The Life Function: The Biopolitics of Sexuality and Race Revisited

This article argues that the relation between the biopolitical functions of life and death and the apparatuses of sexuality and race through which they operate is a contingent one. Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended lectures and Will to Knowledge are revisited for genealogical clarity regarding the strategic relations underpinning their emergence, and to grasp how they differ tactically despite deploying similar discourses of abnormality and inclusion/exclusion. I suggest that sexuality can also act as an apparatus of death, as exemplified in the early twentieth century shift of heterosexuality, and more recently homosexuality, from the realm of death to life.