Biopower

Biopower, as theorized in Neroni's argument, names a modality of power that operates not through the sovereign threat of death but through the administration of life itself. Where traditional sovereign power said "do this or die," biopower says "do this in order to live" — it governs subjects by manipulating their attachment to biological survival, their sense of what must be done to stay alive. This shifts the locus of power from the spectacular and lethal to the intimate and biopolitical: the body, its health, its vitality, its reproduction become the terrain on which power is exercised and contested.

Crucially, Neroni deploys this concept not simply as a description of a historical shift (following Foucault, Hardt & Negri, and Agamben) but as a theoretical limit-case. The central claim is that biopower, precisely because it anchors itself in the living body and its immediacy, cannot be adequately resisted by a theory that remains at the level of the body. By dissolving the subject into bare bodily life, biopolitical theory inadvertently mirrors the logic of the power it opposes. Only a psychoanalytic account — one that insists on the irreducibility of desire, the split between mind and body, the subject's constitutive excess over any biological or ideological determination — can furnish a genuine site of resistance to biopower's grip.

This concept appears exclusively in neroni-hilary-the-subject-of-torture-psychoanalysis-and-biopolitics-in-televisio, where it functions as the biopolitical foil against which psychoanalysis is positioned. Biopower is cross-referenced with Bare Life and Form-of-Life (Agamben's own elaborations of the biopolitical terrain), as well as with Gesture (Agamben's partial bridge toward a politics of the subject). The concept is defined against, and in structural tension with, the canonical Lacanian concepts of Desire, Jouissance, Subjectivity, and Unconscious. Where biopower reduces the subject to a body whose continued existence is the stake of power, Desire in the Lacanian sense is precisely that which exceeds any such reduction — an irreducible lack that cannot be administered or satisfied by regimes of survival. Jouissance, similarly, is the body's "too-much" that escapes the pleasure calculus biopower would manage. The Unconscious, as a discourse of the Other that speaks through the subject without the subject's knowledge or bodily consent, is structurally outside the reach of a power that targets only biological life.

Neroni's move is thus to use biopower as a diagnostic category that reveals the theoretical stakes of insisting on Lacanian Subjectivity: because biopower operates by flattening the subject onto its body, any politics of resistance must recover what that flattening forecloses — desire, the unconscious, the irreducible split. Agamben's Gesture is identified as a partial approach to this psychoanalytic position, though ultimately insufficient. The concept of biopower in this corpus is neither endorsed nor simply critiqued; it is re-positioned as a real historical force whose theoretical adequacy is shown to depend on the psychoanalytic account of the subject it implicitly suppresses.

The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and FilmHilary Neroni · 2015 (page unknown)

Biopower, on the other hand, thinks it can make people do what it wants by manipulating what people think they have to do to stay alive.

The phrase "what people think they have to do to stay alive" is theoretically loaded because it locates biopower's mechanism not in brute biological necessity but in the subject's ideological relation to survival — a belief structure — which is precisely the terrain where desire and the unconscious already operate and where psychoanalytic resistance becomes thinkable. The word "thinks" (as in what power "thinks it can" do) also subtly ironizes biopower's own presumption, implying the limit of its reach.