Biopower: a concept developed by Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault became known for reformulating the way we understand the domination of bodies.

Michel Foucault coined the concept of biopolitics, or biopower, in the last section of the first volume of his History of Sexuality.in the last section of the first volume of his 1976 History of Sexuality. In this section, called "right of death or power over life", he explains how in the last two centuries a step has been taken in the way power has been exercised by States: previously power was based on the sovereign's capacity to kill, now it is based on the capacity to manage life.

It is thus a power that not only threatens to dispossess property and ultimately life, but to control lifeto make it grow, to organize it and to optimize it.

Biopolitics according to Foucault

The ancient form of power had in the afterlife, in death, a metaphysical justification of its terrestrial power. Biopower has its limit in death.

This is shown, for example, in totalitarian regimes, which mobilize entire populations to wage war under the pretext of preserving the life of the group.which mobilize entire populations to wage war under the pretext of preserving the life of the group, whereas before people went to war to maintain the political power of the lord or sovereign.

The two forms of biopower

For Foucault, various advances in technology that culminated just before the French Revolution made it possible to lengthen and improve life while better controlling it. Thus, biopower began to be exercised in two different but interconnected ways: disciplines but connected to each other: disciplines of the body and population controls.

Disciplines of the body

The disciplines of the body arise in the mid-17th century, and focus on making strong and useful an individual body understood as a machine. They are exercised by institutions such as education or the army, but also by anatomy. They are systems in charge of molding the individual in order to integrate him/her into society society and turn him into a useful element.

Thus, the educational system, for example, in addition to imparting a series of knowledge, is responsible for generating a series of habits and bodily attitudes, in the same way as the army.

Population controls

In the mid-18th century, population controls emerged. While the disciplines of the body focus on the individual, population controls focus on the species. Bodies are studied as supports of collective Biological processes. We are dealing with disciplines such as statistics, and with previously unknown problems of birth control, mortality, longevity or the level of health of the population. We see how these are forms of exercising power that do not seek death, but rather the administration of life.

Thus, we move from conceiving the governed as subjects of rights to conceiving the governed as subjects of rights. to conceive them as living beings. This has the consequence that while the old form of power contemplates human existence as juridical, biopower contemplates it as biological. Thus, power is no longer based exclusively on the law.. Although the law still exists, it is just one more element in a web of institutions (the family, the educational system, the army, medicine, etc.) that seeks to govern by regulating what is normal and adapting all individuals in society to it.

Biopower thus also becomes a new framework for the sciences, which under this new paradigm become part of the web of institutions that exercise biopower.

Opposition to power

In the face of this, opposition to power is based, according to Foucault, on the same biopolitical conception, since such opposition demands the possibility of living a full life, something previously unthinkable. Thus, the ideology of biopower even reaches the resistance to power.

Our own conception of sex would be biopolitical. It is precisely sex, that unmentionable sphere, which seems free of any political interference, where biopower manifests itself relentlessly.

Thus, common sexual practices, but also scientific conceptions of sex, would be a way of shoring up the power balances of the status quo through sexual practice. We see here how for Foucault systems of knowledge generate that which they attempt to describe, so that in their essence they are mechanisms of power.

Biopower after Foucault

Biopolitics has become, after Foucault, a whole academic discipline within fields of knowledge. an academic discipline within fields such as political philosophy, philosophy of nature, philosophy of naturephilosophy, philosophy of nature, sociology or political science.

Indeed, the critical framework created by Foucault has become more and more useful as technology penetrates further and further into biological structures to modify them, both at the molecular and anthropological levels, with the emergence of cyborgs and transhumanism, generating a multitude of ethical problems.generating a multitude of ethical and political problems. On the other hand, the transgression of the boundary between technology and nature is central to issues such as climate change.

Experts today could be divided into two groups. On the one hand, there are those who believe that every biological notion and every conception of nature is an instance of biopower, so that all politics would be within the framework of biopolitics. Thus, there would be no nature to protect but biopolitics to modify.

On the other side there would be those who believe in a kind of positive biopolitics. Following Foucault's own note in the History of Sexuality, this group believes that there is always something in nature that escapes biopower, for example in the most irrational and intimate vital impulses of the human being, or in the element of randomness present in the functioning of nature, which would occasionally escape the mechanisms of biopolitical control. For this group, the objective is to keep nature out of biopower by denouncing biopolitical excesses.

Bibliographical references:

• Foucault, M. (2007). History of sexuality. 1st ed. Mexico, D.F.: Siglo XXI Editores.

• Nilsson, J. and Wallenstein, S. (2013). Foucault, biopolitics, and governmentality. 1st ed. Huddinge: Södertörns högskola.