Biopower — Concept elaborated by Michel Foucault to designate the ensemble of mechanisms through which the fundamental biological traits of the human species — birth rate, mortality, health, longevity — enter the calculations of power, becoming the object of a political strategy for managing populations. The term (from the Greek bíos, life, joined to “power”) is introduced by Foucault in the final chapter of The History of Sexuality, Vol. I — The Will to Knowledge (1976) and developed in his courses at the Collège de France (“Society Must Be Defended”, 1975–76; Security, Territory, Population, 1977–78). Biopower operates through two poles: anatomo-politics, which disciplines individual bodies (surveillance, training, docilisation), and biopolitics, which regulates populations as a species through demographic statistics, sanitary control, and public health policies. Rather than merely repressing, this power produces, organises, and optimises life as a resource. With it Foucault describes a historical transition: sovereign power, which “made die and let live,” gives way to a power that “makes live and lets die.” A concrete example is the state management of epidemics, vaccination, and birth rates, in which the life of the population becomes a target of calculated regulation. The concept is closely tied to that of governmentality — the techniques for conducting conduct — and to the disciplinary power of institutions (prison, hospital, school). Giorgio Agamben (Homo Sacer, 1995) radicalises the notion, arguing that biopower reduces the human being to “bare life” (zoē), exposed to sovereign violence without juridical protection.
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