Murder vs. Killing (specifically, euthanasia)

rc-am rcollins at netlink.com.au
Thu Aug 26 11:10:48 PDT 1999


australia will likely legalise euthanasia within the next five years. it seems to me, that here, the question of the state's role in defining certain kinds of killing as unpunishable, in the suspension of the laws relating to murder (which it also suspends in the case of the death penalty) is precisely the issue.

a citation from Girorgo Agamben's _Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life_ , Stanford Uni. Press, 1998:

"During the physicians' trial at Nuremberg, a witness, Dr. Fritz Mennecke, related that he had heard Drs. Hevelemann, Bahnen and Brack communicate in a confidential meeting in Berlin in February 1940 that the Reich had just issued measures authorizing 'the elimination of life unworthy of being lived' with special reference to the incurable mentally ill. ... it is certain that the reappearance of the formula coined by Binding to give juridical credence to the so-called 'mercy killing' or 'death by grace' (Gnadentod, according to the euphemism common among the regime's health officials) coincides with a decisive development in National Socialism's biopolitics.

There is no reason to doubt that the 'humanitarian' considerations that led Hitler and Himmler to elaborate a euthanasia program immediately after their rise to power were in good faith, just as Binding and Hoche, from their own point of view, acted in good faith in proposing the concept of 'life unworthy of being lived'. For a variety of reasons, including foreseen opposition from Christian organisations, the program barely went into effect, and only at the start of 1940 did Hitler decide that it could no longer be delayed. ... the transformation of the program, over the course of the fifteen months it lasted (Hitler ended it in August 1941 because of growing protest on the part of bishops and relatives), from a theoretically humanitarian program into a work of mass extermination did not in any way depend simply on circumstances. ... Every day, the medical center [in Grafeneck] received about 70 people (from the ages of 6 to 93 years old) who had been chosen from the incurably mentally ill throughout German mental hospitals. Drs. Schumann and Baumhardt, who were responsible for the Grafeneck center, gave the patients a summary examination and then decided if they met the requirements specified by the program. In most case, the patients were killed within 24 hours of their arrival at Grafeneck. First, they were given a 2-centimeter dose of Morphium-Scopolamine; then they were sent to a gas chamber. ...It is calculated that 60,000 people were killed this way.

...From the perspective of modern biopolitics, euthanasia is situated at the intersection of the sovereign decision of life that may be killed and the assumption of the care of the nation's biological body, Euthanasia signals the point at which biopolitics necessarily turns into thanatopolitics.

Here it becomes clear how Binding's attempt to transform euthanasia into a juridico-political concept ('life unworthy of being lived') touched on a crucial matter. If it is the sovereign who, insofar as he decides on the state of exception, has the power to decide which life may be killed without the commission of homicide, in the age of biopolitics this power becomes emancipated from the state of exception [state of emergency] and transformed into the power to decide the point at which life ceases to be politically relevant. When life becomes the supreme political value, not only is the problem of life's nonvalue thereby posed, as Schmitt suggests but further, it is as if the ultimate ground of sovereign power were at stake in this decision. In modern biopolitics, sovereign is he who decides on the value or the nonvalue of life as such. Life -- which, with the declaration of rights, had as such been invested with the principle of sovereignty -- now itself becomes the place of sovereign decision. The Fuhrer represents precisely life itself insofar as it is he who decides on life's very biopolitical consistency. This is why the

Fuhrer's word, according [to nazi jurisprudence]... is immediately law. This is why the problem of euthanasia is an absolutely modern problem, which Nazism, as the first radically biopolitical state, could not fail to pose...

...how it was possible that there were no protests on the part of medical organisations when the bishops brought the program to the attention of the public. Not only did the euthanasia program contradict the passage in the Hippocratic oath that states, 'I will not give any man a fatal poison, even if he asks me for it,' but further, since there were no legal measure assuring the impunity of euthanasia, the physicians who participated in the program could have found themselves in a delicate legal situation. ... The fact is that the National Socialist Reich marks the point at which the integration of medicine and politics, which is one of the essential characteristics of modern biopolitics, began to assume its final form."

the irony perhaps, is that the physicians found guilty of crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials were put to death; but not such a contradiction perhaps if you follow Agamben's argument of the connection b/n the decisions on life/death and sovereignty -- that the assertion of an Allied victory (of its sovereignty) had to include a spectacular decision to kill.

Angela _________



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list