How Freedom Is Possible?-Foucault’s Biopolitics

This paper is intended to explore Foucault’s biopolitics around the problem of’how freedom is possible’,and Foucault himself is stimulated by this problem awareness to develop the study of biopolitics.The emergence of the concept of biopolitics has resulted from the need of developing new concepts and methods when traditional social and political concepts have more or less lost the validity of description.For Foucault,the study of biopolitics is first of all the correction and extension of Discipline and Punish,which implies a critique of the concept of power in traditional mode of law and at the same time a restructuring of the form of the operation of power.For this reason,we will divide Foucault’s study of biopolitics into two parts:biopolitics in the mode of war and that in the mode of governmentality.For biopolitics in the mode of war,’population’appears as its object,and therefore biopolitics is an assembly of knowledge-power in pursuit of the security of society in the biological sense.And biopolitics in the mode of governmentality,by the application of the concept of governmentality,progressively frees itself from the biological and medical dimension and centers around the way by which people is conducted.In biopolitics in the mode of war,the discussion of the problem of ’how freedom is possible’ is still based on the exploration of how ’unfreedom’ is formed.By the introduction of the concept of population,he progressively overcomes his previous understanding of power as direct effect on individuals and therefore as the producing of the docile ’normal’ person.However,Foucault has not yet gone beyond the understanding of seeing power and freedom as the antithesis.When the direction of Foucault’s study gradually centers on governmentality,he begins to directly deal with the interrelation between power and freedom.Specifically,Freedom is the precondition of power and at the same time the condition of the possibility of power.By producing and reinforcing freedom and circulation,governmentality ’forms’individuals as free subjects,and therefore the fundamental function of power lies in the subjectification.By the study of biopolitics in two modes,Foucault provides a set of analysis which differs from the ’traditional ’ idea of power.He attempts to change our understanding of politics and power,implying that power is not the form of institution centering around the state apparatus nor the operation in the form of law.In such an old understanding,freedom is situated in civil society or private spheres,and it appears as a form of right.In Foucault’s study centering on the technologies of power,politics is understood as the relationship of power which goes beyond the antithesis such as state-society and society-individual.Politics is as a result generalized,and biopolitics turns into a combination of politics and ethics in the traditional sense.Accordingly,the possibility of freedom no longer relies on discourse of law or of liberation,as the fundamental effect of power lies in the individual ethics.In other words,the possibility of freedom is realized too in the level of the relationship between self and self.Foucault’s thinking thus is turned to the government of self,and he finds in ancient Greece the way of the cultivation of self for which bios(life as a way of life)is seen as the material.By such a mode of the practice of ’bioethics’,Foucault finds the way of rupturing with the generalized political power,namely biopolitics.The possibility of the theoretical formulation of biopolitics is based on Foucault’s query concerning the separation between politics and ethics in modern times.He locates the effect of politics in the level of individual ethics,in contrast,the subject of ethics and self-cultivation are absent in the discussion of contemporary political philosophy.But on the other hand,Foucault finally appeals to the domain of the individual ethics which radically ruptures with politics.By this roundabout way,he therefore has returned to his starting point,that is to say,the separation and antithesis between politics and ethics in modern times.After all,Foucault has not been fully able to examine the modern political power beyond the modern perspective,which also results in the internal tension and contradiction in his biopolitics mentioned above.