Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

MAURIZIO LAZZARATO
combat and struggle against and for oneself, against and for the others,” 17 a
combat “in this world against the world.” 18
In connecting politics and ethics (and truth) in an indissoluble way, the
Cynics transcend the “crisis” of parrhesia, and the impotence of democracy
and equality to bring about ethical differentiation. They dramatize and
reconfigure the relation to the self politically, by wresting it away from the
good life, and from the sovereign life of ancient thought.
Two models for political action
These two readings of Greek democracy are informed by two very different
models for “revolutionary” action.
For Rancière, politics is a compensation for a wrong done to equality,
through the method of demonstration, argumentation, and interlocution.
Through political action, those that “have no part” must demonstrate that
they speak and not just emit noise. They must also demonstrate that they do
not speak another language or a minor language, but express themselves in,
and master, the language of their masters. Finally, they must demonstrate
by argumentation and interlocution that they are beings endowed with
reason and speech.
The model for revolutionary action based on demonstration, argumentation,
and interlocution aims at an inclusion, a “recognition” that, no
matter how litigious, comes very close to a dialectical recognition. Politics
calls forth the division into parts, where “we” and “they” are opposed as well
as counted, where two worlds are divided while still recognizing that they
belong to the same community. “The non-counted, in displaying the
distribution [partage] by stealing the equality of the others, can make
themselves be counted.” 19
If we were to find something that resembles Rancière’s model, we should
not look to democratic politics, but to the social democracy that was formed
in the wake of the New Deal in the postwar period. This is the kind of social
democracy that we still find in the French system of co-management of
Social Security, the “dialectical model” of class struggle where the
recognition and litigation between “us” and “them” constitutes the motor of
development in capitalism and in democracy itself.
17 Ibid, 261.
18 Ibid, 262.
19 Rancière, La Mésentente, 159.
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