Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

ROUNDTABLE
on the relation between liberalism and freedom and capitalism. Deleuze and
Guattari claim that capitalism is always characterized by two antagonistic
movements: one is the hyper-modernity of capitalism, its hyper-innovative
character; on the other hand there are a series of neo-archaisms that
emerge. These things go together. This is why, in the society of communication,
spaces of freedom go together with George Bush! In Italy, to
offer a further example, you have a kind of capitalist alliance between the
media system and Berlusconi, and which goes together with xenophobic
political organizations like the Lega Nord. In France you have the
modernist discourses of Sarkozy that goes well together with The Ministry
of Immigration and National Identity. So, there are these obvious limits to
Foucault’s discourses on liberalism and we have to understand them,
otherwise we end up in danger of becoming François Ewald.
Julian Reid
I think, in response to Maurizio, it is wrong to think of the absence of an
account of the role of property and finance in Foucault’s theory of liberalism
as a weakness as such. I think it was a deliberate decision on his part not
to address liberalism through those well-trodden tropes, but to think about
liberalism specifically as a regime of power as opposed to a regime of
exploitation, profits and loss. There’s a brilliant discussion between Deleuze
and Foucault, where Foucault literally says that, you know, we know where
the exploitation occurs, we know where the profit goes, but we don’t know
how to explain the powers through which these regimes of exploitation and
profit sustain themselves. That’s a very different and much more complex
problem and way of approaching liberalism than the traditional Marxist
one. I don’t think it’s true to say that liberalism only permits freedom in so
far as we possess property. I think it’s more complicated than that. Freedom
is conceptualized as a property, as a biological property and a capacity of
the human. Liberalism aspires to governance in so far as it can know and
regulate the exercise of freedom as a property of the body, and as a capacity
of the biohuman. So I want to say that we should avoid the risk of treating
Foucault as either just another or “the new” Marx. Let’s not reify these texts
or expect them to deliver answers to, or complete descriptions of, questions
about how liberalism is functioning today, how it works, what its basic
principles are, even what its ontology is—if it indeed has an ontology? I
mean, it seems obvious to me that we still live in a biopolitical world—we’ve
never been so biopoliticized. When I look at the character of international
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