Foucault: The biopolitical status of therapeutics

Abstract

Departing from the Foucauldian analysis of Biopolitics, this article aims at showing how interpreting therapeutic practices becomes possible. In order to do that, we will present Foucault’s conception of Biopolitics as a kind ofpolitics that, with the objective of guaranteeing people’s lives, inverts the principle of sovereignty. From this point, we will focus on how therapeutic practices are developed and managed so as to guarantee such lives, though with a very particular meaning of disease in the biosocial sense rather than from the anatomic-individual perspective.