ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault first used the term “biopolitics” during his 1975-1976 Lectures at the Collège de France, entitled “Society Must be Defended.” These lectures were Foucault’s first attempt to conceptualize the phenomenon of totalitarianism, which he understood as the resolution of two antithetical technologies of power: sovereignty-the power to produce death-and biopolitics-the power to regulate life. The totalitarian solution to this technological paradox was to turn the regulation of life into its contrary, the massive production of death in the concentration camps.1 In this way, Foucault showed that totalitarianism was not a historical necessity but an impossible and ultimately suicidal solution to the technological antithesis of power created by modernity’s nation-state system and its dominant forms of political rationality: the “let live and make die” of sovereignty, and the “let die and make live” of biopolitics. The totalitarian resolution to this antithetical convergence was to collapse one technology into the other through the supplement of race. Racism was thus at the heart of the lectures in which the paradigm of biopolitics first emerged.
