Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

CATHERINE MILLS
combined to form a “biopolitics” has received relatively little attention.
Even where it has received attention, the focus has primarily been on the
nature of modern politics, a politics, it is claimed, that takes hold of and
controls the phenomena of life. But this is a one-sided way of addressing the
problem. For one may also ask, what is it about “life” that attracts the
interests of governance and what, in life, allows it to be an object of political
technique? In what ways do the phenomena of life provoke a biopolitics?
Given the rhetorical centrality of the “bio” in biopolitics, it is striking that
there is a widespread reluctance in the literature to approach the problem of
life in more than a gestural or fantastic way. While the equivocations of the
concept of life have undoubtedly been productive, the referent of the “bio”
in the term “biopolitics” remains almost completely undisclosed. Instead, it
is the dark background upon which the machinations of modern politics
play out. In a sense, the ghost of Aristotle returns in virtually every attempt
to theorise the relationship between life and politics.
It may seem strange to claim that the problem of life has fallen to the
wayside in discussions of biopolitics, for is this not exactly what is most at
stake in this literature? One could point to the proliferation of notions of
life—from nuda vita or bare life, 2 to creaturely life, 3 and surplus life, 4 to
name but a few. These exploit the manifold senses of the term “life,” insofar
as it is used to name a range of phenomena from mere animation to more
specific areas of experience such as “public life” or “personal life” and so on.
But to give one example of the obfuscation of “life,” let me point briefly to
Nikolas Rose’s influential and widely read text, The Politics of Life Itself. 5 At
no point does Rose give any account of “life itself,” preferring instead to
“explore the philosophy of life that is embodied in the ways of thinking and
acting espoused by the participants in [the] politics of life itself.” 6 Thus, in a
manner that is characteristic of much biopolitics literature, what is under
investigation here is not life, but politics. While Rose’s approach certainly
has its advantages insofar as it brings out the discourses at work in
contemporary consumer genetics and medicine, it also has its dangers. In
2 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
3 Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago: University Of Chicago
Press, 2006).
4 Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era
(Washington: University of Washington Press, 2008).
5 Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power and Subjectivity in the
Twenty-First Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
6 Ibid, 49.
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