ABSTRACT
In this book, I have provided an overview of key theoretical contributions and traced the broad contours of various current debates and topics for further consideration in biopolitical studies. The book proceeded in two parts; in the first, I looked closely at the theorizations of biopolitics provided by key figures, primarily Foucault, Agamben, Arendt and Esposito, and also included a brief discussion of Hardt and Negri. Today, it could almost be said that the key line of differentiation between scholars of biopolitics is whether their intellectual sympathies mesh with the genealogical approach to biopower initiated by Foucault, or the ontologically focused ‘paradigmatic’ approach of Agamben. As we saw, Agamben casts his reflections on biopolitics as an attempt to correct or complete the previous analyses of Foucault (Agamben 1998, 9), but in fact his prior philosophical commitments ensure that his own account significantly differs from Foucault’s. By this point, it will probably be evident that my own sympathies lie more with Foucault’s genealogy than with the Agambenian framework of sovereign exceptionalism and bare life. In my own work on reproductive technologies, I have found Foucault’s texts productive, and his concepts sufficiently analytically flexible to yield new insights about phenomena that he could not have discussed himself (such as prenatal testing technologies). This is not to say that his work is beyond critique; far from it. But the central aphoristic characterization of biopower as a power that aims to ‘foster life or disallow it to the point of death’ (Foucault 1990, 138), and the analytic focus on the integration of knowledge as styles of thinking with the institutions and apparatuses of power seems to me to provide an unparalleled conceptual and methodological framework for the study of biopolitics.
