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.Legal normativityoperates by laws that codify norms, whereas discipline installs hier-archical differentiations that establish a division between those con-sidered normal and abnormal, suitable and capable, and the others.Itfunctions by designing an optimal model and its operationalization,that is, by employing techniques and procedures to adjust and adaptindividuals to this standard.The technologies of security represent the very opposite of thedisciplinary system: whereas the la er assumes a prescriptive norm,the former take the empirical norm as a starting point, which servesas a regulative norm and allows for further differentiations and varia-tions.Rather than adjusting reality to a predefined should-be value,the technologies of security take reality as the norm: as a statisticaldistribution of events, as average rate of diseases, births and deaths,and so on.They do not draw an absolute borderline between thepermi ed and the prohibited; rather, they specify an optimal middlewithin a spectrum of variations (2007, 55 63). 48 The Government of Living Beings: Michel FoucaultThe formation of political economy and population as new po-litical figures in the 18th century cannot be separated from the emer-gence of modern biology.Liberal concepts of autonomy and freedomare closely connected to biological notions of self-regulation andself-preservation that prevailed against the hitherto dominant phys-ical-mechanistic paradigm of investigating bodies.Biology, whichemerged about 1800 as the science of life, assumes a basic principleof organization that accounts for the contingency of life without anyfoundational or fixed program.The idea of an external order that cor-responds to the plans of a higher authority beyond life is displacedby the concept of an inner organization, whereby life functions as adynamic and abstract principle common to all organisms.From thispoint on, such categories as self-preservation, reproduction, and de-velopment (cf.Foucault 1970) serve to characterize the nature of liv-ing bodies, which now more clearly than ever before are distinguish-able from artificial entities.In the 1978 and 1979 lectures, Foucault conceives of liberalismas the general framework of biopolitics (2008, 22).This accountof liberalism signals a shift of emphasis in relation to his previouswork.The theoretical displacement results from the self-critical in-sight that his earlier analysis of biopolitics was one-dimensional andreductive, in the sense that it primarily focused on the biologicaland physical life of a population and on the politics of the body.Introducing the notion of government helps to broaden the theo-retical horizon, as it links the interest in a political anatomy of thehuman body with the investigation of subjectivation processes andmoral-political forms of existence.From this perspective, biopoliticsrepresents a particular and dynamic constellation that character-izes liberal government.With liberalism, but not before, the ques-tion arises of how subjects are to be governed if they are both legalpersons and living beings (see ibid.2008, 317).Foucault focuses onthis problem when he insists that biopolitical problems cannot beseparated The Government of Living Beings: Michel Foucault 49from the framework of political rationality within which they ap-peared and took on their intensity.This means liberalism, since itwas in relation to liberalism that they assumed the form of a chal-lenge.How can the phenomena of population, with its specific ef-fects and problems, be taken into account in a system concernedabout respect for legal subjects and individual free enterprise? Inthe name of what and according to what rules can it be managed?(2008, 317)The reformulation of the concept of biopolitics within an analyt-ics of government has a number of theoretical advantages.First, sucha research perspective allows for the exploration of the connectionsbetween physical being and moral-political existence: how do cer-tain objects of knowledge and experiences become a moral, political,or legal problem? This is the theme of the last volume of Foucault sHistory of Sexuality, at whose center stand moral problematizationsof physical experiences and forms of self-constitution (1988, 1990).Contemporary examples are the figure of the human being and thelegal construct of human dignity, both of which are coming under in-creasing pressure as a result of biotechnical innovation.The problemhas thus emerged, for example, of whether embryos possess humandignity and can claim human rights [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]