Lara S’s Reviews > Virology: Essays for the Living, the Dead, and the Small Things in Between > Status Update

Luckily, there is also historian Achille Membe, who directly connects Foucault's idea of the sovereign and of "bio-power" (the right to give or withhold life) to race and racism. "The politics of race," he writes, "is ultimately linked to a politics of death.....In the economy of biopower, the function of racism is to regulate the distribution of death and to make possible the state's murderous functions."