Their argument conflates sovereign power and biopower – biopower isn’t concerned with creating large-scale death; it improves overall quality of life

Foucault points out, however, that since the seventeenth century the West has undergone a very profound transformation in terms of mechanisms of power. Little by little, the violent sovereign power has been replaced by the power that Foucault calls biopower. In the case of biopower it is no longer a matter of bringing death into play in the field of sovereignty, but of distributing the living in the domain of value and utility. Its task is to take charge of life that needs a continuous regulatory and corrective mechanism. The logic of biopower  is not deduction but production:  “It exerts a positive influence on life, endeavours to administer, optimize, and multiply it.”4 Biopower replaces the right to “take life and let live” with that of a power to foster life  – or disallow it to the point of death. Instead of being exercised by means of law and violence, biopower is exercised through the normalising biological, psychological and social technologies – through the “methods of power capable of optimizing forces, aptitudes, and life general.”5 Unlike sovereign power, it does not celebrate death. On the contrary, biopower wants to exclude it  (“disqualification of death”6).  Death is no longer the way in which power expresses itself, but rather its absolute limit. Instead of death, the focus of biopower is on the birth and life of individuals and populations.7