'The initial shift towards the disciplinary society is marked by, among other things, the fact that “power no longer manifests itself through the violence of its ceremony, but it is exercised through normalization, habit, and discipline” (Foucault 2015, 240). Subjects move through and interact with these normalizing apparatuses, always with the goal of reintegration; however, it may not always end there. Abnormality is a form of “anarchy” from which society must be defended, it disrupts the proper flow of bodies, information, capital, and the maximization of state forces (Foucault 2003, 318). It is a threat to development itself. Madness...disability, indolence...these are categories in the human sciences that help differentiate and categorize the abnormality that constitutes the tide that crashes against the logic of production and the politics of utility. The task of biopolitics can be described as a secular continual pastoral gaze. The pastor is tasked with detecting abnormality and managing circuitries. For this reason, the sovereign right to life is not completely dissolved in this new regime – it is merely reworked and given a new assignment and rationality. Those who have gone astray, whose lives are in error, become a risk that warrants...their liquidation'.

'One of the final pieces Michel Foucault was able to complete for publication before his death was a homage to his beloved teacher, Georges Canguilhem. It was published both in a French metaphysics journal and as the introduction to the English translation of Canguilhem’s seminal text, The Normal and the Pathological. In his piece, Foucault takes note of something important to Canguilhem, error:

At the center of these problems, one finds that of error. For at the most basic level of life, the processes of coding and decoding give way to a chance occurrence that, before becoming a disease, a deficiency, or monstrosity, is something like a disturbance in the informative system, something like a “mistake.” In this sense, life—and this is its most radical feature—is that which is capable of error.

(FOUCAULT 1998, 476)

Life as being that which is capable of error bursts through Foucault’s body-of-work, illuminating so much of what can often be perceived as its darkest moments. This comment on Canguilhem at the end of his life furnishes so much of what was already present in lecture series such as Abnormal or central works like Discipline and Punish. However, it also allows readers to acquire a more immediate understanding of something crucial at stake in Foucault’s work: how we conceive of life. Giorgio Agamben uses this position of errancy and subjectivity in Foucault’s essay to oppose the conception “of the subject on the basis of a contingent encounter with the truth” (Agamben 1999, 221). But one can make a much simpler argument: if to live is fundamentally to always be at risk to err, biopolitical circuitry has had no other goal than to determine, define, and eliminate error in life'.

RevoltingBodies