MICHEL FOUCAULT'S BIOPOLICY: CONTROL OF THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY

Abstract

This bibliographic work aims to apprehend the concept of biopolitics developed by Michel Foucault, having as reference a bibliographic analysis of his works. This thinker offers a literary framework to analyze the historical evolution of contemporary societies of capitalist economic and social modernization, having as object the immersion in the economic rationalization of the processes related to human life. He believes that human life has not only become an integral part of political decisions, of calculations of power, and of social rationalization itself as a whole. For him, life is managed, controlled and shaped based on maximizing its usefulness. Thus, the control of society over individuals is not affected only by conscience or ideology, but in the body and with the body, using the procedures of power put into practice by the modern State whose main task is the configuration and the control of the individual and of society itself, whether in education or in labor relations. Finally, in this essay, the need for reflective exercise to understand the control of the individual and society, immersed in a world in which biopolitics can be understood as regulating life, is considered.