Sur la généalogie du bio-pouvoir

Modernity and the regulation of bodies: Elias meets Foucault

“…Disciplinary power turns those it seeks to control into a social body, but only after individually defining each of its members, through surveillance, correction and punishment. Thus, it is in placing individual bodies within a global mass affected by a series of processes that are a part of life, processes such as "birth, death, production, illness, that something such as bio-power could become constituted and incorporate the disciplinary apparatus"(p. 23) 10 .…”

“…This is Foucault´s birth of biopolitics: life and its mechanisms are brought within the domain of explicit calculations which turn power and knowledge into agents of the transformation of human life. And in this way, human beings as a species are now at stake as the political strategies of Western societies are played out 12 .…”

“…For over more than a century, hygienist medicine represented the epistemological bases from which different branches of an entire range of biomedical, human and social sciences were to take shape and proliferate, as well as a psychiatyry guided by the model of degeneration and the disciplines of anthropology, sociology and criminology. It supplied a model of scientificity and a regime of truth for the racist practices of Eugenics that would soon be applied within liberal democracies and later, through the Nuremberg laws 23 .…”

A sexualidade adolescente como foco de investimento político-social

“…Tal inflexão histórica marca a entrada da vida no domínio da política e, portanto, tal como nomeou Foucault, o nascimento da biopolítica, quer dizer, a entrada da vida e seus mecanismos no domínio dos cálculos explícitos que faz dos poderes e saberes agentes de transformação da vida humana. É assim que o ser humano, enquanto espécie, torna-se algo que entra em jogo nas estratégias políticas das sociedades ocidentais (Bertani, 2001).…”

The World is One Great Hospital

“…Even if, in his published work, Foucault devoted only one text, Birth of the Clinic, to the explicit question of medicine, the problem of medical power and its role in the administration of life was nevertheless "determinant, not only for the life sciences in their entirety, but also for the history of the forms of truth and rationality, and ultimately for the historicalpolitical actuality itself." 15 To be more specific, it is a problem we encounter In biopower's administration of life, the medicalization of the population and the elaboration during the 18 th century of a politics of health would, along with the setups of sexuality and race, come to play central roles. Indeed, of the problems of mass these novel mechanisms of power were intended to address, the most disruptive and dangerous to the wellbeing of the social body was, along with the related problem of the city, the problem of mass illness.…”