Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

MAURIZIO LAZZARATO
“equality and its absence.” Equality is the necessary—though insufficient—
condition for the process of differentiation, where the “rights for everyone”
are the social basis for a subjectivation that sets in motion the production of
another life, another world.
The “little savages” of French suburbia, as they were called by a socialist
minister, in some respects resemble the “barbarian” cynics who, instead of
engaging in the orderly and dialectical games of recognition, prefer to leave
the theater stage and invent other artifices that have little to do with theater.
Rather than a theater stage, the Cynics call to mind contemporary
performance art, where public exposure (in the double sense of manifesting
and taking a risk) does not necessarily occur through language, speech, and
signifying semiotics, or through the theatrical dramaturgy of casting, interlocution,
and dialog.
How does the process of subjectivation, which opens a path to “another
life” and “another world,” occur? Not simply through language and reason.
The Cynics are not only “speaking beings,” but also bodies that no doubt
enunciate something, even though this enunciation does not pass through
signifying chains. To satisfy one’s needs (to eat, to shit) and desires (to
masturbate, to make love) in public, to provoke, scandalize, to enforce
thoughts and emotions, are different “performative” techniques that engage
a multiplicity of semiotics.
The stick, the beggar’s bag, poverty, wandering, begging, the sandals, the
naked feet etc., by which the Cynic’s mode of life is expressed, are
modalities of non-verbal enunciation. The gesture, the act, the example,
behavior, and physical presence are practices and semiotics of expression
that address others without passing though the relay of speech. In Cynical
“performances” language does not solely have a denotative and representtative
function, but above all an “existential function.” It affirms an ethos
and a politics, and takes part in the construction of existential territories, to
speak with Guattari.
In the Greek tradition, there are two ways to attain virtue: the long and
easy way that passes through the logos, i.e. discourse and its scholarly
apprenticeship, and the short but difficult way of the Cynics, which is
“somehow mute.” The short way, or shortcut, without discourse, is that of
exercise and of putting oneself to the test.
Cynical life is not public only through language, through speech. Rather
it exposes itself in its material, everyday reality. It is a materially and
physically public life that immediately reconfigures the divisions constitutive
of Greek society: on the one hand the public space of the polis, on the
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