ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault is widely regarded as the most important figure within debates on biopolitics, since while he did not invent the terms ‘biopower’ or ‘biopolitics’, his work is a touchstone for contemporary debates on these political rationalities. Of central importance is his claim in The Will to Knowledge (Foucault 1990), 1 that the emergence of ‘life’ as an object of politics at the end of the eighteenth century marked a definitive shift in political rationality. Perhaps surprisingly, though, given the influence of his work within biopolitical studies, Foucault himself spent little time directly discussing the concepts of biopower and biopolitics. This has been taken by some as an indication that these were not especially important to him as analytic tools, and played only minor roles in the development of his thought.
