Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

ROUNDTABLE
everything changes after the Gulf war. One has to introduce other things
into this history. A very interesting case to discuss in relation to the idea of
an administration of choice would be the medical reforms that Barack
Obama is trying to infuse in the US. There is something like forty-five
million people who have no access to medical care, others who have limited
access to medical care because they have limited property. And then there
are those who are against Obama’s reform, saying this is a socialist reform
that prevents us from making choices. This is because if they had the
property, they’d have the money. What this example really shows, is that the
problem of choice is the problem of money.
Thomas Lemke
I want to return, very briefly, to the first point you were making, about the
question of resistance: how can you resist productivity? I think the most
important point would be to ask: What do we mean by resistance, especially
since liberal governmentality takes into account forms of resistance;
resistance is, after all, not something exterior to liberalism, challenging it
from the outside. It is part of the productivity and mobility of liberalism,
there’s a permanent process of response, adaptation, and reformulation. We
should avoid the idea of a stable and fixed totality that remains unchanged,
unchallenged—in fact it’s permanently challenged. And we have to make
visible the points of friction and the points of transformation that too often
escape from the analysis. And doing this would mean to reinscribe conduct
and counter-conduct into this very productivity of liberal governmentality.
As for the “bio”—the bio of biopolitics, I think there are several ways to
address the problem. Let me mention just two of them. One would be to ask
how it comes to be that the biological—the reference to the body—is so important
in contemporary forms of government? The other would be to
further investigate and imagine the bios—something that would be a more
comprehensive concept of life, and one not necessarily limited to a biological
idea, and where, yes, the biological may have a role, but not the
dominant and central role that it has today in politics.
Sven-Olov Wallenstein
I think it is time to have some comments from the audience. Please, the
floor is open.
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