What is the definition of biopolitics?
: politics concerned with influencing environmental public policy and decision-making.
What is biopolitics according to Foucault?
According to Foucault, biopolitics refers to the processes by which human life, at the level of the population, emerged as a distinct political problem in Western societies.
What is biopolitics in sociology?
Bio-politics is an influential theoretical framing as well as an empirical perspective that builds from a base where the “knowledge” of “human species-life” becomes a core from which to understand how strategies of power, government, politics and the economy influence the conduct of social life.
Is biopolitics a theory?
Biopolitics is a complicated concept that has been used and developed in social theory since Michel Foucault, to examine the strategies and mechanisms through which human life processes are managed under regimes of authority over knowledge, power, and the processes of subjectivation.
What does Michel Foucault say about biopower?
For Foucault, biopower is a technology of power for managing humans in large groups; the distinctive quality of this political technology is that it allows for the control of entire populations.
How does Foucault define biopower?
Foucault’s concept of biopower describes the administration and regulation of human life at the level of the population and the individual body – it is a form of power that targets the population (Rogers et al 2013). …
What is Foucault’s theory of biopower?
Where does Foucault write about biopolitics?
In the last chapter of The Will to Knowledge entitled ‘Right of Death and Power over Life’, Foucault provides a brief genealogy of biopolitics.
What was Foucault’s philosophy?
Foucault’s entire philosophy is based on the assumption that human knowledge and existence are profoundly historical. He argues that what is most human about man is his history. He discusses the notions of history, change and historical method at some length at various points in his career.
What is biopolitics and biopower?
In the work of Foucault, biopolitics refers to the style of government that regulates populations through “biopower” (the application and impact of political power on all aspects of human life). Conceptualised as the opposite of biopower, which is seen as the practice of sovereignty in biopolitical conditions.
What is Foucault’s will to truth?
Foucault argues though, in The Order of Discourse, that the ‘will to truth’ is the major system of exclusion that forges discourse and which ‘tends to exert a sort of pressure and something like a power of constraint on other discourses’, and goes on further to ask the question ‘what is at stake in the will to truth.