This is not the final manuscript – it is an Author’s Accepted Manuscript of an article published

in Journal of Classical Sociology.

Full citation: Thomas Lemke, From state biology to the government of life: Historical
dimensions and contemporary perspectives of “biopolitics”. Journal of Classical Sociology,
10 (4), 2010, 421-438.

Article
From state biology to the government of life: historical
dimensions and contemporary perspectives of
‘biopolitics’
Thomas Lemke
Goethe-Universität, Germany
**
The notion of biopolitics has recently become a buzzword. While a few years ago

it was known to only a limited number of experts, the term is used today in many

different disciplines and discourses. Beyond the limited domain of specialists, it

is attracting increasing interest among the general public. The notion is

employed to discuss asylum policies, but also the prevention of AIDS and

questions of demographic change. Biopolitics may be used to denote issues as

diverse as financial support for agricultural products, promotion of medical

research, legal regulations on abortion, and advance directives of patients

specifying their preferences concerning life-prolonging measures.1

There are a wide range of views about both the empirical object and the

normative evaluation of biopolitics. Some argue strongly that biopolitics is

necessarily bound to rational decision-making and the democratic organization of

social life, while others link the term to the murder of patients, eugenics and

racism. The notion of biopolitics figures prominently in texts of the Old Right, but

it is also used by representatives of the New Left. It is employed by both critics

and advocates of biotechnological progress, by committed Marxists and

unapologetic racists. A third line of disagreement concerns historical definitions

1
and delimitations. Does biopolitics go back to Antiquity, or even to the invention

of agriculture? Or, by contrast, is it the result of contemporary biotechnological

innovations marking ‘the threshold of a new era’ (Mietzsch, 2002: 4)?

Plural and divergent meanings are undoubtedly evoked when people refer

to biopolitics. This may seem surprising, since it appears to be quite clear what

the notion signifies. Literally, the word denotes a politics that deals with life

(Greek: bíos). But this is where the problems start. What some take to be a trivial

fact (‘Doesn’t all politics deal with life?’) marks a clear-cut criterion of exclusion

for others (Fehér and Heller, 1994; Heller, 1996). For the latter, politics is

situated beyond biological life. From this point of view, biopolitics has to be

considered an oxymoron, a combination of two contradictory terms. The

advocates of this position claim that politics in the classical sense is about

common action and decision-making, and is exactly what transcends the

necessities of bodily experiences and biological facts – thus opening up the

realm of freedom and human interaction.

In the following, I seek to bring clarity to this confusion by offering a

historical and systematic perspective on the topic of biopolitics. My point of

departure is the virtual polarization that is attached to the merger of life and

politics in the notion of biopolitics.** The existing concepts differ in respect of

which part of the word they emphasize. It is possible to distinguish naturalistic

concepts that take life as the basis of politics, and to contrast these with politicist

concepts which conceive of life processes as the object of politics.2 The two lines of

interpretation will be analysed in the first part of the article. My central thesis is

that both of these approaches fail to capture essential dimensions of biopolitical

2
processes. Against the naturalist and the politicist reading, I will propose a

historical notion of biopolitics that was first developed by the French philosopher

and historian Michel Foucault. The diverse refinements and corrections of the

Foucauldian notion of biopolitics can be integrated into an ‘analytics of

biopolitics’, which will be presented in the final part of the paper.

Life as the Basis of Politics: Organicist, Racist and Biologist Concepts

The idea of a natural basis of politics is shared by a heterogeneous group of

theories, ranging from organicist concepts of the state in the first decades of the

twentieth century via racist styles of thought during National Socialism to

biologistic ideas in contemporary political science. I will present very briefly some

important threads of this tradition.

The Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén may have been one of the

first to employ the notion of biopolitics.3 Kjellén, until his death in 1922 a

professor at the University of Uppsala, endorsed an organicist concept of the

state. He conceptualized the state as a collective subject that ruled over its own

body and spirit, and saw in politics, economics, culture and law merely a variety

of formations of the same organic powers, which constitute the state and

determine its specific characteristics. For Kjellén, the natural form of statehood

was the nation-state, which expressed the state’s ‘ethnic individuality’ (1924:

103).4 The ‘state as form of life’ was characterized in the final analysis, in his

view, by social struggles over interests and ideas articulated by classes and

groups. In conjunction with this conviction, Kjellén introduced the concept of

biopolitics:

3
 In view of this tension typical of life itself … the inclination
arose in me to baptize this discipline after the special science
of biology as biopolitics; … in the civil war between social
groups one recognizes all too clearly the ruthlessness of the
life struggle for existence and growth, while at the same time
one can detect within the groups a powerful cooperation for
the purposes of existence.

(1920: 93–94)

Kjellén was not alone in understanding the state as a ‘living organism’ or a

‘living creature’. Many political scientists of his time, but also biologists and

health professionals, conceptualized the state not as a legal construction whose

unity and coherence is the result of individuals’ acts of free will but as an original

form of life, which logically precedes the individuals and collectives and provides

the institutional foundation for their activities (compare** Hertwig, 1922;

Roberts, 1938; Von Uexküll, 1920). The basic assumption is that all social,

political and legal bonds rest on a living entity, an entity that embodies the

genuine and the eternal, the healthy and the valuable. The reference to ‘life’

serves here both as a mythic starting point and as a normative guideline that

eludes democratic decision-making.

During the period of National Socialism the anti-democratic, conservative

character of the organicist concept of the state became tainted with racism. The

widely used metaphor of ‘the people’s body’ (Volkskörper) now designated an

authoritarian, hierarchically structured and racially homogeneous community.

There were two central features of the National Socialist conception of state and

society. First, it promoted the idea that the subjects of history were not

individuals, groups or classes, but self-enclosed communities with a similar

4
genetic heritage. This idea was supported by the assumption of a natural

hierarchy of peoples and races according to their different ‘inherited biological

quality’, such that it seemed not only justified but also imperatively necessary to

treat individuals and collectives unequally. Second, National Socialist ideology

rested on the belief that social relations and political problems could ultimately

be ascribed to biological causes.5

Hans Reiter, the president of the Reich Health Department, explained the

racial underpinning of ‘our biopolitics’ in a speech in 1934. Reiter claimed that

the past, present and future of each nation were determined by ‘hereditary

biological’ facts. This insight, he said, established the basis for a ‘new world of

thinking’ that had developed ‘beyond the political idea to a previously unknown

world view’ (Reiter, 1939: 38). The result of this understanding was a new,

biologically grounded concept of people and state: ‘It is inevitable that this course

of thought should lead to the recognition of biological thinking as the baseline,

direction and sub-structure of every effective politics’ (1939: 38). The goal of this

policy consisted of improving the German people’s ‘efficiency in living’

(Lebenstüchtigkeit). In concrete terms, efforts should be directed towards a

quantitative increase of the population and a qualitative improvement in the

‘genetic material’ of the German people. In order to achieve this, Reiter

recommended negative and positive eugenic practices. Inferior offspring were to

be avoided and all those regarded as ‘biologically valuable’ were to be supported

(1939: 41).

However, National Socialist biopolitics comprised more than ‘selection’ and

‘elimination’. Laws, regulations and policies governing racial politics had as their

5
objective not only the regulation and control of reproductive behaviour; they also

contained responses to the imaginary dangers of ‘racial mixing’. The development

and maintenance of genetic material was, in this light, only possible through

protection against the ‘penetration of foreign blood’ and the preservation of the

‘racial character’ of the German people (1939: 39). Concerns about the purity of

the ‘race’ coincided with the battle against internal and external national

enemies. At this point biopolitical ideas join with geopolitical considerations. The

combination of the racial political programme with the doctrine of Lebensraum

(‘vital space’) provided the ideological foundation for the imperialist expansion of

the Nazi Reich (see Von Kohl, 1933).

Even if racist biopolitics no longer had any serious scientific or political

standing after the end of the Third Reich and the atrocities of the Second World

War, it continued to have appeal. Representatives of the extreme Right still use

the concept of biopolitics today, in order to complain about the ignorance of the

zeitgeist towards the ‘question of race’; they contend that the category of race has

continuing relevance for the present. Like the National Socialist ideologues, they

diagnose a fundamental social crisis resulting from the alleged struggle between

different ‘races’ and the imagined threat of ‘racial mixing’ and ‘degeneration’. One

example of this persistent theme is a book by Jacques Mahieu, formerly a

member of the Waffen SS, who fled to Argentina after the war and taught there

as a political scientist in various universities. In order to establish a ‘foundation

for politics’, Mahieu believes political science’s ‘important role’ today consists in

defining the causes of the increasing ‘racial struggles’ and ‘ethnic collisions’

(2003: 13). Beyond the ambition to specify the problem, the biopolitical triad

People–Nation–Race evoked in the title of Mahieu’s book is also

6
meant to offer solutions to the crisis it claims to identify. ‘The meaning of

biopolitics’, is, according to the author, ‘to calculate the totality of genetic

processes insofar as they influence the life of human communities’ (2003: 12; see

also Nation Europa, 1965).

Beyond organicist and racist concepts, a further variant of the naturalist

understanding of ‘biopolitics’ emerged in the middle of the 1960s within political

science. The ‘biopoliticians’ (Somit and Peterson, 1987: 108) use biological

concepts and research methods in order to investigate the causes and forms of

political behaviour.6 Within this heterogeneous field of research, it is possible to

identify four areas to which most projects can be assigned. The first area

comprises reception of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory. At its centre stands

the historical and anthropological question of the development of human beings

and the origins of state and society. A second group of works takes up ethological

and socio-biological concepts and findings in order to analyse political behaviour.

Works interested in physiological factors and their possible contribution to an

understanding of political action fall into the third category. A fourth group

focuses on practical political problems (‘bio-policies’), which arise from

interventions in human nature and changes to the environment (Blank and

Hines, 2001; Kamps and Watts, 1998: 17–18; Meyer-Emerick, 2007; Somit

and Peterson, 1987: 108).7

Common to all representatives of ‘biopolitics’ is thus a critique of the

theoretical and methodological orientation of the social sciences, which to their

minds is insufficient. They argue that the social sciences are guided by the

assumption that human beings are, in principle, free beings, a view which gives

7
too much significance to processes of learning and socialization and thereby fails

to see that human (political) behaviour is in large part biologically conditioned. In

this perspective, the ‘culturalism’ of the social sciences remains ‘superficial’ as it

systematically ignores the ‘deeper’ causes of human behaviour. Conventional

social-scientific research is thus ‘one-sided’ and ‘reductionist’ insofar as the

biological origins of human behaviour remain outside the horizon of the questions

it poses. In order to produce a ‘more realistic’ evaluation of human beings and

how they live, biopoliticians demand a ‘bio-cultural’ or ‘biosocial’ approach. This

is supposed to integrate social-scientific and biological viewpoints, in order to

replace a one-sided either–or with a combined model (Alford and Hibbing,

2008; Masters, 2001; Wiegele, 1979).

Biopoliticians do not as a rule assume a deterministic relationship, but

refer to biological ‘origins’ or ‘factors’ which are supposed to shape decisively the

motives and spaces of political actors. They presume that in human evolutionary

history a multitude of behavioural patterns have arisen, and that although none

of these completely determines human behaviour, many mould it to a

considerable degree in various areas of life. Works written under the rubric of

‘biopolitics’ are interested above all in competition and cooperation, anxiety and

aggression, relations of dominance, the construction of hierarchies, enmity

toward foreigners and nepotism. These phenomena ultimately go back –

or at least this is the assumption – to evolutionary mechanisms and lead

to the formation of affects that usually guide individuals in the direction of

‘biologically beneficial’ behaviour. According to this view, the formation and

persistence of states depend less on democratic consensus or social authority

than on psychologically and physically grounded relationships of dominance,

8
which can in turn be traced back to inherited behaviour patterns (compare**

Blank and Hines, 2001; Wiegele, 1979).

A long list of reservations and objections has been put forward in response

to this research perspective (Euchner, 2001; Saretzki, 1990; see also Esposito,

2008: 23–24). One crucial shortcoming of the ‘biopolitical’ approach is that

representatives of this type of research pay too little attention to symbolic

processes and cultural patterns of meaning for the investigation of political

processes and structures. By only treating social phenomena from the perspective

of their alignment with natural conditions, they grasp only a very limited section

of reality. They are not sensitive to the question of how far socio-political

evolution affects and changes ‘biological factors’. Biopoliticians therefore see ‘the

human being’ as a product of biological processes only, not as a co-producer of

these processes. This one-sided perspective conceals an important dimension in

the present discussion of the relationship between nature and society, biology

and politics: the question of the institutional and political shape and the social

answers to the ‘question of nature’ that provide the point of departure for the

second line of interpretation addressing ‘biopolitics’.

Life as the Object of Politics: Ecological and Technology-Based

Concepts

In the 1960s and 1970s, another understanding of biopolitics took shape. This did

not focus on the biological foundations of politics, but discovered life processes as

a new object of political thought and action. The increased awareness of

ecological crisis among political actors and social movements prompted a

9
different reading of biopolitics as a term that referred to all efforts to steer and

regulate with a view to solving global environmental problems. A very important

event in this respect was the publication of a report to the Club of Rome

(Meadows et al., 1972). Based on computer simulations and modelling, this report

highlighted the ecological and demographical limits to economic growth and

demanded political intervention to stop the destruction of the natural conditions

of life on earth.

In this historical constellation, the notion of biopolitics acquired a new

meaning. In publications of the ecological movement, it was used as an

‘integrating general notion for health policies, environmental policies and

survival policies’ (Bruns, 1977).** Biopolitics represented a new domain of

politics and action generated by the concern to preserve the natural conditions of

life for human beings. This reading is very evident in the book series Politik

zwischen Macht und Recht (‘Politics between power and law’) by the German

political scientist Dietrich Gunst, who devotes a book to the issue of ‘biopolitics’

(alongside books on constitutional and foreign policy). According to Gunst,

biopolitics encompasses

… all areas that deal with health and population policies,

with environmental problems and the future of mankind.
This domain of politics is characterized by a global form that
is relatively new. It accounts for the fact that questions of
life and survival are becoming increasingly important.

(1978: 9)

The book addresses the social and political problems that result from the growth

of the world population, the critical nutrition situation and food shortages in

10
many countries, the contamination of water and air, the depletion of basic

materials, and shortfalls in the provision of energy.8

The idea of biopolitics as preservation and protection of the natural

environment was soon complemented and finally replaced by a second conception.

The 1970s saw a growing ecological movement and an increasing awareness of

environmental questions, and this decade was also marked by some spectacular

biotechnological innovations. In 1973, it became possible to isolate and re-

combine genetic information. From now on molecular biologists could exchange

DNA across organisms. At the same time, prenatal testing became part of health

care during pregnancy and new reproductive technologies (like in-vitro

fertilization) were developed. The growing importance of genetic and reproductive

technologies raised questions concerning the regulation and control of scientific

progress. Research findings and the application of the new technologies showed

how contingent and fragile the border between nature and society actually is. It

was the insight into the instability of this dividing line that led many people to

the conclusion that more and more effort was needed to redefine and fix it. It was

necessary to specify which technological procedures were acceptable, and under

what conditions. In addition, there was a need to resolve which research efforts

should be financed by public funding and which should be considered illegal or

unacceptable. These problems led finally to a second – technology-based

– reading of biopolitics. This has arisen alongside bioethical

considerations, and signifies collective communication and negotiation about the

socially acceptable use of technological options. The sociologist Wolfgang van den

Daele has summed up this version of biopolitics quite well. According to Van den

11
Daele, the notion of biopolitics denotes ‘the social discussion and regulation of the

application of modern natural science and technology to human beings that has

lasted for about two decades now’ (Van den Daele, 2005: 8; see also Geyer, 2001).

In recent years, this interpretation has become dominant in the media and

in political declarations and speeches. Since at least the turn of the millennium,

biopolitics stands for administrative and legal procedures that determine the

foundations and boundaries of biotechnological interventions.9 It is safe to say,

then, that since the 1970s ‘life’ has become a reference point for political thinking

and political action in two respects. On the one hand, there is a growing

conviction that the human ‘environment’ is threatened by the existing social and

economic structures, and that policy makers need to find the right answers to the

ecological question and to secure the conditions of life on earth. On the other

hand and at the same time, it is becoming increasingly difficult to know, because

of scientific discoveries and technological innovations, what exactly the ‘natural

foundations’ of life are and how these can be distinguished from ‘artificial’ forms

of life. In this light, Walter Truett Anderson notes a shift from ‘environmentalism

to biopolitics’ (1987: 94). The latter goes well beyond the traditional forms of

environmental protection and represents a new political field that gives rise to

hitherto unforeseen questions and problems. As Anderson sees it, biopolitics not

only comprises measures to save endangered species but should also tackle the

problem of ‘genetic erosion’ and regulate biotechnological progress (1987:

94–147).

The philosopher Volker Gerhardt puts forward a comprehensive definition

of biopolitics that encompasses both approaches discussed above. Gerhardt sees

12
biopolitics as a ‘wide-ranging domain of action’ characterized by ‘three main

tasks’. Along with ‘ecologically securing the basics of life’ and ‘the biological

increase of the benefits of life’, the protection of the development of life through

medical intervention has also become an issue (Gerhardt, 2004: 32). According to

Gerhardt, the challenges posed by the last domain have radically changed and

expanded the range of contemporary biopolitics so that it now includes ‘those

questions in which the human becomes an object of the life sciences’ (2004: 44).

He laments the broad range of scepticism and refusal that stretches from

representatives of the church to Marxists. These people put ‘biopolitics under

general suspicion’ (2004: 37) and foment irrational fears about new technologies.

In the face of such critics, Gerhardt demands a rational debate about the

possibilities and risks of technology. He argues that it is necessary to foster a

political culture that respects the freedom of the individual and ensures that the

human being remains an end in itself (2004: 30):

Since biopolitics to a certain degree impinges upon our self-

understanding as human beings, we must insist on its link to
basic liberties and to human rights. And since it can have
wide-ranging consequences for our individual self-
understanding, it also makes demands on the individual
conduct of our lives. If one does not wish biotechnology to
interfere with questions which are situated within the
discreet sanctuary of love, he must make this decision first
and above all for himself.**

(2004: 36)

This appeal fails to convince. Biopolitical questions are indeed fundamental,

but they are fundamental not only because they are objects of political discourse

13
but also because they encompass the political subject himself/herself. Should

embryonic stem cells be considered legal subjects or biological material? Does

neurobiological research reveal the limits of human free will or not**? In such

cases, the question is not just about the political assessment of technologies or

the negotiation of a political compromise in a field of competing interests and

value systems. Rather, the question is who should participate in such decision-

making and how normative concepts of individual freedom and responsibility

interact with biological factors. In this respect, biopolitics defines

… the borderland in which the distinction between life and

action is introduced and dramatized in the first place. This
distinction is nothing less than a constitutive element of
politics as the development of the citizen’s will and decision-
making powers. Biopolitics is in this respect not a new,
ancillary field of politics, but rather a problem space at the
heart of politics itself.

(Thomä, 2002: 102, emphasis in original)

The concept of biopolitics cannot simply be labelled a specific political

activity or a sub-field of politics that deals with the regulation and governance of

life processes. Rather, the meaning of biopolitics lies in its ability to make visible

the always contingent, always precarious difference between politics and life,

culture and nature, between the realm of the intangible and unquestioned, on the

one hand, and the sphere of moral and legal action, on the other.

Michel Foucault’s Historical Concept of Biopolitics

In the following, I will argue that both the lines of interpretation presented so far

fail to capture essential dimensions of biopolitical processes. Apart from their

obvious differences, the politicist and the naturalist position share some basic

14
assumptions. Both conceptions are based on the idea of a stable hierarchy and an

external relationship between life and politics. The advocates of naturalism

regard life as being ‘beneath’ politics, directing and explaining political reasoning

and action. The politicist conception sees politics as being ‘above’ life processes;

here, politics is more than ‘pure’ biology, going beyond the necessities of natural

existence. Each fundamental position on the problem of biopolitics relies on the

stability of one pole of the semantic field in order to explain variations in the

other pole. Either biology accounts for politics, or politics regulates biology.

However, this means that both conceptions fail to explain the fragility of the

border between ‘life’ and ‘politics’ – and it is exactly this instability that

has prompted so many people to take up the notion of biopolitics. As the two

approaches take ‘life’ and ‘politics’ as isolated phenomena, neither of them is able

to account for their relationality and historicity. The emergence of the notion of

biopolitics signals a double negation (compare** Nancy, 2002): in contrast to

naturalist positions, life does not represent a stable ontological and normative

point of reference. The impact of biotechnological innovations has demonstrated

that life processes are transformable and controllable to an increasing degree,

which renders obsolete any idea of an intact nature untouched by human action.

At the same time, it has become clear that biopolitics also marks a significant

transformation of politics. Life is not only the object of politics and external to

political decision-making, it affects the core of politics – the political

subject. Biopolitics is not the expression of a sovereign will, but aims at the

administration and regulation of life processes on the level of populations.

Biopolitics focuses on living beings rather than on legal subjects – or, to be

more precise, it deals with legal subjects that are at the same time living beings.

15
 Against the naturalist and the politicist reading, Michel Foucault

developed a historical notion of biopolitics in the 1970s. In Foucault’s work, the

term ‘biopolitics’ breaks explicitly with theoretical approaches which reduce

political processes and structures to biological determinants. Instead of assuming

foundational and ahistorical laws of politics, he diagnoses a historical break, a

discontinuity in political practice. From this perspective, biopolitics denotes a

specifically modern way of exercising power (Foucault, 1980; see also 2003:

239–264).

However, Foucault’s notion of biopolitics not only turns against the idea of

life processes as the basis of politics but also rejects concepts that regard life as

the object of politics. He argues that biopolitics is not an expansion of politics, but

reformulates concepts of sovereignty and subordinates them to new forms of

political knowledge. Biopolitics represents a constellation in which the modern

human and natural sciences and the concepts of normality inform political action

and determine the goals of politics. For this reason biopolitics, in Foucault’s

reading, cannot be reduced to the ecological crisis or the emergence of new

technologies. Rather, biopolitics stands for a fundamental transformation in the

order of politics:

For the first time in history, no doubt, biological existence

was reflected in political existence …. [W]hat might be called
a society’s ‘threshold of modernity’ has been reached when
the life of the species is wagered on its own political
strategies. For millennia, man remained what he was for
Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a
political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics
places his existence as a living being in question.

16
 (1980: 142–143)

Foucault’s concept of biopolitics recognizes that the seemingly stable border

between nature and politics taken for granted by both naturalist and politicist

approaches represents the effect rather than the point of departure of political

practice. According to Foucault, biopolitics designates a political economy of life

aiming to administer, secure, develop and foster life. The Birth of Biopolitics (the

title of his 1979 lecture series at the Collège de France) is closely linked to the

emergence of liberal forms of government. Foucault conceives of liberalism not as

an economic theory or a political ideology but as a specific art of governing

human beings. It has its target in the new political figure of population, and it

relies on political economy as the principal form of knowledge. Liberalism

introduces a rationality of government that differs both from medieval concepts

of domination and from early modern state reason: the idea of a nature of society

that constitutes the basis and the border of governmental practice. This concept

of nature is not a traditional idea or something left over from pre-modern times;

rather, it marks an important historical rupture in the history of political

thought (Foucault, 2007, 2008).

Paradoxically, the liberal recourse to nature makes it possible to leave

nature behind, or more precisely to leave behind a certain concept of nature that

conceives of it as eternal, holy or unchangeable. For liberals, nature is not an

autonomous domain in which intervention is forbidden as a matter of principle,

or impossible. Nature is not a material substratum to which governmental

practices are applied, but rather their permanent correlate. It is true that there

is a ‘natural’ limit to state intervention, as it has to take into account the nature

of the social facts. However, this dividing line is not a negative borderline, since it

17
is precisely the ‘nature’ of the population that opens up a series of hitherto

unknown possibilities of intervention. These do not necessarily take the form of

direct interdictions or regulations: ‘laisser-faire’, inciting and stimulating become

more important than dominating, prescribing and decreeing (Foucault, 2007:

70–76; 2008: 267–316).1 0

The notion of biopolitics in Foucault’s work refers to the emergence of a

specific political knowledge and of new disciplines such as statistics, demography

and epidemiology. These disciplines make it possible to analyse processes of life

on the level of populations and to ‘govern’ individuals and collectives by practices

of correction, exclusion, normalization, disciplining, therapeutics and

optimization.1 1 The ambivalent status of the political figure ‘population’ plays a

decisive role in this context. On the one hand, population represents a collective

reality that is characterized by its own dynamics and modes of self-regulation;

this autonomy, on the other hand, does not imply an absolute limit to political

intervention but is on the contrary the privileged reference of those interventions.

The discovery of a ‘nature’ of the population (for example, rates of birth and

death, diseases, and so on) that might be influenced by specific incentives and

measures is the precondition for directing and managing it.

The emergence of the new political figure of population cannot be

separated from the formation of modern biology. Liberal concepts of autonomy

and freedom are closely connected to biological notions of self-regulation and self-

preservation, which prevailed over the hitherto dominant mechanistic paradigm

of understanding bodies. Biology, which emerged around 1800 as the science of

life, assumes a basic principle of organization that accounts for the contingency of

18
life without any foundational or fixed programme. The idea of an external order

that corresponds to the plans of a higher instance beyond life is replaced by the

concept of an inner organization characterized by life as a dynamic and abstract

principle common to all organisms alike (compare** Foucault, 1994).

Foucault’s concept of biopolitics addresses the dissociation and abstraction

of life from its concrete physical bearers. The object of biopolitics is not singular

human beings, but their biological features measured and aggregated on the level

of populations. This procedure makes it possible to define norms, establish

standards and determine average values. As a result, ‘life’ has become an

independent, objective and measurable factor and a collective reality that can be

epistemologically and practically separated from concrete living beings and the

singularity of individual experience.1 2

To conclude, we can note that Foucault’s notion of ‘biopolitics’ combines

apparently contradictory issues. If politics in the classical sense refers to a state

beyond existential necessities, biopolitics introduces a reflexive dimension. It

proposes to treat as the inner core of politics what once defined its external

border: the body and life. Seen in this light, biopolitics re-integrates the excluded

other of politics. However, neither politics nor life remains what it was before

biopolitics emerged. Life ceases to be the always presumed but never explained

counterpart of politics. It is separated from the singularity of concrete lives and

becomes an abstraction, the object of scientific knowledge, administrative concern

and technical improvement. Politics, too, is transformed by biopolitical

rationalities and technologies. It depends on life processes that it cannot directly

control, and it has to respect their capacities for self-regulation. However, this

19
very limitation allows politics to expand its range of options for intervention and

government. It does this because politics disposes not only of direct forms of

authoritative command but also of indirect mechanisms for inciting and

directing, preventing and predicting, moralizing and normalizing. Politics can

prescribe and prohibit, but it can also incite and initiate, discipline and supervise

– or activate and animate.

The Foucauldian perspective on the naturalist and politicist notions of

biopolitics enables us to comprehend them as constitutive elements of a common

biopolitical problematic. The conception of nature as deterministic is the other

side of its increasing permeation by science and technology (compare** Latour,

1993). Both perspectives diminish the significance of politics by conceiving of it as

reactive, deductive and retroactive. The naturalist interpretation limits itself to

reproducing the order of nature and expressing what biological processes have

predetermined. In the politicist variant, politics seems to be merely a reflex of

scientific and technological processes since it only regulates how society adapts to

these developments. In conclusion, I would like to outline an analytics of

biopolitics that takes politics seriously and develops an alternative to these two

basic positions, which are simultaneously contrasting and complementary.

Beyond Foucault: Towards an Analytics of Biopolitics

An analytics of biopolitics differs from both naturalist and politicist concepts,

since it focuses on neither the origins nor the effects of a politics of life but

instead describes its mode of functioning. At its centre we will find the question

‘how?’ instead of ‘why?’ or ‘what for?’ An analytics of biopolitics does not diagnose

a biologization of politics or a politicization of biology, since it conceives of ‘life’

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and ‘politics’ as elements of a dynamic relationship rather than as external and

independent entities.

This analytic perspective has its starting point in Foucault's work on

biopolitics, but it mainly ‘lives’, so to speak, from the numerous corrections and

elaborations of this concept that have been put forward during the past thirty

years. In broad terms, it is possible to distinguish two main lines of reception.

The first is dominant in philosophy and social theory. It inquires into the mode of

politics that biopolitics represents: How does it work and what forces does it

mobilize? How is it to be distinguished historically and analytically from other

forms of politics today and in the past? Giorgio Agamben’s writings and the

works of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri are certainly the most prominent

contributions to a reformulation of Foucault’s notion of biopolitics (Agamben,

1998; Hardt and Negri, 2000, 2004; see also Esposito, 2008). The second line of

reception originates in social studies of science and technology, the history of

science, medical anthropology, and also in feminist theory and gender studies

(Fassin, 2005, Franklin, 2007; Haraway, 1991; Iacub, 2001; Rabinow, 1999; Rose,

2007). The starting point in this theoretical strand is the observation that living

bodies are open to technological decomposition and improvement, and so cannot

be conceived simply as natural organisms. Here the question arises: What is the

substance of life within the present political and scientific constellation?

Taken together, these lines of reception have advanced and substantiated

the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics in different ways. First, they make it clear

that contemporary biopolitical processes are based on an altered and expanded

knowledge of the body and biological processes. Thus, the body is conceived of as

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an informational network rather than a physical substrate or an anatomical

machine. Secondly, it was necessary to supplement the analysis of biopolitical

mechanisms with an examination of the modes of subjectivation. This theoretical

move makes it possible to assess how the regulation of life processes affects

individual and collective actors and gives rise to new forms of identity. In short:

following Foucault, recent studies of biopolitical processes have focused on the

importance of knowledge production and forms of subjectivation. An analytics of

biopolitics should investigate the network of relations between power strategies,

knowledge practices and modes of subjectivation. Accordingly, it is possible to

distinguish three dimensions of his research perspective (see also Rabinow and

Rose, 2006: 197–198).

First, biopolitics requires a systematic knowledge of ‘life’ and of ‘living

beings’. Systems of knowledge provide cognitive and normative maps that open

up biopolitical spaces and define both subjects and objects of intervention. They

make the reality of life conceivable and calculable in such a way that it can be

shaped and transformed. Thus, it is necessary to comprehend the regime of truth

(and its selective format) that constitutes the background of biopolitical practices.

One must ask: What knowledge of the body and life processes is taken to be

socially relevant, and, by contrast, what alternative interpretations are devalued

or marginalized? What scientific experts and disciplines have legitimate

authority to tell the truth about life, health or a given population? In what

vocabulary, using what terms, are processes of life described, measured,

evaluated and criticized? What cognitive and intellectual instruments and

technological procedures stand ready to produce truth? What proposals and

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definitions of problems and objectives regarding processes of life obtain social

recognition?

The problem of a regime of truth cannot be separated from the question of

power. Secondly, we have to ask how strategies of power mobilize knowledge of

life, and how processes of power generate and disseminate forms of knowledge.

This perspective enables us to take into account structures of inequality,

hierarchies of value and asymmetries that are (re-)produced by biopolitical

practices: What forms of life are regarded as socially valuable, which are

considered ‘not worth living’? What existential hardships, what forms of physical

and psychic suffering attract political, medical, scientific and social attention,

which are seen as intolerable, a priority for research and in need of therapy, and

which are neglected or ignored? How are forms of domination, mechanisms of

exclusion, and the experience of racism and sexism inscribed into the body, and

how do they alter it in terms of its physical appearance, state of health and life

expectancy? In addition, this perspective investigates the ‘economy’ of the politics

of life: Who profits, and how, from the regulation and improvement of life

processes (in terms of financial gain, political influence, scientific reputation,

social prestige, and so on)? Who bears the costs and suffers such burdens as

poverty, illness and premature death because of these processes? What forms of

exploitation and commercialization of human and non-human life can be

observed?

Third, an analytics of biopolitics must also take into account forms of

subjectivation: that is, the manner in which subjects are brought to work on

themselves guided by scientific, medical, moral, religious and other authorities,

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and on the basis of socially accepted arrangements of bodies and sexes. Here

again, one can formulate a complex of questions that presents some relevant

issues: How are men** called upon, in the name of (individual or collective) life

and health (their own or the health of the family, the people, the ‘race’, and so

on)? How should they comport themselves in the light of well-defined goals, such

as the prolongation of life, improvement of health and quality of life,

enhancement of the gene pool, and population growth (or even die if need be for

the fulfilment of these goals)? How are they brought to experience their life as

‘worthy’ or ‘not worthy’ of being lived? How are they interpellated as members of

a ‘higher’ or ‘inferior’ race, a ‘strong’ or a ‘weak’ sex, a ‘rising’ or a ‘degenerate’

people? How do subjects adopt and modify scientific interpretations of life for

their own conduct and conceive of themselves as organisms regulated by genes,

as neurobiological machines, as composed bodies whose organic parts are in

principle exchangeable? How can this process be viewed as an active

appropriation and precisely not as passive acquiescence?

What does such an approach contribute to the understanding of

contemporary societies? Where is its ‘theoretical surplus value’ to be found

(compare** Fassin, 2004: 178–179)? From a historical perspective, an

analytics of biopolitics demonstrates how, in the last few centuries, not only has

the importance of ‘life’ for politics increased but also the definition of politics

itself has thereby been transformed. From reproductive cloning via avian flu to

asylum policies, from health provision via pension policies to the decline in

population – individual and collective life, its improvement and

prolongation, its protection against all kind of dangers and risks, has come to

occupy more and more space in political debate. While the welfare state has been

24
able until recently to focus on the problem of securing the lives of its citizens,

today the state also has to define and regulate the beginning and the end of life.

Thus, the question of who is a member of the legal community, or, to put it

another way, of who is not yet or no longer a member (embryos, the brain dead,

and so on), becomes acute.

In empirical terms, an analytics of biopolitics allows us to link areas and

domains that are usually separated by administrative, disciplinary and cognitive

borders. The categorical dividing lines between the natural and social sciences,

body and mind, nature and culture lead to a blind alley in biopolitical issues. The

interactions between life and politics cannot be dealt with using social-scientific

methods and research approaches alone. The analysis of biopolitical problems

necessitates a trans-disciplinary dialogue between different cultures of

knowledge, modes of analysis and explanatory competences. In addition, it is

clearly inadequate to isolate the medical, political, social and scientific aspects of

biopolitical questions. The challenge of an analytics of biopolitics lies precisely in

the project of presenting the issue as part of a more comprehensive constellation

– a constellation that contains numerous divisions as empirical facts,

which could be explained historically and might potentially be superseded or at

least shifted in the future.

Finally, an analytics of biopolitics also fulfils a very important critical

function. It shows that biopolitical phenomena are not the result of

anthropologically rooted drives, evolutionary laws or universal political

constraints. Rather, they have to be explained by social practice and political

decision-making. These processes do not follow a necessary and global logic, but

25
are subject to a very specific and contingent rationality displaying institutional

preferences and normative choices. The task of an analytics of biopolitics is to

reveal and make tangible the restrictions and contingencies, the demands and

constraints, that impinge upon it. Thus, the critical aspect here does not consist

in a rejection of what already exists. Rather, it seeks to generate forms of

engagement and analysis that enable us to perceive new possibilities and

perspectives, or to examine those already existing from a different point of view.

An analytics of biopolitics is a problematizing and creative activity that links a

diagnostics of the present with an orientation to the future, by challenging

apparently natural or self-evident modes of practice and thought –

inviting us to live differently.

Notes
I would like to thank Kevin Hall for commenting on an earlier version of the
manuscript and Gerard Holden for copy-editing the text.**

1. Compare the contributions to the Italian Lessico di Biopolitica (Brandimarte

et al., 2006).
2. The argument is presented in more detail in Lemke (2011). 3. For a
brief history of the concept of biopolitics, see Esposito (2008: esp.
16–24).
4. All translations from German and French are my own.
5. For the formulation and elaboration of its social and political conception, the
National Socialist movement made use of many different sources,
integrating Social Darwinist ideas along with Pan-Germanic and nationalist
ideologies. It took up anthropological, biological and medical concepts and
ideas, and simultaneously influenced the production of theories and
empirical work in these disciplines. Since heterogeneous elements and
theoretically mismatched notions frequently stand unmediated alongside
one another in National Socialist texts, it is difficult to speak of a coherent
conception of biopolitics (see Weingart et al., 1992).
6. The first political scientist to use the concept of biopolitics in this sense was
probably Lynton K. Caldwell (1964).
7. Despite research and publication activity that now spans four decades, it is
only in the USA that one can find a rudimentary institutionalization of this
theoretical perspective today. In 1985, the Association for Politics and Life

26
 Sciences (APLS) acquired an official section of the American Political
Science Association (APSA), but lost it ten years later because of declining
membership. The journal founded by this section, Politics and the Life
Sciences, has been in existence since 1982 (Blank and Hines, 2001:
6–8).
Outside the USA this branch of political science is almost invisible, even if
there are scholars in a few countries who consider themselves biopoliticians.
In Germany, Heiner Flohr, now emeritus professor of political science at the
University of Düsseldorf, has for thirty years argued consistently for the
importance of this research perspective (Flohr, 1986; compare** Kamps and
Watts, 1998).
8. One of the most curious responses to the ‘ecological question’ is the idea of a
‘Christian biopolitics’ put forward by theologian Kenneth Cauthen in his
book Christian Biopolitics: A Credo and Strategy for the Future (1971).
Cauthen claims that the world is moving towards a ‘planetary society’,
which comes into existence once the biological frontiers of Earth are
exceeded. The book explores the dangers arising from and the opportunity
for a fundamental change in consciousness that would be caused by such a
development. According to Cauthen, a transformation in ideas, goals and
attitudes is necessary in order to bring about the desired transition, and
this is where theology and the church have a special role to play. ‘Christian
biopolitics’ consists in developing
… a religio-ethical perspective centered on life and the
quest for enjoyment in a science-based technological
age. This ecological model requires an organic
understanding of reality. Such an understanding
interprets man as a biospiritual unity whose life is set
within cosmic nature, as well as within human history.
(Cauthen, 1971: 11–12)

9. The Zeitschrift für Biopolitik (‘Journal of Biopolitics’), which was founded in

2002 but has now been discontinued, contained many examples illustrating
this reading of biopolitics (compare** Mietzsch, 2002).
10. Foucault insists that biopolitical problems cannot be separated
… from the framework of political rationality within
which they appeared and took on their intensity. This
means ‘liberalism’, since it was in relation to liberalism
that they assumed the form of a challenge. How can the
phenomena of ‘population’, with its specific effects and
problems, be taken into account in a system concerned
about respect for legal subjects and individual free
enterprise? In the name of what and according to what
rules can it be managed?
(2008: 317)

11. Foucault uses the notion of government in the ‘broad meaning of the word’
(1993: 204). While the word has a purely political meaning today, Foucault

27
 is able to show that up until well into the eighteenth century the problem of
government was placed in a more general context. Government was a term
discussed not only in political tracts but also in philosophical, religious,
medical and pedagogic texts. In addition to management by the state or
administration, government also addressed problems of self-control,
guidance for the family and for children, management of the household,
directing the soul, and other questions (see 2000: 341).
12. While Foucault stimulated this direction of analysis, he did not pursue it
systematically. He failed to substantiate his ideas about the relationship
between biopolitics and liberalism, the question that was supposed to be at
the centre of his 1979 lecture series (see 2008: 21–22, 78).
Regrettably, what we have is the ‘intention’, as Foucault conceded self-
critically in the course of the lecture (2008: 185–186).

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Author Biography

Corresponding author:
Thomas Lemke, Goethe University, Faculty of Social Sciences,
Robert-Mayer-Str. 5, D-60054, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Email: [email protected]

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