凌駕生命與死亡的權力：傑佛瑞．尤金尼德斯《中性》中的生命政治、酷異與種族化主體

Abstract

本論文以傑佛瑞．尤金尼德斯所撰之《中性》為文本，探究書中著墨的酷異與種族化主體。透過研讀傅柯與阿岡本對生命政治的剖析，本文認為《中性》一書記載的三代移民家族史揭露了掌權者如何操作生死，治理臣服於其的主體。值得注意的是，生命政治不僅積極干預整體人口的出生與健康，同時也具有撲殺、放逐有害個體，為社會除惡的權力。由書中角色們在美國及歐洲的境遇可知，即使身處不同國度，施政邏輯仍依循雙極進行：一方面以「生」為本，致力提升人口數量與素質，確保國家繁盛，一方面又以「死」為手段，淘汰國家負擔和隱患，去蕪存菁並有效且全面地控管生命。本文共分三章闡釋《中性》描寫的生命政治主體。一、分項研究傅柯、阿岡本以及姆邊貝論述之生命／死亡政治，試圖爬梳此權力自十九世紀進入當代的形式和流變。二、以書中的他者角色為主軸，分析生命權力在移民身分和性／性別偏異的身體上之運作。三、著重討論種族主義──生命政治在當代的形變之一，推崇生命的同時也放任或蓄意導致他族的死亡。有別於以「生」為主旨的第二章，第三章轉向主體之死，探討生命權力如何處置無用的種族化或移民主體。當代政治的治理手段凌駕生命與死亡，在主體的四周布下天羅地網，但本文強調，《中性》的主角卡爾最終看似黯然妥協，實則透過保持「中性」、「中立」的身體／身分反抗生命權力──亦即，卡爾的存在本身便是主體逾越的終極體現。

This thesis examines the lives of queer and racialized subjects in Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel, Middlesex. Based on the biopolitical concepts developed by Michel Foucault and advanced by Giorgio Agamben, this thesis argues that Middlesex, through the immigrant saga it depicts, parallels a family history with the mechanisms of a biopolitical regime to expose the underlying workings of power upon the living and dying of its subjects. Biopolitics defines a power over not only the biological processes, or life, of a population, but also the social and physical deaths of subjects that have been deemed by the authorities as risky, harmful, and therefore killable. As Middlesex has shown through depictions of lives in the U.S. and Europe as lived by its characters, the authority adopts a bipolar technology that simultaneously supports life for economic productivity and prosperity, while exposing disposable bodies to danger in the name of national security to enact an infinite control over individual bodies at the level of population. This thesis is divided into three chapters. The first chapter explores biopolitical concepts in works of Foucault, Agamben, and Achille Membe, tracing a genealogy of this form of power that has come to dominate the modern experience. In the second chapter, aspects of the lives of immigrant and sexually deviant characters, who are situated outside the norm in Middlesex, are teased out and analyzed in conjunction with the mechanisms through which biopower operates. The third chapter continues to analyze the novel by turning to racism, a modern biopolitical construct that not only makes live, but let die or makes die as well. In contrast to the previous chapter, which investigates the circumstances of survival, this chapter shifts the focus to shed light on the ways biopower constrains or kills unlivable and undesirable lives, particularly racialized or immigrant subjects foreign to the nation. While it remains debatable as to whether the novel’s ending suggests a compromise with the ineluctable power over life and death, the narrator Cal has indeed arrived at a “middle sex” and a “middle ground” that establish his very existence as the ultimate form of transgression.