Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction

3. The Government of Living Beings: Michel Foucault

33 3 The Government of Living Beings: Michel Foucault I N T H E 197 0 S , the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault introduced a concept of biopolitics that broke with the naturalist and politicist interpretations that were discussed in the preceding chapters. In contrast to the former conception of biopolitics, Foucault describes biopolitics as an explicit rupture with the attempt to trace political processes and structures back to biological determinants . By contrast, he analyzes the historical process by which “life” emerges as the center of political strategies. Instead of assuming foundational and ahistorical laws of politics, he diagnoses a historical break, a discontinuity in political practice. From this perspective, biopolitics denotes a specific modern form of exercising power. Foucault’s concept of biopolitics orients itself not only against the idea of processes of life as a foundation of politics. It also maintains a critical distance from theories that view life as the object of politics . According to Foucault, biopolitics does not supplement traditional political competencies and structures through new domains and questions. It does not produce an extension of politics but rather transforms its core, in that it reformulates concepts of political sovereignty and subjugates them to new forms of political knowledge. Biopolitics stands for a constellation in which modern human and natural sciences and the normative concepts that emerge from them structure political action and determine its goals. For this reason, biopolitics for Foucault has nothing to do with the ecological crisis or an increasing sensibility for environmental issues; nor could it be 34 The Government of Living Beings: Michel Foucault reduced to the development of new technologies. Rather, biopolitics stands for a fundamental transformation in the order of politics: For the first time in history . . . biological existence was reflected in political existence. . . . But what might be called a society’s “threshold of modernity” has been reached when the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies. For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question. (Foucault 1980, 142–143) Foucault’s use of the term “biopolitics” is not consistent and constantly shifts meaning in his texts. However, it is possible to discern three different ways in which he employs the notion in his work. First, biopolitics stands for a historical rupture in political thinking and practice that is characterized by a rearticulation of sovereign power. Second, Foucault assigns to biopolitical mechanisms a central role in the rise of modern racism. A third meaning of the concept refers to a distinctive art of government that historically emerges with liberal forms of social regulation and individual self-governance. But it is not only the semantic displacements that are confusing. Foucault not only employs the term “biopolitics”; he also sometimes uses the word “biopower,” without neatly distinguishing the two notions. I briefly discuss the three dimensions of biopolitics in this chapter before addressing the role of resistance in the context of biopolitical struggles. Making Live and Letting Die Although the notion of biopolitics appeared for the first time in Foucault ’s work in a lecture he gave in 1974 (2000a, 137), it is systematically introduced only in 1976 in his lectures at the Collège de France and in the book The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (Foucault 2003 and The Government of Living Beings: Michel Foucault 35 1980, respectively). In this work, Foucault undertakes an analytical and historical delimitation of various mechanisms of power while contrasting sovereign power with “biopower.” According to him, the former is characterized by power relations operating in the form of “deduction”: as deprivation of goods, products, and services. The unique character of this technology of power consists in the fact that it could in extreme cases also dispose of the lives of the subjects. Although this sovereign “right of life and death” only existed in a rudimentary form and with considerable qualification, it nevertheless symbolized the extreme point of a form of power that essentially operated as a right to seizure. In Foucault’s reading, this ancient right over death has undergone a profound transformation since the 17th century. More and more it is complemented by a new form of power that seeks to administer, secure, develop, and foster life: “Deduction” has tended to be no longer the major form of...