ABSTRACT

This chapter shows that concept of biopolitics has been subjected to a number of sophisticated elaborations that significantly stretch the concept. It outlines the intertwined concepts of biopower and biopolitics in the thought of Michel Foucault. A biopolitical key allows law to be understood in its multiple and complementary registers of operation. Biopolitics has a varied and long history; a history that unfolds along multiples lines of elaboration, and shows no necessary theoretical coherence. Biopower is ‘bipolar’ and evolves in ‘two basic forms’ that represent ‘two poles of development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations’. These are: disciplines and regulatory controls. A key to the elaboration and enactment of biopolitical technologies of power is knowledge, and the relation between power and knowledge is a crucial dimension of Foucault’s work. The chapter outlines the ways in which the concepts have been elaborated by subsequent scholarship, with the aim of offering corrective to Foucault’s theory of biopower and biopolitics.