Living in a Biopolitical World

Extract

Practiced by both state and nonstate agents, biopower operates by recognizing certain bodies as life-worthy and cultivating them so that they thrive under capitalism, while consigning other bodies to death, deprivation, or extractable labor in the service of the life-worthy. French philosopher Michel Foucault famously coined the term in his historical analyses of modern Western power. He argued that biopower emerged in the eighteenth century in western Europe in conjunction with imperial wars of conquest. It joined forces with sovereignty, which relies on laws and the legitimate monopoly of physical force, and discipline, a newer mode of power, which shifted the traditional target of sovereign rule from a territory and its borders to a population conceived of as abstract individuals. Three recent books take us to the nineteenth century in England and the United States, a period when biopower expanded its reach, positing and exploiting biological divisions within and between national populations: Nathan K. Hensley's Forms of Empire: The Poetics of Victorian Sovereignty, Nasser Mufti's Civilizing War: Imperial Politics and the Poetics of National Rupture, and Kyla Schuller's The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century.