Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

Roundtable
Sven-Olov Wallenstein
Biopolitics is, as we know, a theme that appears at a certain point in
Foucault’s work, and then disappears, or is, rather, absorbed into other
concerns—for instance the problem of governmentality, of conduct and
counter-conduct, and later into the idea of subjectivation and the technologies
of the self, to mention two of the most visible ones.
While this may seem to give the topic of biopolitics a lesser importance,
it is also true that it constitutes something of a caesura in Foucault’s work,
just after the first volume of the History of Sexuality (where it appears for
the first time in the published work, as a kind of addendum). The emphasis
that we find in Discipline and Punish on processes of discipline as pervasive
in modernity does not disappear altogether, although it is fundamentally
modified with the introduction of the apparatuses of security, which have a
certain situated freedom as their correlative, and together make up something
that at least in the 1977–78 lectures on Security, Territory, Population
can be called a kind of biopolitical complex.
It is in this context that Foucault makes the suggestion that liberalism is
the fundamental form of governmentality within which biopolitics unfolds,
first by way of an analysis of its development in the eighteenth century, but
then, in following the 1978–79 lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics, more
surprisingly also during long in-depth discussions of modern neoliberalism.
As a way to open for the general discussion, I would like to pose three
general questions that I think have been present throughout the talks and
the discussions, but that need to be stated even more clearly, perhaps even
bluntly:
1. The first question has to do with what could be called historical
specificity. When Foucault says that we are still within the kind of problem
that was initiated in the eighteenth century, how should we understand
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