Definition of "biopolitical"

Foucault argued in several works in the mid-1970s that one cannot understand the passage from the “sovereign” state of the ancien régime to the modern “disciplinary” state without taking into account how the biopolitical context was progressively put at the service of capitalist accumulation […]

2000, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press, page 27

They [Hardt & Negri] write of a “biopolitical” revolution—one that will transform every aspect of life. “The flesh of the multitude,” they say, “is an elemental power.” It will act like some immense bio-organism, restructuring the body politic.

2004 August 7, Edward Rothstein, “For Radical Visionaries, the Evil Empire Is Us”, in The New York Times‎

[…] a new biopolitical vocabulary for expressing racial and class anxiety: Instead of claiming brown and black people were biologically inferior, you claimed they were — for reasons you sympathized with, reasons that weren’t really their fault — compromised by the food and drink they ingested; all those artificial dyes had darkened them on the inside.

2014, Ben Lerner, 10:04

A global corporate power, Del Rio Inc., attempts to refunction a Mexican peasant culture of small-holders for biopolitical exploitation by commodifying the water that sustains their way of life.

2016, Antje Dallmann, Eva Boesenberg, Martin Klepper, Approaches to American Cultural Studies, page 143