Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

FOUCAULT, BIOPOLITICS, AND GOVERNMENTALITY
be found in the Islamic world. Whether we like it or not, Islamic theocratic
government represents a very different kind of political rationality, a
different kind of governmentality. According to Islamic law, you cannot pay
or charge interest, for example. Such a principle would completely devastate
our governmentality since our political system relies so heavily on banking
and global financial markets. However, I am obviously not suggesting that
Islam would provide a solution to our problems. But at least one way
forward in imagining political alternatives could be a dialogue with the rest
of the world—with these alternative systems of thinking about politics,
society, and culture.
Maurizio Lazzarato
I would like to bring up the question of freedom. There are many limits to
Foucault’s analysis and we have to shed some light on them. When it comes
to liberalism, there is never any question of money, which is very
astonishing. Liberalism, or more precisely neoliberalism, is really a question
of finances. There is no discussion of property in Foucault’s analysis, which
is another very important limitation. There is a discourse on freedom in
liberalism that is always connected to a discourse on property. In the
theories of liberalism one is free only to the extent that one has property. If
liberal theory had in fact been implemented, there would for instance never
be such thing as voting, or what we understand as voting, because in all
theories of liberalism voting is connected to having property. It was the
labor movement that made a system of voting possible, which was never an
issue for liberalism. Foucault says many things that are very imprecise, and
we can never take them literally or accept what he says at face value.
Sometimes he makes an apology for liberalism, for instance in the Birth of
Biopolitics. When, for example, he raises the theory of human capital he sees
only the relation in which the worker becomes an entrepreneur of himself.
But at the same time this is a production of workfare. I think it is precisely
this ambiguity in Foucault’s work that we have still to shed light on. A
concept of freedom or liberty is always very ambiguous, because we don’t
know what it means to be free; we are never simply free, but always also
caught up in relations of dependence. A sociologist like Gabriel Tarde
proposes a theory that is in fact much more interesting. He says that one
can always act or choose differently, but he doesn’t say that we are free. I
think we have to take the history suggested by Foucault in a kind of reverse
manner, and I find much more interesting things in Deleuze and Guattari
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