Disciplinary and biopolitical power are co-constitutive, not separate theories

Evidence

Hence the importance of sex, not as a repository of secrets or basic truths about individuals, but rather as a target, as a political issue. “On the one hand it was tied to the disciplines of the body: the harnessing, intensification, and distribution of forces, the adjustment and economy of energies. On the other hand, it was applied to the regulation of populations, through all the far-reaching effects of its activity…It was employed as a standard for disciplines and as a basis for regulations.” … The specificity and the importance of labor and sexuality—and the fact that they are “cathected” or “hypercathected” by the discourse of political economy on the one hand and by medical knowledge on the other—arise from the fact that they are the points where relations of disciplinary power and biopower’s normalizing techniques intersect and therefore intensify their effects and strengthen thew hold. These two powers therefore do not, as has sometimes been said, constitute two separate “theories” within Foucault’s thought. One does not preclude the other; one is not independent of the other. One does not derive from the other; they are, rather, knowledge /power’s two conjoint modes of functioning, though it is true that they do have their own specific foci, points of application, finalities, and enyewx: the training of bodies on the one hand, and the regulation of the population on the other. — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 294

Categorization

• DEFINE: Resolves a common misreading: anatomo-politics and biopolitics are two poles of one power-over-life, not distinct systems.
• XREF: Essential scaffold for the reader’s biopolitics/necropolitics vocabulary that Islamophobia readings assume. — connects to: The norm is what circulates between disciplinary and regulatory power — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 268; Analyzing power requires simultaneously reworking both theory and historical method

Related

• Sexuality is produced by biopower’s discourses, not a repressed secret to decode (similarity 0.79)
• Biopolitics governs populations through statistics, not individuals (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Analyzing power requires simultaneously reworking both theory and historical method #corroborates (0.75)