Biopower

Part Five of The Will to Knowledge, “Right of Death and Power over Life”, starts from sovereign power. Historically it was founded on violence, the right to kill, and its symbol was the sword. It was exercised mainly by “deduction” (prélèvement): appropriating a portion of the nation’s wealth through taxes, demanding the subjects’ time and strength, and ultimately life itself. In the modern West deduction became only one element among others, and sovereign power was complemented and partly replaced by a power that “endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply” life, “subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations”. Life became a positive object of administration and death its reverse side; wars grew bloodier because they were waged in the name of everyone’s survival rather than the sovereign’s, and the death penalty became a scandal for a power that administers life.

Foucault saw two forms of the new power. The first, discipline, the anatomo-politics of the human body, is “centered on the body as a machine: 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”, at work in institutions such as the school, the army, the factory and the prison. The second, emerging later, is the biopolitics of the population, focused on the “species body”, “the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that cause these to vary”. Where discipline makes individuals behave as efficient and productive workers, biopolitics manages the population, for example to ensure a healthy workforce. The two poles were joined not by speculative discourse but by concrete arrangements, of which the deployment of sexuality was one of the most important; sex, Foucault said, lies at the hinge of the two axes, the disciplines of the body and the regulation of populations.

Foucault considered biopower an indispensable element in the development of capitalism, which could only be secured at the cost of the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of population phenomena to economic processes. Its dominance gave norms growing importance at the expense of the juridical system of the law, producing a society in which the power of the law has subsided in favour of regulative and corrective mechanisms based on scientific knowledge. What the body and the population have in common is the norm, the statistical norm. Biopower penetrates traditional forms of political power, but it is essentially the power of experts and administrators.

Foucault developed the concept further in his lectures. Society Must Be Defended (1976), on the genealogy of racism, examines biopolitical state racism and is regarded as perhaps the clearest exposition of biopower, a companion to The Will to Knowledge. In Security, Territory, Population (1977–1978) he defined biopower as “the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power”. Following a genealogy of “government”, he traced how the Church’s pastoral power passed into the “governmentality” of the modern state, and The Birth of Biopolitics (1978–1979) carried biopolitics on into a genealogy of neoliberalism.

Foucault used the word biopolitics far less often than biopower, but later thinkers took up biopolitics independently. His work on biopower has been widely influential, particularly for Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt.