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Articles

No. 17 (2024): Foucault: 40 years after

Organism: Biopolitics Diversification

DOI
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14548853
Submitted
December 23, 2024
Published
2024-12-23

Abstract

By returning to Richard Lewontin’s theoretical proposal, we try to resituate in the frame of biopolitics a biological perspective centered on the organism, to contrast it with the biopolitical practices that operate within the framework of molecular biology and the genocentric paradigm, as well as to warn the consequence that this theoretical movement can produce. Throughout the article, we will focus, first, on exposing Michel Foucault’s approaches to molecular biology, biohistory, and biopolitics; second, on examining some genocentric biopolitical drifts of the 21st century; and third, on explaining Lewontin’s theoretical proposal that understands organisms as historical entities resulting from the interaction between genes, environment, and chance. In the end, we will conclude that a biopolitics centered on the organism must understand it, above all, as a historical object-subject, whose activity is part of the processes of biological transformation.

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