Revisiting Franco’s death: Life and death and biopolitical governmentality

Abstract

In Discipline and Punish (1991b) Michel Foucault famously characterised the emergence of the modern state as the displacement of the classical sovereign’s power to punish transgression by more dispersed governmental mechanisms which aimed instead to discipline and enhance the productive powers of the political subject. In The History of Sexuality (1990), Foucault expanded on the theme, emphasising the manner in which this distinctively modern deployment of power focused particularly on the subject in his or her factical, biological existence. As Foucault put it: For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question. (1990: p. 143).