Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

BIOPOLITICAL LIFE
particular, the term “life” tends to operate as a signifier without referent,
almost infinitely encompassing and divisible, with the consequence that
“life itself” is whatever is said about it and the operations by which life is
managed and directed are seen as almost inevitably efficacious. A further
danger of this approach, then, is that it elides the ways in which the
phenomena of life might exceed and escape the ways in which people think
about them, as well as the practices that strive to contain and improve them.
In this paper, I want to address the lacuna in recent literature on biopolitics
to take the prefix “bio,” which makes biopolitics a specific political
rationale and form of organisation, seriously. To do this, I discuss the ways
of thinking about “life” that have emerged in biopolitics literature, and
through that, trace some of the parameters of “life” as a problem for
thinking about politics today. 7 In the first section of the paper, I discuss the
contributions to a philosophy of life suggested by Giorgio Agamben in his
work on biopolitics, especially the idea of an absolutely immanent “happy
life.” I suggest that Agamben’s strong resistance to biological conceptions of
life limits the appeal of his work, since this tends to foreclose analysis of the
“bio” of biopolitics. Following this, I turn to Roberto Esposito’s recent book,
Bios, in which he urges attention to the work of Georges Canguilhem as a
starting point for a positive biopolitics that sees the norm as an immanent
impulse of life. I use Esposito’s discussion as a springboard for reconsidering
the role of norms in Foucault’s own work on biopolitics—especially in
light of his essay on Canguilhem, in which he emphasises the productive
capacity for error internal to life. I conclude that it is in the relationship of
error and norms that the connection between life and politics may be made
apparent. The reciprocal production of social and vital norms in the human
as living being, and their specific conjunction in concerns such as
population health, eugenics and new genetics, precipitates a biological
politics that then extends into other domains of living. This point of view
suggests that biopower is less a matter of controlling life that it is a matter of
managing error—or rather, it is the former by virtue of the latter. It also
highlights the way in which the biopolitical state is fundamentally reactive
in relation to life.
7 This forms a kind of prolegomenon to an approach to biopolitics that engages more
thoroughly with theories of biology—not as a simple substitute for a theorisation of
biopolitics, but as a way of generating a theorisation that is more able to engage with the
biological microstructures of human life and their potential—but I do not attempt to
develop such an approach here. Such a project would be situated at the conjunction of
theories of biopolitics and recent interest in the philosophy of life, as well as a genealogy
of modern biology.
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