Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

INTRODUCTION
stantially new reception. These three phases not only have an inner complexity,
but also contain many themes and questions that extend across
those divisions: the first must include the early work leading up to the study
of madness, and its contradictory and shifting exchanges with phenomenology
and existential psychoanalysis extend throughout the 1960s; the second
must be seen as a gradual process of discovery of a new idea of power,
which however always was in a state of flux; and the third is rather something
like a prismatic diffraction, to the effect that we here can see a multiplicity
of questions that never coalesce into a unified complex.
In hindsight, the published works appear like snapshots, momentary cutouts
from a process; perhaps they were too well written, too obsessed with
creating self-enclosed unities, all of which has generated criticisms whose
depth of ambition may vary, while the underlying theme remains the same:
Foucault’s mode of presentation is itself panoptical and totalizing, it mirrors
the forms of discipline that he wants to uncover, and it immobilizes us in
the face of an irreversible dystopia. Reading the lectures from the Collège de
France however provides an efficient antidote to this. In those lectures we
see Foucault at work, constantly returning to older questions, restating and
reframing them, always prepared to discard his earlier claims if a new angle
should present itself.
In this way, the unity of Foucault’s work does not consist in a system or a
set of theses. Such reductive ideas have become widespread, especially
among his critics, where they have petrified into an unshakable doxa: the
individual, desire, and subjectivity are nothing but surface effects of
discipline; the human and social sciences are nothing but the exertion of
power; and even truth itself is only a deceptive mask behind which we find
rhetoric, or even coercion and simple violence, all of which makes Foucault
into little more than a modern Thrasymachus, and an easy prey for all the
self-appointed Socrateses of this world. If there is a unity, it must rather be
sought on the level of questioning, in the necessity of never remaining
satisfied with the answer just given, and of constantly returning to the
starting point in order to frame the investigation differently. This incessant
mobility might no doubt provoke a certain impatience, not least since it
makes Foucault less useful as a quasi-magical reference in debates, either as
an authority or a projected opponent, but it is also a salient example of what
Wittgenstein once claimed, to be sure in a different context: philosophy is
not a doctrine, but an activity.
10