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Giorgio Agamben examines biopolitics from a historical perspective dating back to Ancient Greece and, unlike Foucoult, considers the violence and oppression of the sovereign power as a policy that develops strategies that legitimize it. It is also possible to see how the authoritative includes the biological existence of man in his own politics and the dilemmas created by this, in the tragedies that frequently express the conflict between legal-political life and natural life. Among the three great tragedian writers, Euripides provides an opportunity to read through contemporary political relations in that he writes realistic and extraordinary works in terms of both content and form, and uses an unsettling and critical style instead of suggesting moderation. This study investigates the reflections of biopolitics in Ancient Greek tragedies in order to expand the field of political thought in tragedies and to make anachronistic aspects of biopolitics visible, and tries to find the equivalent of Agamben's determinations on biopolitics in Euripides's Bacchas. Bacchas, like Sophocles' Antigone, place the unjust domination of state law over bare life and the violence mechanism of the sovereign power in the tense conflict between the natural order and the social order. With such a reading, Pentheus and Dionysus assume the semantic counterpart of the dominant power and homo sacer figure and 'Bios' and 'Zoe'.

This article proposes 'biopolitics multiple' as an approach to the heterogeneity of biopolitical technologies deployed to govern migration today. Building on work that has started to develop analytical vocabularies to diagnose biopolitical technologies that work neither by fostering life nor by making people die in a necropolitical sense, it conceptualises 'extraction' and 'subtraction' as two such technologies that take 'hold' of migrants' lives today. Extraction, explored in the article through a focus on borderzones in Greece, captures the imbrication of biopolitics and value through the 'outside' creation of the economic conditions of data circulation. Subtraction, which is analysed in this article through a focus on Calais, captures the practices of (partial) non-governing by taking material and legal terrain away from migrants and reconfiguring convoluted geographies of (forced) hyper-mobility. This move allows us to understand the governmentality of migration beyond binary oppositions such as 'making live/letting die', biopolitics/necropolitics and inclusion/exclusion. Biopolítica múltiple: migración, extracción, sustracción

The article addresses the puzzling silence of the Foucaldian studies of biopolitics about Soviet socialism by revisiting Foucault's own account of socialism in his 1970s work, particularly his 1975–6 course 'Society Must Be Defended'. Foucault repeatedly denied the existence of an autonomous governmentality in socialism, demonstrating its dependence on the techniques of government developed in 19th-century western Europe. For Foucault Soviet socialism was fundamentally identical to its ideological antagonist in its biopolitical rationality, which he defined in terms of racism. This article challenges Foucault's reading, demonstrating that his notion of racism is ill-suited to describe the governmental rationalities of Soviet socialism during both the formation and the consolidation of the Stalinist regime. While the Soviet project was paradigmatically biopolitical in its ambition to transform the forms of life of the population in line with the communist ideology, its biopolitics was fundamentally different from the security-oriented logic of racism, focusing instead on the exposure of the population to the violent transformation of their forms of life. Revisiting Foucault's genealogy of racism, we argue that the point of descent of this biopolitics lies in the 19th-century split of the 'counter-historical' discourse of the struggle of the races into the discourses of state racism and class struggle. While Foucault's genealogy focuses on the development of the former into liberal and totalitarian biopolitics as we know them, it leaves class struggle out of the history of biopolitics and is therefore unable to account for the biopolitical specificity of the Soviet project. ; Peer reviewed

Foucault's work on biopolitics and governmentality has inspired a wide variety of responses, ranging from philosophy and political science to history, legal studies, and urban planning. Drawing on historical sources from antiquity to twentieth century liberalism, Foucault presented us with analyses of freedom, individuality, and power that cut right to the heart of these matters in the present.

This article examines the biopolitical dimension in ordoliberal thought using Wilhelm Röpke and Alexander Rüstow as exemplary figures of this tradition. Based on an explication of various biopolitical themes that can be extracted from Foucault's writings and lectures the article argues that these biopolitical themes, although rarely touched on in Foucault's lectures on ordoliberal governmentality, nevertheless constitute an integral aspect of the thought of Röpke and Rüstow. From the regulation of the population through the strategic lever of the family to the organicist concerns over the health of the social body, biopolitical themes pervade the socio-economic theories of ordoliberalism. The article suggests that critical evaluations of the ordoliberal approach to political economy, which has been gaining ground again in the aftermath of the financial crisis, should take into account the biopolitical–and rather illiberal–dimension of this approach as well.

Major service change in healthcare – whereby the distribution of services is reconfigured at a local or regional level - is often a contested, political and poorly understood set of processes. This paper contributes to the theoretical understanding of major service change by demonstrating the utility of interpreting health service reconfiguration as a biopolitical intervention. Such an approach orients the analytical focus towards an exploration of the spatial and the population – crucial factors in major service change. Drawing on a qualitative study from 2011–12 of major service change in the English NHS combining documentary analyses of historically relevant policy papers and contemporary policy documentation (n = 125) with semi-structured interviews (n = 20) we highlight how a particular 'geography of stroke' in London was created building upon multiple types of knowledge: medical, epidemiological, economic, demographic, managerial and organisational. These informed particular spatial practices of government providing legitimation for the significant political upheaval that accompanies NHS service reconfiguration by problematizing existing variation in outcomes and making these visible. We suggest that major service change may be analysed as a 'practice of security' – a way of redefining a case, conceiving of risks and dangers, and averting potential crises in the interests of the population.

International audience ; PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis) is a relatively new drug-based HIV prevention technique and an important means to lower the HIV risk of gay men who are especially vulnerable to HIV. From the perspective of biopolitics, PrEP inscribes itself in a larger trend of medicalization and the rise of pharmapower. This article reconstructs and evaluates contemporary literature on biopolitical theory as it applies to PrEP, by bringing it in a dialogue with a mapping of the political debate on PrEP. As PrEP changes sexual norms and subjectification, for example condom use and its meaning for gay subjectivity, it is highly contested. The article shows that the debate on PrEP can be best described with the concepts 'sexual-somatic ethics' and 'democratic biopolitics', which I develop based on the biopolitical approach of Nikolas Rose and Paul Rabinow. In contrast, interpretations of PrEP which are following governmentality studies or Italian Theory amount to either farfetched or trivial positions on PrEP, when seen in light of the political debate. Furthermore, the article is a contribution to the scholarship on gay subjectivity, highlighting how homophobia and homonormativity haunts gay sex even in liberal environments, and how PrEP can serve as an entry point for the destigmatization of gay sexuality and transformation of gay subjectivity. 'Biopolitical democratization' entails making explicit how medical technology and health care relates to sexual subjectification and ethics, to strengthen the voice of (potential) PrEP users in health politics, and to renegotiate the profit and power of Big Pharma.

As COVID-19 spreads across the globe, new technologies are being leveraged to enforce social distancing requirements. I explore social distancing through the theoretical lens of Michel Foucault's biopolitics, with an emphasis on recognizing unauthorized movement and controlling circulation. Although reporting and widely shared data visualizations about COVID-19 have made many people newly aware that their movements are being tracked and surveilled, governments are already implementing new measures such as geofencing and artificial intelligence (AI)–based facial recognition to facilitate the enforcement of social distancing. The tracking of COVID-19 spread and social distancing behaviors of the public has made more visible the practices of biopolitics but also generated new opportunities for even greater surveillance and control. The current moment offers an opportunity to shift public perceptions about data surveillance, technological control, and the racial disparities of biopower, much in the same way that public perceptions around social media shifted during and after the Arab Spring. How we collectively respond to these biopolitical processes will, in part, determine how such power relations are articulated in the future.

After the last quarter of twentieth century, it has become almost impossible not to take into consideration the importance of the contributions of Michel Foucault's legacy, and hence, its impact on various fields of human knowledge, concerning the achievement of a more refined comprehension of current social issues. In educational field, in particular, whether in regard to the analysis of the discursive and non discursive practices that currently take place in schooling and beyond it, or in studies on the subjectivation processes and, still, in investigations on the resonances between education and the political, economic and cultural changes in present times, the fact is that Foucault seems to be more alive than ever.

International audience ; The article demonstrates that Hannah Arendt's examination of modern temporality strongly intersects with Michel Foucault's diagnosis of modern biopolitics. Both observe three key features of biopolitical modernity: the political zoefication of life, a technocratic understanding of politics, and processual temporality which link the project of modernity to the project of 20th-century totalitarianism. Arendt, however, also offers an alternative, nonbiopolitical understanding of politics, life, and time captured in the concept of natality. Built into the concept of natality is the 'weakly' messianic temporal structure of the interval as opposed to processual temporality.

The bodies of murdered Mexican women in Roberto Bolaño's novel 2666 have been taken by critics to signify the biopolitical power of the neoliberal order. This article will contend that such readings overlook a broader crisis of bodily representation, which is apparent both in 2666 and in Bolaño's earlier novels. The extent to which the body might be 'read' as part of a signifying system is insistently challenged in Bolaño's work, where images of the human are frequently fragmented or unstable. Drawing on ideas from Levinas and Deleuze, I suggest that the difficulty of representing the human, and the political implications of that act, are particularly clear when Bolaño approaches the face. I then argue, following Jean-Luc Nancy, that the theological imagery which accrues around the body of the artist in Bolaño's work stages the deconstruction of Christian humanist aesthetics. Ultimately, Bolaño's fragmented bodies invite a mode of reading which is not uniquely concerned with representation.

The article demonstrates that Hannah Arendt's examination of modern temporality strongly intersects with Michel Foucault's diagnosis of modern biopolitics. Both observe three key features of biopolitical modernity: the political zoefication of life, a technocratic understanding of politics, and processual temporality which link the project of modernity to the project of 20th-century totalitarianism. Arendt, however, also offers an alternative, nonbiopolitical understanding of politics, life, and time captured in the concept of natality. Built into the concept of natality is the 'weakly' messianic temporal structure of the interval as opposed to processual temporality. © 2007, SAGE. All rights reserved.

In this article it is discussed the present effort that aims at an approach of bioethics and politics, following a proposal which sustains that bioethical conflicts reach a political scenery, specially the ones which are connected to poverty, social inequity and exclusion. By elucidating some definitions of politics, it is introduced the idea that bioethics and politics act in different ambito and with different methods. Bioethics thus cannot adopt power discourse. A consonance between bioethics and politics in a deliberation plan is not contrivable to biopolitics. The proposal of bioethics, in general, and of protection bioethics, in specific, recognizes a deep incompatibility with biopolitics. The first one is formed by bíos – existence – and biopolitics is componed by zôì, destroying the bíos, as the name indicates, life approximates from animal life and is deprived from its humanity. In this antagonism, bioethics has precisely the task of protecting the bios of not being treated as only azôì, and of arguing in resistance to the biopolitical perspectives, which work excluding freedom values. ; En este artículo discuto el actual esfuerzo por facilitar el acercamiento de la bioética a la política, dentro de la propuesta de la derivación de los conflictos bioéticos a la arena política, ante todo los que se relacionan con la pobreza, la inequidad social y la exclusión. Al aclarar algunas definiciones de la política, introduzco la idea de que el ideario del poder es foráneo a la bioética, para argumentar que Bioética y política obran en ámbitos distintos, y con métodos que difieren entre sí. La bioética no puede, por lo tanto, adoptar el lenguaje del poder. Una convergencia entre bioética y política en el plano de la deliberación no es pensable para la biopolítica. La propuesta de la bioética en general, y de la bioética de protección en particular, reconoce una profunda incompatibilidad con la biopolítica, en tanto la primera se ocupa del bíos – existencia- y la biopolítica se ensaña con la zoe destruyendo el bíos pues, como su nombre lo indica, la vida nuda se acerca a la vida animal y es despojada de su humanidad. En este antagonismo, la bioética tiene precisamente el rol de proteger al bíos de no ser tratado como merazoe, y de argumentar en oposición a las perspectivas biopolíticas, que operan en forma excluyente de los valores de libertad.

Our aim is to show how the discussion about the most suitable scale for imperial scientific policies conditioned the type of botany that was to spread throughout the colonies. Thus we want to explore the shift between two conflicting types of biopolitics: the botanical policy of the Metropolis and the political botany in the colonies. This is a distinction that refers to the shift from an organizational model based on the production of data towards one that assigns and redistributes values. They both emanate from the plant world. The first biopolicy seeks to take advantage of the domain through its floristic resources; the second, in contrast, tries to ensure that the qualities of the plants, by digestion, should improve the moral stature of the community. The Empire demands a policy to organize plants, while in the colonies they need a type of botany to create the polis. ; Peer reviewed

American Dolorologies presents a theoretically sophisticated intervention into contemporary equations of subjectivity with trauma. Simon Strick argues against a universalism of pain and instead foregrounds the intimate relations of bodily affect with racial and gender politics. In concise and original readings of medical debates, abolitionist photography, Enlightenment philosophy, and contemporary representations of torture, Strick shows the crucial function that evocations of "bodies in pain" serve in the politicization of differences. This book provides a historical contextualization of contemporary ideas of suffering, sympathy, and compassion, thus establishing an embodied genealogy of the pain that is at the heart of American democratic sentiment. Print versions available for purchase at https://sunypress.edu/Books/A/American-Dolorologies ; Open Access version supported by Knowledge Unlatched ; VoR ; SUNY Press ; N/A