Biopower is a concept developed by Michel Foucault as ‘a power that exerts a positive influence on life.’ It is the most prevalent mode of political power in the modern age, maximising and optimising life above all else, acting both on bodies and on entire populations. Foucault contrasts this with thanatopower, the old sovereign power centred around ‘the right to take life,’ present when the sovereign’s very existence was threatened.
It might seem counterintuitive, then, that Foucault claims biopower, that positive life-affirming power, is more dangerous than the death-bringing thanatopower. In this essay I will carefully explicate Foucault’s understanding of power to in order to ultimately affirm his statement.
Power, for Foucault, takes on many guises, but always relative to an age—an episteme (or ‘regime of truth’ as he later develops it) that provides the conditions of emergence for power, truth and knowledge.
Though Foucault always insisted that he did not posit a metaphysics of power, his texts seem to betray his wishes: Béatrice Han-Pile notes that ‘the problem is that the idea of a “perpetual articulation of power on knowledge and of knowledge on power” [quoting Foucault] … might turn the power-knowledge network into an independent quasi-metaphysical reality, which would successively transform itself through history.’ (9) Indeed, we can see Foucault’s “power” as something akin to a Schopenhauerian or Nietzschean Will, though unmoored and afloat in time: it is a deep reservoir of forces which constitutes subjects and things, working through them rather than being harnessed by them. Power is exercised (in the passive voice).
Additionally, for Foucault, power forms the modern subject, rather than moulding or subtracting from a positive essence outside of power. He argues that the modern subject is not somehow prior to its own historical conditions of possibility; it is made possible through the particular regime of truth that is modernity.
Thanatopower and biopower, being modes of power in general, must be party to this subject formation.
Thanatopower was the political mode of power articulated in pre-modern classical Europe. The sovereign had the right to kill, but only conditionally: ‘the power of life and death was not an absolute privilege: it was conditioned by the defence of the sovereign, and his own survival.’ (History of Sexuality 135) Thanatopower included power over life, but only as a secondary power, one given form by the momentary withholding of killing-power: ‘The sovereign exercised his right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing; … [he] let live’. (136 emphasis in original)
The power of this age was a purely negative power, one which removed—which subtracted that positive life that poured forth from each subject as its essence. In describing thanatopower, Dreyfus and Rabinow orient it toward its future demise at the hands of truth residing in the discourses of the modern subject: ‘as a systematic refusal to accept reality, as a repressive instrument, as a ban on truth, the forces of [thanato]power prevent or at least distort the formation of knowledge. … Since it fears truth, [thanato]power must suppress it.’ (129) Thus the control which thanatopower exerted on the classical subject was minimal. Sure, the brute violence of suppression was large in degree, but it was not dextrous nor internally focussed in the subject, and most importantly was restricted to a reactive mode in response to existential threats to the sovereign. The sovereign power of death left room for a multitude of joyous activities and freedoms for the classical subject.
Biopower, however, as ‘situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population’ (HS 137) leaves no such room for free subjective play. Foucault defines it as ‘a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavours to administer, optimise, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations.’ (137)
Biopower is conveyed via two different apparatuses: the disciplinary and the regulatory. Foucault writes that ‘the disciplines of the body and the regulations of the population constituted the two poles around which the organization of power over life was deployed.’ (139) Discipline is the site of interaction of biopower with the body, maximising its utility and making it docile—that is, nonresistant to power supplied by the second apparatus: regulation, which is the site of interaction with the population as a biological whole, wielding its knowledge-tool of the statistic.
With implicit reference to the constituting nature of power for the subject, Foucault draws out a negative implication of the developing supremacy of biopower in the late classical era: ‘[a] consequence of this development of bio-power was the growing importance assumed by the action of the norm, at the expense of the juridical system of the law. … Law cannot help but be armed, and its arm, par excellence, is death; to those who transgress it, it replies, at least as a last resort, with that absolute menace. The law always refers to the sword. But a power whose task is to take charge of life needs continuous regulatory and corrective mechanisms.’ (144) Thus, ‘the law operates more and more as a norm,’ meaning that any notion of the law as “blind” must go by the way-side. By using the tool of the statistic, with its inherent “normals” (those peaks of the bell-curve), biopower acts via regulatory apparatuses to homogenise the population toward the norm (qua normal). Within the scope of the subject, the effect of this is a severe curtailing of the ability to live otherwise. While regulatory apparatuses are teleologically aimed at the population as a biological whole, their immediate site of interaction is always with the subject, and it is here where control and freedom take their meaning.
Take for example, the impact of particular regulatory implementations of biopower during the COVID-19 pandemic—how did we, as subjects, change as the pervading fields of power shifted?
One way is the strengthening of the self/other binary, to both positive and negative moral consequences. For one, I began to care more for total strangers by wearing a mask, and not entering public spaces when sick. That is, I othered people more frequently and with greater intensity, placing their priorities over my own. However, my self became more contracted, concentrated—learned from physical isolation and immobility. Things that were previously mine (my immediate environment, my train carriage, my plentiful toilet paper on the supermarket shelf) I became dispossessed of—they became someone else’s, or else we would have to share them.
These consequences on my being as a subject can stand in any sort of relation to received morals. What is key here is the comparative lack of freedom I came to have due to the strengthened self/other binary framework.
And this comparative lack of freedom is so insidious that we do not even realise it. Indeed the progression of history is often told as an upward march toward more freedom. This is demonstrative of Foucault’s power-knowledge nexus: knowledge opens up the channels of power, while power infiltrates through a branched network to sprout knowledge at its extremities.
Foucault had good reasons for fearing biopower. The dominant mode of political power in the modern age has broken free of the main restriction the old mode of sovereign power. Thantopower wielded death, yes, but it was constrained to only those moments when the sovereign himself was threatened. The modern subject is constituted by a power without such limits, and it risks strangling us.
Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Paul Rabinow. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Routledge, 1984.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley, Penguin, 2008.
Han-Pile, Béatrice. Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical. Translated by Edward Pile, Stanford UP, 2002.
Muldoon, Paul. “Bodies in motion: The pandemic, the economy, and the dictator.” Australian Book Review, no. 425, October 2020, pp. 7–9.
Rabinow, Paul and Nikolas Rose. “Biopower Today.” BioSocieties, no. 1, 2006, pp. 195–217.