ABSTRACT
The idea I wish to develop here is that in putting forward the concept of biopolitics, Michel Foucault opened up a major area of study, founded on a brilliant intuition, but that paradoxically, he perhaps failed to address the core of the issue-life itself. This was not for lack of time, his own untimely death depriving him of the space to take it on, but through a form of avoidance-for no sooner had he opened up this arena than he turned quickly away from it to address himself to other questions and produce other concepts, notably that of governmentality. This concept forms the substance of what we might consider his third intellectual phase, after archaeology and genealogy: the “government of the self and others,” to cite the title of his penultimate course at the Collège de France (Foucault 2008). What the author of The History of Sexuality did was effectively to shift “biopolitics,” in the sense that it is-literally, or at least etymologically-a politics of life, that is to say a politics which takes existence as its object and the living as its subject, turning it into what is in essence a politics of populations, a politics which measures and regulates, constructs and produces human collectivities through death rates and family planning programs, health regulations and migration controls (Foucault 1979). With “anatomopolitics,” conceived as the set of disciplines practiced on the body, which constrain and encompass behavior, design and determine a social “order of things,” biopolitics constitutes biopower-in other words, a normalizing power over life, which Foucault fl eetingly but decisively theorized around 1976, notably in the last chapter of The Will to Knowledge.
