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.” (143)

In the French original¹, 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 (34) that Foucault’s use of the term biopolitics is not consistent². 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" (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" (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" (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 (7), expresses the problem of asking for a theory of bio-
politics, more lucidly than anyone ever could, 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. We, on the other hand, are interested in doubts and
questions.

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 right could have manifested with the formation of this new
juridical being and here, he quotes Pufendorf² who understands the sovereign in terms
of an analogy found in chemistry (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 within³.

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, but now, life carries within itself this constant apprehension to
live longer, healthier, to avoid disease and death. Note that "life" is the immanent
condition of both life and death, meaning that more life is taken in the name of life. For
Foucault, social body replaces the sovereign⁴. So, this irony 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 in so far as it has subjects to govern on 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 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. To that extent, 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 is the norm of life, what is
normal. 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" (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 outside 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".

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 (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 in terms of its conceptual depth. 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" (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.

«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.» (207) “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]

Clearly what Foucault is doing is not simply a ‘history of mentalities’ (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. 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 (147).
So, if blood was a symbol, what is sex? Foucault says,

“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.” (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 (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” (155). To speak figuratively, due to my want of
theoretical ways of putting it, 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 (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.”

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 (156). It is at the depth of this level that scholars of bio-
power will have to work, the ability of power to create desire. In fact, if we extrapolate
using a very simple equation, we reach at a daunting picture, which is, if ‘sex’ was
produced within the deployment of sexuality by the biopolitics of sex, then in making us
desire sex, power is making us desire itself. Of course, there is no metaphysics of power
in Foucault and at the end he is optimistic that a different economy of bodies and
pleasure will come to be.
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 (228) titled “The relations of
power pass through the body”, Foucault is speaking of how he wrote Order of Discourse 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 done 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)

2. Cf. a statement from Birth of Social Medicine delivered in Brazil 1974 which is generally accepted to be
the first statement of the term. «Pour la société capitaliste, c'est le bio-politique qui importait avant tout,
la biologique, le somatique, le corporel. Le corps est une réalité bio-politique ; la médecine est une
stratégie bio-politique.» (210) “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.”

2. 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? (135)

3. 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 remark saying
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.

4. Foucault says, "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. " (136-7)

5. Foucault says, "It is not a question of claiming that this was the moment when the first contact between
life and history was brought about. On the contrary, the pressure exerted by the biological on the
historical had remained very strong for thousands of years... For the first time in history, no doubt,
biological existence was reflected in political existence; the fact of living was no longer an inaccessible
substrate that only emerged from time to time, amid the randomness of death and its fatality; part of it
passed into knowledge's field of control and power's sphere of intervention". (142)

It is not that life has been totally integrated into techniques that govern and administer it; it constantly
escapes them. (143)

The problem that will then arise is for us to then understand what is inside history and what is outside!

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.