ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a discussion of the concept of ‘biopolitics’, as used by M. Foucault, and examines how it is being used by scholars after him. It discusses how biopolitics can be understood as a system of power inscribed with war, and capable of mobilizing power relations, in addition to military action, to produce the effects of battle. Biopolitics deals with life at the level of populations. It also involves treating the body of the individual as a machine, using disciplinary mechanisms to optimize its capabilities, extort its forces, increase its usefulness and docility and integrate it into systems of efficient and economic controls. Biopolitics is also the power to take human lives; as well as being a system of power that makes life live, it is also one that kills life. In biopolitics, the power of death/the right to kill is exercised as ‘the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life’.
