Biopower takes control of life through the twin poles of body and population

Evidence

Beneath that great absolute power, beneath the dramatic and somber absolute power that was the power of sovereignty, and which consisted in the power to take life, we now have the emergence, with this technology of biopower, of this technology of power over “the” population as such, over men insofar as they are living beings. It 1s continuous, scientific, and it is the power to make live. Sovereignty took life and let live. And now we have the emergence of a power that I would call the power of regularization, and it, in contrast, consists in making live and letting die. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 262 (#expands, via linked claim)

You know that in the classical theory of sovereignty, the right of life and death was one of sovereignty’s basic attributes. Now the right of life and death is a strange right. Even at the theoretical level, it is a strange right. What does having the right of life and death actually mean? In one sense, to say that the sovereign has a right of life and death means that he can, basically, either have people put to death or let them live, or in any case that life and death are not natural or immediate stant phenomena which are primal or radical, and which fall outside the field of power. If we take the argument a little further, or to the point are - ly where it becomes paradoxical, it means that in terms of his relationship with the sovereign, the subject is, by rights, neither dead nor alive. From the point of view of life and death, the subject is neutral, a and it is thanks to the sovereign that the subject has the right to be alive or, possibly, the right to be dead. In any case, the lives and deaths of subjects become rights only as a result of the will of the sovereign. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 255 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

But the body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs. This political investment of the body is bound up, in accordance with complex reciprocal relations, with its economic use; it is largely as a force of production that the body is invested with relations of power and domination; but, on the other hand, its constitution as labour power is possible only if it is caught up in a system of subjection (in which need is also a political instrument meticulously prepared, calculated and used); the body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 73 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Colonial and apartheid terror fuses biopower with the state of exception and siege. — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 68; Biopower replaces sovereignty’s power over death with power over life — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 262; The classical age reconceived the body as a manipulable object of power. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 213 (+5 more)

Related

• Biopower replaces sovereignty’s power over death with power over life (similarity 0.89)
• Sovereign power makes the subject’s very life and death depend on its will (similarity 0.86)
• Sovereign power over life is asymmetrical, always weighted toward killing (similarity 0.82)
• Nineteenth-century power added ‘make live and let die’ alongside sovereign right to kill (similarity 0.80)
• Demographic explosion and industrialization forced power beyond sovereignty (similarity 0.80)
• Atomic power exposes biopower’s paradox of killing to preserve life. (similarity 0.79)
• Demographic explosion and industrialization forced sovereignty to yield to biopower. (similarity 0.79)
• Atomic power exposes the paradox of a sovereign power that kills life itself (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Biopower replaces sovereignty’s power over death with power over life #expands (0.92) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 262
• Sovereign power makes the subject’s very life and death depend on its will #qualifies (0.88) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 255
• The classical age reconceived the body as a manipulable object of power. #expands (0.85) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 213
• A body becomes a useful force only when it is both productive and subjected #expands (0.85) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 73
• Power produces the individual rather than merely repressing it #expands (0.80) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 301
• Reproduction serves an economic function at both societal and family scales #exemplifies (0.78) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1098
• Knowledge of colonized peoples produces power to control them #exemplifies (0.72)