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Brad Viles
11/16/2015
Professor Brendese
Biopolitics and Racism
Michel Foucaults theory of biopolitics and biopower is based upon the fact that the
sovereign power appropriates the individuals right to life or death, and instead gives itself the
right to make live or let die among the communities of the sovereign power (Foucault 241).
Foucault addresses the right of life and death as being inherently tied to State control of the
biological, as we have progressed into the era of recognized distinct sovereign states with a
method of government (Foucault 240). The State holds the power to let live and make die, and
alternatively, to make live and let die, a very important distinction in Foucaults eyes. The
individual is neutral from the view of life and death and is reliant upon the sovereign for its
right to be dead or alive. Because it is impossible to grant life in the same way as it is to inflict
death, the right of life and death is always exercised in an unbalanced way, the sovereign
power can express its right to life only when the sovereign can kill. Foucault is fascinated with
the idea of how the evolution of the right of the sovereignty to the sword, and the shift from the
old right, to take life and let live, to the new right of to make live and let die (Foucault 241).
Foucault places the incipience of this paradigm shift on the jurists of the 17th and 18th
centuries, as they debate the issue of granting a sovereignty with absolute power. He poses the
question of how it is that a sovereign, created from the individuals of a society, demand absolute
power over the individuals that created it? How is it that the sovereign can be created in order to
live but then demand the power to kill over the individual populace of its creation (Foucault
241). These are some of the questions Foucault touches upon but does very little to answer,
instead using as a backdrop to explain the origin of the political discourse about this sort of

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power. Foucault chooses to instead talk about the transformation as it is in context with the
mechanisms, techniques, and technologies of power.
The description of the most important shift of this transformation in power begins with
the bodies acted upon. In the 17th and 18th centuries, techniques of power were centered around
the individual body, its spatial organization, (their separation, their alignment, their
serialization, and their surveillance) and organizationof a whole field of visibility (Foucault
242). In such an extent as this primarily disciplinary power is enacted upon the individual, in the
second half of the 18th century, the predominant technology of power departs slightly from
discipline in such a traditional sense, as power enacted directly upon the body. The new
technology of power instead exists at a different level, on a different scale, and because it has a
different bearing area, [it] makes use of very different instruments. The new technology of
power is enacted upon the multiplicity of men not as individuals, but instead as man-asspecies. This new technology of power, where the individual is not concerned as much as the
collective of individuals which are acted upon by mechanisms of power, is what Foucault names
biopolitics.
Foucault begins to go in depth with what biopolitics truly involves, the control of
biological functions among a populous, or a segment of a populous, in order to regularize and
predict phenomena previously dictated by biological mechanisms alone. The first objects of
knowledge for biopolitics are those surrounding the birth rate, mortality rate, and longevity
(Foucault 243). Biopolitics begins to examine the issue of disease and illness no longer as an
epidemic which caused all individuals to be in danger of imminent death but rather as an
endemic within a population. These factors were viewed as something that sapped the
population's strength, shortened the working week, wasted energy, and cost money and

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therefore caused death to be something new that was more internal to a population than ever
before (Foucault 244).
The second aspect of biopolitics Foucault presents is that phenomena which can never
completely be eradicated, even if they are accidental (Foucault 244). This aspect primarily
deals with the issue of old age, of those individuals who no longer are able to be a part of the
populace to the same extent as their more able-bodied peers. Biopolitics will establish two
things in order to take this segment of the population into account; it will establish charitable
institutions, but more importantly, will also establish much more subtle mechanisms such as
insurance, individual and collective savings, safety measures and so on. These mechanisms
are seen to be much more dependable than the indiscriminate charityunder church control
that Foucault describes as the former basis of the solution to this issue. The last aspect of
biopolitics which Foucault outlines is the relation between human beings insofar as they are a
species, insofar as they are living beings, and their environment (Foucault 245). This is the
direct effect of geographic spaces upon those living near them, for instance the epidemics linked
to the existence of swamps, and the effects on the populations and biopolitics which are near
swamped areas.
Foucault poses a variant of the question asked by jurists in the 17th centuries, exploring
the ways in which a power, where its basic function is to improve life, can in fact expose not
only its enemies but its own citizens to the risk of death (Foucault 254). If the powers
objective is to make live, how can it let die? This is where racism enters for Foucault as the
basic mechanism of power. Certain races are defined as good and others as inferior as a way
to [separate] out the groups that exist within a population (Foucault 255). This separation
allows the sovereign to act upon different subsets of their population, different subspecies of

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the human race. The examination of the relation of war provides a second function of racism in
the modern State. The basic relation of war, in order to livethe other must die, allows for a
compatibility with biopower resulting in a biological-type relationship of confrontation. As
the population is regularized, the more abnormal individuals are eliminated and the normalized
species will be stronger, more vigorous, healthier and purer. In the same way that war is the
elimination of a political threat of an enemy, killing in the biopolitics sense is a protection of the
population biologically.
Killing is in this sense only acceptable when it results in the elimination of the
biological threat to and the improvement of the species or race (Foucault 256). The murderous
function of [a] State which operates under a mode of biopower can only be justified by racism.
Racism is a precondition for exercising the right to kill in a biopower society. Foucault
clarifies that killing is not always directly murder, but also every form of indirect murder. He
quantifies this as exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or,
quite simply, political death, expulsion, or rejection. Racism in biopower is a justification of
the death-function by following the logic that death of others makes one biologically stronger
insofar as one is a member of a race or a population (Foucault 258).
Lauren Berlants conception of slow death sounds very similar to this construction of
racism within biopolitics, especially as it relates to negligence toward a certain sub-species of
the population based on observed endemics within the group. Berlant defines slow death as
the structurally motivated attrition of persons notably because of their membership in certain
populations (Berlant 761). Slow death again harmonizes with Foucaults view of the way in
which the new technology of power, biopolitics, embeds itself within the community. Berlant
describes slow death as being interwoven with ordinary life even though it is an upsetting

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scene of living that has been muffled in ordinary living. Berlant also contrasts Foucaults view
on dying as a biopolitical issue, where slow death is equivalent to the biopolitical sovereign
which lets die those portions of a population and sub-species through institutional means.
The issue of establishing one of these biopolitical slow-death situations and bringing
attention to it and in fact radicalizing it is what Berlant calls a misrepresent[ation of] the
duration and scale of the situation by calling a crisis that which is a fact of life (Berlant 760).
These environmental conditions are apprehended by activists and scholars in order to create a
distorting or misdirecting gesture and make a crisis-claim about an issue which in fact is a
structural and predictable condition.
There are long-term problems in these situations falsely labeled as crises, and in order
to adequately deal with the structural issues it will require other frames for understanding the
contexts of doing, being, and thriving than those allocated to the crisis management (Berlant
764). The issue with mass patterns like this, is that when they are finally recognized, they are
often strategically dramatized in ways that are in fact contradictory to the actual issue, and will
point the blame away from the structural slow death these people are suffering (Berlant 765).
Biopower however does not directly act upon the individual as the crisis-claims would have one
believe. It is not the shameful toxic habits of individuals who, not knowing or caring, and
having financial resources, undermine their own health one bad decision at a time that leads to
increasing obesity rates in the United States, but rather a much deeper underlying organization of
the reproduction of life in ways that allow political crises to be cast as conditions of specific
bodies and their competence at maintaining health or other conditions of social belonging. In
this sense the bodies of the problematic sub-species, in this case those suffering from obesity, are
able to be judged as having an agency which is fundamentally destructive. These populations

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then have apartheid-like structures constructed against them by society, and their sub-species is
made to represent embodied liabilities to social prosperity of one sort or another.
In many ways Berlant echoes Foucaults construction of biopolitics within her
development of the notion of slow death. Both involve an insidious and endemic approach
toward the systems and structures represented by a sovereign state, both involve a specific
control of life and longevity, and both divide society into sub-species based on misperceived
endemic issues within differing segments of the sovereign state.

Works cited
Berlant, Lauren. "Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)."Critical Inquiry 33
(2007): 754-80.
Foucault, Michael. "Society Must Be Defended, 17 March 1976." Lectures at the College
De France. Paris. 18 Oct. 2014. Society Must Be Defended. Vol. 2. New York: Picador, 1976.
239-63.