Biopolitics and Biopower: The Foucauldian Approach and Its Contemporary Relevance (original) (raw)
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Master's Thesis "Michel Foucault on Bio-power and Biopolitics"
Foucauldian concepts of bio-power and biopolitics are widely utilized in contemporary political philosophy. However, Foucault’s account of bio-power includes some ambivalence which has rendered these concepts of bio-power and biopolitics rather equivocal. Foucault elaborates these concepts and themes related to them in his books Discipline and Punish (1975) and History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1976), and also in his Collège de France-lectures held from 1975 to 1979. Through a detailed analysis of these works this research suggests that there are differences in Foucault’s account of bio-power. The aim of this thesis is to shed light to these differences, and consequently, clarify Foucault’s account of bio-power and biopolitics. This research is divided into two main sections. The first analyzes Foucault’s works of 1975-76. In those works Foucault investigates relations of power and knowledge through a framework of what he called the normalizing society. Foucault identifies two essential forms of power operating in the normalizing society: individualizing discipline and population targeting bio-power. Together they form a network of power relations that Foucault calls power over life. By this concept Foucault designates the process by which human life in its totality became an object of power and knowledge. In this framework bio-power and biopolitics are essentially connected to particular system of norms which creates its power effects through medicine, human sciences and laws and regulations. The two pivotal reference points for normalizing techniques are race and sexuality. The second section focuses on Foucault’s lectures of 1977-79 and his other works published approximately until 1982.In these works Foucault elaborates the subject of governing population from different angle and with novel concepts. He abandons the view according to which one could locate a uniform architecture of power operating in society. Rather, he begins to analyze society as being constituted by multiple different forms of power and political rationalities. The crucial research question is what kinds of modifications take place in techniques of government when relations of power and knowledge are changed. In these investigations bio-power and biopolitics are identified with liberal apparatuses of security and pastoral power. The conclusions deduced in this thesis are that Foucault’s preliminary analysis of bio-power in the context of normalizing society is not sufficient to produce a firm analytical ground for concepts of bio-power and biopolitics. However, in his later elaborations of these concepts Foucault manages to demonstrate how political rationalities and different forms of power are related to the ways in which human life is governed and modified. Thus Foucault succeeds in creating analytical tools by which to have better understanding through what kinds of rationalities human life is managed in contemporary societies.
Alternation - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of the Arts and Humanities in Southern Africa, 2019
Showing how Michel Foucault moved from his analyses related to disciplinary power, to biopolitics, biopower, governmentality, and political economy, this article seeks to firstly contextualise the study in Foucault's own methodological and discursive oeuvre with regard to his move from 'disciplinary power' to 'biopolitics' and 'biopower'. This is followed by his very brief and concise description of what the study of biopolitics and biopower entail. Secondly, the focus is on Governmentality/ Governmental Reason, with five sub-topics, viz., political economy, regimes of veridiction, the limiting of the exercise of power by public authorities and 'utility', the birth of governmental rationality extended to a world scale (colonisation and imperialism), and the birth of civil society. The study concludes with some remarks related to the distinction between ideal critique, real transformation, and a few perspectives on what real transformation would entail in the postcolony, as it relates to the role of 'thought', the reason in governance, or governmentality.
Foucault’s Genealogy of Biopolitics and Its Significance for Contemporary Political Critique
What relevance does history have for politics? The question is best answered by focusing on a particular case, and examining how a particular historical account can aid in enriching, deepening, informing, and motivating political activity. In this paper, I will this question of the relationship between history and politics as it is broached in the work of Michel Foucault. In particular, I will discuss how Foucault’s genealogical approach to the problem of biopolitics can inform and deepen political strategies surrounding the sphere of politics surrounding health and emerging biotechnologies. I will argue that a historical approach, which tracks the emergence of biopolitics as both a discursive matrix and set of practical institutions within which political problems are determined and discuss, can serve as a crucial perspective for political activity and activism.
Foucault and the Two Approaches to Biopolitics
Biopolitical Governance. Rowman&Littlefield International, 2018
What is biopolitics? What kind of relationship does biopolitics establish between politics and biology? Although the etymology of the term “biopolitics” seems to suggest a straightforward meaning resulting from the relationship between biological life and politics, the current literature is characterized by a wide variety of definitions. [...] the scale of the problem is well exemplified by the decision of the philosopher Roberto Esposito to begin his major work on the topic with a chapter entitled ‘The Enigma of Biopolitics’. [...] In this chapter I will focus on the work of Foucault, with the aim of explaining the impasse in defining the notion of biopolitics. Following Esposito, I will claim that it is the lack of a correct articulation of the relationship between politics and life that lies at the core of the “enigma of biopolitics.” However, the enigma does not lie in the lack of inquiry into the two terms comprising this term; at stake is a deeper and more complicated issue. I will argue that when politics and biological life meet to constitute the notion of biopolitics they define two opposing theories of the human being. In turn, these two ways of defining the human determine two mutually exclusive approaches to biopolitics. The “enigma of biopolitics” is the name of this fracture.
Biopolitical Experience: Foucault, Power and Positive Critique
Biopolitical Experience situates the idea of 'biopolitics' in the context of Foucault's earlier work on the historicity of life and in relation to a broad problematic of understanding structures, or foyers, of (limit) experience. It explores the relevance of what we might call 'biomentality' for understanding class and nationalism, neo-liberal education policy, cultural racism and 'the problem of racism' in the history of present 'western' feminism. Going beyond lamentation at the horrors of biopolitical domination, the book develops a positive-critique of biopolitical experience: offering explanations as to the enormous appeal of biopolitical discourse; and cultivating an affirmative, ethical and productive response to the technologies of biopolitical racism and securitization. Such a response is not about life escaping power or a retreat from life, but rather involves critical work on the conditions of production of population life (becoming collective). Along the way, the book offers a critique of current uses of the idea of biopolitics in the work of Giorgio Agamben and Nikolas Rose.
Biopower: Foucault and Beyond (University of Chicago Press, 2015)
2015
is timely in the sense that it characterizes what Foucault calls the "history of the present" 2 (which is always, at the same time, a thought of the future). Biopower exposes the structures, relations, and practices by which political subjects are constituted and deployed, along with the forces that have shaped and continue to shape modernity. But it is untimely in that its relevance is necessarily dissimulated and masked-the mechanisms of power always have a way of covering their tracks. Before we can elaborate on this concept of biopower-the very etymology of which already points us toward the emergence of life into politics-it would behoove us to look at what power itself is, or what we typically think power itself is. For the traditional model of power is precisely what Foucault's concept of biopower assimilates and ultimately surpasses.