Attempts to prescribe meaning to “biopolitics” are futile--their thesis is an indeterminate “catch all” that reproduces violence.

As so often, Foucault’s periodization (‘in the second half of the eighteenth century . . . by the end of that century’) is less precise than a historian steeped in positivism and empiricism might expect or desire,2 but it is his hesitancy that is so striking: once more, biopolitics is in inverted commas and the notion is presented as an approximation (‘what I would call’). The same hesitancy appears in the first of the 1977–8 lectures on ‘Security, Territory, Population’: ‘I would like to begin with something that I have called, somewhat vaguely, bio-power’ (Foucault, 2007: 1). While issues that have already been associated with biopower – such as the handling of famines, the shift from the social and physical exclusion of lepers from the community to the use of controls, surveillance and regula- tion to handle outbreaks of plague – indicate a focus on strategies of exclusion, a significant shift occurs with the emergence of a biopolitics of population. The key element is the shift from exclusion to the management of populations at the level of a new rationality of the state; much of the text is devoted to an exploration of the themes of pastoral power and then Raison d’État.

The following year’s lectures were, according to their title, to be devoted to ‘the birth of biopower’, but its birth, at least in Foucault’s text, is once more deferred: ‘It seems to me that it is only when we understand what is at stake in this regime of liberalism opposed to Raison d’État . . . only when we know what this governmental regime called liberalism was, will we be able to grasp what biopolitics is’ (Foucault, 2008: 222). The index to a book on biopolitics contains only six references to the topic, and one of those is to an editorial footnote that supplies chronological information about the term’s origin. Most of the text is devoted to a discussion of economic liberalism and neoliberalism (see Lemke, 2001), and not to biopolitics itself. The most probable explanation for the hesitations (which may not be purely rhetorical), the approximations and the deferrals is that, while it represents the emergence of something, biopolitics is also a subset within the broader category of ‘government’ or ‘governmentality’ (see Burchell et al., 1991, for example), and that is a very broad category that includes the pastoral government of a flock of believers as well as the ‘government of the self’ of Foucault’s neo-Stoicism.

Instead of the great divide between ‘races’ as understood in the ‘discourse of race war’ and as practised by a sovereign power exercising its rule over a territory, one sees the emergence of new categories such as population and the nation-state, categories constituted by the governmental rationality described as biopolitics, a rationality enacted through new instruments such as those of police, demographics and political economy, analysed in Security, Territory, Population.