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.Given this ap-parently very comprehensive, but in fact meaningless, conceptionof politics, it is hardly surprising that Giddens deals only marginallywith central dimensions of the politicization of personal existence.His discussion of life politics concentrates almost exclusively onforms of knowledge and the possibilities of intervention with respectto human nature.In contrast to these concerns, he is less interested inthe interplay of social relationships and environmental problems.Although Giddens explains that life-political interests do not re-move or suppress emancipatory political concerns, he does implic-itly work with a phase model.He tends to connect life politics with aspecific societal stage of development and to limit its meaning to in-dustrialized and modernized societies.It is questionable, however,whether his distinction between questions of redistribution and in-equality, on the one hand, and those of identity and recognition, onthe other, is tenable.It is not possible historically or systematicallyto isolate emancipatory politics from life politics or to define themagainst each other (Flitner and Heins 2002, 334 337).1BiolegitimacyLess well known than the works of Fehér, Heller, and Giddens ismedical anthropologist Didier Fassin s concept of biolegitimacy. Inhis books and articles of recent years he has shown that biopoliticalphenomena always have a moral dimension, which means that everyanalysis of the politics of life must also take account of the underlying The Disappearance and Transformation of Politics 87moral economy.Fassin understands morality to be not the establish-ment of values or the distinction of right from wrong but rather thedevelopment of norms in a given historical and geographical context,which is accessible to ethnological investigation.Fassin stresses thatthe inclusion of the moral dimension does not replace political anal-ysis; rather, it expands and deepens it.His central question is, whatare the systems of values and normative choices that guide the poli-tics of life? (Fassin 2006).Fassin distinguishes between two aspects of this moral dimen-sion.First, ma ers of life and longevity, health and illness, are not tobe separated from those of social inequality.That a thirty-five-year-old, unskilled worker in France can expect on average to live a lifenine years shorter than that of an engineer or teacher of the sameage, that the statistical life expectancy in Uganda is half as high asit is in Japan these data reflect collective choices and normativepreferences in a given society or on a global level.These decision-making processes remain, according to Fassin, mostly implicit, sincegovernments are only rarely prepared to declare publicly that they al-low some people to live shorter lives than others or even that somepeople are sacrificed for others.A second moral dimension of biopolitics for Fassin goes beyondthis distinction between the differing life expectancies and qualitiesof life for the rich and the poor and for the rulers and the ruled.In-stead of measuring life comparatively in quantitative or qualitativeterms, this second form of moral reflection embraces the concept oflife itself.In this case, Fassin turns to Agamben s distinction betweenbare life (zoé) and political existence (bíos), though he gives theseterms a definition that significantly distinguishes them from Agam-ben s usage.In contrast to Agamben, Fassin states that the biopolitical rela-tionship between body and state does not take the form of a violentprohibition or ban.He sees rather a subtle government of bodies atwork, one that organizes itself around health and corporeal integrity 88 The Disappearance and Transformation of Politicsas central values. Bare life appears from this perspective as the vec-tor of a biolegitimacy that precludes recourse to violence.WhereasAgamben diagnoses a separation between humanitarianism andpolitics (1998, 133), humanitarianism is the quintessential form ofbiopolitics for Fassin.Humanitarianism is not a closed social field ofaction that is defined and administered by large NGOs but rather amoral principle that grants human life absolute priority.Accordingto Fassin, it is more and more apparent in the social domain that thebody functions as the final authority on political legitimacy (2006).Fassin illustrates his thesis by looking at French refugee policiesof the past twenty years.Throughout the 1990s, one can observe twoopposed but, in Fassin s view, complementary trends
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