Public-private opposition and biopolitics: a response to Judit Sandor - Part III: States and Boundaries - Column

Social Research, Spring, 2002 by Dominique Memmi

PIERRE Bourdieu has constantly taught us something like this: "If you meet a dichotomy when thinking, be brave: try to escape!"

I will do so. I cannot see any clear intellectual distinction between public and private, just as I cannot see any clearer intellectual distinction between body and soul. A good metaphor for the continuity between public and private is the corridor between the private flat and the public entrance to our hotel. This corridor is neither private nor public; it is obviously only more private or public than something else. And some shadows in the corridor might allow us more privacy than elsewhere in any so-called private space. Better, thus, than a continuity, we have here a tension between two ideal-types: the so-called private and public. I would like to show that real shadows between two ideals are sometimes more interesting than false light provided by forced oppositions.

The problem with ideal-types is that they are "types" and "ideals." "Types," which means that they allow a great part of the complexity of reality to escape; "ideals," which means that values are attached to them: we move, then, in the world of connotations, not of denotations.

Despite its false clarity, however, this "opposition" is deeply rooted in our anthropological and psychological experiences: that is precisely why we use it so often, even when it has no clear sense. We have a tendency to think there is a clear difference between "hate" and "love"--despite a century of psychoanalytic knowledge and practice--because we feel them as antinomies. Similarly, the public-private distinction would be one of the experiences premieres (first experiments) we need to discard if we want to start thinking seriously, as Gaston Bachelard teaches us in the first chapter of La Formation de l'esprit scientifique (1960).

So, how can we manage, when meeting this dichotomy, without escaping our task? The only valid intellectual solution, it seems, is to wonder what people mean by these terms, here and there. What do we mean at any given moment that helps us to think we speak the same language, for example, the here and now of the conference in Budapest at which these papers were presented? What did Judit Sandor mean by using the term "privacy" while working on reproduction?

Privacy in her paper often implicitly refers to women's liberty to act as they want about their reproductive functions. No such "privacy" is guaranteed as such in any country, she then discovers.

But "privacy" can also allude, in her paper, to the right to oppose oneself to the use of one's body by others.

Then, we discover with Judit Sandor, that there are some differences between Hungary and others nations in Europe, for example France. The Hungarian constitution recognizes the protection of personal data, personal reputation, sanctity of the home, and private secrets. But the only allusion to "privacy" in the matter of health would be the "right to exercise" for a doctor. She thus finds nothing like an absolute protection of the body in the matter of reproduction. In France, on the contrary, there is now a law, since 1994, that, making clear allusion to biomedicine in general and reproduction in particular, has assumed the proclamation of the inviolabilite (inviolability) and incessibilite (inalienability) of the human body. Here we find something like a privacy against the doctors, the biologists, the other patients in search of fresh organs or reproductive materials.

But again, when implicitly Judit Sandor means by "privacy" or "liberty" a woman's right to do what she wants to her body against any public intervention, such privacy has nowhere, to my knowledge, been assessed. In France, abortion, contraception, sterilization for contraceptive purposes must be treated the same way: they are not mentioned as rights, but as mere social possibilities, and are strictly regulated.

But this should not surprise us. In this last sense, privacy of the body never existed for men or women. Michel Foucault claims that "there is no society which is not very deeply concerned with the uses of the body and that would not regulate it in a very precise way. "Dans toute societe, le corps est pris a l'intgrieur de pouvoirs tres serres qui lui imposent des contraintes, des interdits, des obligations" (Foucault, 1975: 8). "Biopolitics" is the term that expresses this public necessity. What is more interesting, thus, and again is the shadow between public and private--that is, the recent changes in this public intervention.

What has thus changed about Judit Sandor's objects of research? Something important: social practices about the beginning and end of life, are (contraception, abortion, artificial procreation) or will be (sterilization, euthanasia) no longer penalized. While state regulation has moved from "punishment" to "surveillance," from the Punir to the Surveiller, to quote the famous title of Michel Foucault, while this regulation has deeply and merely changed its forms, does it mean any quantitative evolution? Does it mean an "increase" or a "decrease" in the public sphere? An obligation to speak and tell one's private life to a doctor, to justify one's claim for abortion or sterilization (or soon, for euthanasia): here is what turned out to be, to my eyes, the main and recent way modern states found to interfere with social uses of the body. The physician studio has become a space where a sort of secular confession is expected, for the public interest, by a ... liberal professional. Extension of the public or private sphere, or, again, complexity of the shadows? (cf. Memmi, 2000)