Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

INTRODUCTION
at least in Cynicism, affirmed the possibility of leading such a life of
truth. But listen, I had more things to say about the general framework
of these analyses. But it is too late now. So, thank you. 13
Whether these developmental lines (to which others undoubtedly could be
added) may be knitted together at some more profound level must remain
an open question. It is indeed true that certain themes, like the problem of
governing, recur regularly, although their significance seems to vary contextually;
other topics, like sexuality, suddenly return after long absences, as
if all of these questions would co-exist at a deeper level, although not simply
in a peaceful and thus mutually indifferent way, but as a series of unresolved
tensions. If one were to seek out a pervasive theme, then the idea of
“governing” would probably be the most likely candidate: on the one hand,
we are presented with the governing of others, the roots of which take us
back to the Christian pastorate and, specifically, to the relation between the
shepherd and his flock; on the other hand, we also encounter the governing
of oneself, which becomes a question of the subject and its self-relation as
ethos. The success, even inflation, of the concept of “governmentality” in
subsequent political science (addressed in Thomas Lemke’s contribution
below) would testify to the fecundity of choosing this angle, although it
would be far too reductive if we were to allow it to subsume all of Foucault’s
research since the mid 1970s, at the expense of other concepts like truth,
subjectivity, and experience. These remain just as pertinent, indicating that
the question of interiority and individual experience, with which he began, by
no means disappears, but is rather resituated within a more encompassing
analysis of historical practices.
What position, then, does biopolitics hold in this complex development?
The extended historical analyses of the history of governmentality initiated
in Security, Territory, Population seem to push biopolitics aside, and the
topic only recurs briefly at the end of the volume; and despite its title, the
next lecture series, The Birth of Biopolitics, after having summarized the
results of the previous analyses, moves ahead to discuss modern liberalism,
whose connection to the earlier theme is at least not obvious (an argument
for the continuity of these two discussions is given in Johanna Oksala’s
contribution below). A reasonable conjecture would however be that these
moves constitute different steps in a gradual slide from discipline to
subjectivation, a process in which the problem of biopolitics may be taken
13 Le courage de la vérité: Le gouvernement de soi et des autres II, Cours au Collège de
France 1984, ed. Frédéric Gros (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2009), 308f.
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