Beginning Biopower

In preparation for a paper I've agreed to write and a course I'm slated to teach, I'm going to try to look systematically at some writing on biopolitics and biopower. The remarks here will likely have the mixed (up) quality of being addressed to undergraduates as well as to my future writing-self (in my teaching, I am perpetually torn by a sense that I should cover a great deal of material--lots of reading--and the desire to pick texts apart in a detailed, obsessive fashion; part of the challenge of teaching undergraduates is that many seem to think that spending more time on a text means that they don't need to re-read it or read it more closely; they assume "there's no more reading;" reading is eyeballs on pages).

The thematic of the course, and of the paper to a degree, is set by two remarks, Foucault's (cited by Agamben) that "modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question" and Zizek's "biopolitics is postpolitics."

At any rate, I'm beginning here with the last section of The History of Sexuality, "Right of Death and Power Over Life."  The book was published in French in 1974 and in English in 1976.

1.   As the concluding section of The History of Sexuality, "Right of Death and Power Over Life," reiterates some of Foucault's key themes in the book, primarily his critiques of the repressive hypothesis and psychoanalysis.

a. Foucault rejects the claim (prominent in the 60s) that the Victorians installed a repressive regime of sexuality and that the liberation of sexuality would be the liberation of people. Instead of sexual silence, he notes both the command that sex speak and an extensive sexualization--the hysterical woman, masturbating child, Malthusian couple, and perverse adult.

b. In connection with his critique of the idea that there is a truth of sex that needs to be made to speak, Foucault also criticizes psychoanalysis. With psychoanalysis "the task of truth was now linked to the challenging of taboos." Psychoanalysis provides a mechanism for the deployment of sexuality; indeed, to this extent, its emphasis on telling the truth and freeing oneself from sexual repression prevents it from serving as a critical resource against the deployment of sexuality. Far from it--psychoanalysis by the end of the 19th century had become one of its key instantiations and institutions of dissemination.

One of the ways that psychoanalysis serves the deployment of sexuality is by providing a mechanism for attaching sexuality to the system of alliance. Alliance was rooted in a sovereignty of blood. Psychoanalysis connects this sovereign power to the law of the father: desire itself depends on the law. Without law, there can be no desire (the incest prohibition and the Oedipus complex at the basis of adult sexuality).

2.   "Right of Death and Power Over Life" does not begin, though, by repeating these themes. Instead, it begins with sovereign power as power of life and death (the right to take life or let live). This is a juridical power (and thus not absolute). And it is a subtractive power, a power that takes a way, that can appropriate and seize. Sovereign power can "seize hold of life in order to suppress it." The sovereignty Foucault is discussing here is the sovereignty of the system of alliance.

3.   Foucault says that the mechanisms of power have changed in "the West" since the classical period of the system of alliance. Subtraction is now accompanied by forces of generation and ordering. Where there was submission and destruction there is now also incitement, reinforcement, control, monitoring, and optimization. There is also a change in the sovereign right of death which is "now manifested as simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life."

On the one hand, this change is a simple shift from death to life, from sovereignty understood as the right to take life to sovereignty understood as the right to maintain and develop life. On the other, there is also a change in the locus of this right: from the sovereign understood as king to the sovereign understood as the social body.

Foucault does not emphasize this right of the social body. Nor does he emphasize that central to the change from the classical age were the American and French revolutions, the spread of liberalism and democracy. I do not intend my point here as a criticism but rather as a reminder of our different conjuncture. Foucault writes at a time when communism was still an option, when radical anti-war, anti-nuclear, and post-colonial struggles did not necessarily anchor their claims in the supposition of democracy but also and with awareness of the promises of socialism. He writes, moreover, in the context of a movement against a regulatory state, a state viewed as consisting of a vastly expansive power to administer, mobilize, and optimize, a state with the capacity many times over to destroy the planet in a nuclear conflagration.

Accordingly, rather than emphasizing the right of the social body, Foucault emphasizes the war capacity of the state rooted in power over life:

Wars are no longer wages in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital.

For Foucault, then, atomic war is the flipside of the power over life, as if the democratic extension of power multiplies sovereign force exponentially. A war is not the defense of a juridical sovereign (soldiers do not sacrifice their lives as requirements for the defense of sovereignty). Rather, "at stake is the biological existence of a population." And the reason for this: "because power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, and the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population." So, race war and the extermination of peoples (waged in the name of a right to exist, in the case of Israel). But also the very existence of a power distributed throughout the population; democracy has a genocidal core (or, at least democracy as organized in the system of sexuality, the regulatory state, and the administration of life).

4.   In place, then, of a secret sex or a silence regarding sex, modern society is characterized by a kind of evasion of death (that remains pervasive nonetheless): since power is over life, death "is power's limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most 'private.'" Reading Foucault more than thirty years later, we might ask ourselves whether death remains a secret or whether it is widely imagined, whether it is power's limit or power's neglect, extension, supplement, fear, threat, or delight, and whether what Foucault marks as death's escape from power might in fact become an opportunity for considering the working of the death drive.

5.   At any rate, for Foucault power over life evolved in 2 forms or poles (that are richly interconnected):

a.   the disciplines (an anatomo politics of the human body): view body as machine, optimize its capabilities, extort its forces, increase its usefulness and docility, integrate it into systems of control;

b.  regulatory controls (a biopolitics of the population): focus on the species body, "the body imbued with the mechanics of life," they concern birth, mortality, health, life expectancy, migration, housing.

These two forms would be joined via the deployment of sexuality.

6.    Biopower was indispensable to development of capitalism:

it had to have methods of power capable of optimizing forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the same time making them more difficult to govern.

Biopolitics operated in the economy and made economic development possible: through segregation, hierarchization, allocation of profit, joining groups to expansion of forces. More important, then, than the Protestant ethic described by Weber, biopolitics marked the "entry of life into history.

7.    Biopolitics is thus more than the influence of the biological on the political. Plagues have always mattered; famine has political effects. The difference Foucault is emphasizing involves the nexus of power/knowledge and of political techniques. Biopolitics involves a knowledge of the species' life and the tactical use of this knowledge (this would be a point to consider a contrast between Foucault's account of biopolitics and Marx's discussions of species being and of the general intellect). More precisely, as the improvement of agriculture and development of fields of knowledge of life expanded

a relative control over life averted some of the imminent risks of death. In the space for movement thus conquered, and broadening and organizing that space, methods of power and knowledge assumed responsibility for the life processes and undertook to control and modify them. . . For the first time in history, no doubt, biological existence was reflected in political existence; the fact of living was no longer an inaccessible substrate that only emerged from time to time, amid the randomness of death and its finality; part of it passed into knowledge's field of control and power's field of intervention.

Biopolitics emerges in a specific context. It is not essential to the political as such or to a specifically Western political ontology. It is not an element of sovereignty's original or originary form but a supplement to and supplanting of that sovereignty, an addition (and set of additive techniques) linked to the spread of political power throughout the population.

8.     For Foucault, the classical version of sovereignty in the system of alliance is primarily a juridical form of power; subjects are legal subjects who can be killed but who in that moment of death escape sovereign power. The power of this sovereign is not a power that extends into the management of lives or life. In contrast,

one would have to speak of biopower to designate what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an age of transformation of human life.

Biopower is not fundamentally a version of juridical or legal power (although it can be made to underlie law and law can be based on and in it as law becomes norm). Rather, it is the set of practices and techniques that politicized life by making it calculable, by making it an object of politics, for political intervention. And, for Foucault, what is crucial here is the species nature of the life, as if it were "all of life."  To this extent, biopower can become life itself because it is the flipside of atomic annihilation, the correlative of the knowledge that produces the power to annihilate the species (also through other developments in microbiology).

9.   We might understand this biopower as the knowledge/capacity to move/impact the species, to modify and organize the species at will (fully aware that this will not be complete and that there are aspects that will escape this modification and organization). And this knowledge/capacity to organize, tie, bind, bring together is necessarily accompanied by impulses to destroy. To this extent, biopower, as Foucault conceives it here, as life both inside and outside human history (outside in some biological environment and inside the changes of knowledge/power), resembles Freud's account of the drives as between psyche and soma, and as forces of binding and unbinding.

10.   Foucault opposes biopower and law. This is not surprising, given the contrast between the system of alliance and the system of sexuality, between his association of juridical power with death and biopower with life. Accordingly, insofar as biopower involves regulation, correction, qualification, measure, and appraisal, insofar as it involves the norm, it is opposed to a law that has to "draw the line that separates the enemies of the sovereign from his obedient subject." Biopower effects a change in law toward regulation, administration, normalization. 

11.   Resistances to biopower have relied "on the very thing it invested, that is, on life and man as a living being." Life has emerged (been constituted as) the self-evident political object, that which is taken at face value. Thus Foucault emphasizes that life more than law has been the issue of political struggle, even when these struggles are waged in the name of rights. Rights to life, health, happiness, one's body all derive from biopolitics rather than the juridical structure of sovereignty. Biopower produces that which resists it, yet these resistances nonetheless extend it.

Comments

[the vanishing mediator]

Dear Professor Dean,

I love your work; your Zizek's Politics is one of the best books yet on Zizek. So please forgive me if this is a dumb question--and please understand that I mean no disrespect--but why Foucault now? I read Foucault extensively in grad. school, and I have read your most recent post several times, and I just don't see anything in this topic that approaches the depths and the provocations of your work on Zizek.

Yours sincerely,
the vanishing mediator

[old]

Thorough yet succinct. An outstanding summary toward lecture notes or whatever. For point three, I would make reference to the lectures in Society Must Be Defended in which the right of the social body is much more thoroughly thematized.

For point four, there is a quote on suicide right around the material you've noted which mentions suicide in passing. This is crucial, and I think still very important. Suicide is one of the original fascinations of biopolitical societies because it wrenches power over life from the social body.

Look forward to future developments and posts ...

[old]

Oh, and mention should be made of all the strange stuff about blood in part four and five of HS. It many ways, genetics is what is really at stake, at least these days.

[Craig]

Jodi, I concur with Old's comments. I'd suggest taking a peek at some recent secondary work on Foucault from those moderately sympathetic to his project: Brian Singer and Lorna "Politics and Sovereign Power" in the European Journal of Social Theory and their "Sovereignty, Governance, and the Political" in Thesis 11 and Bruce Curtis "Foucault on Governmentality and Population" in the Canadian Journal of Sociology. If you haven't read it, Blandine Barret-Kriegel's The State and the Rule of Law (Princeton UP) is interesting for her quasi-Foucauldian defense of the state and sovereignty (Foucault oversaw her thesis on theories of monarchy in France). Lastly, and this is getting further afield from what you are working on (but someone should do it one day - I'm only aware of one paper), is the account of modern political theory presented by Foucault and Skinner.

[Jodi]

argh--it looks like my comment from yesterday didn't post.

anyway, thanks, folks for your nice comments and the very helpful citations.

VM--I'm not particularly interested in Foucault, but I think an inquiry into biopower/biopolitics has to start there. I'm interested in the connections between biopolitics, postpolitics, and drive.

Old--the next text for this series is The Birth of Biopolitics. I had Society Might be Defended in mind as a phrase, but you've pointed out that I need to look at more there. That seems right. Thanks again.

Also, Craig, I wasn't familiar with those articles--thanks for taking the time to give me the cites.

[bjk]

Isn't the most obvious form of "biopolitics" affirmative action? If affirmative action isn't a biologically flavoured politics, it's hard to imagine what is. And yet a Google search under "affirmative action" and biopolitics turns up almost nothing. Curious.

[old]

No bjk, affirmative action is not the most obvious form of biopolitics. Please reread (or read for the first time) Jodi's post.

[Jodi]

It's nearly impossible for me to see how anyone could associate affirmative action and biopolitics. To see how it might be possible, I started thinking about eugenics as biopolitics (which it is for Foucault; this seems uncontroversial). And, then, affirmative action could be thought of as a counter to eugenics so it could be a kind of biopolitics once or twice removed. But this seems wrong insofar as affirmative action laws are not based on knowledge of the species or on optimizing the species. They are not laws about birth and procreation.

[bjk]

Affirmative action policies could not exist without distinguishing between one race and another, and race is surely a biological concept. And how is a political policy based on biological concepts not a biopolitics? A biopolitics restricted to "laws about birth and procreation" is too narrow, by Foucault's own definition. If biopolitics is "incitement, reinforcement, control, monitoring, and optimization ... the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life," then laws aimed at promoting one race or another, particularly in the business of making a living, are certainly a form of biopolitics. No, affirmative action is not "based on the concept of the species.” Were Nazi policies a form of biopolitics because they were based on the concept of the species? Or were Nazi politics based on a concept of race?

[Jodi]

affirmative action is not based on promoting one race or another

[Craig]

"race is surely a biological concept"

This is dubious at best - incidentally, Foucault's original development of the concept biopolitics comes directly out of research into the history of the race concept.

[bjk]

I'd agree that affirmative action is not about promoting the health or optimizing the fitness of one race or another. But it is about promoting the economic welfare of one race or another, and it does so by using a biological concept, race. If somebody is going to say that affirmative action, in its intent, is about remedying an injustice, and therefore not a biopolitics, that borders on saying that whatever we like is not a biopolitics.

Craig: What you say about Foucault is not surprising. As for the status of race as a biological concept, the more we know, the more it's becoming clear that race is indeed biological. Of course, many people's sensibilities are offended by the crudity of race as a concept. Maybe that's what Jodi means by saying that affirmative action is not about race. What are you? is not a polite question to ask a mixed race person. But if there are going to be policies based on race, it is necessary to use crude racial concepts. Self-reporting is not sufficient, for obvious reasons.

[Bob Allen]

Affirmative action is a tactic to undermine the inherent inequalities, socially, of capitalism. It upsets capital's law of (labor) supply and demand. It rips surplus value off the boss's back, of course, they don't like it. If biopolitics is a precursor to capitalism, then affirmative action would be , not a form of biopower, but a part of a sub set of things that are its opposite.

[bjk]

So biopolitics is just a catch-all for whatever you don't like? Thanks for clearing that up, Bob.

[Bob Allen]

Well it could very well be or not, but I was talking about what affirmative action is or isn't.

[Jodi]

Bob's point is a good one--it points to the suppositions of affirmative action as a policy, the sorts of knowledges in which it is embedded; these knowledges are primarily juridical, part of the state's intervention in the market in the name of justice and fairness. The supposition or logic at work is not situated in a set of claims about the population as a biological entity.

[guest]

This is an interesting discussion. I think bjk is right about affirmative action being an example of biopolitics. Biopolitics is a political rationality that can involve arguably better or worse incarnations (for (a crude) example: Nazism vs. consumer capitalism). It does seem that people are associating a judgment of moral 'badness' with what they want to call 'biopolitics'. The use of morality in this way was not part of Foucault's analysis. Consider one of his somewhat famous statements:

I don’t mean that mass slaughters are the effect, the result, the logical consequence of [this] rationality, nor do I mean that the state has the obligation of taking care of individuals since it has the right to kill millions of people… It is this rationality, and the death and life game which takes place in it, that I’d like to investigate from a historical point of view. (Foucault “The Political Technology of Individuals” 147-8)

Limiting ‘biopolitics’ to laws that have only to do with birth and procreation seems like an attempt ad hoc to exclude affirmative action from the definition. Such a conception is not supportable in the context of Foucault's work and seems too narrow to be practically useful. In History of Sexuality Foucault discusses biopower in terms of managing bodies and populations. As quoted in the original post on page 137 he writes that it “is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of the population.” In Society must be Defended he discusses race in connection to biology and the nation (see especially pages 241-258). Affirmative action as a policy of “intervention in the market in the name of justice and fairness” is possible precisely because ‘race’ is a political concept situated (in different ways) at both the level of the body and social ‘body’ (population).

Isn't it possible to support affirmative action policy in a normative sense (i.e.: from a point of view internal to biopolitics) while still being able to identify (and critique?) the conditions of possibility of biopolitics, conditions which make affirmative action attractive as a potential remedy to injustice?

[bjk]

I can see the argument that affirmative action does not have the goal of increasing or extending life, and therefore is not a part of biopolitics. guest also is right that affirmative action would not be possible without the extention of the state into biopolitics, even if affirmative action is not strictly about birth, death, and health.

Foucault almost sounds like a small government conservative paranoid about the extention of state power over every inch of public and private life (but I can't stand his paranoid style, which is why I try not to read him, even if I might find him sympathetic).

[Jodi]

As I see it, to refer to something as biopolitical is to make a claim about the kinds of knowledges it depends on/empowers. It's not a matter of being for or against. With respect to affirmative action, I see it as a juridical logic (right/fairness) intervening in a biopolitical (race, sex) context. What makes it interesting is that to guarantee goals of rightness/fairness in the context of discrimination as defined by the policy it becomes necessary to rely on various kinds of monitoring, demographics, etc. But, as I see it, this is a product of the context, not the logic of the law/policy.

[Jodi]

Below is a comment from Nate. He sent it to me by email because typepad was not cooperating.

hi Jodi,

I hope you're well, and happy new year. I tried to post a comment on your blog post on biopolitics but I got an error message. I figure I'll email it to you. I found the post really helpful and I hope you'll keep posting stuff re: the class and paper on biopolitics as it developed.. I have a really hard time with Foucault and Foucault-speak. One thing that's always bugged me about talk about biopower is that folk don't make clear historical claims and conceptual claims. Like, are they talking about *examples* of biopower or the historical genesis of biopower? Or something else entirely?

And the thing about the right to take life as part of sovereignty. Sounds good, but it's not sufficient as a definition of sovereignty nor was it limited only to governments. Slave masters had great powers to take and punish life, and force life to continue. Or industrialization - it seems to me that with industrialization there was a great spread of the power to take life with relative impunity. Masters couldn't just murder employees, but could force them with impunity to work on machines that killed employees. Arguably, that's a form of sovereignty according to the Foucaultian definition, but that would eliminate the difference between company owners and governments.

I found this sentence of yours particularly helpful: "Biopolitics involves a knowledge of the species' life and the tactical use of this knowledge" But this too seems to cut against the Foucaultian implication of biopolitics as tied to some particular epoch. As you wrote, "Plagues have always mattered; famine has political effects;" presumably any political power facing such problems would make use of some "nexus of power/knowledge and of political techniques," even if would look simple to us today. I mean, can we imagine states that don't involve management of populations, and management of populations that doesn't involve some power/knowledge nexus?

Question for you - on point 10, I've never understood the point about law. Can you explain what you think Foucault means by these distinctions, please? I dug out my copy of HS, on p144 Foucault talks about norms "at the expense of the juridical system of the law." I totally don't get it. It seems to me that "juridical system of the law" is pretty redundant. Maybe this is a matter of France having a civil code legal system vs the English and US common law system, it seems to me that under common law courts were pretty much always capable of the stuff Foucault is talking about. (But like I said I don't understand, so maybe there's a distinction here I don't get.)

This is barely related, but if you want some comparative historical materials, I can think of three that I liked. None deal with biopower/biopolitics as a term, but all could be put in dialog with this stuff. Ann Taylor Allen, _Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe, 1890-1970: The Maternal Dilemma_; Walter Johnson et al, _The Chattel Principle_ (collection of essays on slavery and capitalism in US history); John Witt, _Accidental Republic_ (monograph on workmen's compensation and industrial injury in the US).

Best wishes,
Nate

[Jodi]

Here is my response to Nate:

Hi Nate,

these are good comments; it sucks that they didn't post. would you mind if I posted them in the comments section to the post in your name? thanks also for the cites to other material, particularly the last one on workmen's compensation.

anyway: I completely agree with your remark on the problem of biopolitics re historical and conceptual claims. I hope to navigate this in the posts on biopolitics.

I also think you are right about sovereignty and taking life. It's interesting, though, that the theorists of sovereignty--and I think Foucault mentions this--associate
sovereign power with the power of the father/master. So the power to take life is derivative of a power that is not sovereign even as sovereign power depends on
it for its own claim to authority. That there are other relations of power that take life isn't disputed; a question, though, is their right to do so and how this right is
grounded.

you write: can we imagine states that don't involve
management of populations, and management of populations that doesn't
involve some power/knowledge nexus?

I would say yes to the first: states can ground themselves in brute force and not manage at all; some African states do this (Charles Taylor of Liberia, maybe Mugabe and Amin?) On the second,
the issue is population; Foucault thinks that population is the key to biopolitics as a formation.

On the law stuff: frankly, as far as I'm concerned, Foucault is terrible as a theorist of law; his claims are too broad and crude. What sucks is too many people seem to just
repeat them easily, as if the US legal context were the same as France's. That said, the point is the difference between state law and norms. Violation of a law usually does
not have the same sanctions. You can think about this also in terms of regulations and administration as opposed to distinctions between the lawful and the crimes. Also, there
is a broader expanse of the permissable in the norm (at least this seems to be Foucault's supposition) than in the binary lawful/unlawful. I think one reason this is challenging for
us as contemporary readers is that we have been reared in an administrative, liberal, biopolitical context. To me, the easiest way to understand Foucault's distinction (whether
one thinks it is useful or not) is in terms of the juridical as a regime of right. This can cut into various other regimes--normal, permissible, efficient, exceptional, etc.

Also, juridical system of law isn't redundant because of the plurality of law: canon law, patriarchal law, natural law, tradition, custom, physical, gay, union, military etc

thanks again for your comment,
Jodi

[old]

two quick things, wish I could be far more involved as this conversation continues ...

1) It's a mistake to think or act as if Foucault is saying that there is some sort of clear historical line where nothing like biopolitics (i.e. famine respons) ever happened in the past or that all power in the past was concentrated in one single form of sovereignty. It's far more about primary modes of political reasoning, scale, etc. So Nate's comment about such things in the past looking simple to us today is appropriate. The fact that the theoretical and practical locus of power from a sovereign point in a king was shifted very much more to the people from, say, the Magna Carta forward is just undeniable, even if a bit uninteresting on its own. It's the way Foucault makes use of this narrative that's interesting. He wants to show that this isn't simply to be taken as a progressive movement as it is very much a necessary part of movement to a nuclear society in which it is not primarily the king that has to be defended, but the entire population. Wars in the past were fought and justified primarily in terms of the kings perogatives, now it is the concept of the people that is primarily appealed to. This is why Society Must Be Defended is so important and why, for me, the most important quote in History of Sexuality v. 1 is the one you've quoted above, Jodi, about the biological existence of a population being at stake in contemporary wars. This is what Foucault is after very most importantly. As he puts it somewhere around there, "why wars are so much more bloody" now than ever. And this is the nub of my problem with leftist models of "sieze the state." Ultimately, a power that siezes the state gets caught in the logic of feeling the responsibility of maintaining the purity of the social body within and organizing in such a way as to be prepared to defend that entire body from outside powers.

Okay, that's far too long of a paragraph, but it's late, I'm not going to break it up and my second point will be the short. Foucault isn't as bad on the law as you make out. Yes, sometimes far to sweeping. And he could obviously use the help of "citationality" in his understanding of law, but Society Must Be Defended shows someone with great historical insight into the importance of law in the shift from monarchical power to people power.

[Jodi]

Thanks for the comment, Old. Putting the law stuff aside, I think where we differ most is on what you call the leftist model of seizing the state. What has been most pronounced to me in reading the Birth of Biopolitics is the way that Foucault shows how ostensible efforts to limit government (not to govern too much)result in precisely the opposite--a hideous regime of control and intervention. So it's hardly the problem of seizing the state that is at work here.

[Nate]

hi Jodi,

Thanks for posting that comment for me. I hope this one works.

On population, that's another bit I don't really get in Foucault. Is he talking about the emergence of discussions of population (and if so, explicit discussions where the term is present or implicit discussions where the concept is present without the term, in the way that we might say race or class or gender are all over in - and determinant of - American culture even when not in the manifest content) or the existence of populations as entities existing in the world? I worry I'm repeating myself here, but it seems to me that this is really old stuff. I really liked some of your phrases, the stuff I quoted. Part of what your post helped me clarify is that I think that to the degree that things like famine and plague and so on have posed political problems because of their effects on actually existing human populations, and to the degree that governments have successfully dealt with those problems, then there must have been some level of knowledge - some knowhow - of populations, even if not explicitly formulated as such. This is probably ultimately a trivial point, so I'll leave it off.

The stuff on law and norm is clearer, thank you for that. If you don't mind, can you say more on norms, though, what those are? Your comment made this stuff clearer, but not all clear. Part of this may be that I just don't think of law that way - lawful/unlawful. For instance, under the common law system judges can make law such that it's not a *crime* to commit an act but to commit that act opens people to possible civil suit I've run into this in the little bit of research I've done on workplace accidents prior to the creation of workmen's compensation, where judges would rule that a law or ruling that said that saws need to be guarded also applied to ironing machines, or something like that, such that the lack of a guard makes an injury legally actionable but only in civil court. Maybe that's a more succinct way to put this - I don't get how civil law fits into the law vs norm thing. Again maybe I just misunderstand Foucault (or the law), but I think it may also be a matter of what laws Foucault was talking about, such that the distinction he's talking about may be less law vs something other than law and more some body or bodies of laws vs something else. Not sure that's clear, not sure I can do better, I'm off to read your other posts.

take care,
Nate

[old]

Jodi, you are right about limiting the state being the more important focus than seizing the state. By that point, Foucault was working in a decidely post-marxist mode and had no time for any suggestion of seizing the state. He wasn't privy, of course, to the return of old school Marxism in Zizek and Badiou. In fact, he was involved in a pretty rigorous with Habermas around this time.

To the extent that anti-statist tendencies end up propping up 'limit the state' regimes, they are to be completely scorned, but there are ways of ordering one's politics around a rejection of the state that do not work in this direction.

[Heiti]

Hi, I would like to join the discussion and Jodi I am glad that you made this blog. First of all I would like to add one comment regarding the "affirmative action" argument. I do believe that it is not a form of bio-power, but serves merely as a intervention in order to regulate public opinion and to prevent more resistance from part of the desired "race", if you want to call it that way. Maybe we could say that it is a negative externality of bio-power.

However, I would like to ask about your thoughts, if your time permits, about the relations between bio-power and genocide, considering aspects of race and purity. (Here we might come back to the transformation of the sovereign bloodline to the concern of pureness within a society, which was suddenly faced with borders).