ABSTRACT
Chapters in Part I outline the modalities of biosecurity power. They decipher its roots in medical relations and practices; outline the threat biosecurity aims to counter; examine the legal blueprint of biosecurity; address its practices in relation to public health, and to society; and decipher its epistemological premises.
Medical power is, essentially, pastoral power based on scientific expertise. Concerned primarily with saving life, medical power is benevolent and caring — but also relentless, surveillant, interrogative and undeniable. This power marks biosecurity. In turn, biosecurity, makes it a prominent modality of state power, and expands its remit: as it becomes epidemiological, medical power comes to primarily apply not on specific individuals, but to society as a whole.
