Right of Death and Power Over Life

Michel Foucault

Classical Power Over Life

• The ancient original source of power over life was the Roman right of the father to dispose
of the life he created
• This was extended, in a more limited form, to the sovereign as a response to threats,
internal and external
• Power over life was negative, symbolized by the sword, which can only take or allow life
• The more basic source of the power might have been as a means of seizure (e.g. taxes)

Modern Power Over Life

• Modern power is positive and multifarious
• Its aim is to cultivate forces through order
• The right take life is now subservient to the cultivation of life
• This has led to wars of mass destruction in the name of life, though at the mass level
• The principle defining the strategy of states is that one must be able to take life in order to
go on living

The Death Penalty

• The death penalty is the counterpart to war—the sovereign’s reply to violators
• The number of its victims decreases as the number of victims of war increases
• The reason is that putting people to death violates the end of ensuring, sustaining, and
multiplying life
• Only those presenting a biological danger to others could be executed in the name of life

The Rituals of Death

• In classical culture, death was the passage from the hands of one sovereign to another
• The rituals of death were, thus, political
• Now, death is the limit of life, and it is an embarrassment to the forces promoting life
• Suicide is a puzzlement, and as such becomes an object of early sociological study

Two Forms of Power Over Life – Emergence

• Two interacting forms of power over life have emerged since the 17 th century
• An anatomo-politics of the human body treats it as a machine, disciplining it
• A bio-politics of the body treats it biologically, regulating it
• This bi-polar technology is about the investment of life, rather than the right to kill

Bio-Power (Extra)

For Foucault, biopower, is a technology of power, which is a way of managing people as a group. The

distinctive quality of this political technology is that it allows for the control of entire populations. It
is thus essential to the emergence of the modern nation state, modern capitalism, etc. Biopower is
literally having power over other bodies, "an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for
achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations". [15] Foucault then goes on to
further elaborate in his now famous lectures at the College de France between January and April
1978

..."By this I mean a number of phenomena that seem to me to be quite significant,namely,the set of
mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a
political strategy,of a general strategy of power,or,in other words,how,starting from the 18th
century,modern Western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings
are a species.This is what I have called biopower".... [16]

It relates to the government's concern with fostering the life of the population, and centers on the
poles of discipline ("an anatomo-politics of the human body") and regulatory controls ("a biopolitics
of the population").

Biopower for Foucault contrasts with traditional modes of power based on the threat of death from
a sovereign. In an era where power must be justified rationally, biopower is utilized by an emphasis
on the protection of life rather than the threat of death, on the regulation of the body, and the
production of other technologies of power, such as the notion of sexuality. Regulation of customs,
habits, health, reproductive practices, family, "blood", and "well-being" would be straightforward
examples of biopower, as would any conception of the state as a "body" and the use of state power
as essential to its "life". Hence the conceived relationship between biopower, eugenics and state
racism.

With the concept of "biopower", which first appears in courses concerning the discourse of "race
struggle", Foucault develops a holistic account of power, in opposition to the classic understanding
of power as basically negative, and akin to censorship. Sexuality, he argues, far from having been
reduced to silence during the Victorian Era, was in fact subjected to a "sexuality dispositif" (or
"mechanism"), which incites and even forced the subject to speak about their sex. Thus, "sexuality
does not exist", it is a discursive creation, which makes us believe that sexuality contains our
personal truth (in the same way that the discourse of "race struggle" sees the truth of politics and
history in the everlasting subterranean war which takes place beneath the so-called peace).

Furthermore, the exercise of power in the service of maximizing life carries a dark underside. When
the state is invested in protecting the life of the population, when the stakes are life itself, anything
can be justified. Groups identified as the threat to the existence of the life of the nation or of
humanity can be eradicated with impunity. "If genocide is indeed the dream of modern power, this
is not because of the recent return to the ancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and
exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of the
population." [17]
Bio Power (For our relevant reading)
• On the side of discipline, schools, barracks, workshops, etc. formed
• On the side of biology, population, health, migration etc. were studied
• This began an era of “bio-power,” in which the body is subjugated and populations
controlled
• It is not be be understood through ideology, but through its concrete arrangements in the
19th century
• The growth of bio-power and of capitalism went hand-in-hand
• Capitalism needed control over bodies as machines of production
• But it also needed control over the larger forces of life
• So many techniques of power were created

The Entry of Life into History

• Ascetic morality was important for capitalism
• But more important was the entry of the phenomena of life into political techniques
• Power and knowledge were now concerned with life, diminishing the effects of starvation
and disease
• Attention could be turned to modifying life
• “Part of it passed into knowledge’s field of control and power’s sphere of intervention”

The Threshold of Modernity

• Power no longer concerns the power of the sovereign over life, but mastery over life itself
• There are limits
• Starvation exists on a large scale outside the West
• Biology makes it possible to destroy ourselves
• The human being is no longer an Aristotelian rational animal with political capacities
• “Modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question”

The Consequences of Bio-Power

• Scientific discourse was greatly affected
• Man is outside of history insofar as he exists in a biological environment
• But he exists inside history as well, in that our knowledge-power affects the course of our
development
• Many political technologies developed as well

The Norm vs. the Law

• Classical society was governed by the juridical system of law, whose sanction was death
• Bio-power is concerned with regulating life, by qualifying, measuring, appraising, and placing
in hierarchies
• The law is now based on norms, which regulate society through many apparati

The New Struggle

• Struggle now looks forward, rather than to the restoration of something lost in the past
• It claims life as its objective, looking it is basic needs and realization of its potential
• Examples are “rights” to life, health, happiness, satisfaction of needs
 • These are not derived from anything in the classical juridical system

Sex as a Political Issue

• Sex lies at the intersection between discipline of the body and regulation of population
• It is a means of access to the life of the body and the life of the species
• Concern with it gave rise to a micropower of the body
• This explains the preoccupation with sex in the 19 th century
• It became the locus of political activity, e.g., raising standards of morality and population
control

Four Great Lines of Attack

• Discipline relying on regulation:

• The sexualization of children, to prevent early activity thought harmful to the species
• The hysterization of women, in the name of the health of the family
• Regulation relying on discipline:
• Birth control
• Psychiatrization of perversions

Sanguinity and Sexuality

• Classical society is one of blood symbols—blood relations, sacrifice of blood, etc.

• Modern society is one of sexual “analytics”
• The themes are health, progeny, race, future of the species, vitality of the social body
• Sex was the dual object of excitement and fear
• It is on the side of norm, knowledge, life, meaning, the disciplines, regulation

The Transition

• The transition from the symbolics of blood to the analytics of sex was not abrupt
• The administration of sexuality has been haunted with the symbolics of blood
• This is the basis of racism
• Nazism was the most cunning and naïve marriage of the two
• The irony is that Hitler’s sexual program was ineffective, but his concern for blood led to the
greatest blood-bath in history

Psychoanalysis

• The other side of the classical regime was the rule of law, order, sovereignty
• The psychoanalysts were suspicious of the fascist attempt to regulate sexuality
• Against this, Freud tried to revert to the old form against the regulatory aspect of bio-power
• He tried to ground sexuality in the law, “to surround desire with all the trappings of the old
order of power”