State good stems from Sotiris’s democratic biopolitics which is fallacious and refers not to Foucauldian Biopolitics but to authoritarian anatomo-politics

Sotiris understands ‘biopolitics’ as a set of political practices that “attempt to guarantee the health (and productivity) of populations.” He relies upon this broad definition because he wants to use the term ‘biopolitics’ to discuss a wide range of political practices related to health. For example, he argues that practices as diverse as social distancing amidst COVID, the battle against HIV, and bans on smoking in closed public spaces are all part of biopolitics.

When Sotiris speaks of ‘democratic biopolitics,’ he means that biopolitical practices could be authorized by “collective decision processes that are based on knowledge and understanding.” This definition implies that democratic biopolitics hasn’t yet been realized. After all, if democratic biopolitics already exists, then asking whether it is possible would be trivial. In summary: democratic biopolitics happens when rational, collective decision-making processes legitimize biopolitics, and democratic biopolitics does not currently exist.

We should reject Sotiris’ definitions for two reasons. First, Sotiris conflates two very different politics of health that Foucault studied: biopolitics and anatomo-politics. Second, if we use Sotiris’ definition of democracy, then democratic biopolitics has already been realized. In The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault provides a rich historical study of how biopolitics was legitimized via free, rational, and collective decision making. Additionally, democratic biopolitics has been far more violent and corrosive than Sotiris makes it seem. My contribution here is divided into two sections, each of which elaborates on one of these problems.

Differentiating Biopolitics from Anatomo-Politics

In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault defines biopolitics by contrasting it with anatamo-politics.

Anatomo-politics is a “politics of the human body” (243). This means that anatamo-politics doesn’t refer to all political techniques that alter the population’s health, but rather just to techniques that directly act on the body. More specifically, anatamo-politics attempts to discipline the human body. As Foucault puts it, discipline is always “addressed to the body” (242). When we are disciplined, this means that our body is directly induced to behave more productively or usefully. Anatomo-politics “could be used to take control over bodies … to increase their productive force through exercise, drill, and so on” (ibid.).

A good example of anatomo-politics would be therapy in a psychiatric institution. The therapist uses all sorts of exercises and drills to guarantee that her patients are maximally healthy and productive. Another good example would be putting a respirator on a patient suffering from COVID in an attempt to directly control and maximize their body’s health.

By contrast, biopolitics describes not the politics of the body, but “of the human race” (243). This form of politics, like anatomo-politics, is not a blanket term for all politics related to the health of humans. The difference between anatomo-politics and biopolitics is that biopolitics doesn’t describe techniques that discipline an individual, but techniques that secure the health of the ‘race’ or species. We can’t measure the health of a population just by looking at individual cases. For instance, the fact that therapy guarantees an individual patient’s health says nothing about the species’ health writ large. Thus, instead of monitoring and controlling individuals, biopolitics relies on “processes such as the ratio of births to deaths, the rate of reproduction, the fertility of a population, and so on” (243). These processes measure and regulate the health of the whole population via statistics.

A good example of biopolitics would be a city government that uses the rate of death from COVID in different boroughs to distribute a limited number of respirators. The goal here is clearly not to increase the productivity of each individual. In fact, these decisions about how to distribute respirators will hasten some individual’s deaths. Instead of disciplining each body, the goal of this biopolitical measure is to secure the rate of death for the population in general. One upshot of all this is that biopolitics doesn’t require maximum control over each individual’s life. Biopolitics doesn’t surveil and control so much as it assesses and regulates risk. Where is the rate of crime highest? The rate of disease? The rate of drug use? All these are biopolitical questions.

In this context, we can see that Sotiris’ definition of biopolitics is problematic: he tries to draw a sharp distinction between current biopolitical practices and future democratic biopolitics, but the current biopolitics he describes actually sound much more like anatomo-politics. For example, Sotiris counterposes democratic biopolitics to ‘authoritarian biopolitics,’ which are apparently exemplified by China: “Many commentators have suggested that China … could implement an authoritarian version of biopolitics … which was helped by the vast arsenal of coercion, surveillance and monitoring measures and technologies that the Chinese state has at its disposal.” Sotiris generally accepts the commentators’ assertion that surveillance and monitoring are instances of biopolitics. Insofar as surveillance and monitoring are part of the political project of guaranteeing people’s health, they count as biopolitics on his terms. However, a vast arsenal of ‘surveillance and monitoring’ is clearly much closer to discipline and anatomo-politics than it is to biopolitics.

In summary, Foucault defined biopolitics in contrast to anatomo-politics precisely to distinguish two different historical strategies for regulating health. It is unclear why Sotiris has chosen to use biopolitics as an umbrella term. We shouldn’t accept his modified definition until it is more clear why this modification is helpful.