obstacles for human kind to self-determine their collective action and history.^[23]

This last element allows us to conclude clearly on the links between Biopolitics and Anthropocene. Indeed, what matters is that sovereignty as the power to kill one individual, and let the others live, is still a possible horizon of State power, as wars or arbitrary uses of power might regularly recall us. Still, Biopolitics has taken a growing importance as the general management and administration of populations. As it was mentioned in the introduction, Biopolitics has become, through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the dominant paradigm of power, as the power “to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.”

“Fostering life” is a key element to the definition of Biopolitics. Biopolitics is not thought or defined as a mainly or uniquely repressive apparatus of power: it is positively producing life, and reproducing life. Let us come back to the first lecture of Sécurité, territoire, population at the Collège de France:

Finally, the milieu appears as a field of intervention in which, instead of affecting individuals as a set of legal subjects capable of voluntary actions-which would be the case of sovereignty-and instead of affecting them as a multiplicity of organisms, of bodies capable of performances-as in discipline-one tries to affect, precisely, a population. I mean a multiplicity of individuals who are and fundamentally and essentially only exist biologically bound to the materiality within which they live. What one tries to reach through this milieu, is precisely the conjunction of a series of events produced by these individuals, populations, and groups, and quasi-natural events which occur around them.^[24]

The “quasi-natural” event is neither fully human, nor fully natural. Overall, it makes us wonder what the conditions would be to reach a concrete possibility to govern this milieu. Indeed, even though Michel Foucault is a critical thinker, Biopolitics as a power technique to govern the milieux appears to be a concept forged to understand and explain a historical evolution which is basically, on a transversal basis, coined as the Anthropocene today.

The Anthropocene, as it has now become an acceleration of climate and milieux changes, questions Biopolitics as a valuable technique of power for humankind. Indeed, it appears that the form of power that emerged in order to “foster life,” leads us to a situation of destruction and disarray which in return raises a key interrogation on whether a self-determining sovereignty can be reactivated, and on which basis. But let us first examine the twist current and contemporary evolutions due to the Anthropocene imply.

The Twist of Biopolitics

The Anthropocene puts at stake the survival of the human species itself. One of the reasons it does so is precisely the uncertainty underlying our belonging to this time of fast climatic and biological changes. We do not know if the future conditions of life will be compatible with human life. But what we do know is that the speed and wide scope of those changes strongly depend on human actions, and particularly our capacity to engage a fast and deep shift of our modes of production and consumption.

Biopolitics, according to the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito, “has no other object than the maintenance and expansion of life”. ^[25] Basically, the main problem of Biopolitics in this perspective is its political reductionism. Everything is reduced to the biological dimension of our lives, which is considered as a risk of moral and political wreck of humankind. These political implications of Biopolitics are a clear source of decisive discussions regarding the human devenir (future). ^[26]

Still, the Anthropocene being the age of a possible disappearance of humankind’s basic conditions of life, life reductionism is not the sole problem anymore, at least not as Roberto Esposito meant. Life annihilation is a horizon of possibility directly connected to the ability or the incapacity of human structures-i.e., human agency in the same movement1-to move toward the possibility of preserving humankind from this horizon. In a way, Biopolitics has become much more serious, as a concept pointing out a reality, since it is quite obviously failing.

Indeed, a political regime which “has no other object than the maintenance and expansion of life” and which at the same time is producing unprecedented destruction worldwide, of the very milieux that are conditions to human life, is a failure, especially regarding its particular and specific objective. If we consider Biopolitics as a regime whose main obsession is life, the ongoing process of milieux destruction is particularly not fitting Michel Foucault’s definition. This new power emerged out of the Anthropocene and no longer “fosters life and/or disallows it to the point of death.”

Just as the pretension to ideally govern the climate failed, Biopolitics as a project to foster life also failed: the concomitance between Anthropocene and Biopolitics is to be found here again. Biopolitics has then an intimate and little discussed relation to the Anthropocene: both engage with the possible end of humankind. The post-apocalyptic fictions enter with us in this new age. Even if their function might be, as stated by Jean-Paul Engélibert,^[27] to conjure this possible end, they still indicate a new and massive form of collective preoccupation for the future of humankind.

Biopower does not work as a reassuring power which would guarantee the survival of the species from an obscure bargaining process in which people would have lost their political freedom. The irruption of a new geological age and the simultaneous scientific and political consciousness about the Anthropocene is definitively undermining the conditions of possibilities an eventual Biopolitical society would lie upon. As for the shift from sovereign power to Biopower, the fact this paradigm is being contested does not mean its main manifestations would immediately vanish from our social and political reality as it is implied by the coexistence of paradigms mentioned earlier. Instead of imagining such a situation, it seems far more interesting to draw the new arrangements of sovereign power and Biopower in the light of these radically new stakes. That is why I offer to discuss a new concept, that of “ecopower.”

Ecopolitics and “Ecopower”

We define “Ecopower” as the power to perpetuate life conditions of human species and the vertebrate living, or to produce their destruction. In other words, Ecopower comes as a new form of power which makes the sovereignty-Biopower duo a trio. As Biopolitics seems to have considerably failed in the move to preserve life, a radically new political stake appears as the modifications of our milieux accelerate abruptly: our preservation as a species, as well as the preservation of species which rely on the same basic conditions of life as humans do.

Ecopower works dialectically. Indeed, sovereign power is “to take life or let live” individuals who are subjected to the sovereign, while Biopower works as the power “to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.” As contemporary politics are deeply transformed by ecological challenges, it appears that one new form of power has emerged, one which would reconcile both former ones, as Ecopower is the form of power that can “take life or let live” at the scale of the species. This extension of Foucault’s works implicate a material dimension, given that this new form of power resides in the possibility to govern the physical dynamics which jeopardize the vertebrate living, those very same dynamics that have been launched from the human-capitalist realm.^[28]

Would it be possible to reorientate those dynamics, such that political and social reality would remodel the logics of power as the sole possibility of preventing the end of human life. This would tend to be a factor of strong political polarization. As depicted by the French philosopher, Pierre-Henri Castel, the radicality of the stake implies new forms of moral determination. As he writes in Le mal qui vient (The Coming Evil), if some ruling elites basically bet on the end of humankind as a way that their power and wealth remain untouched, these elites will not arouse political moderation from the populations as a response to their morally and concretely destructive behavior.^[29]

Ecopower shares one central characteristic with Biopower: it is polycentric. As Michel Foucault assumes in the Will to Knowledge, “in political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king.”^[30] Even if Ecopower signals a return to sovereign power logics, basically because it implies the possibility to annihilate life conditions and makes death central again in power dynamics, this concept we propose does not mean we would put the head back on the King’s shoulders as far as political theory is concerned. It only means that we cannot consider power to be exclusively transcendent as criticized by Michel Foucault, as in the conception of an ideally “absolute” monarchy-nor totally immanent-power being produced without any forms of hierarchization or power asymmetry which could be identified. Power production has many centers and the ecological matters imply to catch these centers at the multiple crossroads between politics and economics, as once suggested about the State by the Greek philosopher, Nikos Poulantzas.^[31]

The “sociological mystery” identified by Michel Foucault as concomitant to the emergence of Biopolitics, was suicide: “It is not surprising that suicide—once a crime, since it was a way to usurp the power of death which the sovereign alone, whether the one here below or the Lord above, had the right to exercise became, in the course of the nineteenth century, one of the first conducts to enter into the sphere of sociological analysis; it testified to the individual and private right to die, at the border and in the interstices of power that was exercised over life.”^[32]

This mystery is renewed in the light of Ecopolitics and Ecopower. Indeed, the various trajectories taken by the distinct societies over the globe are, in their vast majority, destructive of our milieux. Their economic unity, despite their cultural and political diversity, is a key element to explain this phenomenon.^[33] It leaves us, though, with a crucial interrogation: why are we, as a species, taking a direction that could be a close analogue to collective suicide? Of course, the polycentricity and structural dynamics at stake in the Anthropocene prevent the analogy to be strictly applied, from personal suicide to collective self-destruction. However, this power seems to escape both from the sovereign, as there was no explicit decision to jeopardize our species as such, and from Biopower, as it is aiming at the preservation of life. This fundamental interrogation, which can once again be an extension from Foucault’s works, invites reflection about the links between Ecopower, the possibility of our devenir (future) and the Anthropocene. Collective self-destruction is not the only way out for humankind, which is one of the interests implied by the concept of “Ecopower,” according to my point of view of this concept and phenomenon.

The Grey Zone of Anthropocene and Ecopower as a Determined Uncertainty

Biopolitics is twisted by the Anthropocene and we ought to analyze this shift in human history. Indeed, our species is coming to the edge of a new space-time agency which involves the short-term possibility of disappearance. The status of human activity, particularly the status of politics, is to become central in the gray zone of our contemporary history. Such a situation leads our thought to reconsider Michel Foucault’s statement according to which “one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea”.^[34] Paradoxically, the current ecological situation overthrows this intellectual dynamic analyzed by Foucault, as humanism is partly resuscitated by the very possibility of collapse. Here, the conclusion of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s article on climate change is a useful counterpoint to Michel Foucault’s thesis:

Yet climate change poses for us a question of human collectivity, and us, pointing to a figure of the universal that escapes our capacity to experience the world. It is more like a universal that arises from a shared sense of a catastrophe. It calls for a global approach to politics without the myth of a global identity, for, unlike a Hegelian universal, it cannot subsume particularities. We may provisionally call it a “negative universal history.”

Humanism, defined as the ideological production of human political unity, is reborn out of the possible ashes of our civilization. Indeed, this creation of a “negative universal history” is based not on the intellectual possibility of man’s vanishment, but rather on the very concrete possibility of humanity being self-erased. One partial conclusion is that humanism as a fully abstract figure is not only on the path to disappear, but that present times urge to build a concrete humanism which would integrate both material conditions of ecological dynamics’ deployment, on the one hand, and human particularities on the other.^[35] As man can effectively vanish as a fugitive trace on the sand, a concrete humanism seems to emerge at the light of Ecopower relations. Biopolitics reject human autonomy out of the social machinery, as it is not required for the management of populations.

On the contrary, Ecopower urges for human politics and human action to take back control over the course of history, on the grounds of this new “negative universal history.” This is precisely the point to which we are conducted by climate change and the ongoing sixth mass extinction. Our current historical situation strengthens Gunther Anders’s thesis which puts a particular emphasis on human responsibility under an atomic age.^[36] Indeed, history and the relation between politics and time have already deeply changed since the introduction of nuclear weapons as a massive means of human self-destruction. One strong paradox pointed out by Anders in this apocalyptical philosophy is linked to the irreversibility of this new historical condition for humankind. Even if humanity would reach a global agreement on full nuclear disarmament, the technical conditions of possibility of its existence remain, so that this horizon definitely belongs to human history.

Under the Anthropocene, these conditions of uncertainty are even truer.^[37] What was right about nuclear armament has become true for our economic conditions of production and consumption. However, there is an additional difficulty, which resides in the intersection between political and economic changes and the mitigation of the Anthropocene destructive phenomenon: will it be enough to perpetuate human conditions of life? Will it, all things remaining unchanged, effectively threaten human conditions of existence as a species? Ecopower, as the power to perpetuate or to eradicate the human conditions of existence, is a power exerted on a determined uncertainty of history.

The negative universal evoked by Dipesh Chakrabarty can actually be extended to other species that are jeopardized by human activities and by our current mode of production. Capitalism does not only produce strongly unequally distributed wealth, it produces an assured disaster.^[38] This extension to other species and the living, as undefined this latter category is, is clearly of a strong importance considering the consequences of a destructive Anthropocene which would pursue the path of the erosion of our conditions of life. Still, regarding the responsibilities, socioeconomic human structures are first in chain and first to be changed as far as causes are regarded. In this situation of indetermination, the conceptualization of Ecopower aims at usefully completing the Biopolitics. First, because Biopolitics is indeed overcome and twisted by the current situation. Secondly, because Ecopower points at a fundamental power and political intersection between human societies, our milieux and the physical dynamics of transformation affecting and produced by both. In a way, Ecopower as a concept born out of an imaginary dialogue with Foucault aims at shedding some light on the gray zone of indetermination that characterizes, at least for a few decades, the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene is, as I write, still indeterminate regarding the stakes raised by Ecopower. Much scientific evidence, from the IPCC successive reports to the recent Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystemic Services (IPBES) report, shows that the twenty-first century is particularly central regarding the possibilities to adapt or to be wiped out in the middle-run, historically speaking. Some studies receiving notice pay more attention to the positive feedback loops which could accelerate the dynamics of climate change and sixth mass extinction. It is not a scientific impossibility that we would have already ceased to be the actors of this history if tipping points are already reached.^[39] This statement is not proveable though, nor the most likely, and the possibility to mitigate changes and to adapt to them so that the Anthropocene would be compatible with human life is still a thinkable possibility, and as such, belongs to the realm of politics. That is precisely where the gray zone becomes much more determined, as the action taking place in our contemporary history settles this new landscape to come.

Ecopower, Foucault and Polycentricity

It is worth noting Foucault’s conception of power is rightly coined as immanent. There is no power transcendence or clear hierarchies which could explain social and political dynamics. Each domain of power has its own power dynamics which are basically working on a horizontal plan, far from any pyramidal conception of power. This conception is particularly clear in the following passage:

It seems to me that power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in the various social hegemonies.^[40]

This conception of power was basically linked to the will Foucault had to excerpt his works out of the Marxist sphere, which he accused of putting too much emphasis on the State as the key to all powers in society. As it is obvious reading Foucault, the State apparatuses only “embody” the “institutional crystallization” of power strategies specific to each sphere of power. In order to understand and complete what we want to introduce here with the concept of

Ecopower, it seems quite worthy debating this approach of power. The existence of multiple spheres of power is undeniable and that is a common ground to Sovereign power, Biopower and Ecopower.

However, there is no certainty about the fact that power logics are “immanent” in these spheres. Indeed, this idea raises two fundamental interrogations. The immanence cancels the analysis by the asymmetry and hierarchy between social forces, on the one hand, and it traps the political analysis as well as political actions in the deceitful perspective of collective action paralysis, on the other hand. In other words, even if it is clear, Ecopolitics is determined by multiple centers of power, the immanent conception of power might well prevent us to fully understand and accordingly change the social structures which produce a destructive Anthropocene.

This critical approach was brilliantly constructed by Nikos Poulantzas who was easily giving reason to Foucault’s critics about orthodox Marxism, but who was considering the philosopher was willingly making the confusion between this approach and Marxism in general. Indeed, the critics formulated against a static conception of power and a narrow conception of the State as its only core cannot erase the fact that States have been granted with further influence and control on society over the last centuries. As stated by Nikos Poulantzas, “What is truly remarkable is the fact that such discourse, which tends to blot out power by dispersing it among tiny molecular vessels, is enjoying great success at a time when the expansion and weight of the State are assuming proportions never seen before.”^[41] The materiality of States is a strong element Poulantzas opposes to Foucault as an invitation to reconsider the very foundations of power in the economic sphere and the relations between social classes and fractions of those classes.

This perspective allows theorists to introduce some asperities in the conception of power, which opens a door by which it is possible to analyze hierarchical and asymmetrical relations of forces as well as the possibilities to change these configurations. In a nutshell, politics still matters for Ecopolitics and the twist Biopolitics has known invites us to consider the concrete power relations that can avoid a full disaster. As stated by Poulantzas again, “with regard to the dominant class and fractions, the role of law in setting limits expresses the relationship of forces within the power bloc. It becomes concrete above all by delimiting the fields of competence and intervention of the various apparatuses, in which different classes and fractions of this bloc have dominance.” ^[42] Those “limits” might be related to various spheres of power which is by principle the State synthetic force. Power relations are of primary importance and though we do not claim here that they should be reduced to class relations under the Anthropocene, the material dimension of the latter strongly invites us to reconsider Poulantzas’ debate with Foucault as the main dispute was about the material grounds of power.

Ecopower, as the power to reproduce or to annihilate life conditions, is the most material conceivable form of power. This material form of power invites us, indeed, to analyze the definition of limits determined by law as well as the power relations that produce this definition.

Governing Climate and the Anthropocene by the Limits

There could be an anthropocentric risk in evaluating the possibilities for human action at the edge of the Anthropocene era, which is the clear tendency affirmed by the geoengineering which aims at reducing the transversal dimensions of the crisis we experience to a complex of technical problems (Wallenhorst and Theviot, 2020). The face of (hu)man is reactivated by the Anthropocene which might imply a distinct relation to technological evolution and its relation with economic accumulation, a path explored by the French philosopher Jacques Ellul.^[43]

The paradox of establishing through law the limits that would make Ecopower go in the direction of perpetuating human life, and life beyond humans, holds in the former twist of Biopolitics. As the latter was aiming at preserving populations, Biopower dynamics built the conditions for Ecopower to become. the new and central political stake of our century. It is possible to assume the Anthropocene reproduces the classical problem of human actions’ unintended consequences. Still, the stake is unprecedentedly new, and new forces are coming on stage. Climate, once considered the landscape of longue durée (long term approach to history),^[44] disconnected from engineers or economic activities, has come to the forefront of human history: climate change is induced by material consequences of human material actions.

This new element comes to close a quite short parenthesis of human history, if we follow the interesting insight formulated by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher:

If climate change has been and is a shock for consciences, it is because since the beginning of the 20th century, the industrial civilization and science inculcated two comfortable, but false, ideas. On the one hand, that human action would not disturb the climate, and on the other hand that wealthy societies had, for most of it, nothing to fear of its perturbations. Our astonishment in front of the existential crisis of warming is mainly linked to these comforting illusions of both an unwavering and harmless climate.^[45]

As these illusions are torn apart by social and political reality, and as they were matched to the emergence of Biopolitics, a new reality of power is emerging, which needs a new conceptualization. Therefore, in this paper, Ecopower is both the extension and related to the discussion of Biopower. Even if we consider the Anthropocene having begun with the conquest of the Americas or the eighteenth century, it is still possible to conceive humankind is “at the edge” of this new geological time, as a few centuries do not count much on those scales.

The Limits, Ecopower and Poulantzas

The Anthropocene does rehabilitate the idea that compromises by law about new limits determined for human action is the core of politics; more precisely, it is the core of Ecopolitics. Ecopower might push toward the logics of human and vertebrate life perpetuation, if the balance of power decides so.

As we find ourselves in the middle of this huge possible shift, Poulantzas’ conception of the State as a producer of laws as limitations of actions within multiple spheres of power is particularly relevant. The extension of Foucault’s thought thanks to one thinker that engaged in a detailed discussion with his arguments appears singularly fruitful.

Indeed, class relations matter in the formation of the various balances of power of each sphere of power. The social and political compromises which are going to be made in the years to come are the central piece of Ecopower dynamics. Following Castel, about the necessity to form new moral statements on the current choices made by the most powerful ruling groups,^[46] it seems quite coherent to produce political theory on the consistency and possibility of new class compromises. These new compromises are a central part of Ecopolitics, but they integrate a fundamentally new dimension: the capitalist class not only produces exploitation, but also bears the main responsibility of the destructive Anthropocene. James O’Connor had conceptualized this new reality as “the second contradiction of capitalism.”^[47] His thesis was that capitalism would not resist the inner contradictions the productive system had unchained by exploiting nature.

However, it seems that capitalism can resist such a contradiction for a time that might be long enough to severely damage the possibility to reproduce human life on Earth which is a central statement for environmental political theory that cannot be simply dismissed.^[48] This latter element leads us back to the gray zone opened by the Anthropocene. Though this zone is determined by uncertainty, it calls for political decisiveness, and democrats legitimately wish this decisiveness to be self-determined.^[49] This contemporary time zone might be indefinitely transitory if Ecopower reveals to favor the perpetuation of life, but it might also be an apocalyptical time which is now a rational, though dreary, hypothesis.^[50] For that, human material actions matter. Politics and the environment matter and their conceptual union refers to what one calls “political ecology.”^[51]

Ecopower, then, can be rewritten as the form of power from which humankind will decide if our time will be indefinitely transitory, or if it will abruptly end. In these conditions, Ecopower creates a new regime of historicity like the Anthropocene, except it definitely includes the social and political unlike some technical or messianic conceptions of the Anthropocene.

Conclusion

Biopolitics is a power over life. Michel Foucault pays a lot of attention to the shift from Sovereign politics to Biopolitics. As Biopolitics fails to “foster life,” and on the contrary leads to an unprecedented centrality of death, the short-run fate of the species being at stake, a similar shift must be operated now. That is what I have advocated for in this chapter, by defining Ecopower as the new form of power, as the power to perpetuate life conditions of human species and the vertebrate living, or to produce their destruction.

This form of power points toward a new regime of historicity, in which environmental and social justice are deeply entrenched with the very issue of survival. Such a situation implies, for those who are attached to democratic ideals, a strong insight of lucidity to avoid the trap of a permanent state of emergency. Political theory, under the conditions of the Anthropocene, must deal with two questions without further delay: the power of capital over economic and social dynamics and the possible democratization of those very same processes.

If “Man is Nature becoming conscious of itself,” to conclude by Reclus’ words, one can hope the recognition and influence of Ecopower relations can be achieved before it is too late.