Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

CATHERINE MILLS
ship,” such that “power literally ignores death.” 50 Foucault’s comments here
may be regarded as a transposed repressive hypothesis; in suggesting that
“death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the most
secret aspect of existence, the most ‘private,’” 51 Foucault echoes the theoretical
fallacy that he diagnoses with regard to sexuality. This then suggests
the response that rather than being the limit of power, death is the means by
which biopower functions—that is, it is precisely by recalling the risk of
death, its immanence in life, that biopower operates, since it is the everpresent
threat of death that justifies and rationalises regulatory intervention
in the life of populations and individuals. Therefore, rather than attempting
to eliminate or privatise death, biopower presupposes it for its operation;
death is not the limit of biopower but its precondition. Against Foucault, we
might say that it is not so much that “a relative control over life averted
some of the immanent risks of death,” 52 but that an increasing control over
death averts the immanent risks of life and permits its administration. This
suggests, then, that biopower cannot be considered in terms of oppositions
of “care” or “violence,” “death” or “life”; instead, it establishes a mutually
reinforcing relation between them: death is a precondition of living; violence
is a precondition of care, and vice versa.
Conclusion
I have argued throughout this paper that contemporary literature on
biopolitics has largely neglected to examine the concept of life that it
continually invokes. Despite the proliferation of notions of life, the “bio”
that marks the specificity of biopolitics as a rationality and technology of
power fades into being little more than the obscure object of political
techniques. The problem, though, is that to the extent that this is true, theoreticians
of biopolitics risk participating in and reinforcing the very
operations that they seek to diagnose. That is to say, the obfuscation of life,
the apparent failure to conceptualise life as such, risks seeing it as merely an
epiphenomenon of the state and of governance. This completely fails to see
the active power of life itself. It mistakenly casts the state as productive of
life, and therefore neglects the fundamental reactivity of the biopolitical
state in relation to life.
50 Foucault, “Society Must be Defended,” 248.
51 Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 138.
52 Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 142.
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