ABSTRACT
Foucault’s discussion of biopower/biopolitics in the History of Sexuality is part of a larger genealogy of power that culminates in the discussion of governmentality in his posthumously published lectures at the College de France. Here is how Rabinow and Rose explain the relationship between the terms biopolitics and governmentality in the overall development of Foucault’s thinking:
Whilst initially linking biopolitics to the regulatory endeavors of developing states he recognizes that ‘the great overall regulations that proliferated throughout the nineteenth century are also found at the sub-state level, in a whole series of sub-state institutes such as medical institutions, welfare funds, insurance, and so on’ . . . This is the point at which Foucault begins to develop his concept of ‘governmentality’ to encompass the variety of ways of problematizing and acting on individual and collective conduct in the name of certain objectives which do not have the State as their origin or point of reference. And as he develops this line of thought, he distances himself from the view that such power over life is unambiguously nefarious.
