From state biology to the government of life: Historical dimensions and contemporary perspectives of ‘biopolitics’

Abstract

The notion of biopolitics has recently become a buzzword. However, there is no consensus about its empirical object or its normative implications. A further disagreement concerns the historical period to which the term refers. For some, biopolitics goes back to Antiquity, or even to the invention of agriculture, while others regard it as the result of contemporary biotechnological innovations. My point of departure in this article is the virtual polarization that is attached to the merger of life and politics in the notion of biopolitics. The existing concepts differ in respect of which part of the word they emphasize. It is possible to distinguish naturalistic concepts that take life as the basis of politics and to contrast these with politicist concepts which conceive of life processes as the object of politics. The two lines of interpretation will be analysed in the first part of the article. My central thesis is that both approaches fail to capture essential dimensions of biopolitical processes. Against the naturalist and the politicist reading I will propose a historical notion of biopolitics that was first developed by the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. The diverse refinements and corrections of the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics can be integrated into an ‘analytics of biopolitics’ that will be presented in the final part of the paper.