The Concept of Biopolitics between Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben

Abstract

Michel Foucault's conception biopolitics refers to the different practices by which not only are the behaviours of individuals regulated, but also life itself, is subjected to the exercise of power. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Bio- politics took take the form of the "anatomical politics" of the body and the "bio -politics of population," which became the most definitive character of the power relations that shape the contemporary world. While the anatomy policy concentrated on the body as a machine — improving its capabilities, directing it and integrating it into effective disciplinary systems, the bio-policy of the population, conversely, focused on the body as the basis for biological processes of birth, death, and reproduction and level of health etc. Agamben's bio-politics did not lose its basic orientation, with life as its intention. Agamben conceptualises biopolitics as a means to reduce the life of an individual into "bare life," that is, life deprived of any legal rights, losing citizenship and agency, through the state of exception. The state of exception is a model whereby the sovereign power legislates the suspension of the law itself, and in this case the individuals in the state of exception become what Agamben calls the Homo Sacer , an individual who is effectively stripped of all rights and who be freely killed without consequence.