Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

BIOPOLITICAL LIFE
complete vitalisation of the norm, insisting on a more differentiated
approach to norms and normalisation. This is important because while the
exteriority—perhaps even transcendence—of social norms is indicated by
the capacity to question those norms, it also opens them to such questioning
and, ultimately, to transformation. In this regard, Esposito has
notably little to say about one particular aspect of the productive power of
the living that Canguilhem emphasises in the final pages of The Normal and
the Pathological. This is the notion that life is characterised by an internal
errancy, or capacity for error. Interestingly, it is this capacity for error that
Foucault emphasises, suggesting that “Canguilhem has proposed a philosophy
of error, of the concept of the living, as a different way of approaching
the notion of life.” 35 It is to Foucault’s treatment of the capacity for error,
and its implications for biopolitical life, that I now wish to turn. I have so
far argued that the main theories of biopolitics are ill-equipped to articulate
the prefix “bio” that gives the concept any specificity. Consequently, they
fail to explain the active role that life plays in the operations of biopolitics.
In the following section, I will suggest that Foucault’s work provides
resources for remedying these problems.
Biopolitics and error: Foucault
In the final chapter of History of Sexuality, Foucault makes his infamous
argument that during the eighteenth century, the fundamental principle of
Western politics changed from a sovereign power to a new regime of
biopower, in which biological life itself became the object and target of
political power. Biopower incorporates both disciplinary techniques geared
toward mastering the forces of the individual body and a biopolitics centred
around the regulation and management of the life of a new political subject,
the population. 36 This new regime of political power operates according to
35 Foucault, “Life: Experience and Science,” 477.
36 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Richard
Hurley (London: Penguin, 1981), 135-45. See also Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”:
Lectures at the College De France, 1975–76, eds. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana,
trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), and Foucault, Security, Territory,
Population: Lectures at the College De France, 1977–78, trans. Graham Burchell (New
York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), in which he explicitly discusses the idea of biopolitics.
As this suggests, on occasion Foucault makes a distinction between “biopolitics” and
“biopower,” wherein the former term refers to the constitution and incorporation of the
population as a new subject of governance, and the latter is a broader term that encompasses
both biopolitics and discipline. Even so, he does not rigorously maintain it. I
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