Biopolitics Is Not (Primarily) About Life: On Biopolitics, Neoliberalism, and Families

The emergence of topics such as reprogenetics and genetic testing for hereditary diseases attests to the continued salience of Foucault's analyses of biopolitics. His various discussions pose at least two problems for contemporary appropriation of the work. First, it is unclear what the "life" on which biopolitics operates actually refers to.1 Second, it is unclear how biopolitics relates to the economy, either in the classical form of the family/household (oikos) or in the current form of neoliberalism.2 In what follows, I argue, first, that modern biopolitics is marked less by the entry of biological life into the polis than by a new consideration of the form of life proper to humans. This is because Foucault's ..