From Hegemony to Biopolitics

Theory, Culture & Society, 2007

W HAT IS the problem to which hegemony is the answer? It is that of power -not about what it is, but rather about its general operation from the point of view of political strategy, legitimation and intellectual leadership, and from the standpoint of organized opposition to prevailing relations of power . Underlying the question of hegemony, therefore, is another set of questions concerning, on the one hand, the government of conduct and the problem of the correlations of security, territory and population in the context of the mobile and conjunctural production and reproduction of unequal relations of power , and, on the other hand, concerning the anticipation of a time to come in which such inequalities will have been abolished or altered. Differently imagined futures are at stake here; they bring to the surface principles outside political interest in the narrow sense, for they implicate the ethical and ontological principles inscribed in the foundation of the political, say, about notions of the human that underlie fundamental rights and the idea of the common good. They thus refer to a transcendent or metaphysical dimension, for example inscribed in a religion -which is the conventional though still prevalent route -or circumscribing claims for an immanent, unrepresentable but generative force that would underlie the imagination of political order of one kind or another. Thus, in the background to the question concerning power, besides issues relating to political or economic interests, one encounters a dimension of the virtual that harbours being as potentiality, whether animated by a will, or desire or élan vital, or indeed a transcendent spirit. In what follows I shall construct a genealogy of power by reference to cultural theory, paying attention to what has been at stake in the shifts in the effectivity of the concept of hegemony for cultural theory from the 1960s, alongside shifts

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.

Bioethics and Biopolitics. Theories, Applications and Connections (Ed. Peter Kakuk). Springer, 2017

The notions of " biopolitics " and " biopower " enjoy commonsensical plausibility in many fields of humanities today. From philosophy and sociology through cultural and gender studies up to various forms of contemporary political thinking, these notions are used and reused in many descriptive and normative approaches. However, even if it is often highlighted that the work of the French historian and social theorist, Michel Foucault served as a cornerstone in attaching the prefix 'bio' to the words 'politics' and 'power', the question as to for what reasons these terms, designed originally for historical research in Foucault, could reach such an interdisciplinary popularity remains to be worth studying. With this context in mind, this paper has two objectives. On the one hand, it seeks to reconstruct the meanings and roles of the notions of biopolitics and biopower as they are displayed in Foucault's historical and theoretical researches. On the other hand, it aims to foreground the theoretical significance as well as the descriptive and normative values that could be associated today to these notions in various fields of humanities within the contemporary conjuncture of biopolitical thinking.

2013

2018

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.

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.

From the 1980's to the present times, Michel Foucault's work has been increasingly influential in International Relations. While some scholars have followed his conceptualization of exclusionary forms of power and applied it to the modalities of identity formation in a sovereign states' system, others have recently applied his work on rationalities of government to the development of extra national biopolitical regimes. However, a closer reading of Foucault reveals a number of ambiguities concerning the ways in which he understood and combined different forms of power. This paper argues for a more critical and comprehensive reading of Foucault in IR theory and, more specifically, for the need to uncover the various intersections between sovereign (especially in light of recent executive orders) and biopolitical/disciplinarian forms of power

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.

Arturo Escobar has recently proposed that we take stock of the modernity/coloniality project, singling out its general lines of argument based on a critique of modernity which shows its inherently colonial character (Escobar, 2003: 77). Escobar proposes a broadening of the horizons of this project on the basis of the inclusion of three subjects which offer a fruitful field for discussion: the perspective of gender, alternative economies and the perspective of political ecology. The modernity/ coloniality project thus would need a new arena of discussion: the pattern of the colonial power over nature. To further this aim, I would like to show how the modern/ colonial discourses not only produce subjectivities and territorialities, but also "natures", that is, it is possible to find evidences of a "coloniality of natures". I thus propose an interpretation of nature which, on the one hand, shows the post-colonial devices present in current disputes about the definition of biodiversity and, on the other, avoids the positions which reify and essentialize the local populations involved in this dispute. That is why I think it is important to broaden Aníbal Quijano´s notion of the "coloniality of power", which is only based on the production of colonial subjectivities linked to racial and epistemic hierarchies. I will employ the notion of the bio-coloniality of power to discuss the current production of nature in the framework of post-Fordian capitalism.