The Advanced Liberal Logic of Nicotine Replacement and the Swedish Invention of Smoking as Addiction

Abstract

A major theme in the later work of Foucault is the rise of a new form of power over life — bio-power. While the sovereign exercised power over life by commanding ‘the right to take life or let live’, the advent of capitalist society was preceded by a new concern with the productive administration of life, and the power ‘to foster life or disallow it to the point of death’ (Foucault 1990). Bio-power aspires to power over life ‘throughout its unfolding’ and understands death as marking the limit of its dominion. Foucault also saw bio-power as corresponding with a re- spatialization of power. While the generic space of operation for sovereign power is the territory, the equivalent space of bio-power is that of circulation. Due to its overriding concern with fostering life, optimizing it and multiplying it, bio-power favours circulation, but it recognizes the ambiguous and dual nature of productive patterns of exchange and intercourse. The circulation of food may avert famine, but the greater free-flow of people, goods and services also allows for the broader spread of infectious diseases. Thus, bio-power is concerned with ‘organizing circulation, eliminating its dangerous elements, making a division between good and bad circula-tion, and maximizing the good circulation by diminishing the bad’ (Foucault 2007).