ABSTRACT
Recent scholarship on biopolitics argues that Foucault’s analytic for knowing power can no longer fully capture the ways life is governed and made an object of power. For example, Elizabeth Povinelli argues that there is a more fundamental binary (life/nonlife) that underpins biopolitics and better addresses other forms of governance that, for Povinelli, biopolitics misses, and that scholarship on biopolitics is too focused on spectacular forms of death and biological racism, and thus, misses ordinary suffering. This chapter works towards offering a biopolitics that theorizes death in terms of ordinariness and suggests that biopolitics is still a useful analytic within neoliberalism. It accepts that massive-scale killing is not the modus operandi of the biopolitics of neoliberal spatio-temporality, and that the logic of neoliberalism does more than “reduce social values to one market value,” as Povinelli suggests. Rather than advocate for moving beyond biopolitics, this chapter argues instead that neoliberal biopolitics can still be understood in terms of Foucault’s analytic, and that perhaps, we need to disentangle Foucault’s work from Achille Mbembe’s “Necropolitics.”
