You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
A subtle, yet significant, shift in governmentality has taken place in Western societies since the mass introduction of fossil fuels, and with it the infrastructures necessary to facilitate the commodities that allow one to live “the good life”—from railroads, motorways, waste management systems, and airports, to electrical grids, wind parks, dams, pipes, wiring, and diesel generators. This change can be described as a shift from what Michel Foucault once called “biopolitics” to what Dominic Boyer has dubbed “energopolitics.” Those who control energy, from its production and circulation to its consumption, are those who control life: “power over energy has been the companion and collaborator of modern power over life and population from the beginning” (Boyer, 2011, p. 5). Those who have easy and cheap access to the outputs of infrastructures are those who get to live and thrive. However, in energopolitics, biopolitics transforms into a form of thanatopolitics—a violent politics of death rather than a sustaining politics of life. Roberto Esposito, who theorized thanatopolitics in the context of the Holocaust, argued how, in the words of Christopher Breu:
biopolitics is always split or double—privileging one community, nation, or group as immune, while marking another segment of the population as outside the cordon sanitaire. In the name of immunity, biopolitics turns around into thanatopolitics, justifying violence against those who are outside the sphere of protection.
Page 193[…] biopolitics becomes a ceaseless campaign of death. (2014, p. 17)
The same is true for energopolitics: rather than focusing on life, it manifests in such ways that it will value energy over life, following neoliberal capitalist logics of unlimited accumulation, where human life is only valorized to the extent that it provides energy. The place where energopolitics reveals itself most clearly is in our dependence on infrastructure: energopolitics i