Biopolitics

While Michel Foucault was not the first to use the term ‘biopolitics', his formulation of this concept transformed its meaning fundamentally for subsequent generations of scholars. Through this concept, Foucault turned the tables on a tradition of research that would seek in ‘nature', and specifically in organic life, the foundational matrix for political life. Instead, he inaugurated a rich seam of research into the processes through which ‘life' came to be constituted as a political problem and as an object of governance. The theme of biopolitics was initially developed in the context of a genealogy of the modern state but remains relevant in a broader context of governance characterised by liberal and neoliberal modes of thought and operation. The relationship between biopolitics and ‘life' itself is one of dynamic tension. If biopower can be imagined as a form of the exercise of power that seeks to capture, define, and channel the powers of living beings, the vitality of such beings lies precisely in the extent to which their creativity always exceeds and escapes definitive capture.