biopolitics means the interdisciplinary studies relating biology and political science. It carries an Arena rating of 1348, earned across 3 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, biopolitics ranks #211 of 13,276 for Most Incisive Words, #742 of 13,276 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #867 of 13,276 for Scariest Words, #1,389 of 13,276 for Most Malleable Words.
Why “biopolitics” is a great word
The political strategy that governs populations by exerting control over the biological and social processes of life. From the combining form bio- (from Ancient Greek βίος (bíos), meaning 'life') and politics (from Greek πολιτικός (politikós), meaning 'of citizens or the state'), the specific modern sense was developed by Michel Foucault in 1976. Unlike 'geopolitics,' which concerns territorial and economic competition between states, or 'biopower,' which denotes the specific technologies of administration, biopolitics is the overarching logic that converts life into an object of calculated management. It is the demographer’s chart tracking birth rates, the public health decree mandating quarantines, and the pension policy calibrated to life expectancy—a governance that operates not through the threat of death, but through the quiet realization that the sovereign’s ultimate domain is the living body itself.
Etymology
From bio- + politics. Sense 2 was developed by Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality (1976), sense 3 by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire (2000).
noun
- The interdisciplinary studies relating biology and political science.“But political scientists consider early attempts to borrow from biology to have given biopolitics a bad name, partly because borrowed theories, sometimes despite their naivete or lack of validity, were adopted wholesale by social scientists.”
- Politics (style of government) that regulates populations through biopower.“Because the body was the central force in industrial production, [Byung-Chul] Han argues, then a politics of disciplining, punishing and perfecting the body was understandably central to Foucault’s notion of how power worked. But in the west’s deindustrialised, neoliberal era, such biopolitics is obsolete.”
- Anticapitalist insurrection using life and the body as weapons.“This inside is the productive cooperation of mass intellectuality and affective networks, the productivity of postmodern biopolitics. This militancy makes resistance into counterpower and makes rebellion into a project of love.”
- The political application of bioethics.
- A political spectrum that reflects positions towards the sociopolitical consequences of biotechnology.
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