Students, Biopolitics, and State Racism: A Response to Ren-Hao Xu

In this response, I offer a brief addendum to Ren-Hao Xu’s chapter on Foucault and biopolitics. I will do this by joining together two seemingly unrelated points he raised: the first is personal, where he mentions reading Foucault on biopolitics in the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic and the shutdown of Australia’s international borders, and the second is his key argument that higher education enrolment can be linked not only to individual employability, but also to the larger purpose of underwriting the social order and prosperity at the level of the population, thus legitimating sovereignty. For me as a teacher in higher education, a question that arises for me as I reflect on my work is this: Who is this ‘population’ that is to be educated, whose productivity is accounted for within the calculus of national competitiveness, whose life is to be fostered for the sake of securing the nation’s future, and who is not a part of this? This raises another aspect of Foucault’s conceptualisation of biopolitics: the operation of state ‘racism’ as a dividing principle for determining those who are worth ‘making live’ and those who not and that it can hence ‘let die’.