Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

ROUNDTABLE
that engenders an immediate, or even prior, resistance. Can we say that
Foucault understands the question of “life” as a properly ontological
question, or does he simply historicize this concept as yet another invention
within power-knowledge, which has no priority as such?
So, these were the three questions I would like to put, as simply as
possible. Perhaps we should just start with the first one.
Johanna Oksala
This question was posed to me already yesterday, and I didn’t manage to
give a very good answer then. But I have now had some time to reflect, and
maybe I understand the question better. You are asking: is there an outside
to this liberal governmental regime of truth, or this liberal governmentality,
and if so, what would this outside be? Or in more practical terms, how does
one resist neoliberal governmentality? In my paper I argued that neoliberalism
was a much deeper and more complex phenomenon than a mere
economic doctrine, and that this entailed a fundamental rethinking of the
tools of critical thought as well as of political resistance. But it is my
contention that the neoliberal production of regimes of truth is never
complete, nor is their operation as internally consistent as neoliberalism’s
own representations would lead us to think. We must question their hegemony,
as well as the political neutrality of economic knowledge, and analyze
the way in which economic truths produce political effects. We must also
advocate the seemingly crazy argument that the maximal material wellbeing
of the population is not necessarily the undisputed aim of good
government. At the moment I am very interested in these political movements
of “degrowth” or “post-growth” that aim for global well-being without
relying on economic growth to make it happen. In other words, we
should question neoliberalism’s exclusive claim to rationality and regain
and reinvigorate alternative political values, such as justice and equality,
with which to assess the ways we are governed. While we have to accept that
practical forms of resistance against neoliberalism have to consider the
efficaciousness of their strategies and even apply strictly economic, costbenefit
analysis to some of their actions, economic rationality should, and
does not form the only framework for assessing politics. So, there is
obviously an outside. I also think that Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback’s
question yesterday was to the point: we tend to look at politics from a very
westernized perspective. There are alternative governmentalities elsewhere
in the world. Perhaps the most paradigmatic counterweight at present can
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