Foucault's biopolitics & biopower

Biopolitics are an essential concept for understanding contemporary society. Biopolitics is the name given by French philosopher Michel Foucault to a specific form of government that aspires to the management of the population's biological population. Foucault argues that Biopolitics is the effect of an earlier political power concern: Biopower, which is a set of knowledge strategies and power relationships that are articulated in the 17th century on what is living in the West.

The book "The Birth of Biopolitics" (FCE) integrates the classes taught by the French philosopher at the Coll enge de France between 1978 and 1979. The compilation was edited by Michel Senellart and focuses on what Foucault calls the art of governance, which is the "meditated way of making the best government and, at the same time, reflecting on the best possible way to govern."

As a brief introduction, Swedish geographer and politologist Rudolf Kjellen in the 1920s published a series of writings integrating the new knowledge, trying to think of the state as an agency. Looking for appropriate names for the different branches of the new political science that he was looking at, he coined the terms 'geopolitics' and 'biopolitics'. The latter concept applied it to social life, to the struggles of ideas and interests between groups and classes that take place in society. The emergence of Biopower absorbs the old right to life and death that the sovereign held over his subjects and, in post-Revolution French societies, aspires to make life an administrable object. Foucault accuses the emergence of individualizing power technology, which, through analysis of individuals, their behaviors and their bodies, aspires to produce soft and fragmented bodies. Based on this, tools such as monitoring, monitoring, performance counting or continuous capacity review are invented. This thought came to a head in the eighteenth century with the development of a domain of knowledge that was beyond the concerns of power administrators: demography. "The development in the eighteenth century of population, urban structures, the problem of industrial labour, brought to light the biological and medical question of human 'populations' with their conditions of existence, habitat, food, birth and mortality, with their pathological phenomena (epidemics, endemic, etc.). The social 'body' is no longer a mere legal-political metaphor (such as the one found in Leviathan) to emerge as a biological reality and a medical field. Biopolitics inherits this concern and a new form of political power management. Foucault placed his emergency in the mid-18th century and accused it of being a body-specific procedure, opening up a population bio-policy for the government of the bodies. A number of social mechanisms and techniques are introduced to seek well-managed life care. 

Another take on his theory, we could understand that Anatomo-political and bio-political would be from Foucault's point of view; two aspects of the same process, typically modern, of rationalization or 'discipline' of the living: in the physical-individual; in the physical-social process, always in order to achieve their political profitability. Therefore, strictly bio-political is a major change not only in the traditional concept of politics but also in the equally traditional relationship between political power and life. Indeed, for Foucault, "with the classical age, the old right to life and death, characteristic of sovereign power is transformed into a technology of disciplinary power, articulated in disciplines and biological control over populations: now, of a 'power over life' 

The bio-political problem in Foucault is, in this sense, strictly modern, while it links it directly to the liberalism of the XVII-XVIII centuries and the parallel problem of government. All that does not mean, however, that there is no prehistory of government for Foucault himself. Indeed, Foucault intends to show how this fundamental phenomenon in the history of Western modernity has its most remote origin precisely in this first form of 'government of men' which would have been Christian pastoralism, a real turning point in Western history; to the extreme that for Foucault, strictly speaking, before Christianity there would have been no "government of men" in the sense of "governmentally" or politics, therefore, would have been understood as "shepherding of human herds". On the other hand, there is another political technology, somewhat later invention, which targets not individuals alone but human populations. In fact, the author claims, in parallel with the emergence of anatomy, "it is discovered that what power is exercised is about the population, which does not simply mean a large human group, but living beings who are through, mandated and governed by biological processes and laws. At the moment, bio-politics was invented". In short, "in power technology there have been two major revolutions: the discovery of discipline and the discovery of regulation and the development of an anatomy and a bio-politics".