Biopolitics the Sicilian Way

In a cross-section of Sicily at the beginning of the millennium we see a private clinic in which the control of the health of Sicilian citizens is exercised by means of the most modern diagnostic and therapeutic equipment available and, at the same time, we see an extermination camp, where the power of Cosa Nostra is concretised in the exercise of extreme forms of violence on the bodies of the very same citizens, in contiguous alignment, side by side occupying the same space. Both these scenarios, the apparently legal one in which, by means of advanced technologies, a “power of life” is exercised, and the other completely illegal scenario, in which, with similar technological precision, a terrible “right of death” is manifested (FOUCAULT M. 1978: 119-142), seem to participate in a unique system of dominion (9). To put it in broader terms, beyond any official rhetoric and disciplined politological taxonomies - modern State and Cosa Nostra, “dressage”, “the administration of bodies” or the “calculated management of life” (FOUCAULT M. 1978: 123), on one hand, and “the right to make one die or to let one live” (ibid.: 122), on the other, could seem to configure as pervasive expressions of a single system of governmentality. On the other hand, on a social level, around and in support of, a similar association, we find exponents of a “mafia middle-class” (SANTINO U. 1994, 1995) – men and women that give life to a dense network capable of incorporating diverse and ideally separate (if not in contrast with each other) spheres of Sicilian society. This aspect, therefore, takes on a connotation – which we suppose may be different from the biopolitical aspect, or from that founded on the exercise of sovereignty, with the possible use of violence, which, apart from the ethical foreboding and orderly disciplinary partitions, may well be worth investigating. In effect, in this paper we will try to put this peculiar declination of Sicilian modernity into focus, by following only a few of the numerous avenues that open up, once one begins to reflect upon the practices that, on the Island, link power over life and death, dominion and practices of manipulation of bodies.