Theoretical concepts like biopolitics and biopower have garnered extensive attention in fields ranging from philosophy to political science to legal studies. While Michel Foucault is credited with first articulating biopolitics in relation to modern states regulating their citizens’ biological conditions, subsequent thinkers have built on and critiqued his formulation through their own philosophical lenses. This proliferation of perspectives resists easy definition, instead revealing the situated, dynamic nature of knowledge claims.
Foucault introduced biopolitics as part of his broader examination of power, governance and discourse. He argued that authorities increasingly construe individuals’ bodies and aggregate populations as objects of control and optimization to align with state interests. Giorgio Agamben extends Foucault’s notion of biopower into more ominous dimensions, warning how it can deprive subjects of rights and reduce them to “bare life” at the mercy of sovereign decree. In contrast, Roberto Esposito adopts a more sanguine view of biopolitics’ potential for fostering communal welfare, care and solidarity when directed toward ethical ends.
Other prominent theorists like Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Thomas Lemke and Nicholas Rose have analyzed how biopolitical logics operate in contexts from globalized neoliberal networks to the proliferation of biological and genetic sciences. Across these diverse perspectives, a shared recognition exists of biopower’s growing reach into intimate, corporeal realms once considered outside the ambit of governance.
However, as feminist scholar Donna Haraway contends, assumed knowledge and perceived objectivity must be interrogated to reveal the situated, partial nature of knowledge claims. No single definition or deployment of biopolitics can be detached from the theorist’s particular identity, motivations, era and disciplinary paradigms that shape its articulation. We must ask questions that dig beneath surface meanings: Who is constructing this concept, for what aims and through what lens? What assumptions underpin their approach? Whose perspectives and experiences are marginalized? How could alternative standpoints reshape understanding?
Probing the contextual basis of biopolitical ideas in this manner enables more nuanced critique. It highlights the boundaries of specific knowledge frameworks, opening space for new configurations and multivocal insights. This dynamic, self-reflective orientation is especially crucial given biopolitics’ frequent invocation in debates around structures of power and inequality.
For instance, Jasbir Puar’s work The Right to Maim creatively adapts Foucault and Agamben’s theories to analyze biopolitical violence enacted upon Palestinian bodies. However, her usage does not neatly align with how those previous thinkers formulated biopower within their own projects. Puar expands Foucault’s institutional focus to encompass diffuse cultural forces and transmutes Agamben’s “bare life” into more incremental tactics of debilitation. These adaptations stem from her situated perspective as a feminist queer theorist concerned with subtle operations of control in Israel/Palestine. Her rendering of biopolitics cannot be divorced from this conditioned standpoint and associated political commitments.
Ultimately, Puar provides both an illuminating deployment of biopolitical theory and an object lesson in the situated relativity of such theoretical concepts. Rather than seek rigid definitions, we should embrace biopolitics and biopower as flexible frameworks ripe for constant reworking and contestation from diverse subject positions. This enables more pluralistic, ethical approaches to pressing issues of embodied governance and justice.
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Victoria Mummelthei (17. Januar 2024). biopolitics, essay on situated perspectives: rethinking assumed knowledge about biopolitics. Keine Disziplin – No Discipline. Abgerufen am 26. März 2025 von https://doi.org/10.58079/13jpr