Bare Life In The Circumstance Of Thanato-Politics:An Agambenian Study Of George Orwell's Animal Farm And Nineteen Eighty-Four

Biopolitics,according to Michel Foucault,denotes the control of human populations through political means.He contends that the entry of human life into the calculations of political power marks the dawn of biopolitics.With the emergence of the modern nation state and modern capitalism,a new technology of power,coined by Foucault as biopower,intervenes to improve life,complementing and replacing the old sovereign power that takes life to manifest its unchallengeable authority.In the new age,the governments are more concerned with maximizing,protecting and fostering the life of the population than bringing about death.However,Giorgio Agamben stresses Foucault's apparent neglect of the problem of sovereign killing in biopolitics.Against the backdrop of life being made safer in general,individual lives are being killed.This chilling dimension of biopolitics,the so-called thanatopolitics or the politics of death,is the focal point of Agamben's study.He completes Foucault's understanding of biopolitics by making sovereign violence,which is left undiscussed by Foucault,as his preoccupation.The logic of sovereignty,as Agamben summarizes,is always a logic of exceptionalism.Every society,from antiquity to modernity,practices this logic of sovereign exceptionalism to demarcate between those who are admitted into it and those who are to be cast outside.The once full and proper life is rendered by a sovereign decision as politically irrelevant and insignificant,reduced to bare life on the edge of survival and exposed to violence or killing.Such production of bare life,as Agamben puts it,provides the nutrient for every sovereign power.The annihilation of a minority in the name of the public good testifies to the righteousness of the sovereign.Agamben's observations on thanatopolitics offer valuable scope to examine the logic of sovereign exceptionalism and the circumstance of bare life in the purgatory of violence as depicted in George Orwell's Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.From this perspective,the thesis sheds light on political power's intrusion into and manipulation of individual life.By exploring the emptiness of law and the predominance of power on the farm as well as in the state,and investigating the living conditions of the animals and Oceanian people under the rule of the tyrannical leaders who consolidate their power by depriving others of their rights and lives,the thesis argues that Animal Farm as well as Oceania constitute a space of exception,a space in which the state of exception becomes the rule.In the state of emergency in the immediate post-revolutionary days,Napoleon and the Ingsoc Party are invested with a kind of sovereignty to lead the masses and reestablish order and stability.They decide what is to be done on the basis of the concrete situation,not bounded by any norms or juridical rules.Yet,during the long long days and nights afterwards,such provisional and exceptional state is prolonged into permanence by the power-hungry leaders to maintain themselves in power.To enhance their power,the Party and Napoleon deprive the citizens of basic rights for whatever reason they choose,exposing them to violence or even death.The thesis consists of three parts.Firstly,the thesis analyzes the ultimate exceptions on the farm and in the state.Napoleon and the Ingsoc Party are the final authority on Animal Farm and in Oceania,their will transcending the laws and their power remaining total and unchecked at all times.Secondly,the thesis discusses the bare life of Snowball,Emmanuel Goldstein,Winston Smith and Boxer,in the purgatory of violence perpetuated by the despotic rulers who make their power absolute by exterminating political rivals,liquidating dissidents and rebels,exposing innocent lives to violence and death.Thirdly,the thesis elaborates on the Orwellian thesis that the oppressed masses remain the sole vehicle of hope to create something better than the status quo,and contends that the only hope does not lie in the past,nor in the proles,but in pure humanity.To stay human is the only decent way of living in an oppressing world.Unlike the earlier reading that deems Orwell's positive treatment of the proletarians in Nineteen Eighty-Four as nihilist optimism,the present thesis regards his positive representation of the average citizens of Animal Farm and Oceania as the silver lining in the dark clouds of totalitarianism.In the end,the thesis concludes that Orwell's solution to totalitarianism is also inspiring for people living in this new era when various kinds of man's dominion over man still pervade.More importantly,to stay human is probably the only decent way of living in the age of artificial intelligence when robots and men come to blur with each other.