IN THE AFTERMATH OF FOUCAULT, BIOPOLITICS, RACE, AND POWER

Foucault cannot be explained or comprehended. The reason why the sovereign rule has limited authority over life and the right to die is that he sees and lives in a community rife with bloody wars in the West. However, he discovers that the death penalty, which was once seen as a vengeful act of destruction, is now being extended to individuals as a means of protecting life and eradicating the threat to humanity. The opportunity to live has become the underlining demand amid most political struggles, whereby the bio-power has been mobilized as a way of deduction to the human body for population regulation to achieve a great bipolar technology that seeks to undergo a profound transformation.

Summary and Analysis

When the main character was riding in the taxi of his father thinking to go to a party, he met a beautiful woman who was named Andrea. Instead of going to the party, they spent the night together using drugs and having sex. In the morning, Nasir woke up and found Andrea in the apartment dead. Apparently, she was stabbed to death; and, on top of it, Nasir could not recollect the events of the night. Later that day, he was arrested.

Andrea was demonstrated in the series as a stunning and cold young woman who is not afraid of adventures of any kind. When Nasir asked her where she would like to spend the evening, she almost immediately replied “The Beach,” almost with no expression in her voice. Naz was stunned by her strong aloofness and exquisiteness; it was only a matter of time before they got involved. The pair ended up at the apartment of Andrea, and the day ended almost dreamlike and horrifying for them. The course of the episode is edgy and persistent. Even before the main events of the plot happened, the viewer is forced to look at the eyewitnesses who were looking at the tapes of the surveillance cameras in a store while Naz bought a drink for his aloof companion. That proofs that New York is never asleep and someone will always be watching. Furthermore, on the course of the first episode of the show, the average level of the noise never raises. The gruesome assassination of Andrea Cornish occurs during time leap. Even the uncovering of her dead body by the law enforcement is not shown to the viewer, with the urge of a police officer to vomit being the single intuitive cue to the dismays, which they have perceived the moment before.

The selected scene demonstrates the tensest and bright moment when the main character was arrested, as he attempts a pointless escape from the horrifying reality. Apart from the scenes, which were aimed to reveal Nasir’s character, a beautiful stranger was filled with premonition. The general feeling of the show makes the viewer think that immediately after the opening credits the story will not end on a romantic note. Even in a case when a watcher was introduced to ‘The Night Of’ while being completely uninformed on the subject of its genre or general idea (Murthi par. 3). Also, the viewer receives an almost identical feeling of the gloomy inescapability in the selected scene, when Nasir makes a series of crucial errors, which speed up his apprehension by the law enforcement agents and ends up looking a lot more like a fit suspect for the doubtful case.

The majority of the characters in the scene, as well as in the episode, merely appear in the most unusual ideas of plot schemes about the assassination of Andréa. Nonetheless, each one of them has played a vital role in the representation of the odd and progressively terrifying situation in which Nasir suddenly appears. It is clear from the scene that the single thing, which had the impression of going well for Nasir (being the acquaintance with Andrea), falls apart in the worst fashion imaginable. The selected scene reveals the character of Andrea as being a genuine epitome, as she demonstrated the traits of both a troubled young woman and femme fatale. As a result, speculating excessively on her motives, at least at this point, means ignoring her being a major conspiracy instrument.

Foucault laments the painful events that have been contributed by political struggles through a biopower limiting people’s rights such as the equal opportunity to life. The drama of Night of Recap has demonstrated sorrowful assassination episodes that can be used to relate to the biopolitical concept that has persisted in the modern world (Murthi, 2016).

Nasir is brutally charged with brutal murder and based on his status as a Pakistani-American college student. He is thrown into New York City’s criminal justice system for more investigations to allow for justice by cops. Nasir finds himself in a callous and unsafe corner of the world yet unprepared for the events that follow him. The director does not reveal the murder and the murderer this leaves behind a difficult period to understand the crime. However, the investigations do not have directions that could free Naz last night free from the clutches of law (Murthi, 2016).

Nazi’s finds escape plan after noticing Andrea’s bloody corpse lying in bed. Unfortunately, he finds himself I the hands of cops for over speeding charges and driving under the influence of alcohol. Naz is taken to the police station to wait for his fate as the cops respond to the scene of the crime that is surveyed as a homicide investigation. Cops are willing to let Naz go until the moment when they realize he has drugs and a bloody knife in his jacket. Naz is kept in custody as number one suspect for the murder. All this time the audience is made to understand that the Pakistani-American Muslim who spends his night with a woman who is later found dead in the morning is the murderer because he has been found with a deadly weapon and more precisely because of his origin (Murthi, 2016).

Naz’s arrest and justice are not fair compared to other citizens. At first, Naz corresponds using statements such as, “I can’t remember…I do not know,” which the judges and juries terms to be vague and ambiguous in any investigation. Later Box is seen in a different scene manipulating the suspect as he pushes him to make a confession with assumptions that he is guilty of the crime committed. The harsh treatment he gets during his interrogation is not just considering he does not have any criminal record with the cops (Murthi, 2016).

The analysis of the series reflects the role of justice in criminal investigations individuals from foreign states. It thus offers a better explanation of denied justice to innocent suspects in cases of insufficient information to the crime. Biopower has been used by many judges and juries to enhance the judiciary proceedings against suspects in the contemporary world. Drug and drug abuse have also been linked to a self-destructive behavior that could have resulted in murder in the Night of Recap (Murthi, 2016).

Biopolitics, Race, and Power in the Wake of Foucault

The biopolitics arguments by Michael Foucault designate what brings life and its mechanism into the realm of explicit calculation and make knowledge power as human life transformation agent. Foucault differentiated between historical and analytical ‘power to life dimensions. The dimensions include individual body discipline on one side and societal or population regulation body on the other side. Bio-politics according to Foucault indicates clear cuts of modernity and places life at the center of political order. Therefore, the capitalist society constitution interlinks with the birth of biopolitics. The control of the society is achieved through ideologies, consciousness, and the body. The biopolitics in capitalist governments, the biological matters more compared to anything else.

Racism disrupts the regime of power and tends to introduce a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control. Racism intends to disintegrate and create caesura with the biological continuum that bio-power aimed to address. Secondly, racism transforms older power over life and death associated with sovereignty (Macey, 2009). The old sovereignty power over life allowed imperative to kill or actual killing so long as it does not result to political adversaries. It was acceptable to eliminate biological threat eminent within species of a race.

Bio-power aims at regulation the population and the homogenous body. However, human groups are classified or categorized into homogenous groups referred to as races (Rai, 2014). Racism may be understood from biological or genetic theories. However, it extends to a visible difference of certain minority culture or religion. According to Foucault, the ‘races’ have more to do with lineage, breeding, and lines of descent than with the difference between (Macey, 2009). Therefore, it results to the creating to ethnicity but does little to eliminate the confusion. The races are always at war with one another competing for power and control. The Nazism, for instance, was a movement that aimed at eliminating a certain race of people. However, the Macey in Society Must be Defended article indicated that racism is a serious threat to the core existence of societies (Macey, 2009). Defending the society means shifting the discourse from race wars into peaceful coexistence. The people must prepare to eliminate sovereign powers that conquer the vanquished and embrace inclusivity.

Conclusion

The author indicated forces that help individuals and population to grow impede them and make them submit and sometimes destroy those (Macey, 2009). Commenting on the psychoanalysis by Foucauldian also widely differ from the pseudo-science charge as presented by Canguilhem George, Foucault’s mentor. Canguilhem had earlier indicated that psychoanalysis does not meet the threshold of genuine science. The work done by Foucault, in contrast, allows the readers to identify issues at stake when people debate on whether psychoanalysis is a science or not. The answers according to Foucault arguments are in bio-power. The science of truth is privileged as it effectively disseminates certain norms of the body thus assist in regulating individuals and the larger population. Science, therefore, therefore obscure the creation of norms thus make them look as natural truth. The bio-power notion by Michael Foucault is the fertile concept in recent theory. It can influence thinkers from various concerns and disciplines. Deirdre Madden

References

Rai, A. (2014). Rule of sympathy: Sentiment, race, and power 1750 -1850. Place of publication not identified: Palgrave Macmillan.

Macey, D. (January 01, 2009). Rethinking Biopolitics, Race and Power in the Wake of Foucault. Theory Culture and Society, 26, 6, 186-205.

Murthi, Vikram (June 28, 2016). “”The Night Of Recap: A Twist of the Knife””. Vulture. Retrieved Feb 7, 2017.

Murthi, Vikram. (2016. Web. 02 Feb. 2017).The Night of Recap: A Twist of the Knife. http://www.vulture.com/2016/06/night-of-recap-season-1-episode-1.html

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