FROM BIOPOWER TO NECROPOWER: BRIEF CONSIDERATIONS ON THE PROCESS OF GOVERNMENTALIZATION OF LIFE

Abstract

Based on Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, this reflection aims to analyze the evolution of power in the West toward a form of oikonomia (government of men or oikonomia of life). Then, based on Achille Mbembe’s reflections, the article examines the extent to which it is possible to situate, in this context, a kind of necroeconomics of life/algorithmic necropolitics, its foundations, its structure, and its developments as a genealogy of the governmentality of life, focusing on the close relationship between life and necropower in the contemporary era, understood as brutalism. The starting point is the repositioning of the notion of biopolitics as a disposition of things, seeking to demonstrate how the Western political structure, over the centuries, can be understood under the paradigm of necropower, of the necroeconomics of life, which circumscribes the processes of governmentalization of life on a planetary scale, culminating in a growing algorithmization of life.