Biopolitics According to Michel Foucault – Detailed Study Notes

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Clarify "biopolitics" as theorized by Michel Foucault.
Situate concept within Foucault’s broader analysis of modern institutions and power.

Foucault studies multiple institutions:
- Hospitals, prisons, clinics, government agencies, etc.
Each institution functions as a microcosm of wider power relations.
Key analytic device: the Panopticon (Jeremy Bentham → Foucault’s Discipline & Punish).
- Central tower affords potential, not constant, surveillance.
- Individuals internalize observer → begin to self-police.
- Demonstrates a shift from overt coercion to self-regulation.

Anatomo-politics / anatomopower (earlier stage)
- Rooted in dissection and anatomical knowledge.
- Medicine abandons mystical causes → focuses on biological mechanisms (cf. The Birth of the Clinic).
- Bodies assessed as individual organisms; illness addressed case-by-case.
Biopower / biopolitics (later stage)
- Extends anatomical logic to populations.
- Establishes norms about size, weight, race, life expectancy, fertility, etc.
- Individuals judged not merely as separate bodies but as deviations/conformities relative to population norms.

Norms arise through statistical repetition & aggregation of bodily data.
Become taken-for-granted standards of “health” or “proper life.”
All norms are ultimately artificial, yet they acquire the aura of scientific truth.

Foucault links rise of biopolitics to liberalism (governmental rationality that seeks to shrink overt state intervention while maximizing productivity/control).
- Mantra: reduce government size → let the market/self-regulation work.
Paradox: Promise of less control effectuates a perfected, more penetrating control.
- Analogous to Panopticon: subjects behave “freely” yet within an invisible cage of norms.

Surveillance without visible coercion → people voluntarily align with norms.
Homogenization: Whole populations managed via health statistics, public-health campaigns, insurance tables, etc.
Medicalization: Every difference interpretable as pathology or risk factor.

Biopolitics does not eliminate death; instead re-codes it.
- Deviant bodies blamed for their own demise (e.g., fat-phobic narratives).
State racism (Foucault):
- Norm defines racial purity; deviations legitimize exclusion or extermination.
- Example: Nazi Germany codifies biological norm into law → violence appears “naturalized.”
Necropolitics (Achille Mbembe):
- Complementary concept in which power decides “who may live and who must die.”

Fat shaming:
- Bodies exceeding prescribed BMI portrayed as irresponsible.
- Early death interpreted as “self-inflicted,” absolving systemic factors.
Medical exclusion of racialized bodies:
- Under-diagnosis, dismissal of pain, lack of research focus.
- Extending coverage does not solve issue; the underlying norm still pathologizes difference.

Biopolitical regimes can invisibly entrench discrimination under guise of health or science.
Critical awareness required to interrogate “natural” categories of normal/abnormal.
Activists & scholars question universalizing medical frameworks, propose plural health epistemologies.

Key lecture courses:
- Security, Territory, Population
- The Birth of Biopolitics
Key books:
- The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (power over life, population, sexuality)
- The Birth of the Clinic (anatomopolitics)
Related works: Discipline & Punish (Panopticon), various essays/interviews on governmentality.

Anatomo-power → Biopower:
- From the individual body to the population as a body.
Norms are statistically produced yet naturalized, guiding policy, medicine, & social attitudes.
Liberalism perfects control by making it appear as freedom.
Biopolitics integrates both life (optimization, health) and death (justified exclusion, racism).
Vigilant critique needed to expose hidden coercion behind claims of neutrality or scientific objectivity.

Be able to define: biopower, biopolitics, anatomopolitics, governmentality, norm.
Cite concrete historical examples (Nazi racial policy, vaccination campaigns, BMI tables).
Compare biopolitics with necropolitics (Mbembe) or thanatopolitics debates.
Relate Panopticon’s logic to contemporary digital surveillance (fitness trackers, health apps).
Prepare to discuss ethical stakes: Who benefits? Who is excluded? How are norms negotiated?