A review by cythera15
Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976 by Michel Foucault

Good excerpt on biopolitics - the last lecture (17 March 1976) was interesting. It outlines how biopolitics becomes an important power after the nineteenth century (presumably into the twentieth century) and the role that racism plays in the new regulatory system, giving those in power the right to terminate life. Foucault meant to use this to explain the Nazi government and the Holocaust, but I saw many connections to how the contemporary world exercises its power to make live and let die - from how COVID-19 was dealt with to how some deaths are sanctioned on the screen in a way that others are not. I wondered if speculative fiction can take the questions Foucault raises further. There's still a sense of speciesism and racism in the futuristic worlds that are depicted. But the stakes change when the spectrum of human life expands beyond those biologically of the same species. (I think) For the most part, I don't really care much about old French history and was unsure what kind of provocation he is making with the genealogy. I don't think I am going to go back to it, at least not for a while.