1. 1 Foucault 5 Biopolitics Nikolas Rose

2. The politics of life itself ‘For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question.  Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality 1: The will to knowledge. 2

3. The politics of life itself La volonté du savoir, 1976: 6 pages on “Right of Death and Power over Life”. From power as deduction to power as management of life and survival of bodies and race – i.e. to ‘governing’ humans as living creatures Biopower seeks to exert a ‘positive’ influence on life, to administer, maximize, multiply it ((HoS: 137) Not to take life or let live, but to actively foster the powers of vitality.  NB politics of life vs ‘necropolitics’ of death 3

4. 4 Biopower (in History of Sexuality, v1) One pole: anatamo-politics of the human body, seeking to maximize its forces and integrate it into efficient systems.  “Discipline” A second pole of regulatory controls, a biopolitics of the population, focusing on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanisms of life: birth, morbidity, mortality, longevity.  “Biopolitics” This bipolar technology, emerging in the seventeenth century, seeks “to invest life through and through” (1976: 139).

5. 5 Biopower (in History of Sexuality, v1) By the nineteenth century these two poles were conjoined within a series of “great technologies of power”. New kinds of political struggle could emerge, in which “life as a political object” was turned back against the controls exercised over it, in the name of claims to a “right” to life, to one’s body, to health, to the satisfaction of one’s needs (1976: 145).

6. 6 Politics of health in the 18 th Century (1976) Extension of obligations of authorities to governing individual and collective vital processes of their subjects and citizens in name of each and of all:  the birth rate, and policies to intervene upon it  morbidity, not so much epidemics but the illnesses that are routinely prevalent in a particular population and sap its strength requiring interventions in the name of public hygiene and new measures to co-ordinate medical care;  old age and accidents to be addressed through insurantial mechanisms  the race and the impact upon it of geographic, climatic and environmental conditions, notably in the town. NB ‘governing’ realms that had their own internal laws

7. Biopower (in Lectures of 1978)."By this I mean a number of phenomena that seem to me to be quite significant, namely, the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power, or, in other words, how, starting from the 18th century, modern Western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species. This is what I have called biopower”  Security, Territory, Population [lectures of 1978] p. 1 (2007) 7

8. 8 Biopolitics Initially linked biopolitics to the regulatory endeavors of developing States. But “great overall regulations that proliferated throughout the nineteenth century … are also found at the sub-State level, in a whole series of sub-State institutes such as medical institutions, welfare funds, insurance …” Ways of problematizing and acting on individual and collective conduct in the name of objectives which do not (necessarily) have the State as their origin or point of reference. “Governmentality”

9. 9 Biopower and Biopolitics defined ‘Biopower’:  range of more or less rationalized attempts to intervene upon the vital characteristics of human existence – human beings, individually and collectively, as living creatures who are born, mature, inhabit a body that can be trained and augmented, and then sicken and die. ‘Biopolitics’  contestations over the ways in which human vitality, morbidity and mortality should be problematized, over the forms of knowledge, regimes of authority, and practices of intervention that are desirable, legitimate and efficacious.

10. 10 Rabinow and Rose on Biopower Biopower involves: Truth discourses about the ‘vital’ character of living human beings, and an array of authorities considered competent to speak that truth.  Truth discourses may not be ‘biological’ in the contemporary sense of the discipline: e.g. may hybridize biological and demographic or even sociological styles of thought, as in the contemporary relations of genomics and risk. Strategies for intervention on collective existence in the name of life and health  sometimes territorialized upon the nation, society or pre-given communities, but today often on emergent bio-social collectivities, sometimes in terms of race, ethnicity, gender or religion Modes of subjectification  individuals work on themselves, under certain forms of authority, in relation truth discourses, by means of practices of the self, in the name of life or health

11. Hardt and Negri's on Biopower in Empire "Biopower is a form of power that regulates social life from its interior, following it, interpreting it, absorbing it—every individual embraces and reactivates this power of his or her own accord. Its primary task is to administer life. Biopower thus refers to a situation in which what is directly at stake in power is the production and reproduction of life itself."(p.24) What, then, is not ‘biopower’? 11

12. Biopolitics in C21 Th e Politics of Life Itself Molecularization The (neuro)molecular gaze Optimization (Hope and Fear) Susceptibility Enhancement Subjectification Somatic individuality New practices of collectivisation Biological citizenship Somatic ethics Expertise A new pastorate Bioeconomics Mobilisation of latent value inherent in life Somatic ethic and the spirit of biocapital

13. Questions for the course overall? Foucault and Derrida? (Stephen Lim)  ‘deconstruction’ vs. ‘genealogy’  “terroristic obscurantism” which embodies the view of the teacher as “master of the texts” with access to the truth  a “petty pedagogy”, “which teaches the student that there is nothing outside the text … that it is never necessary to look beyond it”, because hidden within it allegedly lies “the meaning of being” 13

14. Questions for the course overall? Genealogy vs. textual analysis (Sergio Carvalho) Problematizations:  the emergence of problems in relation to particular moral, political, economic, military, geopolitical or juridical concerns, or within the operations of particular practices or institutional sites (courts, armies, schools, prisons…); the authorities who define phenomena as problems (educational, legal, religious, political…); the criteria in relation to which certain persons, things or forms of conduct come to be seen as problematic (institutional norms, military requirements, legal regulations…); the kinds of dividing practices involved (sickness from health; madness from criminality; normality from pathology…). Explanations:  the operative concepts; the kinds of work done by concepts; the relations amongst concepts; the language and grammar of explanatory systems (rhetorics, metaphors, analogies, logics…); the designation of domains of evidence and the criteria of demonstration, proof or acceptability involved, the forms of visibility, remarkability, calculability conferred, Technologies  the technical assembly of means of judgement (clinical examinations, tests, examinations, assessments with their associated norms and normativities); the techniques of reformation and cure (pedagogic, physical, therapeutic, punitive); the apparatuses within which intervention is to take place (design of prisons, classrooms, equipment, the connection of these into larger assemblages such as schooling or health visiting) Authorities:  the constitution of particular personages or attributes of authority; the emergence of expertise as a mode of authority and of experts as authorities(social workers, personnel managers, experts on child development, clinical psychologists, therapists); the procedures used to acquire and maintain authority; the alliances, conflicts and rivalries between different claims to authority; the types of authority they wield and the locales within which they wield it; their relation with their subjects. Subjectivities  ontological (as spirit, as soul, as consciousness, as creatures of pleasure, of habits, of emotions, of will, of unconscious desire, as individualised or collectivised in various ways); epistemological (as knowable through observation, through testing, through confession…); ethical (the kinds of selves they should seek to be, virtuous, wise, moderate, fulfilled, autonomous, civilized); technical (what they must do to themselves, the practices. regimens, by which they should act upon themselves to reform or improve themselves, in order to become autonomous, free, fulfilled). 14

15. Questions for the course overall? Foucault and Derrida? (Stephen Lim)  ‘deconstruction’ vs. ‘genealogy’  “terroristic obscurantism” which embodies the view of the teacher as “master of the texts” with access to the truth  a “petty pedagogy”, “which teaches the student that there is nothing outside the text … that it is never necessary to look beyond it”, because hidden within it allegedly lies “the meaning of being” 15

16. Questions for the course overall? ‘The Subject’ (Jacob Bittner)  Does Foucault have a concept of the subject/process of subjectivation?  If not; is there an implicit 'minimal' form such a subject must have in order for the historical a priori to work as a constitutive regime? 16

17. Questions for the course overall? How to write the genealogy of ‘The Subject’ (Sergio Carvalho)  “`And the history of human being, therefore, requires an investigation of the intellectual and practical techniques that have comprised the instruments through which being has historically constituted itself`” (Rose) 17

18. Beyond ‘the West’? (Eszter Neumann) Can the Foucauldian analytics of governmentality be fruitful in analysing non-Western states? What are the pitfalls that those who tried have faced? When it comes to the analysis of contemporary neoliberal/advanced liberal governmental regimes and the processes of globalisation, what is the heritage of alternative governmentality regimes and subjectivities and the clash of governmental logics? 18