Filozofska istraživanja, Vol. 28 No. 2, 2008.
Original scientific paper
Michel Foucault: The Birth of Biopolitics
Marijan Krivak
; Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The article tries to detect the initial appearance of the concept of “biopolitics”. This concept, nowadays usually linked with philosophical position of Giorgio Agamben (Homo sacer), first came to an attention by Michel Foucault. His diagnosis in the seventies of the past century was that the power of the scientific-technological production of life created a period of biopolitics. For Foucault, biopolitics is the entrance of life and its mechanisms into the area of conscious calculation and regulation of power that is the knowledge of all the agents of change in a person’s life. The population becomes the subject of political interventions (statistics, control) already by the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century. In alliance with the standard institutions of the disciplinary order – economics, politics, and the military – the constant framework of biopolitics is the population. With regards to the category of life as the matrix of sociability, here we have the foundation of what is later to be formed into "biopolitical theory".
Keywords
Michel Foucault; biopolitics; bio-power; society of control; population; guvernmentality
Hrčak ID:
27863
URI
Publication date:
24.7.2008.
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