Right to Death and Power over Life, and Sexuality

In "Right to Death and Power over Life", Foucault first examines the shift from the so called "right to death" to the "power over life". The latter he argues explains why "sexuality" has become such a pervasive concept. In other terms, it is a shift between "sanguinity" to "sexuality".

The right to death is a power over blood. The sovereign rule or state exercised its power as power over death and blood, by its ability to spill the blood of its people or expose the people's blood in the case of war in order to spill the blood of others, and by blood being in many ways symbolic of power and purity and something that is easily corruptible. This right to death was manifested in the rule of absolute monarchs and later in terms of eugenics, racism, Nazism, and even today in the form of capital punishment. Thus, why suicide is looked upon negatively, which transferred the right to death from sovereign to individual.

Then came a shift to the power over life, power manifested as power over the body and over population, concurrent with a transition from an absolute sovereignty to a capitalistic sovereignty concerned with how the body and the population fits into the socio-economic-political fabric. Society came to have power over life, came to have the responsibility to extend and manage life and not merely to administer death, and thus over sexuality, because sex pervades both the concept of the body and of population. Concern over sex and the repression of sex was one way in which power was exercised, children and female sexuality was seen as being a threat to society and morality itself, and can more recently be seen in the political repression of homosexuality and abortion. Sex is sold, commodified, psychoanalyzed, pervades how we conceptualize society. Yet Foucault urges us to consider how once we were socialized to detest the body, and that now we are socialized to see sex as some precious secret and wonder that must be discovered. Such a view must be recognized in order for us to be liberated from the hold that the concept of sex has on society.