Biopolitics

Biopolitics is a way of exercising power not only over territories or isolated subjects, but over the lives of individuals and populations, so that life itself becomes an object of political management.

According to Roberto Esposito, the term was probably first used by the Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén, who coined it in parallel with "geopolitics" in his 1905 work on the great powers, applying an organicist view to the state. The concept gained wide recognition, however, through Michel Foucault, who used it in 1974 and 1976 and developed it in his lectures at the Collège de France. For Foucault, biopolitics describes the form of governance that corresponds to a power no longer limited to deciding over death, but which administers life: birth and death rates, health, fertility and sexuality within a population.

Foucault contrasted sovereign power, which consisted in "taking life or letting live", with biopower, which consists in "making live and letting die". This power works in two ways: on the individual body, through discipline and control, and on the population as a whole, through regulatory mechanisms such as statistics, public medicine and health policy. A simple example is mass vaccination: it protects collective life and, at the same time, requires calculations about who should receive protection and who is left out.

Since then the concept has been taken up by very different thinkers. Giorgio Agamben links it to the figure of homo sacer and to the exclusion of unprotected life; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri connect it to the production of affects and immaterial goods; Roberto Esposito proposes an affirmative biopolitics, oriented toward favoring life rather than merely controlling it. Current debate centers on whether biopolitics describes mainly a form of domination or also an emancipatory possibility, and on how it applies to pandemics, digital surveillance, reproductive technologies and the management of migrants.