Poder, biopolítica y poder soberano. Seminario: Filosofía política contemporánea.

Summary

The lecture explains how modern power operates through overlapping forms rather than one form simply replacing another. Sovereign power, disciplinary power, and biopower continue to coexist, with governmentality offering techniques for managing life and guiding conduct.

1. Disciplinary power and the body

• Disciplinary power acts on individual bodies, training and organizing them to make their abilities more useful and predictable. It is especially visible in settings such as factories, armies, and sports.
• Discipline involves more than training individuals separately: it also coordinates their efforts. The army, for example, develops collective strength by training soldiers to move and act together. In factories, the assembly line organizes workers’ movements within production.
• The lecture describes the “soul” as a political technology of the body: beliefs, hopes, duties, and identities can motivate people to accept discipline. A worker may internalize the expectation to work; a soldier may be guided by patriotism or belonging.
• Discipline is productive as well as restrictive: it can increase abilities and enable people to learn or perform tasks they could not otherwise manage.
• The lecturer contrasts Foucault’s archaeological approach, which reconstructs the conditions that make forms of knowledge possible, with his genealogical approach, which traces how practices and concepts—such as norms—emerge through power relations.

2. Biopower and the management of populations

• Biopower extends power from the trained individual body to the life of populations. The lecture links its rise to the nineteenth-century state, industrialization, and concerns about national productivity and wealth.
• To manage a population, states measure and classify it. Statistics about life expectancy, infant mortality, illness, and other characteristics help shape public-health and administrative policies.
• The norm is central to this process: it helps define which conditions and ways of life are encouraged, managed, or neglected. State investment in health, education, and infrastructure can favor some communities and lifestyles over others.
• The lecture presents Foucault’s contrast as follows:
  • Sovereign power: “make die and let live.”
  • Biopower: “make live and let die.”
• Biopower is not necessarily oppressive in every instance. Vaccination campaigns, for example, are described as efforts to protect life across a population. Education policies and the provision of infrastructure can also be biopolitical when they shape population-wide capacities and ways of living.
• The lecturer also discusses unequal and destructive uses of population management, including neglecting health provision, forced sterilization, and policies that expose particular populations to death. These examples connect biopower to thanatopolitics and to the logic of genocide.
• Later approaches develop these concerns in different directions: the Italian thinkers Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito, and the Cameroonian philosopher and historian Achille Mbembe, associated here with necropolitics and necropower.

3. Governmentality and the conduct of conduct

• Governmentality is introduced as a set of ways to govern life and populations. The lecture presents it as closely connected to government and pastoral power.
• Government is not simply ruling, issuing commands, or making laws. It means guiding behavior and shaping subjects—in other words, influencing how people act. Such guidance can occur in the state, but also in settings such as schools and churches.
• Government operates at both the individual and collective levels, a relation described as omnes et singulatim: governing everyone as a group while also attending to each person.
• The modern state’s role as a manager of populations develops historically; the lecturer distinguishes that role from sovereignty, which is presented as more fundamental to the state.
• The lecture contrasts political traditions over how much government there should be. It describes liberalism as seeking to limit government, while absolutist and totalitarian forms are associated with a more expansive reach into social life.

4. Pastoral power

• Pastoral power draws on the biblical image of the shepherd. The shepherd cares for and guides the flock, but also directs its movement.
• It is presented as benevolent and protective, concerned with material and spiritual well-being. In Christian contexts, the pastor or priest is also a guide of souls and a guide toward salvation.
• Like governmentality, pastoral power works on both the group and each individual. Its influence must be continually renewed through guidance and the shaping of conduct.

Speakers and sources featured

• Speaker: One lecturer, whose name is not identified in the subtitles. No other distinct speaker is clearly heard.
• Thinkers and sources discussed or cited: Michel Foucault (Discipline and Punish; “Society Must Be Defended”); Gilles Deleuze (the text referred to in the subtitles as “Excursus on the Societies of Control,” likely “Postscript on the Societies of Control”); Baruch Spinoza; Félix Guattari; Giorgio Agamben; Roberto Esposito; Achille Mbembe; Reinhart Koselleck (Critique and Crisis); John Locke (Two Treatises of Government).
• Other figures mentioned as examples or references: Frederick II of Prussia, Plato, and Hegel.