Incorporation: Foucault on the Co-Constitution of Modern Embodiment, Experience and Politics

Abstract

This chapter will draw on Foucault’s genealogy of sexuality and the above account of biopolitics as the politics of trans-organic population life (Chapter 1), to explain the link between the production of population life and that of vitalist immanent biopolitical values. Vitalist ontologies and ethics, indeed the very existence of life as something that could be the ground of political or epistemological evaluation or an end in itself, are conditioned upon the material historical production of trans-organic biological embodiment. Conversely, the production of biological embodiment is a process of vitalisation — not of objectification, physicalisation, or reduction. Biological embodiment vitalises and produces vitality — creative evolutionary life — as experience and values, not simply as objects of power.