Biocriminals, Racism, and the Law: Friendship as Public Disorder

Abstract

This essay offers a reading of the notion of public order from a biopolitical point of view. Departing from Giorgio Agamben’s reading of the state of exception, it will be argued that public order is the legal dispositive allowing for sovereign power to disseminate in a microphysical form throughout the judicial, administrative and securitarian institutions of the state. Moreover, in a similar vein that the state of exception constitutes, for Agamben, a threshold between the order of the law and the order of life, it will be shown that public order represents a fundamental core of Eurocentric regulations of the social life of kinship, gender, and reproduction. Finally, I will contrast the biopolitics of public order, understood as a preserving force for the status quo, with Foucault’s account of friendship, understood as an ever-emerging impulse for creative forms of radical cohabitation.