Article :- By Netra Narayan Chapagain
Bio-power is all about having power over bodies to manage them as a group. Michel Foucault argues that bio-power is modern appearance of power and is supposed to bring positive impact on life, optimize and multiply life by bringing under certain regulations. While defining the bio-power, Foucault opposes the conventional sovereign power that was exercised to seize things, time bodies and seizing of life.
Foucault’s work allows us to recognize Biopower as a form of power that regulates social life from its interior and even throughout the brains and bodies of the citizens residing in the society. It can be argued that within modern state there is a reconciliation of bio-power and sovereign power that legitimizes the misdeeds of the government in power.
Agamben deploys the history of the bio-power in talking about new form of power that takes the bare lives, bodies of the people to political calculations and that marks the modern state. This ultimately proves that the bio-power existed since the beginning of the concept of sovereign in the West. There is nexus between sovereign power and bio-power, and so the bond between sovereignty and bare life. Citizen whose life is reduced into a bare life exists as determined by the sovereign.
In contrast to Foucault, Agamben is of the opinion that, bio-power differs from body power over bare life rather it is power over all life for the sake of the living. Bio-power is not power in conventional sense but it is the living condition of all collective life and also the measure of the success of bio-power.
In simple term, bioethics is an activity associated with the reflective concern of ethics in different medical domains such as healthcare, health policy, health science and genetic engineering. Outwardly, it sounds like bioethics is only related with hospitals and doctors but in fact it is also related with labs, patients, scientists, politicians and general public as well. Despite massive interference of medical science in human life the issue is bioethics is hardly gets attention as the medical field is highly trusted in comparison to other profession.
Probably this is why it is call that bioethics is under the shadow of other great structure and its contribution is not regarded properly in understanding power. One of the problems in the narrative of bioethics is to present it in the fashion of liberationist romance. Autonomy seeking individual, fighting against limitations, and inhibitions inflicted from outer forces like customs, traditions, rules, regulations and institutions. But the scenario is different now; the old liberationist romance is challenged and corrected. There are at least two perspectives to counter the old notion. First, “deontological humanism” i.e. redefines our understanding of dignity and individual sovereignty beyond minimalist notions of freedom from other’s intrusion. Second, ‘critical deconstruction of “biopolitics” and “biopower”’ that gives systematic and political narrative of ethics in relation to power.
When we analyze these criticisms, we come to realize that the intervention of biotechnology into the human life threatens our dignity, sovereignty and rights. This also destroys the basic foundation of personhood, individual identity upon which these ideal have been erected. It is because, though biotechnology is often designed to promote human subjects, itis reductionist form of power that destroys human self which is regarded as a unique subject. Individuated selves become fungible parts such as ‘healthy people’ or ‘people with genetic defects.’ Both bio-power and biotechnology subvert the individualist notion of moral and political community. Rather than taking state as a social contract for mutual self interest, it is taken as a structure of protection designed to preserve the life of productive, functional and efficient bodies, and exclude dangerous, defective, or deviant life.
Criticism on bio-power has a long history. Foucault inspired through his work “Labeling Theory” in sociology, psychiatry and related institutions. In recent years, genetic engineering and bio-technology have been developed because the bio-power has also been broadened.
The term bio-power is coined by French philosopher Michel Foucault which is related to the exercise of modern nation states and their regulation of their citizen via “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations” (34). Similarly, Rabinow reads Foucault and writes: “As the fostering of life and the growth and care of population becomes a central concern of the state, articulated in the art of government, a new regime of power takes hold. Foucault calls this regime “bio-power”’ (17).
One of the prominent critics on Foucault, Paul Rabinow, puts forward some ideas upon the new thought on power. He writes:
The old power of death that symbolized sovereign power was now carefully supplanted by the administration of bodies and the calculated management of life. During the classical period, there was a rapid development of various disciplines – universities, secondary schools, barracks, workshops; there was also the emergence, in the field of the political practices and economic observation, of the problems of birth rate, longevity, public health, housing, and migration. Hence there was an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations, marking the beginning of an era of “bio-power.”
