A death without cause

Birth and death certificates developed in the late nineteenth century as one of the new regime of discourses and practices that Foucault considers “an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a bio-politics of the population.” ¹ Bodies, life, and death became subject to administration and management through new tools of statistics. Vital statistics of the social body captured population and reproduction. ² Life and death became certified events publicly and legally recorded. Birth and death certificates began systematically normalizing natality and mortality around the same time that Foucault suggests the homosexual became “a species,” along with “all those minor perverts whom nineteenth-century psychiatrists entomologized by giving them strange baptismal names.” ³ These new discursive productions and dispositifs (grids of intelligibility)—these newly archived documents—administered many forms of un-archiving alongside captured data. ⁴ As Gyanendra Pandey reminds us, “in Foucauldian terms, the archive authorizes what may be said, laying down the rules of the ‘sayable,’ negating (making inaudible and illegible) much that comes to be classified as ‘non-sense,’ gibberish, madness, and is dispatched therefore to a domain outside agential, rational history.” ⁵