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by Sergei Prozorov, Edinburgh University Press, 2021, 192 pp., ISBN: 9781474485784

Rarely does a book of political philosophy manage to triangulate three themes of public interest as effectively as Sergei Prozorov鈥檚 Biopolitics After Truth: Knowledge, Power, and Democratic Life (). Its main topics鈥攂iopolitics, 鈥榩ost-truth,鈥� and post-Soviet Russia鈥攏ot only speak directly to pandemic politics but also address the relationship between Russia and the West that has become a matter of intense public concern since the election of Donald Trump and Russia鈥檚 invasion of Ukraine. The latest in a trilogy of books on biopolitics written by Prozorov and published by Edinburgh University Press, Biopolitics After Truth extends and combines Prozorov鈥檚 earlier analysis of Soviet biopolitics in 聽The Biopolitics of Stalinism: Ideology and Life in Soviet Socialism () and theory of affirmative biopolitics developed in Democratic Biopolitics: Popular Sovereignty and the Power of Life () in order to diagnose the problem of post-truth and provide a strategy for resistance to it. The book weaves together continental philosophy, contemporary political theories of post-truth, and a study of post-Soviet politics with clarity and concision to diagnose the emergence of post-truth authoritarianism. In doing so the book engages debates in international political theory, security studies, continental philosophy, and studies of Soviet and post-Soviet Russia, and will be of interest to scholars of these topics.

鈥楾he book weaves together continental philosophy, contemporary political theories of post-truth, and a study of post-Soviet politics with clarity and concision to diagnose the emergence of post-truth authoritarianism鈥�

Prozorov takes pains to distinguish the post-truth condition from the simple observation that political actors lie and the ancient observation that there is a relationship between knowledge and power. The worry is that dismissing post-truth as 鈥榥othing new鈥� risks a passivity or indifference that is itself the result of a post-truth condition. For post-truth, in Prozorov鈥檚 account, is about indifference to the question of truth rather than a questioning of truth or the promotion of lies. It is what Prozorov, drawing on Alain Badiou, calls a 鈥榬egime of equivalence,鈥� (14) in which all statements are taken to be commensurable and substitutable according to a common measure. This is a useful conception of a much-abused term but does not necessarily indicate its novelty. Kant, for example, writing at the end of the eighteenth century, identifies neither dogmatism nor skepticism but 鈥榠ndifferentism, mother of chaos and night in the sciences鈥� (100 [A x]) as the gravest enemy of enlightenment and critical thought. This is not to disagree with Prozorov鈥檚 concern鈥攗rgency can be lent to a problem by its persistence as much as its novelty.

The book is adept at drawing out the consequences of the link between biopolitics鈥攇overnment that 鈥榟as taken the living processes of the population as its object鈥欌�攁nd truth as a political technology. 鈥淏iopolitics is a mode of government,鈥� Prozorov explains, 鈥渢hat claims a foundation in the scientific knowledge of life鈥� (19). Here Prozorov鈥檚 analysis provides a useful lens on conflicts over vaccination and other public health measures in response to the pandemic. At stake in these conflicts is not only the question of evidence and misinformation (i.e., the rejection or acceptance of scientific expertise) but a disagreement over the purpose of government. The rejection of 鈥榯ruth鈥� in this sense is not simply a matter of delusion or misinformation but is bound up with the rejection of the biopolitical notion that the aim and purpose of government is the cultivation of life and the health of the population. Those who reject pandemic public health measures in their entirety also reject a set of very broad and very old justifications of modern political authority.

Prozorov, however, mounts an effective critique of the idea that being indifferent to truth is a means of gaining freedom from government or contesting political authority. Post-truth politics is not only a cultural phenomenon but a 鈥榙omestic technology of governance,鈥� one which Prozorov argues is being exported to the West by post-Soviet Russia (91). The post-Communist order in Russia gained legitimacy, according to Prozorov, not by developing its own ideological system but rather by 鈥榬adicalizing to the point of absurdity the ideology critique that weakened and eventually doomed the Soviet order鈥� (111). Russia is thus a case in point of Prozorov鈥檚 general identification (along with Latour) of post-truth with the generalisation of a critical attitude. Prozorov does not mistake this phenomenon as an effect of critique itself, however, or of poststructural critiques of truth, which remain invested in the question of truth and the distinction between truth and error. This post-ideological production of legitimacy lends itself to authoritarian politics because without any standard of truth 鈥榩ower can be exercised without any limitation鈥� (21).

Hence the need for a strategy for resisting post-truth authoritarianism which Prozorov finds in the idea of an affirmative biopolitics. Drawing on Foucault鈥檚 lectures on the Cynic practice of truth-telling, parrhesia, Prozorov develops a conception of truth-telling that institutes the distinction between truth and error through life activity that designed to demonstrate truth rather than argue for it. In its focus on performative efficacy over content it has some similarities with the move from proof to expression that Prozorov argues characterizes the post-truth era. This element of affirmative biopolitics means that it is 鈥榥ot associated with the objectification of life in the apparatus of government but rather with the subjectivation of living beings in resistance to and confrontation with these apparatuses鈥� (147). This points to a broader challenge raised by Prozorov鈥檚 analysis, which is the difficulty of separating subject from object, freedom from domination, and life from death.

鈥楶rozorov 鈥� mounts an effective critique of the idea that being indifferent to truth is a means of gaining freedom from government or contesting political authority.鈥�

Prozorov uses Foucault鈥檚 Subjectivity and Truth lectures to argue for a gap between the subject and discourse that permits the subject to make use of discourse for their own purposes. Yet what is powerful about Foucault鈥檚 account of biopolitical government is the way subjectivation and objectivation are elements of a single process that relates knowledge and power. This is evident in the dual meaning of the word 鈥榮ubject鈥� is which one is at once subject to domination, that is, made an object of power, and produced as a subject with agency鈥攏o gap is required. It is similarly difficult to separate a politics of killing (or thanatopolitics) from a biopolitics aimed at the cultivation of life. Foucault does not present us with a choice between subjectivation and objectification, cultivating and eliminating life鈥攊n biopolitical order, each entails the other. It is not clear that choosing one element of these related processes can provide a way out of this predicament. Affirmative biopolitics is a kind of 鈥榣iving truth to power,鈥� so to speak, yet the truth of one鈥檚 (sexual, psychological, intellectual, emotional) life is a crucial element of the functioning of modern biopolitical government. Truth can be a weapon of the powerful and the weak, of freedom and of domination. Political decisions within a biopolitical condition lie in where, how, and by whom forms of subjectification and objectification, life and death are decided and distributed. The indifference that threatens the biopolitical regime of truth is thus also an indifference to these political questions. In this sense, Prozorov makes an urgent and timely defense of politics.

One force that organizes and justifies these decisions, according to Foucault, is racism and the 鈥榗olonizing genocide鈥� that accompanies it (257). Prozorov has explored this topic in detail in The Biopolitics of Stalinism where he distinguishes between capitalist and Soviet biopolitics. While historical and geographical variations of biopolitical governance are clearly significant, consideration of the commonalities of modern biopolitics would help address a question raised by the contemporary activists that Prozorov argues exemplify affirmative biopolitics, Russian punk band Pussy Riot and Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg: What is the relationship between biopolitics and geopolitics today? If Pussy Riot鈥檚 prayer to the Christian Mary to rid the world of Putin invokes a geopolitics of state conflict, Thunberg鈥檚 demands for action on climate change invoke geopolitics understood as a relationship between human beings, the earth and its inhabitants, and political order. In this context it would be useful to return to the beginnings of species thinking in the natural history of the eighteenth century when Kant was inveighing against indifferentism. This is not long after the birth of modern biopolitics when the link between human progress and exterminating violence is forged by analogy with 鈥榥ature,鈥� a link that is far from broken today. Prozorov鈥檚 politically attuned philosophical analysis is well-suited to addressing these and many other questions provoked by Biopolitics After Truth. Perhaps the trilogy should become a tetralogy.

References:

Foucault M (2003).聽鈥淪ociety Must Be Defended鈥�: Lectures at the Coll猫ge de France, 1975-1976聽(Vol. 1). Edited by Fran莽ois Ewald. Macmillan.

Kant I (1998). Critique of pure reason. Edited by Paul Guyer and Allan W. Wood. Cambridge University Press.

Prozorov S (2016).聽Biopolitics of Stalinism: Ideology and life in Soviet socialism. Edinburgh University Press.

Prozorov S (2019).聽Democratic biopolitics: Popular sovereignty and the power of life. Edinburgh University Press.