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Securing Populations: Foucault And The Cartography Of Natural Bodies, Andrew A.T. Grant

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The concept of biopolitics tends towards universal applicability and thus analytical impotency. By examining Foucault’s lecture seminars that address this concept directly and indirectly, this project aims to delimit its coordinates for future use. To do so, I begin by looking at the way biopolitical discourses on the population constituted liberal governmentality in the eighteenth century. This analysis will be supplemented by a cartography of the surfaces on which biopolitics emerges before and within liberalism, affecting its formation. I will therefore map out the formation of two objects that characterize modern biopower: the ‘natural’ body of the individual and the …