The biopolitical paradox: population and security mechanisms

Abstract

This article proposes a way of problematising the concept of biopolitics based on foucauldian and post-foucauldian reflection in order to steer the question towards the meaning of biopolitics, we take as our starting point the relationship between philosphy and the present, as understood by Michel Foucault. From there, a series of questions are posed around the paradoxical economics of relationships between Bios and Thanatos and their varios reading by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Roberto Esposito. On this subject, the links between biopolitics and racist and immunity apparatuses are explored. It is posited that although both apparatuses are fundamental to the modern biopolitical diagram, the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics cannot be reduced to them alone. Consquently, a hypothesis is proposed that biopolitics and the very notion of life cannot be understood without taking into a count the emergence of the concept of "population" and the mutiple "security mechanisms". Only through those security mechanisms it is possible to perceive the paradoxical structure of biopolitics.