Michel Foucault: Biopower and Race
Michel Foucault’s 1975–76 “Society Must Be Defended” lectures, in which his influential conception of biopower receives its first sustained formulation, pose one of modernity’s defining political questions. If modern political power is increasingly organized around the administration of life rather than the sovereign right to kill, how are we to understand the persistence—and proliferation—of colonial conquest, racial slavery, fascism, genocide, and other ongoing forms of mass violence? How can a political formation devoted to fostering, regulating, and optimizing life also become one of history’s most devastating engines of death?
Foucault’s answer is as provocative as it is controversial. Modern states, he argues, do not merely govern through law or coercion; they seek to regulate populations, optimize health, manage sexuality, and secure collective futures. For this reason, the logic of power on which they operate is a fundamentally biopolitical one. Yet precisely because biopower is committed to “making live,” it requires a principle through which some lives can be sacrificed for the sake of others. “It is at this moment,” Foucault declares, “that racism is inscribed as the basic mechanism of power, as it is exercised in modern States.”
Taking Foucault’s diagnosis as our point of departure, this seminar examines one of the most significant and contested claims in contemporary political philosophy: that racism is not simply one form of modern domination, but a constitutive feature of modern political power itself. Through close readings of “Society Must Be Defended,” volume 1 of The History of Sexuality, and selections from other lectures and essays of the 1970s, we will trace the development of Foucault’s account of biopower and explore how questions of discipline, sexuality, race, liberalism, and state violence converge within his genealogy of modernity. We will then place Foucault in conversation with thinkers such as Ann Laura Stoler, Achille Mbembe, Ladelle McWhorter, and Jasbir Puar, whose works challenge, revise, and extend his account by foregrounding colonialism, empire, racial formation, and the afterlives of biopolitical governance.
Some of the questions we will consider as we move through these texts include: Why does Foucault conclude that modern states require racism? How does biopower illuminate the emergence of fascism and other forms of racialized state violence? What is the relationship between liberalism, colonialism, and the governance of life? And does Foucault’s account still help us understand the political organization of life and death in the twenty-first century? In taking them up, we will investigate how the state comes to decide whose lives must be fostered, whose lives may be abandoned, and how the government of life has become inseparable from the politics of race.
