Looking through the lens of biopolitics is important to understanding the relations between the neoliberal state, the law, and the underlying structural subjectification by the state.

Biopower offers a theoretical framework for understanding contemporary forms of governance within a neoliberal order that includes patent law ownership. Foucault argued that, starting in the seventeenth century, mechanisms of power shifted from the sovereign authority to take a life toward the power to foster life.8 Power became directed at administering and regulating the biological existence of populations. Bodies became subject to “techniques of power”9 through diverse institutions such as schools, churches, hospitals, and the family, which were aimed at managing populations for the development of capitalist production. Power therefore, according to Foucault, transformed into a discursive power that “comes from everywhere.”10 As a consequence, Foucault claims that the juridical system of law gave way and shifted to law as norm. This does not mean that the law is no longer an important site of inquiry. Rather, the law, whose task is to govern life, begins to operate more as a norm and “the judicial institution is increasingly incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses (medical, administrative, etc.) whose functions are for the most part regulatory.”11 This later point is important for our purposes.

Law remains a crucial site of analysis to consider within biopolitics. Yet, attention must be paid to the discursive and regulatory power of the law and how it is embedded. How does patent law act as an ethico-legal norm privileging certain forms of knowledge production, bodies, and subjectivities over others? How are patent law, scientific knowledge, and the life science industries co-constituted? How is patent law employed as a technique to optimize and manage life in the service of neoliberal capitalism?