Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

FOUCAULT, BIOPOLITICS, AND GOVERNMENTALITY
of trying to relate the idea of life as creative to an idea of politics through the
process of subjectification.
Thomas Lemke
First of all I would like to thank you, Sven-Olov, for stressing these three
points. I really think you’ve captured the most important points and the
most difficult questions to answer. Concerning the relation between freedom
and agency I think that there is some kind of slippage of vocabulary,
which is also present in Foucault’s work. It is necessary to distinguish
agency from freedom. Freedom of choice is a very limited and specific freedom—a
liberal concept of freedom, which is characterized by consumer
choices and by a certain spectrum of possibilities of action. At the same
time, though, you have to choose, you are obliged to choose. However, we
are not confronted with the paradox of an “enforced freedom” (I was
tempted to say of “enduring” freedom). The task is rather to decipher this
very specific kind of freedom, the very format of liberal freedom, in order to
map its limits and costs. Also, I don’t share Maurizio’s, interpretation of
Foucault’s lectures on governmentality as some kind of apology of neoliberalism.
I think that Foucault tried to analyze the inventiveness of liberalism
and neoliberalism, and to contrast this inventiveness with socialism.
He did this by addressing the question of why there’s no socialist governmentality.
He was fascinated with the fact that something real has been
invented, a system of thought and a set of practices. To reconstruct this
process also means to learn from it, and to be able to imagine a different
governmentality. And this was what he was referring to—too optimistically,
perhaps—when the socialists won the presidential election in 1981. The first
interview he gave after the election was about the possibility of a new
logique du gauche, a logic of the left. And I think this was really what he was
trying to do: to learn from neoliberal inventiveness in order to imagine
something different than neoliberalism.
Maurizio Lazzarato
I want to be a little bit provocative. One has to historicize neoliberalism, I
think. There’s a first phase, which ends at the time of the first Gulf war, in
which you find the innovative and productive aspect of liberalism. And then
there is a second phase, a phase of decline. Foucault couldn’t grasp this
because he was writing The Birth of Biopolitics in a preceding period. It’s a
fantastic book, a fabulous book to read, but still you have this shift where
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