Stefano Vaj’s Biopolitics: A Transhumanist Paradigm

2,371 words

Stefano Vaj
Biopolitics: A Transhumanist Paradigm
La Carmelina Edizioni, 2014

Biopolitica. Il nuovo paradigma, originally written in Italian and first published in its “final” form in 2005 (Società Editrice Barbarossa), later circulated online through the biopolitica.it platform and has been continuously revised and expanded over the years (including an appendix drawn from Guillaume Faye’s La colonisation de l’Europe). The present review is based on the English translation produced by Catarina Lamm in 2014.

The notion of biopolitics, which today saturates theoretical and political discourse, first emerged in the work of Rudolf Kjellén, particularly in his 1916 treatise Staten som lifsform (The State as a Living Form). As with his better-known concept of geopolitics, Kjellén attempted to articulate a framework in which the state could be understood not merely as an institutional apparatus or juridical abstraction, but as a living organism endowed with vulnerabilities, adaptive imperatives, and a biological substratum conditioning its historical destiny. In this early organicist vocabulary, biopolitics signified the effort to secure the vitality of the state through the conscious management of population, health, fertility, and the total set of biological forces upon which national power ultimately rests. Biopolitics was a strategic doctrine: a recognition that the decline of demographic vigor or the mismanagement of collective health would reverberate through the geopolitical arena. For Kjellén, political order presupposed biological resilience, and the preservation of that resilience required deliberate intervention, foresight, and a willingness to treat population not as a neutral mass but as the very medium of statecraft.

In contemporary theory, however, the term underwent a decisive reframing through the work of Michel Foucault, who radically reinterpreted biopolitics by detaching it from its early statist-organicist context and redefining it as a technology of power characteristic of modernity. Rather than the state as organism, Foucault emphasized the state as regulator: an apparatus that administers life through surveillance, hygienic normalization, demographic measurement, and the subtle production of subjectivities—the governmentalization of life itself, in which power no longer operates through command but through the meticulous orchestration of biological processes.

And then there is Stefano Vaj’s biopolitical vision. Or, stated more precisely, Stefano Vaj’s view of the biopolitical.

For Vaj, modern biopolitics emerges as an inevitable consequence of the technological rationalization of human life. As societies acquire more sophisticated tools to understand and manipulate biological processes, the distinction between “natural” and “artificial” becomes unsustainable. Vaj argues that this dissolution produces a new scenario in which biological decisions—reproduction, health, longevity, genetics, selection—are no longer private or random, but part of a political structure that shapes the evolutionary destiny of populations. Therefore, it also shapes the evolutionary destiny of race and ethnicity. In this sense, contemporary biology ceases to be merely contemplative and descriptive; it becomes a discipline that designs life. Technologies such as genetic engineering, assisted reproduction, and advanced biomedicine establish a condition in which intervention into life becomes part of the normal functioning of society. This redefines the relationship between individual, body, and community, and raises questions about identity, responsibility, and evolutionary power.

Evolution is no longer a blind process but becomes susceptible to planning and intervention, since scientific innovations alter the genetic and physiological architecture of human beings, opening an unprecedented space in which humanity can correct or expand what was once conceived as a biological limit. As the normative function of “nature” erodes, ethical objections that attempt to preserve nature as a moral criterion become anachronistic; the natural, subject to continuous technical intervention, no longer means what it once meant. This rupture with classical naturalism also manifests in a rupture with conservatism and its apprehensions (as Faye had already done in Archeofuturism), and implies a rupture with classical humanism: family planning, fertility therapies, embryonic selection, and genetic manipulation expand the spectrum of available decisions and the possibilities for adapting to future contexts.

Technologically mediated reproduction alters traditional identities, since parenthood is no longer a function of spontaneous biology but of technical, legal, and communal decisions, reshaping the concept of family and generational obligations. In the same way, human bodies are no longer conceived as finished and final facts: their form, their capacities, and their deterioration can be intervened upon (in one way or another, human beings have been intervening in the body since the dawn of time). This logic reorganizes ethics, economics, and culture.

Vaj highlights the unrealistic “right-wing” reliance on supposed natural selection, noting that

the effects of modern medicine or of antibiotics are not in themselves distinguishable from those of vaccination, prophylaxis, drainage, a proper diet, hygiene, of physical education and sports for the masses, all ‘healthy’ practices that in fact eliminate or attenuate the pre-existent objective selective pressures – practices that were especially encouraged by political regimes, which in the last century were particularly concerned with eugenics.

As technology enhances biological life, renouncing its use becomes a form of evolutionary irresponsibility, since existence itself is placed in a position of vulnerability. Vaj critiques positions that deem genomic intervention immoral, because omission itself implies perpetuating avoidable limitations or future harm. As molecular processes become better understood, ignorance ceases to be an excuse: knowledge demands action. Not intervening is also a form of intervention, for it consolidates what already exists.

The transhumanist paradigm is anti-egalitarian, since enhancement technologies may produce inequalities—though absolute equality has never existed. Vaj argues that prohibiting enhancement for fear of inequality is equivalent to halting medical progress in the name of fairness. As with Faye’s identification of the Faustian soul of Europe in the refusal of imposed limits, Biopolitics positions itself against both conservatism and liberalism. In his “Transhumanism – the world’s most dangerous idea” (2004), Fukuyama fears that if human nature were technologically altered, individuals would lose the stable reference point upon which rights and values rest:

Underlying this idea of the equality of rights is the belief that we all possess a human essence that dwarfs manifest differences in skin color, beauty, and even intelligence. This essence, and the view that individuals therefore have inherent value, is at the heart of political liberalism. But modifying that essence is the core of the transhumanist project. If we start transforming ourselves into something superior, what rights will these enhanced creatures claim, and what rights will they possess when compared to those left behind?

Biotechnological intervention is not merely a set of tools in service of medicine or individual wellbeing, but a structural force reorganizing the foundations of social life, reproduction, and human evolution. Humanity ceases to be a passive agent of natural history: scientific development turns societies into co-authors of their own biological destiny. In a historical moment where biological characteristics cease to be unmodifiable and evolutionary limits become porous, the question arises: what does it mean to “be human”?

Notions such as “human nature,” “biological identity,” or “genetic destiny” lose their traditional meaning in an environment where genes can be edited, reproduction can be externalized, and the body can be intervened upon from multiple fronts.

Reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization, embryo selection, and prenatal interventions decentralize reproduction, which ceases to be an exclusively biological and intimate process and becomes a political and technical arena. Reproduction is transformed into a domain where decisions are made regarding genetic quality, potential health, and the optimisation of offspring. It must be understood that human beings have never been completely subject to evolutionary chance, but can now reduce it drastically. Preventive medicine, gene therapies, and the possibility of genetic planning cause natural selection to lose part of its determining power. Evolution becomes, at least partially, a socio-technological construction.

Vaj notes that contemporary subjectivity must be incorporated into this logic of intervention. The illusion of autonomy based on a fixed body or a hereditary destiny disappears. The individual is both an agent and a product of biotechnological processes; freedom is redefined as the capacity to actively manage one’s own biology. The author criticises traditional bioethics for operating with concepts that no longer correspond to the current state of the life sciences. He points out that existing normative frameworks were developed when biology was descriptive rather than interventionist. The new reality—or the new aeon, perhaps—requires a future-oriented, disruptive ethics that accepts evolutionary responsibility and rejects the taboos that obstruct progress.

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In his work, Stefano Vaj attempts to recover the concept of race from two simplifying extremes: on one side, crude biological racism; on the other, egalitarian humanitarianism that dissolves all hereditary difference into a moral abstraction called “Humanity.” The starting point is descriptive, not moral: the human species is a biologically diverse population structured historically into lineages, clines, and relatively differentiated sets.

Strictly speaking, Vaj relies on population genetics (Dobzhansky’s Genetic Diversity and Human Equality, Cavalli-Sforza’s “Some Data on the Genetic Structure of Human Populations” and “Human Diversity,” Kimura & Crow’s “Natural Selection and Gene Substitution,” etc.) to insist that race designates statistical patterns of gene-frequency distribution, not metaphysical essences. From this it follows that racial differentiation is a process, not a fixed state, and that in many species it is even more advanced than in the human one:

[T]here exist animal species, including wild species, in which the process of racial differentiation is much more advanced than in man, so much so that it is verging on speciation.

While a species may remain singular from the standpoint of inter-fertility, within it relatively stable subsets consolidate, separated by geographical, ecological, ethological barriers, or simply by patterns of mating.

This connects to another central feature of his definition: the deep interpenetration of biology and culture. Relative endogamy, marriage norms, sexual taboos, kinship systems, and, in particular, linguistic boundaries function as mechanisms of segregation and selection. Vaj invokes Cavalli-Sforza:

Language[…] still today often mirrors the ‘genetic gradients’ to a significant degree. Apparently, people who defend their own linguistic identity also defend their ethnic identity, and language normally plays a decisive role in human courtship.

Thus, belonging to a people, to a linguistic and symbolic community, is far from being merely “pure culture,” and it typically corresponds to a discernible biological depth. Race, in the sense described by Vaj, refers to the level of inherited structures, of lineages and gradients that stabilize across millennia. Ethnicity refers to the historical-cultural crystallization of those lineages into concrete peoples, endowed with memory, language, customary law, landscapes, and characteristic ways of life. Identity, finally, is the reflective and political plane: the way in which those bodies and traditions think themselves, represent themselves, project themselves into the future, and defend themselves or allow themselves to dissolve. Without biology there is no raw material; without history there is no form; without identitarian decision there is no project.

This framework also helps explain why Vaj pauses over examples such as the Jewish people, defined by Georges A. Heuse as a “hiero-ethnic group”:

It is known that there literally does not exist a Jewish ‘race’. The Jews form a ‘hiero-ethnic’ group whose members originate essentially from the Anatolical subrace […] and the southeastern subrace […] As a result of the tendential endogamy that these practice […] it is also plausible that one or two subraces are anthropologically in formation in the midst of the Jewish ethnic group.

When Vaj turns to European races—what, in classical language, we understand as the white race—he does so precisely from this long-duration perspective. He revisits the traditional typologies in which European sub-races are distinguished on the basis of clusters of physical traits and gene-frequency patterns. But this is not merely a catalogue of skulls and pigmentation; in his reading, Europe appears as a mosaic of subpopulations that have co-evolved with specific climates, economies, forms of warfare, and symbolic systems—countries, peoples, landscapes, and human types forming a single tapestry.

At the same time, Vaj emphasizes that the notion of the white race has been, to a large extent, a modern abstraction, useful as a macro-category in contrast to other large groupings (Congoid, Mongoloid, etc.), yet internally highly differentiated and in constant recombination. The issue is not mixture itself, which has always existed, but the kind of mixture, its historical direction, and the loss or preservation of recognizable structures. From the standpoint of identitarian biopolitics, the relevant question is not whether Europeans are “pure,” but whether the combination of demographic, migratory, and cultural trends allows one to speak, in one or two centuries, of recognizable European matrices—or whether these dissolve to the point of becoming irrelevant as historical subjects. (This is where Guillaume Faye argues that the preservation of ethnobiological diversity is essential to European civilization, defending in Why We Fight the European identity as a biological-cultural composite that cannot simply be erased.)

In this sense, when the text discusses mass immigration and dynamics of hybridization, it does so less in a moral register than in terms of historical morphology and ethnic self-preservation. Vaj does not seek to demonize the Other, but to affirm that every population has the right to ask what kind of continuity it desires for itself, and what thresholds of alteration it can absorb without losing its form. In terms of population genetics, a species subjected to approximate panmixia—an indiscriminate and homogeneous mixing—will tend to reduce its internal differences:

in a species that lives in the same environmental conditions and in a state of approximate panmixia, differentiation has neither reason nor possibility to emerge, let alone to persist.

Framed within Europe, Vaj’s diagnosis is clear: if it becomes a space of globalized panmixia, a genetic catch-basin, it will cease to be a set of differentiated races and ethnicities and will become instead a simple, undifferentiated crossing of human flows.

Vaj thus understands race as a descriptive category tied to genetic diversity and the historical development of populations; a deep stratum upon which ethnicities and identities are built; and, in the case of European races, a field in which today the possibility is at stake of Europe remaining something more than an economic zone—namely, a constellation of living lineages, endowed with memory and with the capacity to decide what they wish to become in the biopolitical age.

The author ends the book with a sentence that leaves little room for reinterpretation: “The future will belong to whoever will express the strongest will, the deepest awareness.”

If we do not wish to perish, our mission is to forge that will and that awareness.