An Unproblematized Truth: Foucault and the myth of biopolitics as an only modern phenomenon

Résumé/Abstract

Foucault is considered the demystifier par excellence of great teleological narratives in health and the body. Foucault and his concepts, however, stand today for a rather noticeable narrative (and perhaps even a ‘grand’ one): that a major break occurred in the nature of power at some point in the European Eighteenth century, the so called “birth of biopolitics” (2008); and it is only then that a genuine politicization of medicine, and the making of health as a central value for society, became a key feature of the operations of power, particularly through notions of norm, normality and normalization. The lack of scrutiny and generalized acceptance of this narrative among two generations of Foucauldians in the social sciences (particularly in the Anglosphere) go against the basic requirements of Foucault's method itself: firstly, passing abstract concepts through the grids of actual practices; secondly, genealogy as a patient and meticulous task; and thirdly, history as curative science. The paper challenges Foucault's view on three points: 1) the assumed centrality of the Northern-European Eighteen-Century and its administrative apparatuses as a foundational moment for biopolitics vs. a wider global history of biopolitics at the urban scale; 2) supposed lack of politicization of ancient medicine and only pre-political usages of humoralism; 3) presumed lack of normalization in Galenism and ancient medicine. After challenging these three points, I suggest a revised framework toward a global and longue durée history of biopolitics.

Bio

Maurizio Meloni is a social theorist and a science and technology studies scholar. He is the author of Political Biology: Science and Social Values in Human Heredity from Eugenics to Epigenetics (Palgrave, 2016: Winner of the Human Biology Association Book Award, 2020), Impressionable Biologies: From the Archaeology of Plasticity to the Sociology of Epigenetics (Routledge, 2019), co-editor of Biosocial Matters (Wiley 2016), and chief editor of the Palgrave Handbook of Biology and Society (2018). He is currently ARC Future Fellow in the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University, Australia.

Lien zoom : https://epfl.zoom.us/j/85944485169 (meeting ID: 859 4448 5169)