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Introduction: Why Biopower? Why Now?
V E R N O N W. C I S N E Y A N D N I C O L A E M O R A R
“Biopower,” a phrase coined by Michel Foucault,1 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.
An Analytics of Power
What comes to mind when we think of power? Traditionally power was
conceived as a commodity or a badge of honor supervening on life and the
living, something one either has or lacks. Operating in a top-down manner, the bearer of power dictates, on possible penalty of death, what those
not in power may and may not do. In other words, power is strictly delimiting, the conceptual model being that of the sovereign who rules over
his (or her) subjects with greater and lesser degrees of legitimacy and severity. To guarantee its legitimacy, power must produce its own bodies of
knowledge, its truths. “Power,” Foucault claims, “cannot be exercised unless
a certain economy of discourses of truth functions in, on the basis of, and
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thanks to, that power.”3 During the mid- to late middle ages, as tensions
between the limits of secular authority and those of religious authority began to escalate, the rediscovery of the Corpus Iurus Civilis in about 1070 CE
reanimated the Roman codes of juridicality and right, and served to adjudicate matters regarding the expanses and limitations of sovereign power.
But whether the concepts of law and right were employed for the purposes
of justifying the absolute power of the sovereign or drawing strict limits to
it, and whether the sovereign is one, as in a monarchy, or many, as in a representational government, what is never in question is the nature of power
relations themselves as a form of delimitation or “deduction.”
On this model, the relation between the sovereign and the life of his
subjects is a dissymmetrical one of permissiveness and seizure. The sovereign is in a position to endanger the lives of his subjects—in cases when
society is threatened, he may put them in harm’s way to defend its (or his)
security; and he is also in a position to terminate their lives—in extreme
cases when they blatantly transgress the laws of the sovereign or directly
(or indirectly) threaten his life and the lives of his subjects. The sovereign’s
power over life is thus the power to let live or to make die: “The right which
was formulated as the ‘power of life and death’ was in reality the right to
take life or let live [‘de faire mourir ou de laisser vivre’]. Its symbol, after all,
was the sword.”4 All of this operates under a perceived economy of subtraction, where the most visible manifestation of authority resides in the
sovereign’s power to take whatever possessions he wants or needs from his
subjects, up to and including their very lives: “Power in this instance was
essentially a right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, and ultimately life itself; it culminated in the privilege to seize hold of life in order to suppress
it.”5 The question of right, on this model, is thus always a question of how
far this deductive power extends and what, if anything, constitute the rights
of the subjects. However, it is always in relation to the delimiting sovereign
that this question is posed: “The system of right is completely centered on
the king; it is, in other words, ultimately an elimination of domination
and its consequences.”6 Thus the question of power is supplemental to or
supervenient on, rather than constitutive of, the question of life: “For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the
additional capacity for a political existence.”7
The question of power, then, is traditionally one of domination, or the
overextension of power’s reach. However, as Foucault rightly notes, domination occurs in myriad ways, at all levels of society: not just between de
facto political rulers and subjects, but between lovers, spouses, parents and
children, teachers and students, ministers and congregations, managers
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and employees, store clerks and customers—in short, in all relations of life.
To truly get at the heart of power, therefore, requires not a general and totalizing interrogation of established systems of power, but rather close and
particular analyses of the fundamental, constitutive relations and mechanisms at work in localized settings, which make the establishments of
domination possible in the first place. Foucault writes, “As I see it, we have
to bypass or get around the problem of sovereignty . . . and the obedience
of individuals who submit to it, and to reveal the problem of domination
and subjugation instead of sovereignty and obedience.”8
Against the traditional understanding of power, Foucault demonstrates
that relations of power are not homogeneous commodities that one either simply has or lacks; on the contrary, power pulses and reverberates
through all areas of life; he who is dominant in one situation (as perhaps
a father over his children) is, in a different situation, subject (as employee
and citizen). Thus, rather than power being an external force that impinges
on the lives of individuals (conceived as static and atomistic elements in
the system), power flows through the lives of human beings, constituting
the individuals themselves: “Power is exercised through networks, and individuals do not simply circulate in those networks; they are in a position
to both submit to and exercise this power. They are never the inert or consenting targets of power; they are always its relays. In other words, power
passes through individuals. It is not applied to them.”9 In question, then,
are the mechanisms through which domination and subjectivation, in all
their various forms, take place.
The Emergence of Biopower
At this level of analysis emerges a remarkable shift, according to Foucault.
The sovereign, deductive model of power becomes “no longer the major
form of power but merely one element among others.”10 A more insidious and expansionary model appears (or is invented): “a new mechanism
of power which had very specific procedures, completely new instruments,
and very different equipment. It was, I believe, absolutely incompatible
with relations of sovereignty.11 This new mechanism of power applies
directly to bodies and what they do rather than to the land and what it
produces.”12 Power now appears not to limit but to provoke, purify, and
disseminate force for the purposes of management and control, ramified
throughout all areas of life, the expansion of which is now its raison d’être.
This new form of power is “working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor,
optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating
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forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated
to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.”13
In this model of power, the expansion and efficiency of life, not its deduction, becomes the primary function of power, and deduction is merely
an instrument in the service of expansion. Death, in and of itself, is anathema to a system of life: “death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes
it.”14 Death therefore must become strictly instrumental, a sometime necessity in the service of life, a purgation of impurity or threat. Foucault calls
this new form of power bio-power: “one would have to speak of bio-power to
designate what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit
calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life.”15 And if, for Aristotle, human beings fundamentally are political
animals, Foucault shows us that an important shift occurs with the emergence of biopower; the modern man becomes “an animal whose politics
places his existence as a living being in question.”16
Biopower operates around two poles, according to Foucault. The first,
arising in the seventeenth century, functions at the micro level, what Foucault calls “an anatomo-politics of the human body.”17 It manifests in a host of
disciplinary mechanisms and institutions: militarily, pedagogically, medically, and at the level of labor. The human body comes to be seen as a
machine, complete with functions and utilities, inputs and outputs, predictabilities and precisions. “Disciplinary power,” as Foucault already calls
it in 1975 in Discipline and Punish,18 demands and guarantees of the body
“its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its
forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration
into systems of efficient and economic controls.”19 No longer does power
emphasize the law as the product of an arbitrary dictate of the sovereign.
Rather it functions under a different type of rule, one located in the natural
realm, a norm, legitimated by the sciences.
The birth of this disciplinary form of power thus coincides historically
with the multiplication and expansion of the human sciences, which are
made to serve as the legitimating discourses of this new form of power:
“They are extraordinarily inventive when it comes to creating apparatuses
to shape knowledge and expertise, and they do support a discourse, but
it is a discourse that cannot be the discourse of right or a juridical discourse . . . a discourse about a natural rule, or in other words, a norm.
Disciplines will define not a code of law, but a code of normalization, and
they will necessarily refer to a theoretical horizon that is not the edifice
of law, but the field of the human sciences.”20 Beneath the banner of the
anatomo-political, the concepts of law and right do not disappear or cease
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to function; rather, the law itself increasingly serves the role of controlling,
regulating, correcting, disciplining—in short, normalizing.21
The other pole around which biopower is organized arises later, “emerging in the second half of the eighteenth century: a new technology of
power, but this time it is not disciplinary.”22 This second pole incorporates
the elements of disciplinary power but uses them in a new way, and to a
slightly different end, “not to the extent that they are nothing more than
their individual bodies, but to the extent that they form, on the contrary,
a global mass that is affected by overall processes characteristic of birth,
death, production, illness, and so on.”23 During this point in history, Foucault claims, emerges a host of disciplines and bodies of knowledge whose
task is to calculate, interpret, and predict the overall health of the society
writ large. The regulation and tracking of birthrates, death rates, fertility
rates, economic and poverty statistics, infant mortality, average longevity,
and disease, as well as all of the various factors that influence these aspects,
operate within a power centered not on the individual living body but on
the species-body. This Foucault identifies as a “bio-politics of the population.”24
These two aspects, according to Foucault, the disciplinary power mechanisms of the body and the regulatory mechanisms of the population, constitute the modern incarnation of power relations, labeled as biopower.
It is for this reason that sexuality, situated at the juncture of these two
domains, becomes such a politicized issue in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (and, arguably, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as
well). It is something of a nexus in which these two, the health of the body
and the health of society, discipline and regulation, fuse into one: “whence
the four great lines of attack along which the politics of sex advanced for
two centuries.”25 The first two lines of attack are summed up with the dictum in the name of regulation, discipline. The premature sexualization of children is seen to corrupt their development and thus their ability to healthily
integrate into the world; therefore, it harms the very health of society itself.
Dr. John Harvey Kellogg was one of the more well-known and impassioned
critics of childhood masturbation, famously recommending all manners
of psychological manipulation and genital mutilation for both boys and
girls as processes of normalization. Likewise, in the name of the overall
health of the familial institution (as the cornerstone of a healthy society)
came a massive increase in diagnoses of female hysteria, a broad designation assigned to nearly any ailment that troubled a woman, especially one
that was considered detrimental to the female reproductive capacities. This
diagnosis brought with it an invasive medicalization of the woman’s body
and sexuality, including physician-prescribed “pelvic massage” as a regular
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treatment and, in some cases, a forced hysterectomy if the woman failed
to be “cured.” The other two lines of attack accord with the inverse of the
above declaration, in the name of discipline, regulation: “here the intervention
was regulatory in nature, but it had to rely on the demand for individual
disciplines and constraints.”26 Birth control became a highly controversial
topic of public discourse in the late seventeenth century, continuing into
the twentieth, as women more widely and effectively began to use barrier
methods of birth control. The dissemination of information about birth
control as well as the legality of its methods fluctuates in tandem with societal attitudes toward population as a whole. For the majority in this debate,
a robust population (for reasons such as economic or moral) is seen as
integral to the overall health of society; hence, numerous legal restrictions
regulated birth control information or means during this period.27 Finally,
the psychiatric “pathologization” of sexual perversions emerged as the
study of sex in the form of a psychological phenomenon, but this brings
the individual sexual practices of human beings directly into the domain
of abnormality and “corrective” intervention.
These two poles of biopower (discipline and regulation), however, remain somewhat distinct throughout the eighteenth century, Foucault
claims. When they finally unite, it is not in the form of a totalizing theory
“but in the form of concrete arrangements that would go to make up the
great technology of power in the nineteenth century.”28 A new form of political and social organization emerges in the nineteenth century, one dependent on the pushing to the limits of all human capacities. It demands
social hierarchy, the machinization of bodies, and a vast crop of willing
subjects. Its name—industrial capitalism: “the latter would not have been
possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of
production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes. But this was not all it required; it also needed the growth
of both of these factors, their reinforcement as well as their availability and
docility; it had to have methods of power capable of optimizing forces,
aptitudes, and life in general without at the same time making them more
difficult to govern.”29 Biopower seeks the consistent and ongoing increase
in the forces of life without thereby suffering the loss of control over
these forces—power in the service of vitality. All the societal institutions,
therefore—the family, the church, the education system, the university, the
military, and so on—normalize, structure, optimize, and subordinate the
forces of individuals to enter them into the machine of the economic system, to make them productive members of society who will happily defend
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it to the death if necessary. Life, as both subject and object, has thereby
emerged into the political.
Population, Security, and Governmentality
Interestingly enough, it is Foucault’s more in-depth engagement with the
concept of “population” that will ultimately result in a significant terminological shift on his part. It is important to note—given the tremendous
dissemination of the concepts of biopower and biopolitics by theorists following in the footsteps of Foucault—the durational brevity of Foucault’s
own engagement with and employment of these terms specifically. By 1978
he drops the language of biopower and of biopolitics, or rather resituates
their conceptual apparatuses within the context of the broader notion of
what he calls “governmentality.” This concept he understands primarily
as “the ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific,
albeit very complex, power that has the population as its target, political
economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as
it essential technical instrument.”30 As noted above,31 Foucault introduces
the concept of “biopolitics” in a 1974 lecture in Rio de Janeiro, and the
concept of “biopower” first appears in the context of his final lecture of
the Spring semester, 1976, delivered at the Collège de France on March 17;
this is followed by the somewhat extended treatment of the concepts of
“biopolitics” and of “biopower” in part 5 of The History of Sexuality, volume 1. Foucault then took a sabbatical in the 1976–77 academic year, returning to lecturing on January 11, 1978, and giving to his lectures for the
1977–78 year the title of Security, Territory, Population. The very first line of
the opening lecture begins in the following way: “This year I would like
to begin studying something that I have called, somewhat vaguely, biopower.”32 This announcement therefore heralds explicitly the reopening of
the question of biopower, which he had launched for the first time in his
last lecture almost two years prior as if to suggest that the lecture series on
which he was about to embark was conceived as a direct continuation of
a problematic that had been merely announced and whose substance had
yet to be plumbed. This suspicion is further provoked by the fact that he
takes up, point by point, what he considers to be five guiding intentions of
the analyses to follow, many of which circulate around his earlier articulation of the concept of biopower itself: (1) the analysis does not propose to
offer a general theory of what power is, as such; (2) relations of power are
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not supervenient upon relations of production, relations of family, sexual
relations, etc.; rather, “mechanisms of power are an intrinsic part of all
these relations, and, in a circular way, are both their effect and cause”33;
(3) given the extent and domains of these analyses (economics, historical
formations, etc.), they may branch into the framework of a general analysis
of society, but ought not be confused with history or with economics, as
Foucault’s analyses concern, he says, only “the politics of truth,”34 which,
he claims, is the primary recognizable definition of “philosophy” for him;
(4) the analyses are meant to offer only a “conditional imperative”35—if resistance is sought, here are the trajectories along which it may be pursued;
that is, the analysis is meant to propose merely avenues, not particular directives, for political resistance; (5) the one and only “categorical” imperative he offers—never engage in theoretical polemics, as this serves only to
severely exhaust the relation between struggle and truth. These five threads,
specifically when they speak of the pervasive relationality of power that
would subvert any theorization of power as such, echo quite closely the
earlier formulation of the concept of biopower.
It is in the context of these five general threads that Foucault introduces in the lectures the notion of “security,” which he understands as
the structured efforts to rigorously study and manipulate the probabilities
and statistics having to do with the phenomena detrimental to the overall
“health” of a society. Generally speaking, these apparatuses determine what
are tolerable and intolerable levels of these phenomena, to assess what are
the “tipping points” at which the costs of restricting the phenomena outweigh the benefits, and ultimately, to stabilize these probabilities within
acceptable ranges. In short, the strategies of “security,” Foucault says, aim
to manage forces and circulations (pathological, economic, sexual, pedagogical, disciplinary, etc.) in a society, by way of direct intervention on the
given milieu occupied by the individuals of the society. In this way, “instead of a binary division between the permitted and the prohibited, one
establishes an average considered as optimal on the one hand, and, on the
other, a bandwidth of the acceptable that must not be exceeded.”36 Foucault articulates the distinction between the three specific models of power
relations: “let’s say then that sovereignty capitalizes a territory, raising the
major problem of the seat of government, whereas discipline structures a
space and addresses the essential problem of a hierarchical and functional
distribution of elements, and security will try to plan a milieu in terms of
events or series of events or possible elements, of series that will have to be
regulated within a multivalent and transformable framework.”37
By all appearances, therefore, in the inaugural lecture of Foucault’s re-
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turning semester, he is on track to continue with a more thorough explication of the radical concept of biopower that he had, by this time, merely
introduced, doing so within the framework of an analysis of “security”
(which at this time sounds quite close to the description of, or at least a
component of, the biopolitics of the population, discussed above). Yet, following the opening declaration of intent of the 1978 lectures, the terms “biopower” and “biopolitics” are almost entirely absent from the remainder
of the lectures. Furthermore, just three weeks after the opening lecture, on
February 1, 1978, Foucault makes the following startling claim: “Basically,
if I had wanted to give the lectures I am giving this year a more exact title,
I certainly would not have chosen ‘security, territory, population.’ What I
would really like to undertake is something that I would call a history of
‘governmentality.’ ”38 What then, we should ask, happens in these interim
weeks? Why does Foucault announce on January 11 that he intends to
study “biopower,” but then suggest on February 1 that the title for the lectures he is currently giving is no longer appropriate and should be replaced
with an emphasis on “governmentality,” a concept that he has only just
introduced? There are a couple of important points to make in response to
these inquiries.
A tremendously significant, albeit subtle, shift occurs in Foucault’s terminology between the first and second lectures from the 1977–78 year, regarding the relation between the individual, multiplicity, and population.
In the context of cursory comments on the spatiality of the three specific
models of power relations, Foucault suggests that one might perhaps be
tempted to differentiate the spatiality of the three in the following way:
sovereignty acts on territory, discipline acts on bodies, and security acts on
populations. This schematization, though tidy and neat, does not quite
hold together, and Foucault dismisses it at the end. While sovereignty, it
is true, is a model that is through and through inscribed with territoriality,
it is nevertheless the case, Foucault thinks, that “the effective, real, daily
operations of the actual exercise of sovereignty point to a certain multiplicity, but one which is treated as a multiplicity of subjects, or [as] the
multiplicity of a people.”39 Sovereignty therefore, though it is essentially
inseparable from a notion of territory, nevertheless operates on the multiplicity of the sovereign’s subjects. In an analogous way, the same can be
said, Foucault thinks, of the disciplinary mechanisms discussed above.
Discipline, it is true, intervenes directly on the forces of the body itself to
challenge and optimize them. At the same time, it does so precisely to the
end of situating that particular body within a hierarchy that precedes it.
Thus the disciplinary model as well operates on a group of individuals as
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on a multiplicity: “The individual is much more a particular way of dividing
up the multiplicity for a discipline than the raw material from which it is
constructed.”40 Hence, the basic spatial distinction that would say that sovereignty acts on territory while discipline acts on individuals simply does
not hold up, as both, Foucault argues, act on multiplicities—a multiplicity
of subjects in the case of the sovereign and a multiplicity of hierarchically
organized individuals in the case of discipline. What then of security?
It is here that the major shift between the lectures of January 11 and January 18 takes place. On January 11, Foucault claims, “So sovereignty and
discipline, as well as security, can only be concerned with multiplicities.”41
Therefore, the population, which is the object of security, is in this first lecture considered a “multiplicity,” or an organization of the multiple as the
multiple. By the following week of January 18, however, Foucault comes to
characterize the population as precisely not a multiplicity—the multiplicity in the model of security comes to be that inconsequential group that
falls outside the population, while the population itself will be seen as a
newly emergent political subject unto itself, an individual we might say, of
a different sort. Foucault makes this discovery in the context of an analysis
of the phenomenon of, and of the discursive engagements surrounding,
“scarcity.”
In the January 18 lecture, Foucault writes, “I would like now to resume
this analysis of apparatuses of security with another example in order to
pick out something that is no longer the relationship to space and the milieu, but the relationship of government to the event. I will take straightaway the example of scarcity.”42 This mention of “government” announces
the avalanche of terminological usages of concepts having to do with “government,” “governing,” and ultimately, “governmentality.” The phenomenon of scarcity, the insufficiency of food resources to meet basic subsistence needs, is problematic in the context of the discussion of population,
for a number of reasons. First, scarcity is a phenomenon such that it tends
toward self-perpetuation. As it worsens, the phenomenon of scarcity becomes also a problem for the strategies of power, inasmuch as these heightened moments of crisis and need tend to produce the inevitable outcome
of revolt: “So it is the scourge of the population on one side, and, on the
other, catastrophe, crisis if you like, for government.”43 Thus, scarcity comes
to be seen as an event that the government of population must prepare for
and avoid. However, to do so, government through the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries will employ “a system of legality and a system of regulations, which was basically intended to prevent food shortage, that is to
say, not just halt it or eradicate it when it occurs, but literally to prevent it
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and ensure that it cannot take place at all.”44 The strategies and measures
employed impose strict regulations on the prices of grain, on the amount
of land that can be cultivated, on the exportation of grain, and on its storage. The hope in the use of these strategies is to produce enough food to
feed the townspeople (but only enough), such that the peasants (who produce the grain) are paid as little as possible (but not so little that they can
no longer afford to plant a sufficient amount of grain) and the townspeople can be fed for as low a cost as possible, thereby staving off in advance
the phenomenon of scarcity and, more important, the revolt that would be
sure to follow.
This is the theory behind the system, but unfortunately, the contingency
and intervention of natural forces will ensure, historically, that the theory
does not go as planned. The actual effect of the implementation of these
strategies is that the minimization of prices in fact severely impedes the
planting of grain on the part of the peasantry. When there is a surplus of
grain, the already-low prices are driven further down—a contingency that
the power structure cannot anticipate or prevent—thus, the peasantry who
produce the grain do not break even financially, which thereby further limits the amount of grain they can afford to plant the following season. This
effect is intensified when, due to unpredictable climatic variations, however
seemingly slight they may be, the harvest yields less than was predicted. In
short, the very limitations and restrictions designed to prevent scarcity constantly run the risk of producing the very scarcity it sought to prevent.
But the very reason that scarcity was seen as the intolerable event that
must be prevented in advance by legislative means was the governmental
fear of revolt in the face of widespread famine. With the emergence of political economists of the eighteenth century, the tendency toward revolt
will come to be seen as engendered precisely by the abrupt widespread
recognition of pervasive scarcity: “it was precisely this kind of immediate
solidarity, the massiveness of the event, that constituted its character as a
scourge.”45 Therefore, with the freedom of commerce, proposed by these
political economists, there will no doubt, indeed necessarily, be periods of
scarcity. But the scarcity that occurs will not be like the scarcity that arises,
severely and abruptly, under the conditions of a strictly regulated market.
Rather, the scarcity that will arise under the freedom of commerce will be
more gradual, gaining slowly in intensity and severity over time, as opposed to the abrupt sort of events that produce mob mentality. Before it
gets too extreme, the scarcity will be ameliorated by the very forces that
helped produce it. The loss of the unlucky few who succumb to the scarcity is natural and necessary, and it secures the avoidance of scarcity by the
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population writ large. By allowing these “naturally occurring” periods of
scarcity to take hold of a small number of individuals, the scarcity for the
population itself can be, by and large, drastically reduced. Foucault writes,
“So there will no longer be any scarcity in general, on condition that for a
whole series of people, in a whole series of markets, there was some scarcity, some dearness, some difficulty in buying wheat, and consequently
some hunger, and it may well be that some people die of hunger after all.
But by letting these people die of hunger one will be able to make scarcity
a chimera and prevent it occurring in this massive form of the scourge typical of previous systems.”46
Hence the terminological shift—where in the previous week, Foucault
had suspected that the power models of sovereignty, of discipline, and of
security had all operated on multiplicities, with the birth of the “population,” Foucault now thinks, a new political subject/object is born. It is no
longer a multiplicity because it is not at all the individual, nor is it groups
of individuals, who matters under the model of security; rather it is the
population itself. The multiplicity is precisely the name given to those individuals who fall outside the population, the unlucky ones who are its byproducts. Hence under the model of security, we
have two levels of phenomena therefore. Not a level of the collective and
a level of the individual, for after all it is not just an individual who will
die, or at any rate suffer, from this scarcity. But we will have an absolutely
fundamental caesura between a level that is pertinent for the government’s
economic-political action, and this is the level of the population, and a different level, which will be that of the series, the multiplicity of individuals,
who will not be pertinent, or rather who will only be pertinent to the extent
that, properly managed, maintained, and encouraged, it will make possible
what one wants to obtain at the level that is pertinent. The multiplicity of
individuals is no longer pertinent, the population is.47
Therefore the population emerges as a political being unto itself, and it is
at the level of the population that the strategies of security intervene, while
the multiplicity, though a necessary component of the strategies of security (inasmuch as its “exclusion” makes possible the security of the population), is not its direct object.
We could perhaps suggest (and this will be one of the topics addressed
in this volume), that when Foucault comes to in fact analyze the biopolitics
of the population, which had previously been subsumed beneath the general banner of biopower (along with its companion pole of the anatomo-
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politics of the body), that what he discovers is that there is a more drastic
difference between the objects of the disciplinary model and the model
of security than he had perhaps previously thought. Hence Foucault perhaps no longer believed it obvious that the models of discipline and security fit so tidily and comfortably together beneath the general banner
of “biopower,” that the object of anatomo-politics and the object of biopolitics were so distinct as to justify a terminological shift such that, while
the disciplinary model is no doubt still operative (as we should remind
ourselves that for Foucault, a new regime of power always subsumes and
incorporates the strategies of previous models), it is so only in support of
the health and well-being of the population, now understood as its own
sort of political animal.
The language of “governmentality” to which Foucault turns at this point
is discovered in what he characterizes as a “flourishing development of a
significant series of treatises that do not exactly present themselves as advice to the prince, nor yet as political science, but which, between advice to
the prince and treatises of political science, are presented as arts of government.”48 It is in the sixteenth century, Foucault claims, in the shift between
the sovereign model and the model of security, that the general problem
of “government” arises, and this in a multitude of forms: (1) the government of oneself, in the form of a return to an emphasis on Stoic thought;49
(2) the government of souls and of human conduct, in the form of pastoral
power; (3) the government of children, apparent by an explosion of texts
centered on pedagogical strategies; (4) finally, the government of the state.
“How to govern oneself, how to be governed, by whom should we accept
to be governed, how to be the best possible governor?”50 It is important to
note that the literature on government from this period does not treat the
concept of government from the standpoint of sovereignty, according to
Foucault. Even when it is ostensibly discussing the administration of the sovereign, it does so nevertheless in terms of the right arrangement of things—
resources, wealth, the people, and so on. The art of government, therefore,
presupposes a multitude of various ends, each suited specifically to their
unique objects: “the government will have to ensure that the greatest possible amount of wealth is produced, that the people are provided with sufficient means of subsistence, and that the population can increase.”51 These
discourses on governmentality operate within a framework that accords
quite naturally with the delimitations of the sovereign model of power that
had helped shape the language of “biopower” for Foucault. In addition,
the areas over which “government” functions (economy, resources, health,
security, population, crime, etc.) are well suited to the analyses of the statis-
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tical model, burgeoning in the eighteenth century and central to Foucault’s
earlier articulation of the biopolitics of the population. Thus, even as Foucault
continues to promise an analysis of biopolitics and biopower through the
1977–78 and 1978–79 lectures, his terminology shifts progressively to the
language of governmentality.
Objections and Replies
At the same time, the discoveries that Foucault makes with the concept of
biopower have resulted in conceptual apparatuses that occupy his work for
the remainder of his life. Some of these discoveries are as follows: (1) a
model of power relations that is essentially expansionary of the forces of
life, rather than delimiting; (2) the ubiquity of power relations throughout
all other modes and types of relations; (3) the persistence with which new
models of power employ the fear of sovereign power for the purposes of
maintaining insidious control. All in all, these conceptual apparatuses, as
the diversity of contributions in this volume attests, have not gone away—
they continue to operate to this day throughout all areas of life.
Obvious objections present themselves to us. First, why does sovereign
power, now for the most part relegated to a subordinate role, continue to
guide our understandings of the political? Put otherwise, if biopower has
indeed become the pervasive modern model of power, as Foucault claims
that it has, why is it not recognizable as such? Foucault provides two responses. The first is that the very persistence of the conceptual model of
sovereignty continues to serve as a critical tool against the reemergence of
sovereign power itself. In other words, if biopower, first in its disciplinary form and subsequently in its regulatory form, is indeed to supplant
sovereign power, it needs a critical apparatus to ever keep sovereignty at
bay, and this apparatus is the very concept of sovereignty itself, serving as
the constant reminder of the “dangers” of the excesses of power. Second,
above we stated that the relevance of biopower is necessarily masked, for
the sake of its preservation. In modern, “liberal” forms of government, the
understanding of power as “sovereignty” persists, but in a dispersed form.
The state is a “sovereign,” but one in which its subjects, by virtue of their
being “free” citizens or self-governing agents of the polis, are themselves
understood to be “sovereign.” Sovereignty as the perceived model of power
continues, but it is democratized such that each participant is rational, reasonable, responsible, and capable of making good decisions, of exercising
one’s own “sovereignty,” so long as she does not impose her will on another “sovereign” individual within the system. Thus, believing ourselves
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free, or sovereign, in this manner, the de facto mechanisms of domination
elude us, and we do not recognize our own subjugation; or, put otherwise,
we do not recognize the ways in which our desires and our very choices are
constituted by the relations within the system itself.
Second objection: if this model of power is bent on generating forces,
expanding and monitoring life, how is it that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the period in which the two poles of biopower were actively concretizing into an organic whole, exemplifies the most extreme
nationalistic discourses that would produce the most totalizing slaughters
the world has ever seen? Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and so on are all embodiments of this so-called modern
form of power focused on “life.” Is this not problematic for Foucault’s argument? On the contrary, Foucault will claim that this economy of death is
merely the dark underside of a power over life, its logical extension. With
the emergence of the modern nation-state following the Peace of Westphalia in the twilight of the middle ages, the bellicosity that had permeated
the daily relations of society is relatively marginalized. Warfare becomes
more centralized, and a permanent, “professional” military comes to be
formed. Furthermore, the state apparatus itself provides a more consistent
level of stability, such that bellicose violence, when it does occur, does so at
the limits or frontiers of the state. Paradoxically, this marginalization of the
role of warfare in daily life is contemporaneous, Foucault claims, with the
emergence of a new form of discourse, one that sees war as the constitutive
element of established institutions: “we have to interpret the war that is
going on beneath peace; peace itself is a coded war.”52 In the throes of this
war, one must choose sides: “A binary structure runs through society.”53
This war is believed to be a permanent one, stretching back to a social organization’s origins, extending through the modern age in an insidious and
subterranean form, and culminating in a decisive final battle that is yet to
come and for which we must prepare. This discourse is thus motivated by
mythical elements, imbued with glorious notions of good and evil, and
heroic notions of sacrifice, bloodshed, and ultimate triumph. The binary
structure of society is one in which the “good,” or the “pure” is threatened
from within by the “bad” or “impure,” and in this struggle there can be
only one victor. It is not difficult to see, then, where this line of reasoning
leads Foucault: “The war that is going on beneath order and peace, the war
that undermines our society and divides it in a binary mode is, basically, a
race war.”54
Whether in its explicitly biological form or its socially (or even culturally or religiously) motivated form, the interpretation of the whole of a
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society’s history in terms of internal struggle, between the true and the impostor, who would seek to usurp the birthright of the “genuine” descendants, is the dark underbelly of a model of power intimately invested in
the discourse of life. In the interest of preserving one way of life, another
must be annihilated—there is no middle ground or compromise possible:
“But this formidable power of death . . . now presents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to
administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and
comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer waged in the name of a
sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence
of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purposes of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital.”55
Biopower does not operate anymore at the level of the individual, but it is
waged at the level of the population, and, more important, exercised in the
name of the biological existence of a population. It is “situated and exercised
at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of
population.”56
Finally, the third objection: what of the death penalty? How can a system of power, focused on the multiplication and fostering of life, ever deliberately execute an individual citizen? First, we must note the overall decrease in the use of capital punishment, especially in the Western world,
throughout the twentieth century (the United States being the last Western
nation where it is still commonly practiced): “As soon as power gave itself the function of administering life, its reason for being and the logic
of its exercise—and not the awakening of humanitarian feelings—made it
more and more difficult to apply the death penalty.”57 Here the terminological apparatuses of failed normalization and pathology, and of threat,
intervene. Whereas capital punishment used to be merely an exercise of
justice, a punishment carried out for one of those crimes falling under the
class of “capital offense,” it now becomes something of a proverbial “last
resort” of the state against a criminal nature, a monster, a thing so beyond
the pale of humanity as to be irredeemable, someone who, were they to
ever escape or be released, would pose a severe and imminent threat to the
safety and security of society as a whole.
Foucault thus presents us with a vision of power relations far more insidious and pervasive than any model of power hitherto conceptualized.
The fecundity of his concept is salient in the groundbreaking works of
later European political theorists, whether in the form of critical expansion
(Giorgio Agamben)58 or in the form of inheritance and application (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri,59 as well as Roberto Esposito60). At the out-
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set, we claimed that biopower is a timely concept. It is our conviction that
the conceptual mechanisms characterized by Foucault beneath the banner
of “biopower” can go a long way toward helping us understand who we
are, where we have come from, who we are becoming, and who we can be.
It is a paradoxical fact of our culture that we can become so emotionally
and psychologically invested in preserving the life of a single individual
who has existed in a bare, vegetative state for fifteen years,61 while simultaneously shrugging off the excess of 100,000 unprovoked Iraqi civilian
deaths62 caused by the Multi-National Force’s military intervention since
2003. Or that we can stage protests to protect the rights of US fetuses, while
not flinching at the fact that in 2010, 7.6 million children in the world
died from preventable causes.63 We enter the twenty-first century engrossed
in a seemingly permanent “war on terror,” where no one and everyone is
“the enemy,” welcoming the disciplinary structures that accompany this
war. Here the executive power of the United States can, at will and without
trial, order (1) the execution of anyone on foreign soil, including US citizens, deemed to be hostile to the interests of the US population, or; (2) the
indefinite detention of insubordinate US citizens arrested on US soil.64
Meanwhile the debates that populate our public sphere center on issues of
health insurance requirements, birth control, gay marriage, dietary restrictions for families, immigration laws, stem cell research, future possibilities
for radical genetic alterations and enhancements, and a multitude of other
issues centered around life, the body, and the subject as a living citizen in
the polis.
In This Volume
Biopower: Foucault and Beyond critically engages with Foucault’s concept
of biopower while also reaching into the future, addressing today’s problems but with an eye toward tomorrow’s. As we have shown, biopower is
a multifaceted concept. Thus, as editors, we have chosen each section to
approach this concept from a different perspective to ultimately provide a
general understanding of biopower.
Part 1, “Origins of Biopower,” focuses on the heterogeneous genesis
of the concept of biopower, both in Foucault’s works and in the works of
other major biopolitical thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben and Antonio
Negri. Judith Revel opens this part with an enigmatic concern: how can
one raise the question of a literary (and linguistic) birth of biopolitics
when the literary moment in Foucault’s oeuvre largely precedes his biopolitical concerns? Revel reconsiders here the different statutes of language
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in Foucault’s writings and shows how the linguistic period makes possible
the process of historicization of the power of words. Ultimately she reveals
the slow transformation from knowledge about the world to power over the
things and subjects in the world. And, Revel argues, subjectivation processes
can be resisted and overcome only through a series of inventive processes,
similar to the creative literary ones, that enable human beings to reappropriate themselves.
In his contribution, Toni Negri argues that the origins of biopolitics
trace both to Foucault’s work and, more broadly, to a series of heterodox
currents in Western Marxism, as they have developed in Italy and France.
Negri’s point is that we cannot fully understand the concept of biopolitics
without reinscribing it within a series of events in the 1960s and 1970s;
only then can we fully appreciate the political problem for which the concept was supposed to stand as a new strategy of intervention. Understanding this new form of power, which is exerted on populations, on multiplicities, on the multitude, creates a new space for creative subjects and makes
possible the exercise of their freedom.
In a similar vein, Ian Hacking argues that understanding the origins of
biopower requires an even broader historical timescale. The study of biopolitics needs a historical perspective that highlights how the political body
has become the object of numerical manipulations. Statistical technologies have made possible the study of populations and have transformed
them into objects of knowledge. The gathering of massive quantities of
data was a necessary condition for recognizing patterns and for defining
norms within a multiplicity and, ultimately, for controlling and altering
social practices.
The recent diversification of views about biopower and biopolitics—
from Foucault to Agamben, Negri, Hardt, and Esposito—has not always
clarified these concepts; as a consequence, some scholars have rejected these
notions altogether.65 Catherine Mills’s contribution further clarifies the two
concepts by considering the prefix “bio” and the ways in which different
conceptions of biopolitics (Foucault, Agamben, Esposito) have appealed to
various aspects of the manifold concept—life. Ultimately, Mills argues that
these biopolitical theories all share a significant difficulty: namely, they are
unable to identify the limits of biopower and, consequently, are unable
to conceptualize life independently of its biopolitical production. Paul
Patton’s essay reinforces this critical perspective. Along with Mills, Patton
identifies some of the confusions involved in Foucault’s early definitions of
biopower (and biopolitics). Patton spells out very clearly some of the im-
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Why Biopower? Why Now? / 19
portant reasons that have led Foucault to abandon these conceptual tools
in his subsequent work.
The second part, “The Question of Life,” takes seriously the challenge of
formulating the concept of life. Mary Beth Mader invites us to reconsider
Foucault’s engagement with the concept of life and the ways in which it
has first emerged as the object of sciences of life. By highlighting the relations between classical natural history (as developed in Les Mots et les
Choses) and Georges Cuvier’s functionalist notion of life, this essay exposes
the conceptual basis that underlines Foucault’s understanding of life and
problematizes the very object of biopolitics.
Building also on Foucault’s broader conception of life as the one
emerging from The Order of Things and from the History of Madness, Jeffrey Nealon finds a way not simply to answer to Donna Haraway’s charge
of “species chauvinism” against Foucault, but also to show how, in Foucault’s early archaeological work, a whole series of neglected formulations
of animality are directly linked to the emergence of biopower. The notion
of animality is supposed to decenter the focus of biopolitics from human
biological processes to a broader concern for species or to a new zoology.
This broader view of animality also plays a key role in Eduardo Mendieta’s
chapter. He explores a new space between biology (as the realm of necessity) and politics (as the realm of possible) to call into question the JudeoChristian scala naturae and to show how, through art, we can gain a better
understanding of a (hermeneutical) middle between becoming animal and
ceasing to be human.
Foucault’s bipolar conception of biopower, as developed in La Volonté de
Savoir, serves as a matrix for parts 3 and 4, which emphasize the anatomopolitics of the body and the biopolitics of the population. Part 3, “Medicine and
Sexuality: The Question of the Body,” focuses on two very significant technologies of normalization in Foucault’s works: medicine and sexuality. In
his contribution, Carlos Novas examines the ways in which new forms of
political activism and biopolitical resistance have emerged to address the
problems of rare diseases and orphan drugs. Patients’ associations, Novas
argues, have formed effective coalitions to support specific legislation requiring pharmaceutical companies to pay sufficient attention to individuals affected by rare conditions. With respect to sexuality, David Halperin
raises the question of gay subjectivity and how this notion of subjectivity
has been constantly pathologized under numerous labels like “moral insanity,” “sexual perversion,” “personality disorder,” “mental illness,” and
so on. Keeping the queer project alive, he argues, requires a dual process.
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First, it demands a radical separation of the question of subjectivity from
any medical psychological, psychoanalytical, and “scientific” explanations
of homosexuality since those explanations will always tie the queer culture back to normative taxonomy (e.g., unsafe sex, HIV/AIDS risks) whose
biopolitical function is to produce “normal” subjects. Second, the notion
of queer subjectivity has to be replaced with an entire political program
grounded in a notion of gayness as a quasi-ethnic social identity as a way
to escape the psychological explanation of queer subjects.
Jana Sawicki’s essay closes part 3 on the body by exposing the role
that Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics has played in Judith Butler’s work.
Sawicki addresses three important ways in which Butler incorporates and
responds to Foucault’s projects: first, through an analysis of the concept of
normalization in relation to subjection and resistance; second, through the
notion of precarious life since it brings back the question of the very object
of biopolitics; and ultimately, through the ethical turn, which stresses the
need for a new ethic.
Part 4, “Neoliberalism and Governmentality: The Question of the Population,” focuses on the second pole of biopower and takes into consideration Foucault’s treatment of the question of the population through the
lenses of his later engagements with the concepts of governmentality and
neoliberalism. Todd May and Ladelle McWhorter invite us to think of how
things have changed even for those of us who, following in the path of
Foucault, used to see discipline everywhere. Hence, their question: how do
we understand our present situation? Do we live in a completely new world
where Foucault’s concepts are not useful anymore to map out our present?
May and McWhorter’s thesis is that a new form of power has arisen in the
past forty years, a neoliberal power, and their argument is that The Birth of
Biopolitics lectures show us how Foucault has already anticipated this new
form of governmentality.
The Birth of Biopolitics lectures (1978–79) represent a unique moment
in Foucault’s works. On the one hand, Foucault produces new hypotheses
about neoliberalism that are not taken up elsewhere (in either his books
or interviews). So, it is difficult to predict to what extent they represent
Foucault’s ultimate view on the matter. Second, within the series of lectures
at Collège de France, The Birth of Biopolitics is the place where Foucault first
analyzes immediately contemporary facts and current political events. Frédéric Gros argues that Foucault’s engagement with neoliberalism, which
seems initially foreign to biopolitics, actually makes visible a new form of
neoliberal biopolitics. The last contribution on biopolitics and populations
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Why Biopower? Why Now? / 21
follows Foucault’s engagement with immediate political events and considers very recent revolutionary movements such as the Arab Uprisings. Martina Tazzioli focuses on a politics of/over life that relates to forms of governmentality that manage and control migrant populations. Those migrant
populations have destabilized the strategies of what she calls “b/ordering”
through their increased mobility and have created modes of resistance and
of transgression by redefining the meaning of space and by inventing new
forms of political struggle and survival strategies.
Part 5, “Biopower Today,” captures how the notion of biopower has
evolved beyond Foucault. In other words, it highlights the ways in which
this concept has gained in clarity and thereby provokes a certain academic
traction to be used in future work.66 Through a process of conceptual clarification, Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose’s argument extracts and builds a
model for recognizing biopolitical events in the future. Those events entail
a number of specific features such as truth discourses about living beings,
forms of authority who are deemed competent to speak in the name of
that truth, strategies for collective intervention, and ultimately, modes of
subjectification. In the light of this model, Rabinow and Rose consider also
a series of recent biopolitical developments in race, population, and genomic medicine.
In her contribution, “A Colonial Reading of Foucault,” Ann Laura Stoler
calls into question the idea that sexuality was “originally, historically bourgeois.” Foucault’s assertion does not stand the test of colonial archives
since it fails to capture the issue of race. Stoler’s incentive is to explain why
Foucault is so elusive on this problem and to suggest that the biopolitical
treatment of race should occupy a significantly more important place in
colonial studies concerning sexuality and the education of desire.
Roberto Esposito closes this volume by raising a significant question of
how we should philosophically understand the twentieth century: through
the lenses of totalitarianism or biopolitics? Rather than subordinating
the movement of history to the logic of a given philosophy, Esposito sees
events as consisting of elements that are themselves philosophical. Meaning is no longer stamped from outside, that is, from a point that coincides
with the philosophical perspective of the person looking at the world. Esposito’s response focuses on how meaning originates and is constituted
by facts themselves. These two modalities for understanding contemporary
history—that of the more traditional philosophy of history and that of history as philosophy—are often confused and superimposed. In Esposito’s
view, they are mutually exclusive in their presuppositions and effects on
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meaning. This is why he emphasizes the importance of properly construing these two political paradigms of totalitarianism and of biopolitics.
Every single contribution in this volume takes up some aspect of the
concerns we have discussed about the concepts of biopower and biopolitics. Whether connecting Foucault’s literary texts with the applied
analyses of the biopolitical, or problematizing common understandings of
the totalitarian face of the twentieth century, or contextualizing the biopolitical within the larger discourse of governmentality, each piece in this
volume directly contributes in an indispensable way to the animation of
thought with respect to this concept of biopower, the concept of life in and
as the political. The editors invite the reader to engage with these contributions in an effort to, in the spirit of Foucault, think the history of the present, which is always by necessity a thought of the future.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Some commentators have pointed out that this domain of inquiry might have preceded Foucault’s work. Mauro Bertani points out that the notion of “biocratie” has
already been present in Auguste Comte’s writings as well as in those of French psychiatrist Edouard Toulouse. See Mauro Bertani, “Sur la généalogie du biopouvoir,”
in Lectures de Michel Foucault, vol.1 , A propos de “Il faut défendre la société,” ed. Mauro
Bertani, Daniel Defert, Alessandro Fontana, Thomas C. Holt (Lyon: ENS Editions,
2001), 19 Antonela Cutro makes a similar point in Biopolitica Storia e attualità di
un concetto (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2005), 8. In his book, Biopolitics: An Advanced
Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 2011), Thomas Lemke provides
another interesting story about the birth (and the evolution) of the concept of biopolitics (see 9–33).
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault says “I would like to write the history of this
prison with all the political investments of the body that it gathers together in its
closed architecture. Why? Simply, because I am interested in the past? No, if one
means by that writing a history of the past in terms of the present. Yes, if one means
writing the history of the present.” In Michel Foucault, Surveiller et Punir—Naissance
de la Prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 35, published in English as Discipline and
Punish—The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 31.
See also Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul
Rabinow, 32–50 (New York: Pantheon, 1984).
Michel Foucault, Il faut défendre la société (Paris: Seuil/ Gallimard, 1997), 22, published in English as Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–
1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 24. Hereafter, we will provide
the English pagination first, followed by the French in square brackets.
Michel Foucault, La volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), published in English
as The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:
Random House, 1978), 136 [178].
Ibid.
Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 26 [24].
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Why Biopower? Why Now? / 23
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 143 [188].
Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 27 [25].
Ibid., 29 [26].
Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 136 [179].
This quote, though coming explicitly from Foucault, is quite controversial due to its
hyperbolic use of the words “absolutely incompatible.” Foucault changes his mind
a number of times over the years as to the extent to which the strategies of sovereign
power are incompatible with biopower. Nevertheless we include it precisely because
it demonstrates just how active Foucault’s thinking is at this point in his life.
Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 35 [32].
Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 136 [179].
Ibid., 138 [182].
Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 143 [188—“il faudrait parler de ‘bio-politique’
pour désigner ce qui fait entrer la vie et ses mécanismes dans le domaine des calculs
explicites et fait du pouvoir-savoir un agent de transformation de la vie humaine.”].
Preceded by the notion of biohistory, the concept of biopolitics appears first in the
second lecture Foucault delivered at the State University of Rio de Janeiro in October 1974, two years prior to the concept of biopower in La Volonté de Savoir
(1976). See “The Birth of Social Medicine,” in Power, ed. James Faubion (New York:
New Press, 2000), 137. Between 1978–79, Foucault dedicates a whole course to this
concept, Naissance de la Biopolitique, published in 2004 (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil),
and published in English as The Birth of Biopolitics, trans. Graham Burchell (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 143 [188].
Ibid., 139 [183].
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 170 [172].
Ibid.
Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 38 [34].
Foucault dedicates a whole collective volume to study the technologies of normalization. See Généalogie des Equipements de Normalisation, ed. Michel Foucault (Paris:
CERFI, 1976), including some important sections (esp. January 8, 1975, lecture) in
his 1974–75 lectures at Collège de France, Les Anormaux (Paris: Gallimard/ Seuil,
1999), published in English as Abnormal, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2004).
Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 242 [215].
Ibid., 242–43 [216].
Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 139 [183].
Ibid., 146 [193].
Ibid., 147 [193].
One of the more famous of these is the Comstock Act passed in the United States in
1873, which outlawed the selling of all methods of birth control, as well as all posting of advertisements for birth control.
Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 140 [185].
Ibid., 141 [185].
Michel Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population: Cours au Collège de France (1977–
1978) (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 111; published in English as Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (New
York: Picador, 2007), 108.
See note 14 above.
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32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 1 [3].
Ibid., 2 [4].
Ibid., 3 [5].
Ibid.
Ibid., 6 [8].
Ibid., 20 [22].
Ibid., 108 [111].
Ibid., 11 [13].
Ibid., 12 [14].
Ibid.
Ibid., 30 [32].
Ibid.
Ibid., 31 [33].
Ibid., 41 [43].
Ibid., 42 [43].
Ibid., 42 [44].
Ibid., 88 [91].
This might arguably provide the link between Foucault’s thought on the genealogy
of power structures and his later works centered on the concept of the “care of the
self.”
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 88 [92].
Ibid., 99 [101].
Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 51 [44].
Ibid.
Ibid., 59–60 [51].
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I, 137 [180].
Ibid.
Ibid., 138 [181].
Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita (Turin: Giulio Einaudi
editore, 1995), published in English as Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life,
trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2000).
Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitica e filosofia (Turin: Giulio Einauid editore, 2004),
published in English as Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
The sensationalized Terri Schiavo case in Florida from 1998 to 2005. For an illuminating analysis from a biopolitical perspective, see John Protevi, “The Terri Schiavo
Case: Biopolitics, Biopower, and Privacy as Singularity,” in Deleuze and Law: Forensic Futures, ed. Rosi Braidotti, Claire Colebrook, and Patrick Hanafin, 59–72 (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
The exact figure is uncertain. This statistic comes from Iraq Body Count, accessed
February 12, 2015, http://www.iraqbodycount.org.
“Young Child Survival and Development: Introduction,” UNICEF, accessed February 12, 2015, http://www.unicef.org/childsurvival/index.html.
The National Defense Authorization Act, signed into law by President Barack
Obama on December 31, 2011. See “President Signs Indefinite Detention Bill
into Law,” press release, ACLU, December 31, 2011, http://www.aclu.org/national
-security/president-obama-signs-indefinite-detention-bill-law.
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65. A significant example is Paul Patton’s work both in this volume and in Giorgio
Agamben: Sovereignty and Life, ed. S. DeCaroli and M. Calarco, 203–18 (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2007).
66. An interesting recent development beyond the notion of biopower is exemplified in
Colin Koopman’s work. See Koopman, “The Age of Infopolitics,” New York Times,
January 26, 2014, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com//2014/01/26/the-age-of
-infopolitics.
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