The article takes up Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism in the 1970s. It begins by showing how this analysis represents an unforeseen effect of his introduction of the new category of biopower. It goes on to propose a hypothesis suggesting that, if we are to reappropriate the explanatory potential of the latter notion, it is advisable that we leave aside the political and cultural problematic of neoliberalism, focusing on the specific locus of the economic evolutions which are involved. Biopower has in (...) fact largely become a constitutive function of neocapitalism, and must be examined as such. (shrink)

The article seeks to understand the status of Foucault’s critiques of neoliberalism from the concept of biopolitics developed before his course La naissance de la biopolitique. Two theoretical presuppositions are mobilized to understand the passage from the issue of biopower to that of neoliberalism: Marx and the concept of relative surplus population, because Foucault’s questions on the concept of biopolitics centers around the concept of population. On the other hand, with Polanyi, we can understand how Foucault imagines the (...) novelty of contemporary neoliberalism within an analysis of the contradiction of liberalism as historic capitalism. In the end, this article aims to analyze the categories of power in Foucault in the field of political economy. (shrink)

This article explores German Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s notion of psychopolitics and his concept of the neoliberal subject. For Han, mental processes are now the primary target of power. This means that, according to Han, biopower must give way to what he calls psychopower since perspectives that critically seek to understand neoliberalism through a biopolitical lens are no longer adequate to contemporary regimes of neoliberal achievement. This article examines and evaluates Han’s argument that Foucauldian biopolitics is obsolete in today’s (...) neoliberal age because of biopolitics’ primary focus on the body over mental processes. We suggest that, instead of emphasizing the need to move beyond biopolitics, Han’s theorization of psychopolitics could benefit from paying closer attention to some of Foucault’s insights on biopower and from identifying key connections between biopolitics and psychopolitics. By highlighting some important continuities between Foucault’s biopolitics and Han’s psychopolitics (instead of emphasizing the discontinuities between both theorists’ perspectives, as Han tends to privilege), this article seeks to move towards improved theorizations of concepts like achievement, subjectivity, otherness or optimization, concepts that are key to Han’s understanding of contemporary neoliberal practices. (shrink)

This article explores German Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s notion of psychopolitics and his concept of the neoliberal subject. For Han, mental processes are now the primary target of power. This means that, according to Han, biopower must give way to what he calls psychopower since perspectives that critically seek to understand neoliberalism through a biopolitical lens are no longer adequate to contemporary regimes of neoliberal achievement. This article examines and evaluates Han’s argument that Foucauldian biopolitics is obsolete in today’s (...) neoliberal age because of biopolitics’ primary focus on the body over mental processes. We suggest that, instead of emphasizing the need to move beyond biopolitics, Han’s theorization of psychopolitics could benefit from paying closer attention to some of Foucault’s insights on biopower and from identifying key connections between biopolitics and psychopolitics. By highlighting some important continuities between Foucault’s biopolitics and Han’s psychopolitics (instead of emphasizing the discontinuities between both theorists’ perspectives, as Han tends to privilege), this article seeks to move towards improved theorizations of concepts like achievement, subjectivity, otherness or optimization, concepts that are key to Han’s understanding of contemporary neoliberal practices. (shrink)

This article explores German Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s notion of psychopolitics and his concept of the neoliberal subject. For Han, mental processes are now the primary target of power. This means that, according to Han, biopower must give way to what he calls psychopower since perspectives that critically seek to understand neoliberalism through a biopolitical lens are no longer adequate to contemporary regimes of neoliberal achievement. This article examines and evaluates Han’s argument that Foucauldian biopolitics is obsolete in today’s (...) neoliberal age because of biopolitics’ primary focus on the body over mental processes. We suggest that, instead of emphasizing the need to move beyond biopolitics, Han’s theorization of psychopolitics could benefit from paying closer attention to some of Foucault’s insights on biopower and from identifying key connections between biopolitics and psychopolitics. By highlighting some important continuities between Foucault’s biopolitics and Han’s psychopolitics (instead of emphasizing the discontinuities between both theorists’ perspectives, as Han tends to privilege), this article seeks to move towards improved theorizations of concepts like achievement, subjectivity, otherness or optimization, concepts that are key to Han’s understanding of contemporary neoliberal practices. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a framework to understand the transition in Foucault’s work from the disciplinary model to the governmentality model. Foucault’s work on power emerges within the general context of an expression of capitalist rationality and the nature of freedom and power within it. I argue that, thus understood, Foucault’s transition to the governmentality model can be seen simultaneously as a deepening recognition of what capitalism is and how it works, but also as a recognition of the changing (...) historical nature of the actually existing capitalisms and their specifically situated historical needs. I then argue that the disciplinary model should be understood as a contingent response to the demands of early capitalism, and argue that with the maturation of the capitalist enterprise many of those responses are no longer necessary. New realities require new responses; although this does not necessarily result in the abandonment of the earlier disciplinary model, it does require their reconfiguration according to the changed situation and the new imperatives following from it. (shrink)

This paper argues that Michel Foucault’s lectures that form The Birth of Biopolitics owe a considerable debt to the thought of Max Weber, particularly in their analysis of how different socio-legal regimes shape distinctive national forms of capitalist economies, and the role that is played by social and economic institutions in the shaping of individual identities. This is in contrast to a common interpretation of Foucault’s account of neoliberalism, which synthesizes his work into neo-Marxist notions of hegemony and capitalist (...) domination. It also identifies Foucault’s approach to neoliberalism as an exploratory one, which considers insights into how a particular relationship between ideas and institutional practices may help in imagining socialist forms of government practice. (shrink)

In his 1979 lecture series now translated as The Birth of Biopolitics, Michel Foucault suggests that there is an important relationship between neoliberalism and the cluster of phenomena he had previously named “biopower.” The relationship between these two apparently very different forms of governmentality is not obvious, however, and Foucault does not explicate it. The question has become a pressing one for feminists because it underlies a set of issues surrounding the emerging field of “reprogenetics.” Feminists have been highly (...) critical of invasive reproductive technologies for decades, viewing them as demeaning to and dangerous for women's bodies and as staunchly traditional in their reinforcement of gender roles and of maternity as female desire and destiny. Reprogeneticists accuse feminists of hypocrisy in seeking to curtail the widest technically possible range of “procreative choice.” This essay traces some ways in which reprogenetics may be interpreted as a biopolitical formation as well as a neoliberal formation and suggests how the two seemingly antithetical types of phenomena might actually be overlapping and mutually reinforcing—perhaps opening the way for a more effective feminist critique. (shrink)

In its hegemonic definition, biopolitical governmentality is characterised by a seemingly infinite capacity of expansion, susceptible to colonise the landscape and timescape of the living present in the name of capitalistic productivity. The main trait of biopower is its normative, legal and political plasticity, allowing it to reappropriate critiques and resistances by appealing to bioethical efficacy and biological accuracy. Under these circumstances, how can we invent rebellious forms-of-life and alternative temporalities escaping biopolitical normativity? In this essay, I interrogate the theoretical (...) presuppositions of biopolitical rationality. I provide a deconstruction of the conceptual and temporal structures upholding the notion of biopolitics, in view of laying the ground for new forms of resistance. The articulation between life and power has a long philosophical history, which has been largely ignored by social theorists and political thinkers using biopolitics as an interpretative model. I re-inscribe this model within the tradition of critical materialism, by articulating Foucault’s ‘critical ontology’ to recent philosophical works on biological plasticity (Malabou). In these discourses, the logic of biopower depends on a representation of life – ‘the living’ – as living present. Biopower finds itself anchored in the authority of the present, that is to say, of being-as-presence (ontology); it sustains presentist definitions of life and materiality, be it under the form of a ‘plastic’ ontology. By drawing on Derrida’s notions of ‘spectrality’ and ‘life-death’ and Francesco Vitale’s work on ‘biodeconstruction’, I deconstruct these discourses on life and materiality and attempt to dissociate them from their ontological grounding, in order to suggest new paths of resistance to biopower. In particular, I follow the tracks of “the monster” in the work of Foucault, Derrida and Malabou. Foucault tells us that the monster is a singular figure, parasitic and subversive, beckoning a life beyond life, at once organic and non-organic, located at the limit between the normal and the exceptional, and exceeding the scope of biopolitical normativity in both theoretical and practical terms. It exists at the intersection of what Foucault names “the symbolics of blood” and “the analytics of sex”. As such, it materialises a self-transformative dimension of the living which remains, I argue, inadequate to Malabou’s representation of plasticity. The monstrous is a self-deconstructive motif calling for another biopolitical rationality, before or beyond ontological reductions or reconstructions. (shrink)

This paper uses Michel Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics as a starting point for thinking historically about neoliberalism. Foucault’s lectures offer a rich and detailed account of the emergence of neoliberalism, but this account is far from complete. This paper addresses some of the blind-spots in Foucault’s lectures by focusing on the space between the decline of classical liberalism at the end of the 19th century and the subsequent attempt to develop a ‘positive’ or ‘ordo’ liberalism in post-war Germany. The (...) primary concern of this paper is to chart the emergence of a new or neo- liberalism in the writings of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek through the 1920s and 1930s. These writings, which are barely considered by Foucault, are important as they redefine the liberal project against the political economy of the late 19th century and, in particular, against the threat of socialism. In conclusion, it is argued that by returning to the work of Mises and Hayek it is possible to develop a critical sociology of neoliberalism, one that not only engages with the writings of these two thinkers but which also exposes the fracture lines that exist within the neoliberal project, and reconsiders the political positions that neoliberalism initially sought to reject. (shrink)

Foucault’s analysis of the relation of power and the economy in the lectures given at the Collège de France between 1975 and 1979 opens up modern societies for a radically different interrogation of the relations of force inscribed in historically heterogeneous forms of wealth creation and distribution, but more specifically within the period of liberal capitalism. Its vast scope clears the ground for genealogies of power, political economy and race that demonstrate their intertwinement, yet he underplays several elements which have (...) been central for the institution of the political economy of liberal capitalism, particularly regarding colonial expansion and subjugation, the prior existence of trade and other networks operating on a world scale, and politico-economic and technical developments, such as banking and finance, that acted as conditions of possibility. By redressing the balance, this article outlines a different genealogy of the emergence of biopolitics and the mechanisms supporting global capitalism, making visible the constitutive role of colonialism. It suggests elements for a more fundamental critique of inequality, one that relays the Foucaldian themes of economy, territory, security, population and race according to a longer periodization that reveals most economies to have been zero-sum games of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. Transcending this situation requires a radically different, transcolonial and transindividual understanding of the essentially collaborative and co-implicate character of the production of all life. The implications mean the rejection of ontologies that support not only neoliberalism but other forms of dispossession and pauperization, often allied to the hierarchization of difference, opening the way for a different history of the present and for imagining new economies and socialities. (shrink)

This article takes as its starting point the observation that neoliberalism is a concept that is ‘oft-invoked but ill-defined’. It provides a taxonomy of uses of the term neoliberalism to include: an all-purpose denunciatory category; ‘the way things are’; an institutional framework characterizing particular forms of national capitalism, most notably the Anglo-American ones; a dominant ideology of global capitalism; a form of governmentality and hegemony; and a variant within the broad framework of liberalism as both theory and policy discourse. It (...) is argued that this sprawling set of definitions are not mutually compatible, and that uses of the term need to be dramatically narrowed from its current association with anything and everything that a particular author may find objectionable. In particular, it is argued that the uses of the term by Michel Foucault in his 1978–9 lectures, found in The Birth of Biopolitics, are not particularly compatible with its more recent status as a variant of dominant ideology or hegemony theories. It instead proposes understanding neoliberalism in terms of historical institutionalism, with Foucault’s account of historical change complementing Max Weber’s work identifying the distinctive economic sociology of national capitalisms. (shrink)

This paper argues that today the true source of terror in the economico-biopolitically advanced countries of global capitalism lies in biopower’s own constitution as a normative field (the protection of life) that presupposes its exception (the superfluity of life) as its own precondition. At the two extreme poles of this exception we find “terrorism,” and particularly suicide bombing, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or drones), as the pair revealing the core of biopower. However, of the two only “terrorism” is discursively (...) constructed in the “West” as a monstrous act that should incite horror. Linking horror to the psychoanalytic concepts of repression and foreclosure, I argue that the biopolitical function of horror lies in rendering unreadable the message of such “monstrous” acts. Furthermore, insofar as horror’s experience is an affective state of being that can, nevertheless, be incited discursively, affect shifts to the center of the political domain. The affect of horror in particular becomes instrumental to politics as it can provide the criterion for determining the bio-racial break between, in Foucault’s words, “what must live and what must die.”. (shrink)

This paper argues that today the true source of terror in the economico-biopolitically advanced countries of global capitalism lies in biopower’s own constitution as a normative field that presupposes its exception as its own precondition. At the two extreme poles of this exception we find “terrorism,” and particularly suicide bombing, and unmanned aerial vehicles, as the pair revealing the core of biopower. However, of the two only “terrorism” is discursively constructed in the “West” as a monstrous act that should incite (...) horror. Linking horror to the psychoanalytic concepts of repression and foreclosure, I argue that the biopolitical function of horror lies in rendering unreadable the message of such “monstrous” acts. Furthermore, insofar as horror’s experience is an affective state of being that can, nevertheless, be incited discursively, affect shifts to the center of the political domain. The affect of horror in particular becomes instrumental to politics as it can provide the criterion for determining the bio-racial break between, in Foucault’s words, “what must live and what must die.”. (shrink)

While Foucault’s work on biopolitics continues to inspire diverse studies in a variety of disciplines, it has largely been missing from the debates on the possibility of “affirmative biopolitics” which have been primarily influenced by the work of Agamben and Esposito. This article restores Foucault’s work to these debates, proposing that his final lecture course at the Collège de France in 1983–1984 developed a paradigm of affirmative biopolitics in the reading of the Cynic practice of truth-telling. The (...) Cynic problematization of the relation between truth and life and their transvaluation of conventional truths by relocating them to the domain of bare life not only seeks to transform one’s life in accordance with the truth but also, through the confrontation with the existing conventions and norms, to transform the world as such. Cynic parrhesia is thus biopolitical, insofar as it reclaims the power of one’s life from the social order and its rationalities of government and applies it to oneself, investing one’s existence with truth. Since Foucault developed this reading of Cynicism in the context of his political engagement on behalf on East European dissidents, the article proceeds to analyse the resonances between parrhesia and Václav Havel’s idea of “living within the truth,” elaborating the biopolitical significance of both practices. We conclude by addressing the implications of our interpretation for Foucault scholarship and the wider debates on biopolitics. (shrink)

This paper seeks to further Foucault’s work by coming to understand the specific set of conditions that govern contemporary thought and action, the “historical a priori” of our age, and from this it seeks to assess the prospects for projects of collective self-formation. It focuses on two recent innovations in molecular science: genetic counseling and performance enhancement therapies. The paper argues, on the one hand, that these sorts of practices are indicative of a fundamentally new mode of governance, neoliberalism,and, (...) on the other, that these same techniques can be means for engendering alliances of self-formation that can resist the intolerable elements of contemporary biopolitics. The key to seeing this is shown to be understanding these new technologies as ascetic exercises (“spiritual disciplines”) and thus as falling under the rubric of spiritual development that has historically defined these arts. (shrink)

Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics is generally acknowledged as a pioneering study of neoliberalism, presenting it not merely as an economic theory but also as a mode of government. There is much debate, however, on Foucault’s intentions in analysing neoliberalism and the place of the genealogy in his broader critical project. The Birth of Biopolitics itself lacks both an explicit judgement of neoliberalism and an explicit ethical program. In this article, I maintain that Foucault’s genealogical work on (...) neoliberalism is complementary to his notions of agency. From this perspective, Foucault’s genealogy is not a judgement of neoliberalism in terms of right or wrong but rather serves as a breeding ground for ethical conduct. The notion of the critical attitude in particular shows that Foucault’s genealogical work stands in the service of the subject’s autonomy. However, Foucault is reluctant to fill in his ethical program too much because it should gain substance only in local struggles and through the subject’s own considerations. (shrink)

Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics is generally acknowledged as a pioneering study of neoliberalism, presenting it not merely as an economic theory but also as a mode of government. There is much debate, however, on Foucault’s intentions in analysing neoliberalism and the place of the genealogy in his broader critical project. The Birth of Biopolitics itself lacks both an explicit judgement of neoliberalism and an explicit ethical program. In this article, I maintain that Foucault’s genealogical work on (...) neoliberalism is complementary to his notions of agency. From this perspective, Foucault’s genealogy is not a judgement of neoliberalism in terms of right or wrong but rather serves as a breeding ground for ethical conduct. The notion of the critical attitude in particular shows that Foucault’s genealogical work stands in the service of the subject’s autonomy. However, Foucault is reluctant to fill in his ethical program too much because it should gain substance only in local struggles and through the subject’s own considerations. (shrink)

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Citation Information -- Introduction -- 1 Philosophy and Performance of Neoliberal Ideologies: History, Politics and Human Subjects -- 2 Neo-Liberal Education Policy and the Ideology of Choice -- 3 Varieties of Neo-Liberalism: a Foucaultian Perspective -- 4 The Labouring Sleepwalker: Evocation and Expression as Modes of Qualitative Educational Research -- 5 The Learning Society, the Unfinished Cosmopolitan, and Governing Education, Public Health and Crime Prevention at the Beginning of the Twenty-First Century -- (...) 6 What Were You Thinking? A Deleuzian/Guattarian Analysis of Communication in the Mathematics Classroom -- 7 (Re)Visioning the Centre: Education Reform and the 'Ideal' Citizen of the Future -- 8 Biopolitical Utopianism in Educational Theory -- 9 A Place Pedagogy for 'Global Contemporaneity' -- 10 Antonio Gramsci and Feminism: The Elusive Nature of Power -- 11 Foucault, Educational Research and the Issue of Autonomy -- Index. (shrink)

This the first of a new three-part series in which Antonio Negri, a leading political thinker of our time, explores key ideas that have animated radical thought and examines some of the social and economic forces that are shaping our world today. In this first volume Negri shows how the thinking of Marx and Foucault were brought together to create an original theoretical synthesis - particularly in the context of Italy from May ’68 onwards. At around that time, the structures (...) of industry and production began to change radically, with the emergence of new producer-subjects and new fields of capitalist value creation. New concepts and theories were developed by Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari and others to help make sense of these and related developments - concepts such as biopower and biopolitics, subjectivation and subsumption, public and common, power and potentiality. These concepts and theories are examined by Negri within the broader context of the development of European philosophical discourse in the twentieth century. Marx and Foucault provides a unique account of the development of radical thought in the late 20th and early 21st centuries and will be a key text for anyone interested in radical politics today. (shrink)

Although Foucault’s 1979 lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics promised to treat the theme of biopolitics, the course deals at length with neoliberalism while mentioning biopolitics hardly at all. Some scholars account for this elision by claiming that Foucault sympathized with neoliberalism; I argue on the contrary that Foucault develops a penetrating critique of the neoliberal claim to preserve individual liberty. Following Foucault, I show that the Chicago economist Gary Becker exemplifies what Foucault describes elsewhere as (...) class='Hi'>biopolitics: a form of power applied to the behavior of a population through the normalizing use of statistics. Although Becker’s preference for indirect intervention might seem to preserve the independence of individuals, under biopolitics individual liberty is itself the means by which populations are governed indirectly. In my view, by describing the history and ambivalence of neoliberal biopolitics, Foucault fosters a critical vigilance that is the precondition for creative political resistance. (shrink)

This paper aims to explore and offer different hypotheses that could account for an adequate understanding of the duty to die and its relation to biopolitics from two neglected approaches. First, death will be analysed from a biopolitical perspective to understand the crucial role it has in biopower. Second, the focus lies on the two-folded implication that death has in biopower, for it could be either a defiance of it or the final sublimation of its control. Similarly, the next (...) section addresses the relations between death and neoliberalism from a biopolitical perspective, exploring the possibility of understanding the duty to die as resistance to economic mandates or, on the contrary, as the fulfilment of neoliberal interests. Finally, as a continuation of the relations between the duty to die and neo-liberalism, the paper analyses a similar two-folded view of the former from a psychopolitical perspective. (shrink)

While Agamben acknowledges the Arendtian and Foucaultian thesis of the modernity of biopower, he will claim that sovereignty and biopolitics are equally ancient and essentially intertwined in the originary gesture of all politics; sovereignty is the power to decide the state of exception whereby bare life or zoe is exposed "underneath" political life or bios. Agamben then finds in the concentration camp the modern biopolitical paradigm, in which the state of exception has become the rule and we have all (...) become [potentially] bearers of exposed bare life in that we are all subject to what I will call a "de-politicizing predication": to use the current American jargon, being named an "enemy combatant.". (shrink)

The deaths of millions from war, genocide, poverty and famine are symptomatic of a crisis that extends beyond site-specific failures of governance, culture or economies. Rather than reiterate standard critiques of capitalism, uneven development and inequality, this article probes and maps a shift in both the global economy and logic of capital that posits death as a central activity of value creation. “Crisis,” then, is more than an accidental failure or inconvenient side effect of either global economy or political reality, (...) but pivotal to both. Extending notions of biopower and necropolitics, I argue that, due to the extension of market logic, populations have been reconfigured and reconceptualized as “excess” - not only disposable but also fundamentally valued only in their negation. This devaluation of selected population is devalorization of living labor, thus creating a space for death as a generalized commodity, market and economic activity. Crucially, this shift exceeds the historic understandings... (shrink)

The emergence of topics such as reprogenetics and genetic testing for hereditary diseases attests to the continued salience of Foucault's analyses of biopolitics. His various discussions pose at least two problems for contemporary appropriation of the work. First, it is unclear what the "life" on which biopolitics operates actually refers to.1 Second, it is unclear how biopolitics relates to the economy, either in the classical form of the family/household (oikos) or in the current form of neoliberalism.2 In (...) what follows, I argue, first, that modern biopolitics is marked less by the entry of biological life into the polis than by a new consideration of the form of life proper to humans. This is because Foucault's .. (shrink)

How relevant is Foucault's social thought to the world we inhabit today? This collection comprises several essays considering the contemporary relevance of the work of Michel Foucault. While Foucault is best remembered for his historical inquiries into the origins of disciplinary society in a period extending from the 16th to the 19th centuries, it seems that today, under the conditions of global modernity, the relevance of his ideas are called into question. With the increasing ubiquity of markets, the break up (...) of centralized states and the dissolution of national boundaries, together with new scientific and political discourses on biological life, the world of today seems far removed from the bounded, disciplinary societies Foucault described in his most famous books. Yet in recent years, it has become apparent that Foucault's thoughts on modern society have not been exhausted, and, indeed, that much remains to be explored. Within this volume, novel interpretations and thematic developments of key Foucauldian concepts are presented in the works of 24 authors. Prominent among them are new forms of neoliberal economic conduct framed by distinct governmentalities; new critical concepts of biological life reflected in Foucault's analysis of biopower, and new theoretical treatments of the effects of subjectivation. Moreover, included among these theoretical departures are empirical studies of contemporary formations of religion and spiritual practice, consumerism, race and racism, the discourse of genetics and the life sciences, surveillance and incarceration, and new social movements. Drawn from a conference held at the University of Massachusetts, Boston bearing the same title, A Foucault for the 21st Century: Governnentality, Biopolitics and Discipline in the New Millennium both expands our understanding of Foucault's central theoretical legacy, and applies his ideas to a range of contemporary empirical phenomena. (shrink)

Michel Foucault’s notion of “biopower” has been a highly fertile concept in recent theory, influencing thinkers worldwide across a variety of disciplines and concerns. In The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Foucault famously employed the term to describe “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.” With this volume, Vernon W. Cisney and Nicolae Morar bring together leading contemporary scholars to explore the many (...) theoretical possibilities that the concept of biopower has enabled while at the same time pinpointing their most important shared resonances. Situating biopower as a radical alternative to traditional conceptions of power—what Foucault called “sovereign power”—the contributors examine a host of matters centered on life, the body, and the subject as a living citizen. Altogether, they pay testament to the lasting relevance of biopower in some of our most important contemporary debates on issues ranging from health care rights to immigration laws, HIV prevention discourse, genomics medicine, and many other topics. (shrink)

Michel Foucault articulated the hypothesis of biopower and biopolitics in the 1970s, and Giorgio Agamben developed this hypothesis in his Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, published in English in 1998. Since these interventions, biopower and biopolitics have become indispensable as a theoretical point of reference in the humanities and social sciences. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that in the last thirty years the process of biopower and biopolitical regulation has increased, so much so that today (...) every aspect of social relation is subjected to the operations of this power. This chapter considers the position of biopower in the thought of Foucault and Agamben, and how the two conceive of power and resistance to power. It examines how biopower relates to sovereign power in both philosophers’ work, and specifically how Agamben’s development of Foucault’s thought is radical and offers a markedly different direction to scholarship on biopower and its relationship to sovereign power. Despite the relative age of Foucault’s writings, they continue to offer conceptual and theoretical tools for scholars in ways that Agamben’s theories and work do not. I use the example of the coronavirus pandemic to illustrate the shortcomings in Agamben’s thought. Finally, this chapter draws on recent work by Alexander Weheliye and Achille Mbembé to explore the close relationship between sexuality and race, and to show how both gender and race open up new avenues for exploring biopower and its relationship to sovereignty in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

The article investigates and vindicates the surprising claim Foucault makes in his lecture series The Birth of Biopolitics that the philosophical roots of post-war German neoliberalism lie in Husserl’s phenomenology. I study the similarities between Husserl’s phenomenology and Walter Eucken’s economic theory and examine the way that Husserl’s idea of the historical a priori assumes a determinate role in Eucken’s economic thinking. I also return to Foucault’s lectures in order to show how a version of the historical a priori (...) continues to operate in his history of governmentality, and how it functions as a counterpoint to the universalizing approach to the history of science, such as Husserl and Eucken’s. I conclude by rephrasing my initial question on the philosophical connections between Husserl’s phenomenology and German neoliberalism as a broader philosophical question on the political effects of our philosophical understanding of the history of science. (shrink)

Society Must Be Defended is a collection of Michel Foucault’s courses at the College de France in 1976. In this volume, Foucault discusses the emergence of a new technology of domination called biopower. It is a power that is not “individualizing”, but “massifying”, that is directed at man as a member of a “species”. Biopolitics exerts control over relations between the human races. Yet, some critics claim that Foucault’s biopower does not address colonial societies and problems. This paper argues (...) that Foucault’s theory of biopower could be applied to the postcolonial discourse, too. To trace Foucauldian biopower in postcolonial literature, the authors of this article have focused on E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. In this paper, the plot and the dialogue of Forster’s novel is studied based on Foucault’s theory of biopower as discussed in his Society Must Be Defended. It is concluded that in Forster’s novel, it can be noticed that the English power, which dominated early twentieth century Indian society, employs biopower to subjugate the Indian population. The English officials control India not merely by means of disciplinary institutions, but by manufacturing norms for an entire race which are explainable in terms of Foucault’s theory of biopower. (shrink)

This paper develops a genealogical critique of the concepts of biopower and biopolitics in the work of Foucault and Agamben. It shows how Heidegger's reflections on Machenschaft or machination prefigure the concepts of biopower and biopolitics. It develops a critique of Foucault's account of biopolitics as a system of managing the biological life of populations culminating in neo-liberalism, and a critique of Agamben's presentation of biopolitics as the metaphysical foundation of Western political rationality. Foucault's ethical turn (...) within biopolitical governmentality, along with Agamben's messianic gesture towards a utopian community to come, are questioned as political responses to biopower regimes. (shrink)

This book proposes a shift in the very concept of neoliberalism as an ambivalent product of subjectivity. It is not resolved in dichotomies between the included and excluded, interior and exterior, capitalist and noncapitalist. Neoliberalism operates in blurred lines, through flexible structures, and amid internal gradients and varying tensions.

This paper argues against a common misunderstanding of Foucault's work. Even after the release of his lectures at the Collège de France, which ran throughout the 1970s until his death in 1984, he is still often taken to have made an "ethical" turn toward the end of his life. As opposed to his genealogies of power published in the 1970s, which are relentlessly suspicious of claims of individual agency, his final monographs focus on the ethical self-formation of free individuals. I (...) suggest that this basic misinterpretation makes possible interpretations of Foucault's work as being sympathetic to neoliberal government, by linking the ethical turn to a "liberal" or "neoliberal" turn in his thought. I present a case against the ethical turn by arguing that Foucault's main focus, throughout the 1970s and 1980s, is a concern for the ways in which we become obligated by truth. (shrink)

This article examines the ambivalences in Foucault’s elaboration of the concept of biopower and biopolitics. From the beginning, he relates the idea of a power over life to struggle and war, and so to race. In the period of the formation of the nation-state, threats to the unity and strength of the population were thought to come from a contagion by an alien element. In this context, tropes of race became aligned with the ‘sciences and technologies of the social’ (...) that were emerging as part of biopolitics. They became part of the new rationality of the state, finding expression in projects such as public hygiene and eugenics, and, at the extreme, in Nazism. (shrink)

Neo-liberalism has become one of the boom concepts of our time. From its original reference point as a descriptor of the economics of the ‘Chicago School’ or authors such as Friedrich von Hayek, neo-liberalism has become an all-purpose concept, explanatory device and basis for social critique. This presentation evaluates Michel Foucault’s 1978–79 lectures, published as The Birth of Biopolitics, to consider how he used the term neo-liberalism, and how this equates with its current uses in critical social and cultural (...) theory. It will be argued that Foucault did not understand neo-liberalism as a dominant ideology in these lectures, but rather as marking a point of inflection in the historical evolution of liberal political philosophies of government. It will also be argued that his interpretation of neo-liberalism was more nuanced and more comparative than more recent contributions. The article points towards an attempt to theorize comparative historical models of liberal capitalism. (shrink)

Lacan and Capitalist Discourse explores the political and theoretical connections between the Covid-19 Pandemic and Capitalism, unravelling the direct consequences of Lacan's thesis of so-called "Capitalist Discourse". Jorge Alemán provides an account of neoliberalism, its mechanisms to produce subjectivities and the new modes of the political far Right. The book begins with the problem of a possible exit from capitalism, continuing to consider the possibilities of mourning and the active production of a new Left. Alemán engages deeply with a range (...) of thinkers: primarily Lacan, but also Heidegger, Marx, Laclau, Foucault, Butler, Badiou, Althusser, and others, in making his case. Lacan and Capitalist Discourse will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and to academics of psychoanalytic and Lacanian studies, cultural theory, philosophy and political thought. (shrink)

This essay highlights a methodological weakness in Foucault’s genealogy of neoliberalism often mistaken for a biographical shift in his philosophy. Naissance de la biopolitique is sometimes interpreted as evidence for Foucault’s conversion to neoliberalism, whereas its lack of critical acuity stems rather from its methodological limitations. Through a discussion of the “neoliberal conversion”-thesis, I highlight those limitations. Though Foucault’s appreciative tone in his neoliberalism lectures is surprising, his aim is mainly to defamiliarize readers from the dominant mode of neoliberal rationality (...) so that they can affirm the creative potential to foster new conducts, new identities, and new rationalities. Foucault did not convert to neoliberalism, but sought to destabilise it by revealing its historical contingency. However, as Foucault’s surprisingly positive tone shows, this strategy is insufficient for combatting neoliberalism. There is an elective affinity between Foucault’s own politics of creative self-reinvention and neoliberalism’s promise of a non-invasive, post-disciplinary government by indirect economic incentives alone. Foucault’s libertine stance toward subjectivity hence seems easily integrated into a neoliberal conduct of conducts. I propose to supplement Foucault’s genealogical method as he deploys it in Naissance de la biopolitique with an immanent critique of neoliberalism from the perspective of the governed. Rather than investigating neoliberal rationality as a promising endeavour for the future, we can study the real-life implementations of neoliberalism and their effects on subjective conducts. Neoliberal rationality is involved in a permanent struggle to shape the conduct of conducts along entrepreneurial and competitive lines, but subjects are refractory living beings whose conducts are not so simply transformed. Neoliberalism has had to give up its post-disciplinary aspirations and turn to the power of discipline and abandonment to enforce neoliberal norms of conduct. Neoliberalism has transformed into a negative biopolitics that sacrifices the lives of unproductive subjects as collateral damage to the overall welfare of the population. Immanent critique thereby reveals how subjects are pushed beyond their limits until neoliberal norms of conduct become unbearable. This intolerability of neoliberalism cannot be directly deduced from the writings of Becker, Friedman, or Hayek.111 It becomes manifest in the confrontation between neoliberal rationality and the material living bodies of finite human beings unable to be stretched in the ways neoliberalism requires. (shrink)

Is it even possible to resist or oppose neoliberalism? I consider two responses that translate musical practices into counter-hegemonic political strategies: Jacques Attali’s theory of “composition” and the biopolitics of “uncool.” Reading Jacques Attali’s Noise through Foucault’s late work, I argue that Attali’s concept of “repetition” is best understood as a theory of neoliberal biopolitics, and his theory composition is actually a model of deregulated subjectivity. Composition is thus not an alternative to neoliberalism but its quintessence. An aesthetics (...) and ethos of “uncool” might be a more viable alternative. If and when they function as bad, unprofitable investments, uncool practices like smoothness (predictable regularity) can undercut neoliberal imperatives to self-capitalization. I consider both the impact of neoliberalism on music, and how the study of music can advance theories of neoliberalism. (shrink)

RESUMO O artigo reconstrói a discussão acerca da biopolítica nos pensamentos de Foucault e de Negri e Hardt, a fim de ressaltar a importância que pode adquirir, nesse contexto, a noção de agonística. De início, abordamos de maneira introdutória os conceitos de biopolítica e governamentalidade em Foucault, bem como sua relação com o liberalismo e o neoliberalismo. Também examinamos as ambiguidades que marcam as práticas de liberdade e as possibilidades de resistência em um mundo governado pelo biopoder. Em seguida, explicitamos (...) o sentido dos conceitos de capitalismo cognitivo, Império e multidão nos trabalhos de Negri e Hardt. Nesse ponto, procuramos preencher uma lacuna de suas análises, que não se encontra em Foucault, relativa à questão da agonística: a disposição para a luta da multidão se intensifica à medida que se percebe que a própria vida é agon. Por fim, argumentamos que, em princípio, é possível, no ambiente de trabalho neoliberal, converter processos de empresariamento-de-si em microexperimentos de resistência e liberdade não alienada. (shrink)

This letter attempts to put some preliminary thoughts on the COVID-19 pandemic in relation to Foucault's writings on Biopower, critique of Capitalism, and global wealth injustice. The Letter concludes that schemes, such as COVAX, which are meant to overcome global wealth inequalities, serve better as visible symptoms of these inequalities.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetorical Circulation in Late CapitalismNeoliberalism and the Overdetermination of Affective EnergyCatherine ChaputIn the world we have known since the nineteenth century, a series of governmental rationalities overlap, lean on each other, challenge each other, and struggle with each other: art of government according to truth, art of government according to the rationality of the sovereign state, and art of government according to the rationality of economic agents, and more (...) generally, according to the rationality of the governed themselves. And it is all these different arts of government, all these different types of ways of calculating, rationalizing, and regulating the art of government which, overlapping with each other, broadly speaking constitute the object of political debate.Michel Foucault, The Birth of BiopoliticsCritical rhetoricians interested in the power dynamics between rhetoric and capitalism have established for themselves the ambitious task of explaining how multiple, intertwined rationalities govern individual and collective [End Page 1] behavior in relationship to the ever-shifting logics of capitalism. Approaches to this complicated directive frequently envision rhetoric as a mediating force among agentive subjects who act within well-defined political economic landscapes. Wedded to a political-communicative model wherein appropriate rhetorical choices persuade those with authority to distribute disputed political and economic rights, rhetorical theory becomes a sophisticated handbook for discovering topoi and executing decorous statements. This focus, according to Ronald Walter Greene, results in a "permanent anxiety over the meaning and potential of rhetorical agency" that positions rhetoricians as "moral entrepreneurs scolding, correcting, and encouraging the body politic" (2004, 188, 189). Committing themselves to endless debates about correct responses in situated spaces, rhetorical theories that underscore agency lose site of the world in flux and of our participation in that world's unpredictable unfoldings. Alternatively, Greene suggests rethinking rhetorical theory through a materialist-communicative model wherein the immaterial labor of communication produces value. Conceptualizing discursive practices as a form of labor rather than a form of political signification sidesteps anxiety about well-chosen language and emphasizes the life-affirming activity involved in deciphering issues, inventing paths through those issues, and communicating new ideas to others. In short, Greene's materialist model challenges critical rhetoricians to end their perennial search for a discursive key to the storehouse of political economic goods (a practice propelled by liberal democratic hopes) so that they can begin to invent analyses and modes of production better suited to the contours of contemporary neoliberalism.Unlike liberalism's clearly assigned spaces for public life and private life or work time and leisure time, neoliberal spaces bear few obvious markers. The neoliberal landscape consists of blurred boundaries that fold into one another: information flows almost instantaneously, commodities and people transgress national boundaries, time accelerates, space collapses, and distinctions between such classic demarcations as agent and subject or politics and economics erode. Facilitated by dramatic changes in our sociopolitical boundaries, economic neoliberalism, what James Arnt Aune calls "economic correctness" (2001), reigns throughout vast uneven terrains opened up from the imploded borders of our liberal world. While economics does indeed rule the neoliberal landscape, it does not do so according to uncompromising rationalism. Political and cultural practices flowing into the previously segregated spaces of economics enable market rule through logics that operate entirely outside the rational-irrational divide. Economic neoliberalism moves from situation to situation, disregarding spatial boundaries between the political, economic, [End Page 2] and cultural realms as well as their attendant modes of persuasion, wearing away at the rhetorical linkages between appropriate discursive choices and agentive power.Regardless of the particularities of neoliberalism's spaces, structures, and governing practices, many rhetoricians continue to mediate among different worldviews based on outmoded liberal gauges. Some rhetorical theorists, for instance, maintain that the problematics of neoliberalism result from an imbalance between reason and passion. Even though the most ardent supporters of neoliberal practices hold firmly to a belief in its scientific rationality, rhetorical theorists often argue that passion overpowers reason in neoliberal discourse. The rhetorical form that sustains this disequilibrium is, according to Bradford Vivian, neoliberal epideictic. Based on an impassioned identification, epideictic texts "unite an otherwise fractured citizenry in a dynamic affective experience" (Vivian 2006, 15). Epideictic rhetoric functions didactically to unite the public... (shrink)

Le cours de 1979 au Collège de France révèle-t-il un Michel Foucault « grand adversaire » du néolibéralisme ou un philosophe séduit par ce courant de pensée? Cette question illustre l’effort de classification dont cet auteur a toujours été la cible. Le présent article propose, néanmoins, d’envisager son travail à partir d’une tout autre perspective : plutôt que de s’insérer dans des cases fixes, c’est aux frontières – entre différentes disciplines, courants ou stratégies – qu’une telle pensée se place. En (...) interrogeant, tout d’abord, une partie du débat actuel sur la lecture foucaldienne du néolibéralisme, nous nous intéresserons, ensuite, aux différents contextes dans lesquels le philosophe insère sa réflexion sur ce thème. Ce faisant, nous serons plus en mesure de comprendre la manière dont il construit son travail, à cette époque, sur les bases d’un véritable projet critique, ce qui nous permet de mieux saisir, in fine, les particularités de l’horizon théorique à l’intérieur duquel Foucault développe ses analyses sur le néolibéralisme. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rhetorical Circulation in Late CapitalismNeoliberalism and the Overdetermination of Affective EnergyCatherine ChaputIn the world we have known since the nineteenth century, a series of governmental rationalities overlap, lean on each other, challenge each other, and struggle with each other: art of government according to truth, art of government according to the rationality of the sovereign state, and art of government according to the rationality of economic agents, and more (...) generally, according to the rationality of the governed themselves. And it is all these different arts of government, all these different types of ways of calculating, rationalizing, and regulating the art of government which, overlapping with each other, broadly speaking constitute the object of political debate.Michel Foucault, The Birth of BiopoliticsCritical rhetoricians interested in the power dynamics between rhetoric and capitalism have established for themselves the ambitious task of explaining how multiple, intertwined rationalities govern individual and collective [End Page 1] behavior in relationship to the ever-shifting logics of capitalism. Approaches to this complicated directive frequently envision rhetoric as a mediating force among agentive subjects who act within well-defined political economic landscapes. Wedded to a political-communicative model wherein appropriate rhetorical choices persuade those with authority to distribute disputed political and economic rights, rhetorical theory becomes a sophisticated handbook for discovering topoi and executing decorous statements. This focus, according to Ronald Walter Greene, results in a "permanent anxiety over the meaning and potential of rhetorical agency" that positions rhetoricians as "moral entrepreneurs scolding, correcting, and encouraging the body politic" (2004, 188, 189). Committing themselves to endless debates about correct responses in situated spaces, rhetorical theories that underscore agency lose site of the world in flux and of our participation in that world's unpredictable unfoldings. Alternatively, Greene suggests rethinking rhetorical theory through a materialist-communicative model wherein the immaterial labor of communication produces value. Conceptualizing discursive practices as a form of labor rather than a form of political signification sidesteps anxiety about well-chosen language and emphasizes the life-affirming activity involved in deciphering issues, inventing paths through those issues, and communicating new ideas to others. In short, Greene's materialist model challenges critical rhetoricians to end their perennial search for a discursive key to the storehouse of political economic goods (a practice propelled by liberal democratic hopes) so that they can begin to invent analyses and modes of production better suited to the contours of contemporary neoliberalism.Unlike liberalism's clearly assigned spaces for public life and private life or work time and leisure time, neoliberal spaces bear few obvious markers. The neoliberal landscape consists of blurred boundaries that fold into one another: information flows almost instantaneously, commodities and people transgress national boundaries, time accelerates, space collapses, and distinctions between such classic demarcations as agent and subject or politics and economics erode. Facilitated by dramatic changes in our sociopolitical boundaries, economic neoliberalism, what James Arnt Aune calls "economic correctness" (2001), reigns throughout vast uneven terrains opened up from the imploded borders of our liberal world. While economics does indeed rule the neoliberal landscape, it does not do so according to uncompromising rationalism. Political and cultural practices flowing into the previously segregated spaces of economics enable market rule through logics that operate entirely outside the rational-irrational divide. Economic neoliberalism moves from situation to situation, disregarding spatial boundaries between the political, economic, [End Page 2] and cultural realms as well as their attendant modes of persuasion, wearing away at the rhetorical linkages between appropriate discursive choices and agentive power.Regardless of the particularities of neoliberalism's spaces, structures, and governing practices, many rhetoricians continue to mediate among different worldviews based on outmoded liberal gauges. Some rhetorical theorists, for instance, maintain that the problematics of neoliberalism result from an imbalance between reason and passion. Even though the most ardent supporters of neoliberal practices hold firmly to a belief in its scientific rationality, rhetorical theorists often argue that passion overpowers reason in neoliberal discourse. The rhetorical form that sustains this disequilibrium is, according to Bradford Vivian, neoliberal epideictic. Based on an impassioned identification, epideictic texts "unite an otherwise fractured citizenry in a dynamic affective experience" (Vivian 2006, 15). Epideictic rhetoric functions didactically to unite the public... (shrink)

This article explores the link between liberalism and biopolitics in Foucault, through the analyses of the 1979 Lecture at the Collège de France The Birth of Biopolitics.