In “Life: Experience and Science,” an essay published in 1985, Michel Foucault states:

Life and death are never medical problems in themselves. Even when a physician, in the course of his work, risks his own life or that of others, the issue is one of morality or politics, not of science (1985, p. 14).

The body is a matter of politics. Has it ever ceased to be so, at any point or in any historical period?

Today, more than ever, in the aftermath of the pandemic, the debate surrounding thresholds has assumed renewed significance. Threshold is understood here as a zone of indeterminacy and intersection between the health sciences and the sciences of the human; a zone of indistinction in which criminal law becomes intertwined with medicine, sociology, and biology. All politics is biopolitics.

All politics is, and has always been, biopolitics. By embracing this idea, Giorgio Agamben continues Michel Foucault’s work, who, at the end of The History of Sexuality, Volume I: The Will to Knowledge, synthesizes the process through which, at the threshold of modernity, natural life begins, conversely, to be included within the mechanisms and calculations of state power, and politics is transformed into biopolitics: “[...] the threshold of biological modernity of a society is situated at the moment when the species enters as a stake in the game into its own political strategies” (2007, p. 173).

For Giorgio Agamben, politics did not undergo a transformation. From its very origin, it has always been what it now reveals itself to be with particular clarity: biopolitics. At its inception lies the exception: the state of exception and, with it, the fundamental hiatus, the split between zoé and bíos, between voice and language. These are the dichotomies upon which Aristotle structures the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics. Dichotomies: potestas and auctoritas, friend and enemy.

This reflection, linked to Foucault’s work, is accompanied by a definition of sovereignty. Carl Schmitt, in his veiled dialogue with Walter Benjamin, states: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception” (2009, p. 13). Schmitt’s definition must be read in light of Benjamin’s essay “Critique of Violence.” In this regard, the author’s eighth thesis on the concept of history acquires particular relevance: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of exception’ in which we live is in fact the rule” (2024, p. 32).

Everyday life demonstrates that bare life, which had remained concealed in its exceptional character, has moved to the center. This can be seen, for instance, in the heightened attention the State devotes to the General Health Law. It is a domain in which, not coincidentally, its interests converge: the exhaustive list of psychotropic substances and narcotics whose production and trafficking constitute crimes “against health”; the double standard by which fentanyl is assessed; the possibility of certain transplants through the legal redefinition of life and death. This latter redefinition reveals the biopolitical nature of all power, as does the management of health emergencies during epidemics. The abortion debate itself, in relation to the definition of “legally protected life” (from conception to death) adopted by the legislatures of certain states. The offenses in which the legally protected interest is genetic health, as well as those relating to reproductive and therapeutic cloning. The controversy surrounding euthanasia and eugenics, artificial intelligence and transhumanism, organ donation, sale, and trafficking—in short, those areas of debate in which law, medicine, biology, forensic sciences, and political philosophy begin to become indistinguishable.

Those who have contributed to this issue, No. 30, of the Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Penales, shed light on these intersections: on the primordial links between power and life, the aporetic definitions of criminal law, and the prohibitions and illicit markets in which their correlates emerge.

Today, more than ever, a sustained reflection and attentive reading of these issues are imperative. To use Agamben’s expression, the notions that the human sciences—from jurisprudence to anthropology—once regarded as assured require, in the urgency of catastrophe, a thoroughgoing reconsideration.

Renato Sales Heredia