Power over Life, Politics of Death: Forms of Resistance to Biopower in Foucault

Abstract

The chapter by Adorno discusses the implications of the parallel formation of economics and biology in the eighteenth century that account for the continuous transference of medical metaphors to the economy and of economical considerations into medical well-being that is characteristic of the neoliberal normative order. Adorno takes up Foucault’s formula according to which biopower is a power which has “the right to make live” in opposition to the sovereign right to “put to death.” Adorno advances the paradoxical hypothesis that, if thanatopolitics is the product of the power to “make live,” then perhaps an affirmative biopolitics ought to be found on the side of a practice of “learning how to die” which, since Socrates through Montaigne to Heidegger, has characterized the philosophical form of life.

Biopower, juridical power and the afterlife of rights: Medical assistance in dying and the Supreme Court of Canada

“…Medical power is associated with biopower, and operates at both the population and individual ‘poles’ of biopower. Medical expertise may be key to statistical analyses required for the study of treatments and the determination of norms of healthy bodies population-wide (Adorno, 2014: 98; Foucault, 2004: 13–14). It may also determine conduct of rational subjectivity on a more individual level, by postulating strategies a person should adopt to ensure his or her body conforms to norms of health and fitness (Hunt, 2003; Rose, 2007: 10; Tierney, 2006: 626).…”

“…It may also determine conduct of rational subjectivity on a more individual level, by postulating strategies a person should adopt to ensure his or her body conforms to norms of health and fitness (Hunt, 2003; Rose, 2007: 10; Tierney, 2006: 626). Biopower, as a form of ‘humane globalisim’ (Gros, 2016: 264) deploys the freedom of the individual by ‘taking the subject’s well-being into account’ (Adorno, 2014: 64). If subjects rely on knowledges produced by medical power in making lifestyle decisions, it is because they believe it is in their own interests to do so (Tierney, 2006: 615).…”

Farmer Suicides and the Function of Death in Neoliberal Biopolitics

“…Michelsen (2016, 1), likewise, argues that the Kamikaze, suicide bombers, hunger striking, and self-incineration "imply the embodiment of a passionate commitment so absolute that the individual in question is willing to die." Recent research on suicide in IR thus overlaps with the work of those writers who see death and suicide as going beyond, or offering potential resistance to, the biopolitical governing of life (see Mbembe 2003;Adorno 2014;Foucault 2015).…”