Biopower: Foucault and Beyond

SQS Journal, 2018

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.

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.

Dokuz Eylül Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi, 2022

This paper analyzes Michel Foucault's theorisation on life, body and population in referring to the concepts of biopolitics and sexuality. In doing so, the paper puts critical attention to the relation between the rationality of politics and power. Tracing this relationship, the paper basically develops a conceptual framework in which truth and discursive practices of the truth regime gain strategic and operational position to produce social norms and to impose these norms on the idealisations of population and humansubjects. By the end of this paper, this conceptual analysis offers a way through which the subject formation and biopolitical subjectivity are clarified. Relying on this new way, this paper puts forward that biopolitics with its mechanisms and instruments is a perspective in order to reveal power relations and political regulations in general; and is a light to realize boundaries of different sexualities. This analysis ends by questioning the resistance, counteract and power relations in the light of these concepts.

2013

In Wilmer, S. and Zukauskaite, A. (eds.), Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political, and Performative Strategies, 57-73., 2016

Forty years ago, the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault first pronounced in a lecture the semantic merger of life and politics that would shape his subsequent work and the ensuing theoretical debates (Foucault 2000a, 137). 1 His notion of "biopolitics" points to a historical shift at the threshold of modernity. According to Foucault, biopolitics marks a discontinuity in political practice since it places life at the center of political rationalities and technologies. He distinguishes historically and analytically between two dimensions of biopolitics: the disciplining of the individual body and the social regulation of the population. Furthermore, Foucault's concept signals a theoretical critique of the sovereign paradigm of power. According to this model, power is exercised as interdiction and repression in a framework of law and legality. In contrast Foucault stresses the productive capacity of power, which cannot be reduced to the ancient sovereign "right of death." While sovereignty seized hold of life in order to suppress it, the new life-administering power is dedicated to inciting, reinforcing, monitoring and optimizing the forces under its control .

Masters Thesis in Philosophy, 2006

Michel Foucault uses the term biopolitics to highlight the focus on life that is at the center of contemporary politics. Biopower or biopolitics is the maximization of life through various regulatory apparatuses that monitor, modify, and control life processes. I elucidate and exemplify Foucault’s framework in order to show how the medical discourse exercises a certain kind of power over bodies in the name of health. My argument is that through the mechanisms of biopower, the juridico-medical discourse simultaneously makes pregnancy into an object of study and the pregnant woman into a subject of power. With the help of a Foucauldian interpretation, I attempt to unmask the not-so-visible techniques of biopolitics that surround the pregnant woman. The unmasking makes it possible to think differently which is the primary task of philosophy. Specifically, such a critique helps in reformulating the problem as one of subjectivation.

Nebula: A Journal of Multidisciplinary Scholarship, 2009

Since its initial appearance in The History of Sexuality Volume One, Michel Foucault's concept of biopower has indeed taken on a bios of its own. 1 Ubiquitous in recent academic analyses of the contemporary socio-political landscape, the concept and its kin (biopolitics, governmentality) find their most provocative-though, as I hope to show, misguided-articulation in the collaborative work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (The Labor of Dionysius, Empire, and Multitude). 2 Shifting Foucault's focus from population and social management to labor, globalization, and sovereignty, these authors conceive of biopolitics in economic terms, detailing the consequences of the transition from Fordist to post-Fordist labor practices. Significantly, whereas Foucault designates sexuality the principal apparatus in the functioning of biopower, Hardt and Negri argue that sexuality in the post-Fordist era is no longer the privileged site of biopolitical control: when human affect, language, and cooperation are subsumed into the productive processes of capital, the gestures, expressions, and movements-indeed, the very flesh-of the social body become commodities. Their thesis raises a number of pressing questions that bear on the future of sexuality studies: Has sexuality itself been totally subsumed into the productive processes of postmodern capital? Is Foucault's "deployment of sexuality" too blunt an analytical tool to understand biopower in post-Fordism? Indeed, is sexuality any longer a productive category for social analysis at all? Although such questions are not the primary focus of this paper (my aim here is far more modest), they take on quite different meanings in the face of AIDS-a subject that receives no serious discussion in Hardt and Negri's work. If, as I argue, AIDS is understood as a primary locus of biopolitical struggle, sexuality simply cannot be ignored or subsumed into a generalized concept of bios.

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.

Michel Foucault coined the term " biopower " in the 1970s to refer to a particular mode of power that administers life. Biopower is exercised through numerous techniques, all aimed at achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations. Operating within a capitalist frame, the main goal of biopower is not to repress people but to make populations productive. Life and living beings are at the heart of political struggles and economic development. As the juncture of power and life, biopower relates to govern-ment's interest in fostering the life of the population through discipline and regulation. In describing the evolution since the seventeenth century of this form of power over life, Foucault focuses on two poles of development. One is centered on the body—the optimization of the body's capabilities and its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls. Foucault calls the procedures of power that characterize this pole the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body. The second pole, formed somewhat later, focuses on the species body—the biological processes of propagation, births, and mortality. Their supervision is effected through a series of interventions and regulatory controls: a biopolitics of the population. For Foucault, the operation of sexu-ality is biopower exercised through both discipline and regulation; it is at the intersection of the individualizing processes of discipline and training and of the management of the population. According to Foucault, while the eighteenth-century biopol-itics was associated with particular strategies to govern populations, it coexisted with other forms of political power, including strategies for disciplining individual bodies (i.e., anatomo-politics). While the passage from disciplinary societies to societies of control remains mostly implicit in the work of Foucault, Gilles Deleuze (1988), in his commentary entitled Foucault, stresses that disciplinary societies depend on sites of confinement—for example, the prison, the hospital, the factory, the school, and the family—which have broken down in recent times and are being replaced by modulating and regulating systems. For Foucault, biopower contrasts with traditional modes of power that are based on the threat of death from a sovereign. Unlike sovereignty, which consists in the power to take life and let live, biopolitics is the power of regularization, which consists in making live and letting die. In an era in which power must be justified rationally, biopower emphasizes the protection of life, the regulation of the body, and the production of other technologies of power. Regulation of customs, habits, health, sexuality, reproductive practices, family, " blood, " and " wellbeing " would be examples of biopower, as would eugenics and state racism. The significance of biopower emerges in its break with sovereign power, inasmuch as it no longer focuses only on the human body but instead moves to include knowledge The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology. Edited by Hilary Callan.