“Biopower Today” by Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose: Summary and Critique

📜 Conceptual Clarification of Biopower

• Rabinow & Rose revisit Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower—power exercised over life—clarifying its meaning and relevance today.
• Defined as comprising:
  • Truth discourses about the “vital” nature of human beings.
  • Authorities competent to speak that truth.
  • Interventions on collective existence for life and health.
  • Modes of subjectification where individuals work on themselves in the name of life/health (p.197).
• Quote: “Biopower entails one or more truth discourses… strategies for intervention upon collective existence in the name of life and health… modes of subjectification” (p.197).

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⚖ Distinguishing Foucault from Agamben & Negri

• Against “epochal” claims: They critique Giorgio Agamben’s “homo sacer” model and Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt’s “Empire” framing for overgeneralizing biopower.
• Argue these philosophical versions empty the concept of analytical precision.
• Foucault’s approach: grounded in historical specificity—two poles:
  • Anatamo-politics (body discipline).
  • Biopolitics (population regulation) (Foucault, 1978: 139).
• Quote: “This version of the concept of ‘biopower’ is quite antithetical to that proposed by Foucault: the concept is emptied of its critical force—it can describe everything but analyse nothing” (p.198).

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🛡 From Sovereignty to Governmentality

• Critique of viewing all biopower as an extension of sovereign power.
• Modern states rule through governmentalized networks involving non‐state actors—NGOs, professional bodies, patient groups.
• Quote: “Non-state bodies have played a key role in biopolitical struggles and strategies since the origin of ‘the social’” (p.202).

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🧬 Race in the Era of Genomics

• Historical role: race central in biopower (nationhood, colonialism, eugenics).
• Post–WWII: biological racism discredited officially (UN 1963 Declaration).
• Genomics reintroduces race via molecular gaze (e.g., SNP & HapMap projects).
• Uses: health equity, pharmaceutical targeting, identity tracing—but risk of re‐coding race in old categories (“Caucasian”, “African”, “Asian”).
• Quote: “New challenges for critical thinking are raised by the contemporary interplay between political and genomic classifications of race” (p.207).

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👶 Reproduction as a Biopolitical Space

• Decoupling of sexuality and reproduction in last 50 years.
• National & global population control campaigns (e.g., China’s One Child Policy, India’s sterilization drives) framed via economics & ecology.
• Contemporary assisted reproductive technologies (ART) framed as choice but involve responsibilization—especially of women.
• Quote: “The economy of contemporary biopolitics operates according to logics of vitality, not mortality: while it has its circuits of exclusion, letting die is not making die” (p.210).

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🧪 Genomic Medicine & Biocapital

• Potential shift in medicine: from restoring normativity to molecular re‐engineering of life.
• Industry examples: Celera Diagnostics (polygenic disease testing), pharmacogenomics for tailored antidepressants.
• Raises new risk calculation logics and individual genetic self‐understanding.
• Quote: “If this model were to succeed… the logics of medicine, and the shape of the biopolitical field, would be altered” (p.213).

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🔍 Method: Modest Empiricism

• Advocates empirical, specific, historically‐attuned analysis over grand abstractions.
• Focus on small mutations in truth, authority, ethics—where “today is becoming different from yesterday” (p.204).
• Quote: “Celebration or denunciation are insufficient as analytical approaches” (p.215).

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🌐 Conclusion: Vital Politics

• Biopower remains analytically useful if applied precisely and empirically.
• Contemporary biopolitics:
  • Transnational flows of biological materials & knowledge.
  • Localized forms of subjectification and activism.
• Aim: Develop analytic tools for the “near future” (Deleuze) to diagnose transformations in life, health, and governance.

🏛 Poststructuralism & Discourse Theory

• Extends Foucauldian discourse analysis by clarifying “biopower” as a historically grounded and analytically precise term.
• Moves beyond language‐only analysis to the interplay of truth discourses, authorities, and material interventions in life processes.
• Quote: “Biopower entails one or more truth discourses about the ‘vital’ character of living human beings… strategies for intervention… modes of subjectification” (p.197).
• This reinforces poststructuralist focus on contingency and discursive formation, but insists on empirical grounding.

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⚖ Critical Theory (Frankfurt School Tradition)

• Challenges totalizing narratives (e.g., Negri & Agamben) that treat biopower as an all‐encompassing domination.
• Encourages critical differentiation between forms of life‐governing power and death‐dealing politics, resisting “one‐diagram” explanations.
• Quote: “It would clearly be misleading to diagnose [contemporary biopolitics] as a form of genocide, or the re‐awakening of the spectre of the camp” (p.210).
• Contributes to critical theory’s emphasis on historical specificity and judgement over abstract critique.

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🧠 Psychoanalytic Theory & Subjectivity Studies

• Links biopower to modes of subjectification, showing how individuals internalize medical/genetic norms and act on themselves.
• Parallels psychoanalytic readings of the subject as constituted through authority and self‐surveillance.
• Quote: “Modes of subjectification, in which individuals can be brought to work on themselves… in the name of life or health” (p.197).
• Opens space for analysis of somatic individuality (Rose) as a form of subjectivity shaped by biomedical discourse.

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🌍 Postcolonial Theory

• Illuminates biopolitics in global contexts—population control campaigns, genomic projects in diverse geographies—revealing how colonial and postcolonial governance intersect with life regulation.
• Challenges simplistic analogies between contemporary development policies and colonial eugenics.
• Quote: “Limiting population in the interests of national economic prosperity… is not the same as purification of the race by elimination of degenerates” (p.210).
• Encourages postcolonial theorists to consider molecular-level governance alongside historical racial governance.

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📈 Science and Technology Studies (STS)

• Directly contributes to Actor–Network Theory‐inflected readings of science by tracking how genomics, race, reproduction, and medicine become sites of political and social meaning.
• Treats scientific categories (e.g., SNPs, haplotypes) as discursively and institutionally embedded.
• Quote: “New challenges for critical thinking are raised by the contemporary interplay between political and genomic classifications of race” (p.207).
• Adds biocapital and biosociality as analytical categories for cultural theorists.

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📚 New Historicism

• Models a historically layered approach to concepts, tracing Foucault’s original context (18th–19th c. state formation) and 21st‐century mutations.
• Emphasizes that concepts like “biopower” cannot be lifted wholesale into new eras without adaptation.
• Quote: “It would certainly be misleading simply to project Foucault’s analysis forward as a guide to our present” (p.203).
• Offers literary historians a method for reading contemporary texts through genealogies of power.

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🧬 Biopolitics as Cultural Criticism

• Equips literary and cultural theory with a refined analytic toolkit for engaging with narratives of health, life, death, and governance.
• Rejects “celebration or denunciation” (p.215) as sole modes of critique, promoting “modest empiricism” attentive to local variations.
• Enables analysis of novels, films, and cultural artefacts that engage genomic futures, medical ethics, and bodily regulation.

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🎭 Narratology & Identity Politics

• Provides a framework for analysing life narratives and identity claims rooted in genetics, race, and reproduction.
• Shows how “biosocial collectivities” emerge as narrative communities in politics and culture.
• Quote: “The growing sense of many individuals that genetics… holds the key to their ‘identity’” (p.206).
• Informs literary readings of memoirs, testimonies, and fiction dealing with medicalized selfhood.

⚖ Over‐Emphasis on Empiricism

• Their “modest empiricism” (p.204) is seen by some critics as too cautious, potentially downplaying the need for strong normative critique of biopolitical systems.
• Focus on small‐scale, situated studies may underestimate systemic or global structural patterns of domination.

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🗺 Underestimation of Global Power Asymmetries

• While they address transnational biopower, critics argue they underplay economic imperialism, global capitalism, and neocolonial biomedical exploitation.
• Limited engagement with how global inequalities shape access to life‐saving technologies.

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🛡 Critique of Agamben & Negri May Be Over‐Simplified

• Their dismissal of Agamben’s “homo sacer” and Negri’s “Empire” risks mischaracterizing these thinkers’ nuanced political‐philosophical claims.
• Some scholars argue that Rabinow & Rose understate the importance of states of exception in contemporary governance (e.g., migrant detention, pandemic lockdowns).

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📉 Minimizing Thanatopolitics

• Their claim that contemporary biopower is oriented toward “making live” rather than “making die” (p.210) can be criticized for ignoring:
  • Structural health inequalities.
  • Environmental racism.
  • Neglect or abandonment of populations (e.g., Global South health crises).

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🧬 Optimistic Reading of Genomics

• While cautious, their treatment of genomics sometimes leans toward neutral or hopeful interpretations, possibly overlooking the commercial exploitation and data colonialism inherent in genetic research.

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📚 Lack of Cultural Textual Engagement

• For literary and cultural theory audiences, their analysis remains sociological and policy‐oriented, not engaging deeply with cultural representation or narrative analysis of biopolitics in media, literature, or art.

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⏳ Potentially Presentist Focus

• Despite genealogical awareness, their focus on contemporary configurations may underemphasize deep historical continuities in racial and reproductive governance beyond Foucault’s European frame.

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🧠 Limited Ethical Prescriptions

• While strong in conceptual clarification, the work offers little guidance for ethical or political action against harmful biopolitical practices, leaving the normative stance ambiguous.