The term "biopolitics" leads one to expect, minimally, a field of
intervention that gives equal weight to life and politics, a field that is
concerned with the modern process of the "speciation of the human"
and the "recruiting of species life into the strategization of power
relations" (Dillon 2004, 81). Yet in the lectures given in 1978-79 at the
Collège de France by Michel Foucault under the course title of "The
Birth of Biopolitics" - the only course that actually bears the title of
"biopolitics", the central concern was not life per se, but the critique of
political liberalism and political economy undertaken through the
innovative concept of governmentality. Does this mean that
governmentality constitutes the essential problem of biopolitics, or did
Foucault's overwhelming
