Abstract
This Chapter is a reflection on the concepts of biopower and biopolitics. Mapping some of the main approaches to this topic, the paper highlights a tension between policies that seek to encourage and potentialize life and individuals excluded and left to die. The Chapter involves two main concerns: one that questions the existence of biopolitical frameworks that end up producing bodies and subjectivities as mere fruits of the exercise of power and control, and, thus, are circumscribed by them; and another that questions how to read this scenario in the tropics. While contemplating these concerns, the text then reflects on the possible limits and potentialities of this conceptual framework.
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- 1.
In his book Society Must Be Defended (Il Faut Défendre La Société), in which he imagines a succession of knowledge-power regimes, Foucault (2003, p. 243) stated, “After the anatomo-politics of the human body, established in the course of the eighteenth century, we have, at the end of that century, the emergence of something that is no longer an anatomo-politics the human body, but what I would call a ‘biopolitics’ of the human race.” For Foucault, the power that emerged was not directed at the individual body, but at the “total mass” affected by the processes of life (birth, death, illness). Biopolitics deals with the population as a political problem and addresses the biological processes of the man-species, seeking to secure over these not discipline, but regulation (Foucault 2003, pp. 239–264).
- 2.
Governmentality is the object of studying forms of government. Foucault intended to encompass several dimensions of the modes of governing: the set of institutions, processes, analyzes, calculations and tactics that permit the exercise of power over the population, the tendency to manage the predominance of this type of power; a process that leads from a legal and administrative status to a state of population control and security (Castro 2009, pp.188–193). Regarding the concept, see Dean (1999), Gordon (1991), Malette (2006), Rabinow (1999) and Rabinow and Dreyfus (1995).
- 3.
Rose (2007) closely examines two crucial dimensions of contemporary biopolitics: the biological molecularization of human phenomena, and the centrality of the idea of vitality.
- 4.
The journal Diacritics (2006, v.36, n.2), devoted a special issue to Esposito (2006) with articles that provide an overview of the Italian philosopher’s work.
- 5.
I use the terms refuge, shelter and institution interchangeably because these are the expressions most commonly used by my interlocutors (Pereira 2004).
- 6.
Only after the fieldwork was I able to understand the importance of mobility and transit for many of my interlocutors, which explains, for example, the population variance in the shelter – which at certain times, meant up to 50 fewer people (Pereira 2004).
- 7.
- 8.
Butler (2001, p. 13) challenges this “illusory construction” of death being expelled from Western modernity, left behind as a historical possibility, as something foreign to the West. It is, she says, a “ghost story to liberate modernity from death”.
- 9.
This chapter only traces a very general overview of health in the period in question. The characteristics described here, however, are present in virtually all the literature on the period, as observed in: Bertolli Filho (1996), Freire (1989), Gurgel (2008), Miranda (2004), Porto (2006). For a discussion on medicine and medical institutions, see Luz (1982, 1986).
- 10.
For a more detailed discussion on the slave system health, see Porto (2006).
- 11.
However, it is worth noting that these authors maintained a certain distance from discussions on colonialism, even though a solid post-colonial literature existed.
- 12.
On this point, Connell (2010) argues that much of what circulates as “universal theory” is strongly rooted in the sociopolitical experience of Europe. The individual experience emerges as a generic concept, acting on spaces conceived as peripheral – such spaces where the universal theory is tested and refined, but that never emerge as a locus of reflection.
- 13.
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Pereira, P.P.G. (2019). In and Around Life. In: Queer in the Tropics. SpringerBriefs in Sociology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15074-7_2
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