NEOLIBERALISM AND BIOPOLITICS: ABOUT THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN POLITICS AND LIFE IN THE ERA OF NEOLIBERAL GOVERNMENTALITY

Abstract

Perhaps a possible image to think about the relationships between politics and life today is a sentence, not of death, but of life. At the end of the seventies, when Michel Foucault proposed to reflect on the intersection between life and power, he introduced a similar image: “the old right to make die or let live was replaced by the power to make live or to throw to death.” (Foucault, 2002, p.130). As described, it is a power that is exercised over life, not to hinder or destroy it, but to preserve it, intensify it and increase its forces; make it useful. Biopower, far from killing, governs life by enhancing and intervening in the course of its deployment and to do so it uses different techniques and technologies of normalization and individuation that inscribe politics in unnoticed places.