Concept in Definition ABC

lilen gomez | May. 2022
Professor in Philosophy

Genesis and development of the concept

The term biopolitics was initially coined by the Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kyellen (1864-1922), to refer to an organicist conception of society, the state and politics, according to which the state identifies itself with a biological organism, whose “pathologies” must be addressed by politics. Until the 1970s, this had been the predominant meaning of the term. From then on, Foucault takes it up again in another sense, using it to refer to the way in which, in modernity, the state government assumes the management of the biological life of the being human.

Foucauldian biopolitics

In Foucault's theoretical corpus, the first articulated formulation of the concept of biopolitics appears in the work La will to know (1976), to explain the transformation of the mechanisms of power from the seventeenth century. Until then, power was exercised in the form of straight sovereign to kill and let live; that is to say, the sovereign power was the one that was legitimated to kill at its discretion, while allowing those who remained within the established disciplinary limits to live.

From now on, power is organized under two complementary forms, centered on biological life: the disciplines of the human body, which make up an anatomical-political, whose object is the bodies individual; and, towards the eighteenth century, a biopolitics, whose object is the body as a living being and as an element of a population characterized by its belonging to the human species. In this sense, the main object of biopolitics will be the management of living bodies based on variables that describe the biological processes of the population: birth rates, mortality, life expectancy, etc.

Between will to know Y Society must be defended (1976) —although they are contemporary texts among themselves—, a different conceptualization of the relationship between sovereignty and biopolitics, to the extent that, in the first case, this relationship appears as a complementation possible; while, in the second, the link is stated in oppositional terms.

On the other hand, in Security, territory and population (1978) and in The birth of biopolitics (1979), the question of biopolitics is raised in the context of the rationality of the modern state, specifically under the regime of governmental reason of liberalism.

In any case, it should be noted that the concept of biopolitics does not imply a general category of analysis, applicable to any historical moment indistinctly, nor does it describe the "overcoming” from a previous era, marked by sovereign power. Rather, it consists of a method of reading the political practices of modernity in their specificity, taking into account consideration the memory of social struggles and disregarding the traditional universal categories of the historiography.

The conception of biopolitics after Foucault

Another of the authors who has elaborated an important development of the concept of biopolitics has been the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (1942), who places it, unlike Foucault, as a fundamental element from the birth of the politics of West. His reading focuses on the analysis of the legal-political framework of Antiquity, which is based on the differentiation between bare life (life in its biological sense) and life in the context of the polis and the Roman city-state. The Agambenian argument holds that the sphere of politics is founded on the paradoxical exclusion of biological life. that, being considered outside the political community, remains at the disposal of the sovereign power and, therefore, outside the protection of the law, under a permanent Exception status. In this sense, all Western politics is, ultimately, a biopolitics, since its condition of possibility lies in the logic of exclusion of bare life, which justifies the power of sovereignty.

Bibliographic references

Castro, E. (2008). Biopolitics: from sovereignty to government. Latin American magazine of philosophy, 34(2), 187-205.

Rosas, C. m. (2012). Biopolitics in the world contemporary. society magazine and equity, (3).