6 - The Biopolitics of Dignity

Summary

This chapter traces the genealogy of the notion of “human dignity” in modern French law. My goal is to explain how and why dignity has come to be associated with national belonging and public order, as evidenced, for example, by the 2010 law banning “face coverings” in public spaces or by the recent pleas to revive “national indignity” after the attacks on the offices of Charlie Hebdo. I argue that that the definition of dignity circulating in French law since the 1990s is primarily a corporatist one. Rather than promoting abstract individual freedom, human rights, and democratic inclusion, this understanding of dignity (theoretically much closer to that of political Catholicism and personalism than to the Kantian or liberal understanding of dignity that we see in American law) insists on the obligations that the individual has toward the community, toward the social, and, in its most recent formulations, toward France. I propose to consider human dignity in the French context not as a value intrinsic to a person but as a project of biopolitical rule.