Michel Foucault, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Biopower names a specific historical transformation in the way power relates to life — not a timeless feature of political organization, but something that emerged, with particular force, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that reorganized the entire field of political rationality. The classical sovereign's relation to life was essentially one of subtraction: the right to take life or let live, to expose subjects to death as the ultimate expression of sovereign authority.
What began to appear in the seventeenth century was something structurally different — a power whose highest function was no longer to kill but to invest life through and through.1 The old spectacular power of death was carefully supplanted by the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life.2 This new power over life developed along two distinct but related axes.
The first I called an anatomo-politics of the human body — the disciplining of the individual body, the optimization of its capabilities, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, achieved through the procedures of the disciplines.3 The second, emerging somewhat later, was a bio-politics of the population — focused not on the individual body but on the species body, on the biological processes of propagation, mortality, longevity, the level of health, with all the conditions that cause these to vary.4
Discipline individualizes; biopolitics specifies at the level of the population as a mass of living beings. What biopolitics took as its first objects of knowledge were precisely the phenomena that demographers were beginning to measure in statistical terms: birth rates, mortality rates, fertility, the duration and intensity of endemic illness.5
Not the epidemic — that sudden catastrophe that had haunted medieval political imagination — but the endemic, the permanent, the slow drain: illness as something that slips into life, perpetually gnaws at it, diminishes it and weakens it.6 Sovereignty had said: make die and let live. This new power of regularization says the opposite — make live and let die.7
The political stakes of this transformation are not merely institutional. Biopower was, I argued in the first volume of the History of Sexuality, an indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes.8
The disciplines and the regulatory controls of population did not merely accompany capitalist development — they were among its enabling conditions, acting also as factors of segregation and social hierarchization, guaranteeing relations of domination and effects of hegemony.9 One index of this transformation that I find telling: the gradual disqualification of death as public spectacle.
Death had been ritualized precisely because it marked a transition from one power to another — from the sovereign of this world to the sovereign of the next, a passage between courts.10 Once power reorganizes itself around the administration of life, death becomes something to be hidden away, the most private and shameful thing of all.11 The taboo migrates: it is no longer sex that must be concealed but death.
The setting up, in the course of the classical age, of this great bipolar technology—anatomo and biological, individualizing and specifying, directed toward the performances of the body, with attention to the processes of life—characterized a power whose highest function was perhaps no longer to kill, but to invest life through and through.The History of Sexuality Vol I, An Introduction, pp. 113–114
The old power of death that symbolized sovereign power was now carefully supplanted by the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life.The History of Sexuality Vol I, An Introduction, pp. 113–114
One of these poles—the first to be formed, it seems—centered on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls, all this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body.The History of Sexuality Vol I, An Introduction, pp. 113–114
The second, formed somewhat later, focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary.The History of Sexuality Vol I, An Introduction, pp. 113–114
It is these processes—the birth rate, the mortality rate, longevity, and so on—together with a whole series of related economic and political problems, which, in the second half of the eighteenth century, become biopolitics' first objects of knowledge and the targets it seeks to control. It is at any rate at this moment that the first demographers begin to measure these phenomena in statistical terms.Society Must Be Defended, Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976, pp. 266–267
Death was now something permanent, something that slips into life, perpetually gnaws at it, diminishes it and weakens it.Society Must Be Defended, Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976, pp. 266–267
Sovereignty took life and let live. And now we have the emergence of a power that I would call the power of regularization, and it, in contrast, consists in making live and letting die.Society Must Be Defended, Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976, pp. 270–271
This bio-power was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes.The History of Sexuality Vol I, An Introduction, pp. 114–115
They also acted as factors of segregation and social hierarchization, exerting their influence on the respective forces of both these movements, guaranteeing relations of domination and effects of hegemony.The History of Sexuality Vol I, An Introduction, pp. 114–115
What once (and until the end of the eighteenth century) made death so spectacular and ritualized it so much was the fact that it was a manifestation of a transition from one power to another. Death was the moment when we made the transition from one power—that of the sovereign of this world—to another—that of the sovereign of the next world.Society Must Be Defended, Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976, pp. 270–271
death—which has ceased to be one of those spectacular ceremonies in which individuals, the family, the group, and practically the whole of society took part—has become, in contrast, something to be hidden away. It has become the most private and shameful thing of all (and ultimately, it is now not so much sex as death that is the object of a taboo).Society Must Be Defended, Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976, pp. 270–271