Ingy Higazy
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz

Politics, often considered the exclusive realm of the discipline of Political Science, has been to a great extent de-centered by contemporary social and critical theory. No longer does theory perceive politics as the domain of a single discipline or of a single realm of life, namely of the state and its institutions. This becomes more clear when we engage in the work of Michel Foucault, who wrote and lectured extensively on the development of modern power and regimes of control. For Foucault, modern power is disciplinary. His theory of modern power thus moved beyond the personalization of power in a single entity or person, namely the sovereign (from sovereign power), to a more capillary form of power (Foucault 1975, 198). Central to Foucault’s thinking about modern power is the concept of biopolitics. Foucault was interested in what he called “biopolitics and the problem of life” (Foucault 2008, 78). Etymologically, we can construe biopolitics as the politics of life. In the summary to his lectures at the Collège de France for the year 1978-1979, Foucault defines biopolitics as “the attempt, starting from the eighteenth century, to rationalize the problems posed to governmental practice by phenomena characteristic of a set of living beings forming a population: health, hygiene, birth-rate, life expectancy, race … We know the increasing importance of these problems since the nineteenth century, and the political and economic issues they have raised up to the present” (Foucault 2008, 317).

Integral to biopolitics, in both its theory and its function, is the place of sovereignty. For Foucault, sovereignty denotes the mode or régime of power that preceded—but that still arguably exists alongside—disciplinary power. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), Foucault traces a genealogy of disciplinary power, to argue that it “arranges a positive economy” (Foucault 1975, 154). In this respect, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri note in Empire (2000), “Foucault… attempted to bring the problem of social reproduction and all the elements of the so-called superstructure back to within the material, fundamental structure and define this terrain not only in economic terms but also in cultural, corporeal, and subjective ones” (Hardt and Negri 2000, 27). 

Perhaps the statement that best captures Foucault’s conception of biopolitics is “make live and let die,” which refers to the mechanisms and capacities of modern power to organize minute details of life, of individuals and populations, according to power’s efficient and positive economy (Davies, Isakjee, and Dhesi 2017, 1268). In his discussion of the development of the biopolitical, Foucault accordingly engages the modern state and governmentality, what he calls “the art of government” (Foucault 2008, 28). In Foucault’s view, the functioning of biopolitics rests on the liberal governmental regime (Foucault 2008, 22). He contrasts this liberal governmental regime, essentially governmentality, to the raison d’état or the reason of the state (Foucault 2008,  21-22 and 28). Thus, modern power, through the art of government, disseminated through both state apparatuses and society, is geared toward the productive governing life. In biopolitical regimes, life thus becomes an object to be controlled and instrumentalized.

Postcolonial thinkers, most notably Achille Mbembe, have critically engaged with Foucault’s ‘theory’ of biopolitics to expose the centrality of race to its functioning, and thus its conceptual flipside, necropolitics. In his widely cited piece, “Necropolitics” (2003), Mbembe writes that he “[starts] from the idea that modernity was at the origin of multiple concepts of sovereignty—and therefore of the biopolitical” (Mbembe 2003, 13). In doing so, Mbembe traces the forms of racism embedded in the practice of biopolitics, especially on the colonized body and in colonial/colonized spaces. Thus, for Mbembe, some populations are not governed according to a logic of life, but to a logic of death (Mbembe 2003, 18-20). Mbembe further decenters biopolitics, this time from the grip of a Eurocentric view of history and experience of modernity. Mbembe is thus able to argue that “race has been the ever-present shadow in Western political thought and practice, especially when it comes to imagining the inhumanity of, or rule over, foreign peoples” (Mbembe 2003, 17). Mbembe’s intervention complicate Foucault’s view of a biopolitics that is in many ways centered on an analysis of state and power formation that unfold in tandem with, or that seek to produce, a liberal subject.

(See Geopolitics, Governmentality, Liberalism, Neoliberalism, Ordoliberalism)

Bibliography

Davies, Thom, Nick Isakjee, and Hannah Dhesi. “Violent Inaction: The Necropolitical Experience of Refugees in Europe.” Antipode 49, no. 5 (2017): 1263-1284.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books, 1975.

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979. Edited by Michel Senellart. Translated by Graham Burchell. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press, 2000.

Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11-40.