Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

ENUNCIATION AND POLITICS
These arguments immediately call to mind the neoliberal critique of
“socialist” wage equality, and, more generally, equality thought in terms of
social rights: equality is an obstacle to freedom and “ethical differentiation,”
and it drowns subjectivity in the indifference of subjects of right.
In the same way as Guattari, Foucault cautions us that we cannot oppose
neoliberal liberty, which in reality is an expression of a political will to reestablish
hierarchies, inequalities, and privileges, solely by an “egalitarian
politics.” For this would be to disregard those criticisms leveled against egalitarian
socialism by different political movements already before the liberals.
Foucault does not only denounce the enemies of democracy, but,
drawing on the Cynics, he reverses the aristocratic criticism on its own
terrain: ethical differentiation, constitution of the subject and its becoming.
After the crisis of parrhesia there emerges a “truth-telling” that no longer
exposes itself to the risk of politics. Truth-telling in its origin derives from
the sphere of personal ethics and the constitution of the moral subject,
although it confronts us with the alternative between the “metaphysics of
the soul” and the “aesthetics of life,” between knowledge of the soul and a
purification that gives access to another world, to other practices and
techniques that might serve to test, experiment, and transform the self, life,
and world as they exist here and now. This is the constitution of the self, no
longer as “soul,” but as “bios,” as a form of life. This alternative is already contained
in Plato’s texts, but it is the cynics who render it explicit and, by politicizing
it, turn it against the enemies of democracy. The opposition between
the Cynics and Platonism can be summarized as follows: the first articulate
“another life” and “another world,” another subjectivity and other institutions
in this world, whereas for the latter, the issue is rather “the other world” and
“the other life” in a connection that will be prolonged in Christianity.
The Cynics reverse the traditional theme of the “true life,” into which
truth-telling had migrated and installed itself. The “true life” in the Greek
tradition is a life that escapes perturbation, changes, corruption, degradation,
and which maintains itself without modification in the identity of its
being. The Cynics reverse this “true life” by claiming and practicing
“another life,” “whose alterity must lead to a transformation of the world.
Another life for another world.” 16 They reverse the theme of the “sovereign
life, calm in itself and beneficial for others,” into an “activist life, a life of
16 Ibid, 264.
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