Abstract:
The article focuses on one often noticed and mentioned but only partially analyzed theme in Foucault’s discussion of biopolitics: namely that the latter is seen as a complex and historically developing set of techniques of power and control over the biological life of the population. The following analysis proceeds by two main steps: at first, it attempts to clarify the theoretical and methodological relation between the notions of technique and technology and Foucault’s general understanding of power relations. Thus technique is seen as a means to exercising power and stabilizing an ensemble of power relations; technology on the other hand functions in the Foucauldian analysis as the general practical knowledge mobilized in order to exercise power, and crystallized in concrete recipes of action – i.e. techniques – in a given field of force relations. The historical nature of power techniques, shown by Foucault in the example of the disciplines, demonstrates their peculiar dynamics and specificity of form: each power technique has its functions, privileged objects, modes of intervention, tactical deployment, history of polemical uses and contestations, transfers and transformations, etc. The second part of the analysis is a close reading of the problem of biopolitics precisely through the lens of power techniques in order to close the article with some methodological conclusions concerning the historical and sociological study of biopolitics.
