Beyond Bare Life: AIDS, (Bio)Politics, and the Neoliberal Order Jean Comaroff Ie is impossible to contemplate the shape of fate modern history —in Africa or elsewhere —without the polymorphous presence of HIV! 'AIDS, the signal pandemic of the global here and now. In retrospect, the timing of its onset was uncanny: the disease appeared like a memento mori in a world high on the hype of Reaganomics, deregulation, and the end of the Cold War. In its wake, even careful observers made medieval associations: “AIDS,” wrote ‘Susan Sontag (1989: 122), “reinstates something like a premodern experience of illness,” a throwback to an era when sickness was, by its natare, immutable, ‘mysterious, and fatal, Such rections make plain how the genesis of the pandemic affected our very sense of history, imposing a chronotope of its own, a distinctly unmodern sense of fate unfolding, of implacable destiny. By unsettling scien- tific certainties, AIDS also prefigured an ironic, postmodern future, As Sontag intuited, it marked an epochal shift, not merely in the almost omnipotent status of medical knowledge and its sanitized language of suffering, nor eveo in the relationsbip with death, so long banished from the concerns of those preoccupied ‘with Tife and their seemingly limitless capncity to control it. AIDS also casts a ‘premodern pall over the emancipated pleasures, the amoral, fee-wheeling desires that animoted advanced consumer societies. And, as is often the case when West- ‘ern selfimages of reasoned conteol face homegrown disruption, the disease was deflected onto Africa as primal other, Africa as an icon of dangerous desire, Africa as the projection ofa self never fully tamable 1 wish wo cxpress ay erate fo Storen Robins, Chris Dorsey, Dilip Gaonkr, and hn Com tof forthe gener insights they offered an this paper. ublicuturerg 0225 /0899236)2006-050 ‘opyght 207 by Duke Univesity PressInmore ways than one then, AIDS represented the seturn of the repressed, the Here suppressed, the oppressed. Soon overwhelming the received limits of virology ‘anymore and immunology — indeed, of the restricted lexicon of bioscience sui generis—it govern: fet off an avalanche of mythmaking, There have been those in the tradition of institutic Nietzsche (1910: 77) who insist chat modernity has banished such mythmaking, tion—o thot it has condemned us to pain without meaning. In our day, says Jean-Luc more ec Nancy (1997: 149), suffering, ger sacrificial.” Our bodies are broken and. les vial repaired, but “here is nothing to say” There certainly has not been a shortage oF edge. If things to say about AIDS, On the contrary, AIDS has sparked a veritable plague roprodu of images: what Paula A. Treichler (1988) memorebly termed an “epidemic of of all th signification: Striking the unstable landscape ofthe late twentieth eentory ike its prim ‘“lightoning bol (Nancy 1997: 146), iteut a swath at once awesome and abso longuat jute, marking out the path of economic and environmental changes that sped the the Wer ‘evolution and transmission of new viruses across and within species (Davis 2005: ata tio 55), In the process, it signaled emerging biopobitcal insecurities: unrecognizable Butler aliens capable of disrupting existing immunities, penetrating once-sceure bound Als rvios ata time of deregulated exchange. In the West, the disease prefigured a novel figured ‘order of post-Cold War errors: of protean, deteritorialized invaders who hijack. states & pur defenses and threaten to coexist with us in a deadly symbiosis that sets off ject is rapidly mutating, mimetic forms of violence and cousterviolence, In short itis & service process that W. J. . Mitchell forthcoming) has called the “cloning of terr0:” rity, an ‘As allthis suggests, AIDS has been rewriting the global geopolitical coord not the natos within which we think and act, We may lack the nerve or imagination to vests € theorize it adequately, but it has cortainly been theorizing us for quite a while logical “Itdoesn’t matter if you ate HIV-positive or negative," insists South Africa activ the pre jst Adam Levin (2004: 226), “the world has AIDS. And if you give a shit about ini the world, you have it too.” The threatening mutability of the discase challenges shetori efforts to impose stable categories of recognition and exclusion in an already dis moral rupted lat-modern geography. The pandemic is savagely cosmopolitan, making issuei blatant the existence of dynamic, translocal intimacies across received Jines of anda segregation, difference, and propriety. But it has also revived old specters, mark: public ing out pathologized publics and crystallizing latent contradictions and anxieties. such ¢ ‘And, in s0 doing, it has exacerbated existing economic and moral divides on an by aw ver more planetary scale. Coming as it did atthe time of a radical restructuring, neolit ofthe axes ofa bipolar world, of the iberal-democratic nation-state and the works homo: {ngs of capitalism itself the disease served as both sign and a vector of global mora order in-formation—and with it, «new sense af the nature and possibilities of aware the political. 198vressed,the J af virology generis —it radition of nbmaking, s Jean-Luc broken and shortage of century ike e and abso- rat sped the Davis 2008: cognizable sure bou ured a novel + who hijack that sets off short, itis a ‘fterror” tical coordi- agination (0 aite a while. Africa active a shit about ee challenges already dis- ‘tan, making ived lines of eters, marke id anxieties. livides on an restructuring, and the work ac of a global ossibilities of Here again, the timing has not been coincidental It scarcely needs saying anymore that as states around the world set about outsourcing key aspects of fovemnance, withdrawing from a pois of redistribution, the grand disciplinary institutions of the modern state have shrunk, or thatthe task of social reprodue- tion—-of schooling, healing law enforcement, frail care—has been ceded to ever move complex public-private collaborations, to volunteer workers and more or ese viable communities under the sway of corporatized regimes of expert know!- edge. IF "family values” are the all-purpose give meant o ensure social and moral reproduction under these conditions, AIDS has been read as a quintessential Sgn fal that imperisa civilized funre-in-the world, an iconic socia) pathology. Tn its primal association with non-normative soxuaity, ATDS also Tends itself = Tanguage of revelation and zetribution, evoking strong emotions tha, atleast ip the Wes, suggest barely repress anxieties about sexual subjectivity and desie ata time of profound upheaval in gendered relations of power and production (Butler 1997: 21), valso in playin allthis is the incertain issu of citizenship. Here too AIDS kas figured as a standardized nightmare (Wilson 1951). Across the world, as pation- states disengage from the regulation of processes of production, the politcal sub- ject is dofined lss asa patriotic producer, homo faber, than as a consumes of services: the state, reciprocally, is expected to superintend service-delivery, seen rity, and the conditions of heathy, untrarmmeled commerce. With the erosion if mot the erasure, of social categories rooted in nation, territory, and class, identity ‘eats ever more crucially in individual bodies: bodies defined as objects of bio- Topical nature and subjects of commodified desire, Would-be statesmen represent the predicament of contemporary governance as «Herculean battle to bslance tninimal government with maximum personal safety and self-realization, thee thetorie focusing centrally on the quality of life, understood in simultaneously ‘oral and material terms. AIDS embodies, al too literally, core contradictions at {esue in such discourse. For some, its onset made plain the dangers of laissez-faire and a drastic reduction of the reach of the polis—the erosion of institutions of public heath, for example, inthe name of corporate scienoe (Baier 1989), But veh eitical, socal reflection, atleast in the global North has been overpowered ty another process already noted: a projection ofthe dytopic implications of reokheralisin onto the victims themselves. Thus itis that the archetype of the homosexual AIDS sufferer became the specter of a world driven by desire sans evra commitment, The hysteria that erupted in the United States with the first ‘rvareness of the epidemic made plain how central is the register of sexual "per ‘rersion’ to the neoconservative imagination (Berlant 1997). This is an imaging Beyond Bare lifePubli catture tion that strives to reduce expansive vocabularies of polities, social debate, and intimacy toa strsightjacket of absolute oppositions: nature and abomination, trath and deception, good and evil ver more assertively, sex is seen, for good and ill, to hold the Key to life. It isa fetish, attributed with a decisive agency all is own. Much has been written about this, of course. Here J wish to emphasize the way in which sexuality instan- tiates the dark underside of the commodity form and the world it makes possible: transaction cut free from moral regulation and social constraint, manifest in the perversion of responsible reproduction and of the putatively wholesome appetites ‘that animate marketriven sociality. Indeed, an older polities of class and ideo- logical struggle is being widely displaced by what Simon Watney (1990: 100) has termed a “polities of intense moral putty," the sort of polities made evident i the 4isproportionate, disGiguring part played by gay marriage in the 2004 U.S. elec tion, Just how pervasive is this politics of perversion? A liturgy of seamy evidence. springs readily to mind. For example, a recent report revealed that in the 1990s the US. Air Force's Wright Laboratory proposed to develop an “aphrodisiac” chemical weapon to deliver a “non-lethal blaw to the morale af enemy troops by provoking homosexual behavior among them." In reflection on the film Biake- back Mountain and the Abu Ghraib debacle, Jesse Kornbluth (2006) asks why itis that “gay sex [is] unacceptable within our borders, but ideal to export to foreign torture chambers.” Fresh pictures from Abu Ghraib, he notes, confirm a systematic effort to attack Islamic values—in terms that often mimic what he dubs “S&M” gay porn. “Our interrogators strip the Iragis of their heterosexusl ‘masculinity, then force them to reenact somebody's idea of gay scenarios” As in ‘Abu Ghraib, 50 also in Guantanamo: there, to0, rituals of dehumanization have acted out homegrown, homoerotic traumas that cannot be resolved or be satisfac torily cathected (White 2005). Like many features of the new imperialism, this cffort to project depraved sexuality onto others —while our own forces engage in a depraved sexualization of warfare — revisits technologies of an eazlier colonial cra. The enduring consequences of that history are writ large inthe contemporary polities of HIV/AIDS in Africa, But [am running abead of myself. My broad concern here is how, and with What consequences, HIV/AIDS is implicated in the world-altering processes that have reshaped the late-twenticth-century international order: how it has played a 1."U.S. Miltary Gives "Make Love, Not War" Now Meaning.” Cope Tine, January 17, 2005 See also “Pentagon Revels Rejected Chemical Weapons,” New Slenith, January 15,2005, wary rnewsclenti.comfarile.nsTi=mg 18524823800, 200 roleint of new! rations « Exporth: Inthete have re Ditk Us rather, shifted is ende: mass-m ‘century dome suggest cothorne polities relative Americ epitomi inreleva in seare behind site for horrific whose who ray of inno. ‘The: lived re tested— tive con and des and pol 2kro este:debate, and ination, truth key to life, It been written, ality instan- ‘kes possible: anifest in the ome appetites ass and ideo- 390: 100} has ovident in the 04 US. elec- amy evidence in the 1990s ‘aphrodisiac my troops by film Broke- 06) asks why Lo export to tes, confirm vimic what he heterosexual narios.” As in nization have ‘or be satisfac ‘orialism, this ‘oes engage in arlier colonial ‘ontemporary row, and with, processes that “thas played 2 Taouary 472006, 35, 2008, ww role in the redefinition of our moral geography and sense of biosecurity, in the rise of new kinds of politcal subjectivity and sociality, the emergence of new configu rations of integration and exclusion, prosperity and immiseration, Exporting the Pandemic: AIDS Goes South, {nthe two and ahalf decades since HIV/AIDS was identified, therapeutic advances have rendered the condition manageable. As South African “actorvist” Pieter~ Dirk Uys (2005) has put it, itis now a “life sentence... not a death sentence.” Or rather, it should be, In point of ft, the most devastating burden of suffering has shifted to parts of the world where, from the vantage of the privileged, misery is endemic, life is cheap, and people are disposable, As has often been noted, ‘mass-mediated images of the disease have hada signal impact on late-twentieth ccontury Western constructions of third world peoples as abject, intractable, and ‘doomed (cf. Treichler 1999; 210). Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttal (2004: 348) suggest, in respect to Africa, thal these images excecd even the archetypes of ‘otherness iroplied in Said’s Orientalist paradigm. They are correct. Global geo- politics have produced new zones of exclusion in which alterity becomes highly relative, The Muslim terrorist might have emerged as the acme of opposition to ‘Atnerican dominance in the post--Cold War world, but disease-ridden Africa cpitomizes another otherness, a product [ess of an axis of evil than an axis of jrelevance, Bereft ofits former strategic significance and unpromising to those in search of profitable comrnodity markets? the continent disappears once more bbohind colonial images of nature red in tooth and claw. Once more it becomes @ site for European philanthropy and adventorism. Once more itis depicted as a hortific exemplar of all that threntens the natural reproduction of life: mothers ‘whose wombs incubate death, genocidal leaders who court dissident science, men who rape virgins —even bahies—to ri themselves of infection, children bereft of innocence who are driven to preternatural sex and violence for profit ‘These circulating discourses intersect in complex ways with HIV/AIDS as a Lived reality in the postcolony. There, the condition is ever more crucial and con tested —at once a sign, a source of sociality, a figuration of altered states of coll tive consciousness, and a vector of new senses of political possibility, entitlement, ‘and democracy. For AIDS makes scandalously plain the human costs of economic ‘and political marginalization, the limited impact of humanitarian intervention, the 2 roca, eure evidence suggests that despite is endemic poverty, Africa remsins a profi abe st for ret Western avestnent (Comat unl Comat 2006),Publi culture toll of an ever more monopolistic control over the means of life itself. In many African countries, HIV revivifies scarcely suppressed memories of the violence and medicel neglect of times pas, bing with enduring legacies of scientific ac ism, material extraction, and technological dependency. Smal} wonder thatthe dis- ‘ease animates traumas which invert the phobias of the West: suspicions that it was inflicted on black populations by genocidal racists, by careless experimentation, by the CIA, or by drug companies and their craven local sidekicks Across Aitica, moreover, standardized Buropean nightmares ply into @ host of local anxieties and etiologies. Discourses of perversion and shame have been common, for instance. The spread of AIDS has spurred the vlilleation of homo- sexuality despite compelling evidence tha its transraission here is predominantly heterosexual. ft has also licensed the policing of other forms of sexuality not securely under the control of normative authority, hence the demonization of independent women, immigrants, and youth. As Neville Hoad (2005) notes of South Africa, the sexualized tropes of colonial racism continue to stalk the poli tics of HEV/AIDS, provoking official denial in the face of the “silencing phantasm of sexual respectability” Studied refusal to acknowledge the pandemie by those in authority perpetuates the association of race, sex, and pathology. ATDS activ ists and educators struggle to break these associations and the conspiracies of suppression and displacement that perpeuuste them, They aim to secure public places from which sufferers can claim their status in unszabiguous tems. It is in light ofthis struggle that a small gesture made by Nelson Mandela took on enor- ‘mous significance. In announcing that his sole surviving son had succumbed to the disease, he declared: “The only way of making [HIV/AIDS] appear a normal illness like TB or cancer isto come ovt and say that someone has died of [it!” (Gedye and Sapa 2005). Local commentators refested to this as their “Rock Hudson’ moment" (Uys 2005). Bot the inaudibility of talk aboot AIDS is often less a matter of brute repres- sion or seerecy than of complicated communicative practices in the context of radical uncertainty. Nuanced registers and indirect forms of speech flourish in & field haunted by the ubiquitous presence of the disease. For death isthe unspoken referent around which much everyday signification has been ceoriented. In South Africa, where one in fve adults is said o be infected and some clinics report that nearly 40 percent of women between twenty-five and twenty-nine years are HIV Positive, maintaining the ambiguity of one's status, or the presence or absence of 3. "More AIDS in South Africa" JOL News, July UI, 2005, wwyrintoLco-zafindes php? se MeL Aclck ids13Qear_jdeqyt1210857226138162 202itself. In many of the violence | af scientific rac. ader tat the dis- ions that it was srimentation, by play into a host tame have been zation of homo- :predominantly of sexuality not emonization of (2005) notes of > stalk the poli- demic by those 2y- AIDS act conspiracies of 9 secure public 's terms, Ieis in a took on enor succumbed to pear a normal as died of fi” s their “‘Rock of brute repres- the context of sh flourish in a s the unspoken snted. In South, tics report that years are HIV or absence of cozalindes php? che disease, can bean act of sel-preservation, defiance, or resignation in te Face stan appeenty implacable fate. Adjective such as fo or thin, sharp or sages sallow or pumped prime the delicate labor of framing Henies and brosching arores in the shadow ofthe pandemic. The work of sustaining he self inthe face Of AIDS also takes on a discernible spatiotemporal aspect. Frédéric Le Marcis (02004: 454) speaks of the distnetive map of Johannesburg drawn by subfecrs they traverse the ety in search of care, Ther journeys chart a metropolis Pae!¥ Misible, partly hidden from sight In their tenacious quest for teatment, dei a ing bodies ae a place of meeting ofthe public andthe privat, theofficial and the unofficial, the said and the unsaid "Al this suggests that AIDS in ALfrica—as fetish ot taboo, puted truth Or jnreducible realty —has been prolifcally productive, I use this las erm jn tbe anamnner of Marx and Foucault to imply that ithas given birth to signficent forms Or aveiality and signification, of enterprise and activism, both negative and posi tive The pandemic bas redrawn the parameters of existence, asimimate pleasures become mortal risks, as trust and fidlity are freighted with deadly salience and patterns of physical and colteral continuity are eroded in unprecedented ways, 08 ttre generations are “tole,” a3 children become mothers and sebools become supenages (Wines and LaPranice 2004). Where adult workforces are depleted ser omeatc incomes dry up, new orders of dependency and deb, caring and tustody, take shape. So do new etiologies, utopian vocabularies, and visions of pocalypse, ll intensified by fnrs of human malevolence and wteeraft (Ash forth 2002). Such conditions breed desperate forms of inventiveness, represents tion, and enterprise. Vibrant exprossive genres have sprung up around the Pan vremies amoog ther, the Body Maps project in which South African artists and servlets commemorate those who, i the words of Ingrid de Kok (2004/2005), “hic of lows lesions.” Bot the impact of AIDS is also evident in the less clevatod tbusinese of everyday exchange. The banal accoutrements of death jostle other domestic commodities on roadsides and in markets: coffins, wreaths, all mannes ot medicaments, sacrificial beasts, Communities struggle to find the time and place, and the ital and financial means to proces the weight of mova]4y, thos raid the uimate abjection of “bare death” (MeNeil 1998) The prospect of tring anableo dispatch the dead with ue ceremony —to properly consign them, to the ancestral world —marks the null point of social continuity, as threatening to an imagined future as is bare life in the present “While it often unfixes received signs and practices, AIDS ean also authorize strong new associations and visions ofthe common good. Those who embrace ® polis of "pasitive” identity dety silence and invisibility by becoming emphatic 203, Beyond Bare lifepubli Culture embodiments of the disease, Members of the South African Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) wear its declarative T-sbirts like a uniform and take diagnostic indices as terms of person identification, ‘They introduce themselves at support ‘group mectings, for example, by announcing their CD4 T-cell counts and viel Toads (Robins 20048: 7). In these context, claiming positive identity ean e tan amount to a conversion experience: quite literally, a path co salvation, since iden- tification can bring access to medication and material support. A “positive” South ‘African, a neophyte in an antiretroviral (ARV) program, put it thus: “Lam like & born again... 1's ike committing yourself to Tie because the drugs are Tite time thing, ARVs are now ray 1ife” (Robins 2004a: 6). These testimonies rede- ploy the register of transmutation common in the Pentecostal churches that have ‘burgeoned across the global south in neoliberal times, churches that heve had anibivalent relations with AIDS movements. Rebirth through the disease likewise involves standardized formulas of self-declaration, @ passage co new ontologi cal certainty and transparency that claims to reverse the deceptions of prejudice, secrecy, and untruth. Like Susan Sontag (1989) in her vain effort to banish meta pho from representations of illness, AIDS activists often feishize the langusge Of science in their eagerness to Timit the semantic resonance of discourse about the disease —although, as we shall see, they also struggle to reconnect popular science to a vocabulary of critical polities “The various forms of activism and enterprise, anger and argument, coopers tion and conflict that have etmerged in response to AIDS in Africa belie images of abjection, Not only have several countries—Burkina Faso, Senegal, and Uganda, for example —made an impact on rates of infection, the pandemic has also triggered energetic forms of mobilization, striving, and assertion among activists who, often in stark contrast to their counterparts in the West, aspire to extend themselves to a more general polities of life couched in the language of citizenship and global equity. To this end, AIDS activists have forged broad, heterogeneous alliances with international movements, nongovernmental orEe nizations (NGOs), and private philanthropists as well 2s with various corporate entities acting in the name of conscience, public relations, or opposition to bio tech monopolies. And they have pressed a range of national and transnational ‘concerns —from entitlement to life-saving drugs and the rights of FHV-positive 4. Citcs have wcased TAC of downpliying the often severe se offers of ARV mediation scien be United toc, by contrast, ave scugpld o make drug companies acon the ‘Stoplex cunsequneesf wetont(Decotaa 2005 4-15, Clans fox thesmanaestity of AIDS ‘ten in South Asia tus be see in elaion tothe assertion by 0-cated denials that ARS te deadly piss 20amigrants, through the ethics of medical experimentation, to the legal and moral satus of intellectual property. In an ea when many Western intellectuals lament the “lasting eclipse” (Agamben 1998: 4) of politics as wee know it and antiglobal- ization activists struggle to engage rapidly mutating, deteritorialized opponents, ‘AIDS carnpaigners in Brazil, India, and South Africa have developed innovative repertoires of popular insurgency. Recuperating older idioms of mass struggle in Tight of contemporary aspirations, they infuse their current tactics with a novel understanding of the uses of law, media, and the agitprop art, the better to come to grips with complex configurations of power within and beyond the state (et. Farmer 2003), For example, Joti Biehl (2004: 111) claims that in Brazil profes sionals and activists have been especially adept at assembling techniques aimed ‘at maximizing equity within the neoliberalizing state. The initiative, be argues, has emerged as one of the most viable sites for recrafting a vision of democratic polities and ethics. There are grounds to question some of the claitos made for a politics of health eitizenship, as we shall see: to ask whether the terms in which it articulates its concrete, biopotitical entitlements might hamper its broader goals. Yet itis undeniable that health activism in several parts of de south have proven particularly vexing to states seeking to reconcile the privatization of public scr- vices with constitutional empowerment, especially where governments struggle to assort sovereignty against the force of transnational markets and translocal organizations. ‘This has been very obvious in the heated battle in South Alrica between AIDS activists and the Agrican National Congress (ANC) regime. It could be argued (Gee Robins 2004b) that the movement in support of w constitutional right to ARVs —a movement centered on an alliance between the Treatment Action Cam- paign and Medicins Sans Frontiéres—has been uniquely capable of engaging the kind of public-private, local-translocat collaborations that comprise goverment in this day and age.5 The movement has managed to link its specific biopotiti- cal demands to the more capacious terms of enfranchisement enshrined in the Freedom Charter;6 TAC has adopted the songs and commemorative calendar of 5. Alto active on the eationl cane isthe Naina! Association of People Living with HIVE AIDS (NAPWA), which while cote ntcoationaly visible 38 TAC, organizes a network of sop- ‘port groups the ALDS Lay Projet atthe University of te Witwatersrand sad string of local end transloca NGOs (ee Le Maceis 2006; Robins 20640), {6 This docatent, ratified in 1955 at the Congress ofthe People held at Klptoo, Soto, wae the benchmark of opposition during the yeas of spsrthei rol. tt eens included derands or 8 ‘makita, democratically elected goverament: equal opportunites; the atomization of banks, mines, and heavy indus; and the redistribation of land in 956,156 people involved in he ce ‘tion and ratfeation ofthe Freedom Charter were charged with ueason (ee Worden 199: 10). 205 Beyond Bare Ue