Abstract

This paper poses a series of questions about the changing economy of relations between life and death. It analyzes how collective health policies were developed in the framework of the emergence of national states. The thematization of people's welfare in terms of salus populi cannot be explained in isolation from the emergence of biopolitical devices, which had (and still have) a broader scope. Such analysis should offer criticism, in the strong sense of the word, of multiple aspects: surveillance, statistics, hygienism, sanitarism; and not just the extremes -eugenics and racism. This criticism poses the question of whether affirmative biopolitics strengthening individual or collective subjectivity is possible.