Biopolitics SPS26

Foucault 1975

Discipline + Punish: shift from spectacular sovereign punishment (execution, public torture) to disciplinary power. Production of "docile bodies". Panopticon as organising metaphor for modern society

Lemke 2005

Agamben only sees power in the exception of the law, blind to the diffuse power that is produced through law and normalisatoin

Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2019)

Incarcerated Childhoods and the Politics of Unchilding, Cambridge UP. The "unchilding" concept names the systematic biopolitical destruction of Palestinian childhood and futurity. Frequently cited in 2024-26 scholarship including Ihmoud (2026) - “Hunger and the Palestinian Womb”

Foucault 1976

History of Sexuality Vol.1 - biopower: sovereign's "right to take life or let live" replaced by "right to make live and let die". Administration of bodies + calculated management of populations

Hardt + Negri 2009

Biopotenza - the productive, creative, generative capacity of life itself. The collective intelligence, affective labour, and social creativity of populations that capital tries to capture and control but can never fully contain.

Foucault 1978

Governmentality: triangulation of sovereign / disciplinary / bio-power. Wars now waged "on behalf of the existence of everyone" - massacres justified in the name of life. Dark underside of biopower

Schmitt 1922

"Sovereign is he who decides on the exception" - state of exception = suspension of law in public interest but actually unleashes violence. Even democracies can become dictatorships through it. Foundation for Agamben

Agamben 1998

Homo sacer + bare life - life stripped of political dimension that can be killed but not sacrificed. Sovereign power perpetually produces bare life to reproduce itself. Traces biopolitics back to Ancient Greece not modernity

Agamben 2005

The camp as spatial biopolitical technology - "concentration camp appears every time we normalize the exception". Not just Auschwitz - migrant detention, Guantanamo. Camp as hidden matrix of modern statehood. Thantopolitics (what happens when biopolitics, the management of life, tips over into the systematic production of death.)

Minca 2015

"Camp thinking" - Guantanamo as "critically important laboratory in the new spatialisation of global politics" extending far beyond Cuba. Critiques Agamben: are all camps versions of Auschwitz?

Wilson Gilmore 2002

Racism = "state-sanctioned and/or extra-legal production + exploitation of group differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death". Carceral geography + mass incarceration. Links biopolitics to race

Mbembe 2003

Necropolitics: "ultimate expression of sovereignty resides in power to dictate who may live and who must die". The plantation + colonial settlement were earlier sites of biopolitical experimentation than the Holocaust

Povinelli 2016

Geontopower - late settler liberalism makes the crucial distinction between life and non-life (lively vs inert), not just life and death. Anthropocene = era of geontopower. Critiques Foucault + Agamben's Eurocentrism

Gregory 2004

Colonial present: colonial geographies make Guantanamo a space of exception. Said's imaginative geographies continue to operate in the present. Biopolitics + colonialism inseparable in the war on terror

Legg 2005

Adds scale to biopwer (geographer). Biopower operataes across many scales, the body, the territory, the state, the international

Katz 2015

Camps are also sites of human agency, struggle and contestation- agamben erases this resistance

Prisons, Agency, Conflation, Colonial, Diffuse Power

5 critiques of Agamben

Necropolitics, Death worlds, living dead

Mbembe (2003, 2019) key terms (3)

Parsons + Salter 2008

Israeli Aparthaid as a border management example of biopolitics

Mountz et al 2013

Detention centers + globalisation inseperable and biopolitical

Cim + Ozbey 2022

Covid 19 border management - ‘good’ and ‘bad’ nations and migrants

Coleman + Grove 2009

BioP and GeoP inseperable. management of populatiion require control over territory and vice versa.

Escobar 1995

Development link to biopolitics- rendering populations as deficent