(Page 12 of 37) - Biopolitical Color Lines: Foucault and an Anti-Racist Democratic Politics authored by Bhandaru, Deepa.

According to Foucault, the primary entity that eludes sovereign power is life itself. Sovereign

power, with its repressive mechanisms of punishment and spectacle, does not enhance the life of

the social body, but rather takes as its objective the aggrandizement of the sovereign through the

repression of subjects. As the sovereign merges with the social body, however, fostering the life

of the social body becomes the task of power, and as such life-centered power moves into the

foreground.

Foucault gives the name “biopower” to this power whose task is to take control of life by

managing and enhancing it. While sovereign power exercises power over life through death or

the threat of death, biopower controls life by ensuring, sustaining, and multiplying it. Unlike

sovereign power, which is sporadic, brutal, and distant, biopower is constant, benign, and near,

operating at the level of the body, on the one hand, and the population, on the other. As Foucault

writes, biopower evolves in two basic forms: the first

“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… 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 disciplines of the body and the regulations of the population constituted
the two poles around which the organization of power over life was deployed. The
setting up, in the course of the classical age, of this great bipolar technology—anatomic
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.”

Foucault explains that whereas sovereign power is realized through the power to kill,

biopower manifests itself by securing both the individual body and the population

through discipline and regulation, respectively. Through the production and reproduction

of the body and the population, biopower meets its goal of proliferating life itself. By