This paper examines Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics as developed in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, a collection of writings, lectures, and interviews from the final fifteen years of his life. The paper explores how Foucault redefines government through an individual-centered social ontology, tracing the historical roots of governance as self-control rather than collective legislation. It further analyzes the tension between individual liberty and governmental authority, focusing on the roles of "self-care," domination, and techniques of self as forces that shape individual behavior within a broader social and political framework.
In Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, Michel Foucault explores a number of concepts that occupied his thinking during approximately the final fifteen years of his life. The manuscript consists of the author's writings, courses, lectures, and interviews, examining a variety of topics such as sexuality, friendship, government, and what Foucault himself termed biopolitics. The concept of biopolitics is one of the more compelling ideas he examines in the text. Essentially, he defines the term as a new way of exploring relationships of government through an individual perspective, one largely grounded in a thorough examination of historical events that have shaped the concept of government itself.
As he does in most of his notable works, Foucault reflects on the influence of biopolitics — and on government itself — as a means of shaping the lives and livelihoods of individuals from the perspective of subjects. He dedicates a significant amount of thought to the varying roles that biopolitics inherently encourages people to pursue as singular individuals who, of course, also form and constitute a collective population.
What Foucault actually proposes is a new form of social ontology in which the individual is the center of all collective social forms — most vitally manifested in the institution of government. In this sense, Foucault is attempting to articulate a form of liberty in which subjects can pursue a number of roles and relationships steeped in ethical thought and behavior.
His very definition of the term "government" implies as much. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth reveals that well into the eighteenth century, the foundation of this term was not based upon legislation and the collective manipulation of behavior, but was rather dependent upon the self-control of the individual, as well as forms of conduct related to familial roles and obligations. It is therefore significant to note that the role of the individual helps to shape the role of government over a collective — ideally functioning in a co-existence that expresses a mutual level of dependence.
Further examination of this relationship clarifies the ways in which the individual can actually influence the broader conception of government — understood in the traditional sense as the institution that rules and regulates the actions of a particular nation-state or city. The additional responsibility placed upon a single subject in the form of "self-care" should, ideally, lead to a reduction in governmental programs — such as welfare or municipal and state systems of security — that regulate or supplement such processes for individuals.
On a basic level, Foucault determines that the roles people play throughout their lives are largely determined by a number of key influential factors, two of the foremost being domination and the techniques of self. Due to the range of sociological factors responsible for creating power that can be wielded over individuals — attributed in part to advancements in technology and the readily available access of information about people — techniques of self are utilized to cope with the various forms of social coercion and domination (Foucault, 1998).
"Domination and self-techniques shape individual roles"
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