Abstract

This article deals with the way in which Michel Foucault first introduced the notion of ‘biopolitics’ through the referential frame of sexuality and psychoanalysis. It focuses on the concept that is utterly and conspicuously missing from Foucault's account, in The History of Sexuality, of the psychoanalytic take on sexuality — namely, the unconscious. It argues that this omission has important and far-reaching consequences for the concept of biopolitics as such.