Biopolitics

Biopolitics in Foucault is a hyphenated phrase «bio-politique». For this review, I regard

Foucault's section called ​Right of Death and Power over Life ​as a seminal text and this
will be my nodal point¹ through which I will try to connect to the other readings we
have done for the course. If I may seem to bring some concepts that are not within this
terrain, it will be for the benefit of my own understanding and organization and not at
all to make any bold remark that biopolitics could be reduced to so and so fundamental
facts or to place Foucault and the others in any trajectory of intellectual history.

I have chosen this text, because here, Foucault seems eager to give an outline of his
ideas without the distractions of detailed historical data, which is necessary of course. I
will make a statement foremost, which I will be happy to be argued out, which is that
biopolitics does not seem to hold, in my opinion, the supreme position of interest to
Foucault himself. The term is defined in the middle of the text alongside various other
concerns. Let me quote him verbatim.

“If one can apply the term ​bio-history to the pressures through which the movements of life and
the processes of history interfere with one another, one would have to speak of ​bio-power to
designate what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made
knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life.” (1998:143)

In the French original², Foucault uses the phrase «bio-politique» instead of

«bio-pouvoir» and I don't know if the mistranslation was deliberate or accidental. I also
agree with Lemke (2011:34) that Foucault’s use of the term biopolitics is not
consistent³. I will employ the concept of biopower in this review only to the extent in
which Foucault sometimes meant something more than biopolitics. Biopolitics is also
used by Foucault in this text as in the phrase "a bio-politics of the population" in
comparison to the "anatomo-politics of the human body" (1998:139). When he does use
the word "bio-power", the concept is wider than "bio-politics", in that it refers not only
to the mechanisms of deployment (​dispositif​) but also recognizes the potential of bodies
within that order. Therefore, he says, "This bio-power was without question an
indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been
possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production
and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes" (ibid.
140-1). The statement begins with a "this" because he reserves the concept of
bio-power to designate a particular era (roughly beginning with the 18th century for
Foucault), although and precisely because it is not as if civilizations for centuries did not
put to use men's bodies but because, for the first time, life enters history, or there is the
"entry of phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species into the order of
knowledge and power, into the sphere of political techniques" (ibid. 142). Thus, so far,
bio-power and bio-politics are concepts, they simply designate, they do not explain.
Does a theory of bio-politics exist? If it does, how?

Until now, we were simply occupied with definitions of bio-politics and bio-power. Now,
we shall enter Foucault's text to examine the bone and flesh of the business. Timothy
Campbell, in his Introduction (2013:7), expresses the problem of asking for a “theory” of
bio-politics by inviting us to be a reader "who is less concerned with affirming, rejecting,
or applying Foucault’s “biopolitics,” than with understanding precisely the turbulence of
Foucault’s text— its “hesitations, doubts, and uncertainties” and to "retain the potential
to exceed it from within". ​This is not to say that we should engage with Foucault as a
philosopher or a writer, but the inversions and ironies in the text are so interesting that
to read him straight would be to not read him at all. The definitions provided above
already are a summation of all that textbooks tell us to look for in Foucault.

The first inversion that Foucault suggests is with regard to the sovereign's right to kill.
Foucault doesn't hold the commonplace theoretical understanding of the right to kill by
the sovereign as put by Hobbes. True to his historical data, Foucault argues that this
right has diminished and it could only be exercised to defend the sovereign. In fact, he
drops the mild hint that this right⁴ could have manifested with the formation of this new
juridical being and here, he quotes Pufendorf who understands the sovereign in terms
of an analogy found in chemistry (1998:135). We already get a sense of an approach to
facts in so far as they are in relation to another set of facts. These relations are
immanent​. The sovereign exists precisely at the moment when it is most threatened, and
not because of some abstract theory about it. The irony is that the most violent threat is
that which appears from within⁵.

Next, he says that this right is a dissymmetrical one, exercised through seizure or
deduction (​prélèvement​), where the balance is tipped over on the side of death. Now, the
transformation that Foucault talks about is not a simple displacement. First of all,
"deduction" changes into "addition". So, the whole arrangement of elements that was
related to "deduction" shifts accordingly and settles in another arrangement as a mirror
inverse. The new relation is also dissymmetrical, but tipped over on the side of life.
Earlier, the meaning of "life" manifested in death. Now, "death" is manifested in the
meaning of life. To put it simpler, earlier death carried within itself the meaning of
sovereign right over life at the moment of its actualization, but now, life carries within
itself this constant apprehension to live longer, healthier, to avoid disease and death.
The right to life of the social body is the reverse of the sovereign right to death⁶. So, an
irony of life and death is enacted twice: the life of sovereign depends on the exposure of
its subjects to death; the life of the social body depends on the wholesale slaughter of
the population. The irony, as I understand, is that the sovereign is what it is insofar as it
has subjects to reign upon and the social body is what it is insofar as it is composed of
population. This is precisely the place where the turnover from law to norm can be
understood.

But before that, one small side note, which may connect up to the more important point.
Foucault says that death is power's limit, that is to say, for both the forms of power. The
earthly sovereign was governed by the heavenly sovereign and so death penalty was
earlier in the category of political ceremony. This management of death could not be
breached with individual acts of suicide. But once a crime, it became in the course of
19th century an issue of astonishment and entered the sphere of sociological analysis.
Why astonishment?

The single most important point so far has been the investment of power in life through
and through after a particular point in history and we must recognize the seriousness of
this fact. All political decisions, all forms of deployment of power, all knowledge
produced point their fingers now to this fact. If earlier, law was centripetal, power
becomes centrifugal with its desire to have total hold over life. The sovereign governs
over legal subjects, but this power is applied at the level of life. Two points follow from
this. One, law cannot exercise itself today without justifying its action in terms of the
norm. Law now has no sovereign transcending the here and now, whether earthly or
heavenly, to refer to but life itself. Therefore, it now judges only by what it understands
as the immanent norm of life, what is normal. Two, to grasp the subject in its everyday,
law has to come down from its high pedestal and operate like the norm. Life is both the
object and subject of this politics. Hence the scientific shock of encountering the fact of
suicide which is anti-life and at the same time not a willed crime against God. The
challenge was to understand the roots of suicide within life. "Modern man is an animal
whose politics places his existence as a living being in ​question​" (ibid. 143).

It is a question, because life is an enigma for the discourses. In fact, in Foucault,

something is very clear. That there is something that is facing power and which escapes
it. I believe that Foucault, therefore, has a concept of the body. All along, Foucault
maintains his relational approach by way of which elements come to be designated. So,
in the case above, if law is becoming like the norm, law still needs an aberration from
the norm to act on, or else, in a state of perfect complicity, there is no requirement of
law. There is no power without resistance. The point is that life's enigma is precisely
what gave filip to the discourses. Foucault puts it very succinctly thus, "If the question of
man was raised—insofar as he was a specific living being, and specifically related to
other living beings—the reason for this is to be sought in the new mode of relation
between history and life: in this dual position of life that placed it at the same time
outside history, in its biological environment, and inside human historicity, penetrated
by the latter's techniques of knowledge and power (ibid.)".
Here, before going any further, regarding this inside-history outside-history business, I
would like to repeat the concepts of bio-history and bio-politics, especially the former.
For Foucault, bio-history refers to the actual pressures through which the interference
of life and history came about. So, he speaks of how economic development of the 18th
century reduced deaths, in a way, opening up a space for the sciences to, first of all, relax
the control of death over life in order then to make life available to itself for study (ibid.
142). This is bio-history, where the biological side of the story is very clear. Bio-politics
refers to the deployments (medical, administrative and so on) that brought life into the
realm of calculations. Bio-politics is concerned with the population and not with
territories. It is bio-power that is not clear to me. Clearly, this is an era of bio-power, as
Foucault says, where the world would stop if bodies stop working the way they do. In
that case, to understand bio-power as I see it is "to show how deployments of power are
directly connected to the body— to bodies, functions, physiological processes,
sensations, and pleasures; far from the body having to be effaced, what is needed is to
make it visible through an analysis in which the biological and the historical are not
consecutive to one another, as in the evolutionism of the first sociologists, but are bound
together in an increasingly complex fashion in accordance with the development of the
modern technologies of power that take life as their objective" (ibid. 152). But this is
only an outline. If we were to study bio-power where would we start, what would we be
looking for?

Part of the problem is in us assuming that we already know how biopolitics inserts the
population into calculations of statistics to come back to wield power over the
individual body as a case of the population. But to that extent, we are only thinking of
circulation, cordoning, seclusion of bodies by the ‘medical police’ of Germany or the
‘emergency plans’ of France in the 18th century. Do these not already fall under the
category of “deduction”? How do we understand what power “adds” to the body?
Compare another definition of bio-history given by Foucault elsewhere.

“Biohistory, that is to say, an effect of medical intervention at the biological level; the ​trace that a
strong medical intervention starting in the 18th century could leave in the history of ​human
species​.” ​[Italics mine] ​(1994:207)⁷

Clearly what Foucault is doing is not simply a ‘history of mentalities’ (1998:152). The
second part of the essay illuminates a little on how Foucault understands the vital
element of this whole story. We know of the two axes on which biopolitics functioned:
the discipline of the body and the regulation of population. Sex fell under both
categories, through which power had access to both the life of the body and the life of
the species. The biopolitics of sex was exercised in a combination of disciplinary and
regulatory techniques, working at one level to achieve results in another level, which
are namely, the sexualization of children, hysterization of women [regulatory to
discipline] and birth control, psychiatrization of perversion [discipline to regulatory].
Then, there is a discussion of law and sexuality in two forms; on one hand, about what
understanding of sexuality law had within it, and on the other, what understanding of
law the science of sexuality had. So far, it’s all clear. Needless to speak of racism where
the old notion of blood revitalized the politics around this new thing called sexuality.
But like all the inversions Foucault sees elsewhere, here is another that is more
complex: if the perverted and deviant were once excluded, it becomes again the pivot of
this science (ibid. 156). In a way, perversion becomes suddenly a manifest fact of not the
margins but the whole of society, which if we can extrapolate, is owing to the declining
importance of blood. Fetishes are not blood issues. In a society, whose political relations
were arranged along the lines of blood, politics used the symbolic function of blood, it
spoke ​through blood. But, we are in a society of ‘sex’, where power speaks ​of ​sexuality
and ​to​ sexuality (ibid. 147). So, if blood was a symbol, what is sex? Foucault answers,

“Power delineated it, aroused it, and employed it as the proliferating meaning that had always to
be taken control of again lest it escape; it was ​an effect with a meaning-value.​” (ibid. 148)

The analysis of the last phrase would take us into the heart of linguistics, but lets flag it
without losing sight of our aim to have the faint outlines of a theory of biopolitics.
Foucault poses himself questions that he is expecting from his readers, whether
psychoanalysis had not already grasped the conditions for the development of erotic
zones in the body which Foucault was now transposing to the level of the social. But to
say that sex is a ​complex idea is not the same as denying the body. Needless to go over
the details, which again reference linguistics, as to how the four features of the
biopolitics of sex have this complex idea within them, and how this idea is an interlacing
of function and instinct, finality and signification, whole and part, absence and presence,
principle and lack (ibid. 153-4). Foucault reiterates the point that he made a while ago​—
“the idea of sex makes it possible to evade what gives “power” its power; it enables one
to conceive power solely as law and taboo” (ibid. 155). To speak figuratively, due to
want of theoretical ways of putting it (Campbell, 2013:22 calls it a ​generative aporia, a
relation of non-relation), power’s power is only in the pretension that it has no power
over this thing called sex which it ultimately deploys. Power’s power is in hiding the
traces it has left on history. Foucault puts it more beautifully in an interview
(1994:231),

“I wish to show how relations of power can pass materially through even the solid dimensions
of the body ​(l'épaisseur même des corps​) without having to be communicated through the
representations of the subject. If power grasps bodies, it is not because it is first interiorised in
the conscience of the people. There is a network of bio-power, of somato-power which is itself a
network from which sexuality is born as a historical and cultural phenomenon, within which we
find and lose ourselves at the same time… Between every point of the social body, between a
man and a woman in a family, between master and student, between the informed and the
ignorant, pass relations of power, which are not a pure and simple projection of a grand
sovereign over individuals; they are rather the ground, both firm and shaky, to which it anchors
itself, the conditions of possibility so that it can even function.”⁸

This business of finding and losing ourselves is what Foucault identifies as part of the
most essential internal operating principle of the deployment of sexuality: the desire for
sex, that each individual has to pass through in order to have access to his own
intelligibility, body and identity (1998:156). It is at the depth of this level that scholars
of bio-power will have to work, the ability of power (not sovereign power, but
micro-powers) to create desire. Campbell (2013:20) argues that the understanding of
politics in Foucault’s thought concerning power as generative of life than just being
thanatopolitics is not clear from this period onwards. I can take only one lesson from
him regarding this last point, which is to give due to recognition to the body but not
understand it as equivalent of life. In fact, it might seem as if we need to examine the
body to look for traces of history on it. If we do so, we get very close to re-enacting the
manner in which knowledge-power tried to access the enigma of life by isolating its
form (body). Rather we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking that all life is the body. We
already get a sense of the meticulous approach in Foucault to the psychosomatics of
desire.

Finally, we are at a position where we can understand the various entries and exits of
the text. First of all, ​biopolitics is specific in its usage. This is an era of ​biopower​, where
biopolitical ​deployments have harnessed this biopower for the first time in history with
the ​knowledge-power of the body. But this mechanism is not a monolith, nor does it
replace sovereign so much as reorganize it. It is an assembly of heterogeneous forces.
Although we recognize ​discipline and ​regulation as the two poles of it, they can come in
various combinations, like we saw just above for the four features of the biopolitics of
sex or in the example of the grid pattern of working-class housing estates (Foucault,
2013:251). However, the element that circulates between the two is the ​norm because it
can be applied to both ​body and ​population unlike law (Foucault, 2003:253). Thus, in
Foucault’s words, the “normalizing society is a society in which the norm of discipline
and the norm of regulation intersect along an orthogonal articulation” (ibid.). This
orthogonal articulation of the two axes cover the whole of life. For Foucault, life
designates two things: the ​biological (body) and the ​organic (between bodies). This
biopolitical schema is so far so good, but it is still tied to the old notion of deduction, and
therefore, stops at the level of norm. When Foucault says biopower, it appears “when it
becomes technologically and politically possible for man not only to manage life but to
make it proliferate, to create living matter, to build the monster, and, ultimately, to build
viruses that cannot be controlled and that are universally destructive” (ibid. 73). This
biopower, like Frankenstein’s monster, is in excess of sovereign right.

Now, this review will try to see if Agamben and Hardt & Negri make any advancement
on this last point (in a way to sort of limit myself, because these thinkers have said
hundred other things that cannot be brought together here). The ​Security, Territory,
Population lectures are already trying to make inroads into the understanding of
biopower as Foucault says in the beginning of the series. Agamben’s understanding of
biopolitics is also trying to grapple with the same problem which he reformulates it
thus,

“One of the most persistent features of Foucault's work is its decisive abandonment of the
traditional approach to the problem of power, which is based on juridico-institutional models…
on the other hand, (is) the examination of the ​technologies of the self by which processes of
subjectivization bring the individual to bind himself to his own identity and consciousness and,
at the same time, to an external power… then where, in the body of power, is the zone of
indistinction (or, at least, the point of intersection) at which techniques of individualization and
totalizing procedures converge?” ​(2007:5).

Now, Agamben as we know him answers this by saying that the inclusion of bare life in
the political realm constitutes the original, concealed nucleus of sovereign power, which
connects the two things together. So far we have only read of this inclusion as a
juridico-legal phenomenon, which allows the inclusion of ​bios through its exclusion.
This is one valid way to read the inclusion of bare life, where the exclusion is necessary
for the constitution of the sovereign and to justify its legitimacy so much so that it is this
exclusion that allows the sovereign to ​be​, as if it were its necessary enemy. But I believe,
the exclusion can be read from the point of ​bios as well. In fact, Agamben (ibid. 8) brings
a passage from ​Politics ​to precisely make this point​. ​To ask in what way the living being
has language is the same as asking in what way life dwells in politics. Animals have
voice to express pain and pleasure, but we have language to express what is good and
bad. We also feel pain and pleasure, but language already does the task of expressing
them. So, language is opposed to voice but voice is also included in it. Likewise, “people
live ​in the ​polis by letting their own bare life be excluded, as an exception, within it”. We
still carry out animal functions like eating, defecating, having sex, while at the same time
engaging in issues of justice and good and bad in the same city.

Now, if we leap forward to the argument where modernity is marked increasingly by

the state of exception becoming the rule⁹, I believe we can read this again from the
point of ​bios​. For this I take cues from an interview of Agamben with Akis Gavrilidis
(Loggos, 2013). Here, he admits that his inspiration has been Foucault’s discussion on
security and scarcity. The physiocrats did something quite novel. They said, let us allow
famines to occur and let the natural course of things balance prices and production, we
shall only manage according as these laws of economics. So, we see that what was once
a disaster which was to be avoided, an exception, increasingly became a part of the
statecraft. The apparatus of security is part of the iceberg called biopower, where
politics does not prevent or apply negative sanctions on processes of life, but harnesses
its potential to govern effectively. The analogy of a secret laboratory in dystopian
movies where the government lets some monster or virus to grow and develop within a
glass dome is very apt. What is Hobbes’ state of nature but the constant battle of one
against the other. And it is this battle that the sovereign lets happen in the very center of
all its affairs. As Agamben says in the interview, “The government is no longer
interested in maintaining order but in managing disorders”. Too often, we are horrified
by the thought that the sovereign could strip us to bare life and we immediately imagine
ourselves as one of the Jews in detention camps. But isn’t the ​bios side of the story
equally daunting (and strangely cathartic) where the sovereign can allow our base
animalistic violence to manifest in a state of utter disorder? Of course, Agamben himself
writes in a way to make us feel more of the former side of the story. But that doesn’t
mean he denies this side as well. He says,

“​When its borders begin to be blurred, the bare life that dwelt there frees itself in the city and
becomes both subject and object of the conflicts of the political order, the one place for both the
organization of State power and emancipation from it. Everything happens as if, along with the
disciplinary process by which State power makes man as a living being into its own specific
object, another process is set in motion that in large measure corresponds to the birth of
modern democracy, in which man as a living being presents himself no longer as an ​object ​but as
the ​subject​ of political power.​” (2007:9).

Although, this is not to sideline the fact that Agamben has, as mentioned above, given us
the connection between the political techniques and technologies of self by better
evaluating the place of the sovereign in the modern world, as something which in
parallel to the sciences has gradually introduced the corpus into its theory and exerted
control over it. I will be a fool if I, in any way, think of the ​bios as a sort of a given
resource¹​0​. If there is a manifest violence it will have to be understood in tandem with
the processes of subjectification, the technologies of self, the micro-powers that produce
a violent subject on the lines of Foucault who saw the deployment of sex for
self-identification. What I just insist on is to not go to the extreme and say ‘make die’
instead of ‘let die’ but concentrate on the ‘make life’ part. There is one last point here
that I see, which is that just as ‘sex’ was an enigmatic point in the deployment of
sexuality, the apparatuses of security and scarcity also have the probability of an event
as its blindspot, so that if disorders are to be managed, it is because they can run amok
towards any course. Crucial to this was the construction of the naturalness of
population, an entity with its own laws. Foucault (2009:71) puts it thus, “If one says to a
population “do this,” there is not only no guarantee that it will do it, but also there is
quite simply no guarantee that it can do it…. The population appears therefore as a kind
of thick natural phenomenon”. The element of wagering or ​enjeu is also an implicit issue
one needs to look out for in the biopolitical schema.

Hardt & Negri are also interested in the difference between biopower and biopolitics
but they have a different reading of the terms. So, for them “the former could be defined
(rather crudely) as the power over life and the latter as the power of life to resist and
determine an alternative production of subjectivity” (in Campbell, 2013:238).
Biopolitics for them is a term that has more qualifications insofar as they employ it
specifically to understand ​resistance​, which is not too dependent on and subordinate or
homologous to the power it opposes. This is a minor underlying current in Foucault’s
text that they identify. Hardt & Negri add to my understanding insofar as they touch
upon this keyword ‘subjectivity’ which has been the issue since a couple of paragraphs.
They prefer the word ‘biopolitics’, but then, they indicate that they are not sticking to
the strict philological use, which can prevent them from reading deeper into Foucault.
They are grappling with the same issue that Agamben had, namely the dovetailing of the
two lines in Foucault: the society of control and the immense productivity of biopower.
They say, “Biopower is a form of power that regulates social life from its interior,
following it, interpreting it, absorbing it, and rearticulating it. Power can achieve an
effective command over the entire life of the population only when it becomes an
integral, vital function that every individual embraces and reactivates of his or her own
accord” (ibid. 216). For them, the biopolitical context emerges when societies of control
start to recognize this realm of biopower although not totally grasp it (ibid. 219). This
paradox of power in a way reveals the biopolitical context as a new milieu of maximum
plurality and uncontainable singularization¹¹​— a ​milieu of the event (ibid. 218).

The easiest way in which they have put their notion of biopolitics as an event is in its
comparison with the ​parole intervening in ​langue ​(ibid. 240). The ​parole intervenes in
langue by introducing changes into ​langue, which restructures the whole of ​langue​. If
signs are arbitrary, it is to the extent that they have no internal logic, but the
arbitrariness results from all the accidents and encounters introduced into ​langue ​in the
course of the life of the human species in different environments, time periods and
cultures. Next, they say, “The biopolitical event that poses the production of life as an act
of resistance, innovation, and freedom leads us back to the figure of the multitude as
political strategy” (ibid. 241). The connection between the previous point and multitude
is provided thus: “The event marked by the innovative disruption of ​la parole beyond ​la
langue translates to an intervention in the field of subjectivity, with its accumulation of
norms and modes of life, by a force of subjectification, a new production of subjectivity...
Biopolitics is a partisan relationship between subjectivity and history that is crafted by a
multitudinous strategy, formed by events and resistances, and articulated by a
discourse that links political decision making to the construction of bodies in struggle”
(ibid.).

I am not sure whether the concept of multitude is being used here without any slight
modification. Of course, it comes from Spinoza (see Campos, 2015), and if that is so,
then, the concept of ‘body’ in Hardt & Negri would concur with the notion of potentia​.
Spinoza deploys this notion against Hobbes to argue that political power remains within
the concrete bodies of individuals and it is not entirely given over to the sovereign. A
related notion is that of ​affect and ​affection​. Corresponding to the mental state there is
also a state of the body which is now and again filled with either sad or joyous passions.
The multitude is literally an aggregate of different individual bodies bearing different
affects that can come in different combinations to produce different affections. The
sovereign can govern only to the extent that it can maintain a balance of these
multitudinous passions. But for Hardt & Negri, this is only one part of biopolitics, the
productive powers of life. The other part is the creation of de-subjectifying
subjectivities. The example given is from a passage in Meister Eckhart’s sermon, which
they call a biopolitical event (in Campbell, 2013:242). Through the masculinist and
heterosexist layers, a queer subject emerges in the passage.

Of course, my reading is able to trace just one line in the conception of ​bios in Hardt &
Negri from the notion of Spinoza’s bodies and affects. As they opine, concept of the
immaterial labor of the production and manipulation of affects is an important element
in the network of biopolitical production but these only “scratch the surface of the
productive dynamic of the new theoretical framework of biopower” (ibid. 222).

Finally, I would have to agree with Rabinow and Rose (2006) and also Lemke (2011:74)
that Agamben and Negri make the concept of ​biopower too broad to use. I think
Rabinow and Rose’s three pointed definition of biopower is a more or less adequate one
and usable, in terms of a truth discourse, strategies for intervention and modes of
subjectification, although they only raise questions about it rather than answer. In a
way, the final pages of ​Right to Death and Power over Life have opened up this issue of
subjectification, which is one of the gray areas of a “theory” of biopolitics, but
nonetheless an important one.

Notes

1. I do not know enough of the whole project of Foucault, nor do I know enough French in order to put
my finger on even one concept. For example, in an interview with L. Finas (1994:228) titled “​The relations
of power pass through the body​”, Foucault is speaking of how he wrote ​Order of Things in a state of
transition to having a new concept of power finally in ​Will to Knowledge​. As for how many shifts and
rethinking he has undertaken is unknown to me as yet. So, under present circumstances, it is wise to
select one text and avoid making too much of terminological differences with other texts on the face of it.

2. «Si on peut appeler «bio-histoire» les pressions par lesquelles les mouvements de la vie et les processus
de l'histoire interfèrent les uns avec les autres, il faudrait parler de «bio-politique» pour désigner ce qui
fait entrer la vie et ses mécanismes dans le domaine des calculs explicites et fait du pouvoir-savoir un
agent de transformation de la vie humaine.» (1976:188)

3. Cf. a statement from ​Birth of Social Medicine delivered in Brazil 1974, which is generally accepted to be
the first occurence of the term: “For capitalist society it is biopolitics that bore importance before
anything else, the biological, the somatic, the corporeal. The body is a bio-political reality; medicine is a
biopolitical strategy.”(Foucault, 1994:210). Although another lecture from ​Society must be Defended
(2003:247) ​uses “biopower” interchangeably with “biopolitics” as in “Beneath that great absolute power,
beneath the dramatic and somber absolute power that was the power of sovereignty, and which consisted
in the power to take life, we now have the emergence, with this technology of biopower, of this
technology of power over "the" population as such, over men insofar as they are living beings.” In the
same text, he speaks of biopower as exceeding State power. And yet again in the first lecture of ​Security,
Territory, Population ​(2009:1), he admits that he has used biopower vary vaguely (​en petit peu en l’air)
until then.

4. “Must we follow Hobbes in seeing it as the transfer to the prince of the natural right possessed by every
individual to defend his life even if this meant the death of others? Or should it be regarded as a specific
right that was manifested with the formation of that new juridical being the sovereign?” (1998:135)

5. Foucault asks, "Est-il menacé par des ennemis extérieurs, qui veulent le renverser ou contester ses
droits?" (1976:177) This question is inadequately translated in the English version as "If he were
threatened by external enemies who sought to overthrow him or contest his rights, he could then
legitimately wage war." whereas the French roughly translated asks "Is the sovereign threatened by the
external enemies, who want to dethrone him or contest his rights?". This is a rhetorical question meaning
that the sovereign king is threatened but not his sovereignty in principle. This connects up to the next
point that it is treason that threatens sovereignty ​per se ​and it is only then that right to kill is exercised
directly.

6. "This death that was based on the right of the sovereign is now manifested as simply the reverse of the
right of the social body to ensure, maintain or develop its life... Yet wars were never so bloody... (they) are
waged on behalf of the existence of everyone... And through a turn that closes the circle, as the technology
of wars has caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the decision that initiates them
and the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly informed by the naked question of survival. "
(1998:136-7)

7. «​La bio-histoire, c'est-à-dire l'effet, au niveau biologique, de l'intervention médicale ; la trace que peut
laisser dans l'histoire de l'espèce humaine la forte intervention médicale qui débute au XVIIIe siècle.​»
(1994:207)

8. «​Ce que je cherche, c'est à essayer de montrer comment les rapports de pouvoir peuvent passer
matériellement dans l'épaisseur même des corps sans avoir à être relayés par la représentation des
sujets. Si le pouvoir atteint le corps, ce n'est pas parce qu'il a d'abord été intériorisé dans la conscience
des gens. Il y a un réseau de bio-pouvoir, de somato-pouvoir qui est lui-même un réseau à partir duquel
naît la sexualité comme phénomène historique et culturel à l'intérieur duquel à la fois nous nous
reconnaissons et nous nous perdons… Entre chaque point d'un corps social, entre un homme et une
femme, dans une famille, entre un maître et son élève, entre celui qui sait et celui qui ne sait pas, passent
des relations de pouvoir qui ne sont pas la projection pure et simple du grand pouvoir souverain sur les
individus ; elles sont plutôt le sol mobile et concret sur lequel il vient s'ancrer, les conditions de possibilité
pour qu'il puisse fonctionner… Le pouvoir se construit et fonctionne à partir de pouvoirs, de multitudes
de questions et d'effets de pouvoir.​» (1994:231)

9. In fact, the point in ​Right of Death and Power over Life about sex becoming the center of the discourses
is akin to the exception becoming the rule, because moral discourses preceding it had marginalised it.

10. It is not true that state of nature is a constant battle (in fact, animals cooperate to survive) and in any
case, within political philosophy, quite early, figures like Rousseau, say in his ​Discourse on the Origin of
Inequality​, did not agree with Hobbes on this point.
11. I take it that the term ‘singularization’ has a specific usage here, if not borrowed from any other
philosophy, then at least from Spinoza’s, such as in the Ethics IP28: Every singular thing, or everything
which is finite and has a conditioned existence, cannot exist or be conditioned to act, unless it be
conditioned for existence and action by a cause other than itself, which also is finite, and has a
conditioned existence; and likewise this cause cannot in its turn exist, or be ​conditioned to act, unless it be
conditioned for existence and action by another cause, which also is ​finite​, and has a conditioned
existence, and so on to infinity.

References

Agamben, G. (2007). ​Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life​. US: Stanford University Press.

Campbell, T. & Sitze, A. (2013). ​Biopolitics: A Reader​. US. Duke University Press.

Campos, A. S. (2015).​ Spinoza: Basic Concepts​. UK: Imprint Academic.

Foucault, M. (1976). ​Histoire de la sexualité 1: La volonté de savoir.​ Paris: Gallimard

—​(1994) ​Dits et ​écrits (1954-1988) Tome III. ​Paris: Gallimard.
—​(1998). ​History of Sexuality I: The Will to Knowledge​. England: Penguin.
—​(2003). ​Society must be defended: Lectures at the Coll​e​ge de France​, 1975–76. New
York: Picador.
—​(2009). ​Security, Territory, Population: ​Lectures at the Coll​e​ge de France​, 1977–78.
Britain: Palgrave Macmillan

Lemke, T. (2011). ​Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction​. NY and London: New York University
Press.

Loggos M. (2013, July 13). ​Giorgio Agamben on Biopolitics (Eng subs). Video File. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skJueZ52948

Rabinow P. Rose N. (2006). ​Biopower Today​. BioSocieties (2006), 1, 195–217