Daugiau nei apskaičiuojama, mažiau nei vienas: populiacijos ir afekto santykis Michelio Foucault biopolitikos teorijoje
More than Calculable, Less than One: the Relation between Population and Affect in Michel Foucault’s Theory of Biopolitics

Summary/Abstract: According to Michel Foucault, the concept of biopolitics is intrinsically linked with the emergence of the figure of population in a political discourse, which eventually has become an invariant of life in the political context. On the one hand, it signifies that politics is biologized, since the task of a new form of power, biopower, is to govern life through populations. On the other hand, the very attempt to make life “political” appears problematic, mostly due to the immanent resistence of life itself. In this article, populations are analyzed from the standpoint of the affect as vitality, power to affect or be affected. It is attempted to answer the question how biopower makes the affect, which is incalculable and opposed to any order, quantifiable. To answer this question, Foucault’s concept of dispositif as well as its relation to the population are investigated. Then, the genealogy of the concept of population is reconstructed. Ultimately, new quantifying power technologies are contrasted with a qualitative change brought by the affect.

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