What is biopolitics according to Foucault?
by Rachel Adams | 10 May 2017. Key Concept. Despite their prominence in subsequent academic writing, 1. the concepts of “biopower” and “biopolitics” are perhaps the most elusive, and arguably the most compelling (given the attention they have subsequently received), concepts of Michel Foucault’s oeuvre.
What does Foucault argue about the relationship between biopolitics and the political subject?
For Foucault, there is a mutual incompatibility between biopolitics and sovereign power. Indeed, he sometimes refers to sovereign power as “thanatopolitics,” the politics of death, in contrast to biopolitics’s politics of life.
What is the difference between Governmentality and biopolitics?
Governmentality, first and foremost, is a term coined by philosopher Michel Foucault, and refers to the way in which the state exercises control over, or governs, the body of its populace. Meanwhile, biopolitics, which was coined by Rudolf Kjellén, is an intersectional field between biology and politics.
What argument did Foucault make about the connection of biopower and social movements?
In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault argues that biopower is almost necessarily racist, since racism, broadly construed, is an “indispensable precondition” that grants the state the power to kill (2003 : 25 6).
When did Michel Foucault write the birth of biopolitics?
Foucault, Michel. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. Palgrave Macmillan. Loading…
What does Foucault mean by the concept of liberalism?
The concept of liberalism is likewise important. While this term conventionally refers to a political ideology or an economic theory, scholars in the Foucauldian tradition conceive of liberalism as an ‘art of government’ that uses the agency of free subjects as a means to achieve its goals (Dean, 1999;Foucault, 2008;Lemke, 2001; Peters, 2007).
Where did Michel Foucault do his governmentality studies?
In his governmentality studies in the late 1970s Foucault held a course at the Collège de France on the major forms of neoliberalism, examining the three theoretical schools of German ordoliberalism, the Austrian school characterized by Hayek, and American neoliberalism in the form of the Chicago school.
How is the problem of neoliberalism a problem?
The problem of neo-liberalism is rather how the overall exercise of political power can be modeled on the principles of a market economy. So it is not a question of freeing an empty space, but of taking the formal principles of a market economy and referring and relating them to, of projecting them on to a general art of government.