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  • Essay / "Biopower today: an overview

    In the last chapter of The History of Sexuality Vol. 1 as well as in several courses at the Collège de France in 1976, Michel Foucault introduced and developed what he called “biopower”. Previously, according to Foucault, the right of "death and power over life" resided in the figure of the sovereign, and was generally part of the sovereign's right of seizure (property, goods, life, etc.), it has become, since the he classical era, one element among many others which sought to manage, optimize, control and regularize the social fabric. The ancient sovereign right, which essentially consisted of “take life or let live,” is reformulated as the power to “make live or let die.” In other words, biopower, which focuses on a deep investment in life, health and longevity, distinguishes it along two axes. The first is “the anatamopolitics of the human body”, which seeks to generate at the level of the human body. the individual a “docile body” which can then be inserted into social mechanisms. And the second is a “biopolitics of population” which considers the human species as a social category and focuses on regularization and normativization through questions of birth, morbidity, etc. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose take the above concept of biopower and seek to define it as "more or less rationalized attempts to intervene in vital energy." characteristics of human existence. The vital characteristics of human beings, as living creatures who are born, mature, inhabit a body that can be trained and increased, and then fall ill and die. And the vital characteristics of collectives or populations composed of such living beings.” They consider them “as encompassing all specific strategies and contestations over the problematizations of human vitality, collective morbidity and mortality; on desirable, legitimate and effective forms of knowledge, regimes of authority and practices of intervention. These may include: a) single or multiple truth discourses about the "vital" nature of human beings and a network of utterances by people or institutions considered authorities on the same subject. b) interventionist strategies on the health of populations or other biosocial collectives. such as race, religion, gender, ethnicity, etc. .They seek to distinguish this formation from that of Michel Hardt and Antonio Negri. “Biopower” in the works of Hardt and Negri is seen as an extraction of “surplus value” from human life that serves to consolidate global domination, i.e. “Empire”. This is also distinct from Giorgio Agamben's concept of "biopower" – whereby subjects become citizens and enter politics – which, according to Rabinow and Rose, focuses narrowly only on the politics of death (which has the concentration camp as the ultimate form) because it is opposed to the politics of life. Furthermore, Rabinow and Rose delimit the field of action of biopower, which they situate as being configured on the model, in the terms of Gilles Deleuze, of “the molar” and the “molecular”. In the era of the social state, they assert, it was the "molar" form of biopower that was favored, even in liberal states, around concerns as diverse as medical provision, housing standards, health education, immigration control, etc. , are today coupled with global “molar” interventions from organizations such as the World Bank, the European Union, etc. They are, moreover, in the decline of the “social” as a placeof national intervention in Western liberal society. , the emergence of new collective formations. They seek to formulate the effects of biopower in contemporary society as well as its field of action by delimiting areas around which several aspects of contemporary biopower can be located: that of race, reproduction and genomic medicine. Rainbow and Rose place the question of race at the center of the genealogy of biopower. According to them, race constitutes a central window on the genealogy of biopower. Race, they argue, provides a window into issues of narrative, national health, international competitiveness (culminating in the so-called war of nations), etc. They race the pre- and post-Darwinian biologization of race in the 19th century and trace that back to problems of degeneration, racial suicide, and so on. of the late 19th century, culminating in the eugenics strategies of the 20th century. They then cite the discrediting of racist discourses after the Second World War, whereby the “truth value” hitherto granted to quasi-scientific racist assertions was denaturalized. Subsequently, race is evolving as a key socioeconomic category and has much to do with issues such as federal funding and identity politics. However, Rabinow and Rose affirm what they see as a re-emergence of "race" as a "biological truth", this time through a "molecular" lens. They cite research carried out within the framework of modern genomics to achieve a “scientific” understanding of biological diversity. Here we use samples identified in relation to the original population, based on the racial typology of the 19th century. Space is thus created for biological differences between populations, which may be important in terms of factors such as susceptibility to disease. These, they observe, “immediately open up a new way of conceptualizing population differences in terms of geography and ancestry – at the molecular level.” When it comes to reproductive success, the contemporary effects of biopower diverge from Foucault's initial delineation of it. Whereas Foucault saw “race” as a fictional organizing principle of body- and population-centered technologies, Rabinow and Rose locate a decoupling of various practices and knowledges relating to sexuality and reproduction. The field of reproduction has configured around itself various knowledge and technologies that have little to do with sexuality. Here they list in particular different lines along which contemporary issues of reproduction arise. First, reproduction is considered in terms of its economic and political consequences: overpopulation, demographic management, etc. Second, it is considered in terms of abortion policies, which are by and large context-specific. And third, it is considered through a related issue of reproductive choice which views infertility as a curable disease. Biopolitical strategies with respect to the above manifest in various ways on the molar pole through population control campaigns, such as those of India and China. and Southeast Asia. These operate in the areas of demographics and economics and can take the form of birth control and sterilization (like India's sterilization campaign) or limiting family size (like China's policy of the only child). The above is different from the eugenics of the early 20th century. But we can also find a variant of 21st century eugenics linked to public health,,”.