Biopolitics is not a politics of life
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.35699/2237-5864.2023.41779Keywords:
Politics of life, Biolegitimacy, BiopoliticsAbstract
For his courses at the Collège de France in 1975-1976 and in the first volume of his Histoire de la sexualité, Michel Foucault briefly but decisively advanced a theory of biopower whose outstanding element was biopolicy. This concept, which he himself abandoned for other lines of research, nonetheless enjoyed considerable success in the social sciences. Far more, however, than a veritable policy of life as suggested by the etymology of the word, biopolicy in fact referred to the government of populations, behaviours and practices, leaving out what can be called life itself. Based on a two-fold line of reflection by Georges Canguilhem, whose pupil he was, and by Hannah Arendt, whose work was unknown to him, it is proposed in this text to return to the substance of policies of life, between living and lived, between zoé and bioss, and, based on empirical studies of refugees in France and AIDS in South Africa, to grasp some of the issues of these policies, in particular, thinking of life from the viewpoint of both inequalities and legitimacies.
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