ABSTRACT
As the previous chapter made evident, questions of political theory and philosophy have been central to the development of debates on biopolitics. Conflicts about how to conceptualize sovereignty and its relation to biopolitics, or how to think about government or rights, have been among the key lines of differentiation between the major theorists. Indeed, discussions of biopolitics have to a large extent been discussions of politics. This raises a question about the specific work that the ‘bio’ of biopolitics does, and whether it does or ought to serve to distinguish biopolitics from politics more generally. In this, it is interesting that there has been remarkably less engagement in debates on biopolitics with the ‘bio’ part of the term, a recent turn to philosophy of life notwithstanding. For instance, while several of the major theorists discuss Hobbes at length, there is barely any mention in their works of figures such as Antoine van Leeuwenhoek and John Ray 1 , or even Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel to name only several of the best-known figures in the development of modern biology. Indeed, of the major theorists, only Foucault offered any detailed account of the emergence of modern biology as a particular formation of knowledge, in The Order of Things (1994). Here, Foucault traces the emergence of a particular episteme or way of thinking about life and living organisms, which, I suggested in an earlier chapter, acts as a condition of possibility for the centring of life as an object of scientific knowledge and political power. In short, biopower, as Foucault understood it, emerges in tandem with the modern episteme that underwrote the development of disciplines such as biology, statistics and public health.
