The Postmodern Concept of Biopolitics���Foucault and Rose on Biopolitics���

The total medicalisation of life implies both the politicizing and depoliticizing of life. The contemporary bioscience modifies the form and the meaning of life. It makes the life of individuals more somatic, risky, and variable. Analysing the power and truth discourses Foucault has argued the modern biopower controlls the modes of subjectifications of individuals in use of the double bind of individualising and totalising procedures, through that the modern men are reshaped as disciplined individual bodies and regulated population. The concern of the modern biopower is absolutely ���making live���. For Rose who is indebted to Foucault, the postmodern biopolitics is related to the advent of the biovalue and the molecularization and capitalization of vitality. Rose suggests that the individuals are on the one hand subjected to the pastoral biopower and ���capital. On the other they can take the new identities in terms of ���somatic individuality��� and ���biological citizenship���. The postmodern ���politics of life itself��� of Rose enables the formation of new types of subjectification and identity, through that it can be defined as more positive and productive than Foucault���s. Rose���attempt to the positive reframing of the postmodern biopolitics is effective and meaningful, but his conception is not complete enough to include the basic problem of ���power��� and ���death���