The Hegelian Roots of Foucauldian Biopolitics

The Sovereignity-Biopolitics-Thanatopolitics Dialectic

Abstract

In the last decades the affirmation of the biopolitical paradigm in the philosophical-political discussion has generated a series of studies around the concept of biopolitics, first and foremost in the thought of Michel Foucault. W. G. F. Hegel’s influence on the French philosopher, however, is not extensively thematized in the biopolitical literature. In order to start filling this gap, the present work focuses on Judith Butler’s reading of Foucault in the light of the slave-master Hegelian dialectic and proposes to extend this interpretation also to Foucauldian biopolitics. Such an operation enables us to detect potential criticalities and to adopt theoretical solutions to avoid them. Particularly, it will be proposed that the biopolitical figures of Sovereignty, Biopower, and Thanatopolitics can be seen as results of a dialectical process very similar to the one described by Hegel in the fourth chapter of the Phenomenology. We will then be able to highlight some characteristics that are not yet explicit in Foucault’s texts, but that are present in the later philosophers that follow his path like, for instance, Giorgio Agamben, and Achille Mbembe. Lastly, it will be claimed that to let the subjects endure a process of ontologization (as the biopolitical debate that followed Foucault did), means to put an inappropriate stop to the dialectical movement. In fact, such a peculiar and problematic operation solidifies the poles of the social process – by conceptualizing power as an oppressive dimension, and subjects as points that resist it – and opposes one another in a destructive relationship. The latter result can be avoided by highlighting the Hegelian key in which the biopolitical paradigm is rooted in: thus, avoiding any kind of ontologization as Hegel (but also Foucault) did.