Foucault After Foucault. Genealogies of Medical Biopower in the 21st Century Intellectual American Scene

Abstract

This paper’s focused on Michel Foucault’s reception and legacy among his followers in the American intellectual scene, especially in the University of California, Berkeley (1980-1981 and 1983). During the latter year, Foucault founded a researching seminar that embraced the first lines of a “genealogy of bio-power”. The works at Berkeley dealt with several topics. However, none of them were tightl related to what, I argue, best describes the contemporary functioning of biopower; that is, the  medical-health device, or “medicalization”. I raise up here two main points: (1) inside the frame of a discussion about the concept of this notion I seek to highlight the exceptional critical force that this notion has in accordance to Foucault’s work in order to understand what it is going on in this very moment as in the same way as he himself sought to do an “ontology of the present”. (2) I seek also to put into notice that the biopower function, Today, is almost impossible to grasp without the intervention of the medical apparatus insofar its level of influence in current societies, something that could be shown in the birth and evolution of welfare, the eugenics experiments, the assisted reproduction, the public policies against the spread of viruses and its consequent fear of contagion, the exploitation of the use of genetically modified organisms, moreover, which one is the role of the preventive genomic medicine and so on.