Overpopulation and Biopolitical Frames

The issue of overpopulation should also be recognized as confronting new problems of thinking human population, which emerged as a central term in biopolitical discourses. One of the initial challenges can be understood from Jean-Luc Nancy's understanding of the biopolitical as located within ‘ecotechnology’ – technology's engulfing of the human and world in an expansionary logic without limit. Attempting to technically control overpopulation runs the risk of just reiterating ecotechnical manipulation. To avoid the pessimistic response to such globalizing biopolitics, we can, first, examine the itinerary of Foucault's history of ‘population’ as the central figure in the rise of modernity's governmentality; second, focus on a critical ‘hinge’ that connected his understanding of governmental regulation with his insistence that liberalism was essential to the rise of governmentality – the counter-conduct linking individuals to disciplinary practices. Overpopulation can be then approached as an issue framed by existing biopolitical traditions, but open to useful reconceptualization by using counter-conduct as a guide

Biopower · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Governmentality · Modernity · Overpopulation · Pessimism · Political science · Politics · Population · Sociology · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Law · Philosophy · Race, Genetics, and Society