The body as a new inscription surface for politics: Michel Foucault and biopolitics

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to show that the use of the concept of "biopolitics" by Michel Foucault has some differences with the original concept, which certainly was not the creation of the French thinker. One of the fundamental characteristics of the biopolitics analyzed by Foucault lies in the convergence of several notions, apparently unrelated, but with a high potential to generate a sociopolitical framework. For Foucault, the genealogical description of concepts such as "technique", "sovereignty", "government", etc. means the genealogical description of an ontology of the present, in which the body appears as the privileged subject of the new configurations of power.