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Biopolitics is a concept popularized by the French philosopher Michel Foucault in the mid-20th century. [1] At its core, biopolitics explores how governmental power operates through the management and regulation of a population's bodies and lives.
With "sovereign power" Foucault alludes to a power structure that is similar to a pyramid, where one person or a group of people (at the top of the pyramid) holds the power, while the "normal" (and oppressed) people are at the bottom of the pyramid. In the middle parts of the pyramid are the people who enforce the sovereign's orders.
Biopower (or biopouvoir in French), coined by French social theorist Michel Foucault, [1] refers to various means by which modern nation states control their populations.In Foucault's work, it has been used to refer to practices of public health, regulation of heredity, and risk regulation, among many other regulatory mechanisms often linked less directly with literal physical health.
It was in exploring how this new power, with life as its object, could come to include the power to kill that Foucault theorizes the emergence of state racism. Foucault argues that the modern state must at some point become involved with racism in order to function since once a State functions in a biopolitical mode it is racism alone that can ...
Michel Foucault argued that it is intolerable to assume that a minor is incapable of giving meaningful consent to sexual relations. [3] Foucault also believed consent, as a concept, was a "contractual notion", and that it was not a sufficient measure of whether harm was being conducted. [ 2 ]
L'Ordre du discours (The Order of Discourse) is Michel Foucault's inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, delivered on December 2, 1970. Foucault presents the hypothesis that in any society the production of discourse is controlled, in order to eliminate powers and dangers and contain random events in this production. [9]
In his lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault often defines governmentality as the "art of government" in a wide sense, i.e. with an idea of "government" that is not limited to state politics alone, that includes a wide range of control techniques, and that applies to a wide variety of objects, from one's control of the self to the "biopolitical" control of populations.
During the debate, Foucault was critical of what he saw as the hidden political power of seemingly neutral institutions. According to him, power is viewed in European society as something which belongs to institutions of political power (such as the government) and related sectors of society such as the state apparatus, police and the army.