Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

MAURIZIO LAZZARATO
of equality in the institution of a dispute, a community that only exists by
way of division.” 27
The interrogation of these “focal points of experience” and the experiments
that take place in the wake of the cynics, are transmitted throughout
the history of the Occident, and are taken up in a renewed form by the
revolutionaries at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the
twentieth century, and by the artists from the same period.
Organization and activism
The Foucauldian subjectivation is not only an argument about equality and
inequality, a demonstration of the wrong done to equality, but a veritable
immanent creation that takes place in the gap between equality and
inequality, displacing the question of the political by opening the
indeterminate space and time of ethical differentiation and of the formation
of a collective self.
If politics is indistinguishable from the formation of an “ethical” subject,
then the question of organization becomes central, even if in different
fashion than in the communist model. The reconfiguration of the sensible is
a process that must become the object of an “activist” work that Guattari,
prolonging Foucault’s intuition, defines as an “analytical” political work.
For Guattari, the GIP (Groupe d’information sur les prisons) can be
considered as an analytical and activist collective assemblage, where the
object of “activism” is re-doubled: it belongs to the domain of intervention,
but also to the side of those that intervene. The task is to permanently work
with the statements produced, but also with the techniques, procedures, and
modalities of the collective assemblage of enunciation (of the organization).
Inversely, Rancière has no “interest in the forms of organization of
political collectives.” He only considers the “alterations produced by the acts
of political subjectivation,” i.e., he only perceives the act of subjectivation in
its rare emergence, whose temporal duration comes close to instantaneity.
He refuses to consider “the forms of consistence of groups that produce
it,” 28 although May 1968 was precisely about interrogating their rules of
constitution and functioning, their modality of expression and of demo-
27 Rancière, La Mésentente, 55.
28 Jacques Rancière, La méthode de l’égalité: La philosophie déplacée (Paris: Editions Horlieu,
2006), 514.
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