Biopolitics is an intersectional field between human biology and politics. Biopolitics takes the administration of life and a locality’s populations as its subject. To quote Michel Foucault, it is “to ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put this life in order.”

What does Biopolitical mean?

: politics concerned with influencing environmental public policy and decision-making.

Who coined the term bio power?

Michel Foucault
Biopower (or biopouvoir in French) is a term coined by French scholar, philosopher, historian, and social theorist Michel Foucault.

How does Foucault’s concept of discourse help us understand how power systems work?

Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart’ (Foucault 1998: 100-1).

What is Foucault bio power?

Foucault’s concept of biopower describes the administration and regulation of human life at the level of the population and the individual body – it is a form of power that targets the population (Rogers et al 2013).

Who are the authors of beyond biopolitics?

Includes texts by Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Achille Mbembe, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, Donna Haraway, Roberto Esposito, and others. Clough, Patricia T., and Craig Willse, eds. Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

Is Biopolitics inconsistent?

As Thomas Lemke points out, a great deal of the inconsistency with which the concept of biopolitics has been deployed in more recent decades results depending upon whether one takes as their starting point the notion that life is the determining basis of politics, or alternatively, that the object of politics is life.

Is Foucault’s work on biopolitics incomplete?

A good example of Foucault’s work on biopolitics being incomplete is the brief reference to biopolitics at the beginning of The Birth of Biopolitics course, only for the concept to receive no further direct attention. Foucault The Birth of Biopolitics (note 3 above).

What is Biopolitics in Political Science?

In political science, the term “biopolitics” tends to take on two competing and irreconcilable meanings. The first meaning was developed by scholars in the United States in the 1970s and seeks to use theories and data from the life sciences to achieve a more complete understanding of political behavior.