Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

FOUCAULT, BIOPOLITICS, AND GOVERNMENTALITY
C) Reconfiguring subjectivity and agency
Cecilia Sjöholm’s contribution deals with Foucault and psychoanalysis, and
attempts to elaborate a common ground between his later work and Lacan.
Drawing on Lacan’s first seminar from 1953, Freud’s Papers on Technique,
Sjöholm argues that Foucault’s presentation of psychoanalysis as the enterprise
of uncovering hidden truths in the subject is mistaken. Lacan in fact
abandoned an analysis of the ego in favor of desire, and the question “who
am I?” gave way to another question: “who is talking?” Framed as a
technique of transference and counter-transference, psychoanalysis concerns
the forming rather than the truth of the subject, which is compatible
with Foucault’s later ideas on self-creation and his quest to revive the
ancient care of the self. These convergences are not just accidental resemblance
of terminology, Sjöholm argues: both Lacan and Foucault conceived
of the formation of the subject as a response to a structure that is always in
place, rather than as an adaptation to a norm.
Maurizio Lazzarato investigates Jacques Rancière’s claim that Foucault,
being occupied with power, never took any interest in political subjectivation.
In fact, he suggests, they propose two radically heterogeneous conceptions
of political subjectivation: for Rancière, ethics is what neutralizes
politics, whereas Foucault’s political subjectivation is indistinguishable from
a project of ethopoiesis, or the formation of the subject. It is a difference of
opinion that also comes across in their radically divergent interpretations of
Greek democracy.
Lazzarato perceives a logocentric prejudice in Rancière’s understanding
of democracy. Democracy is, according to Rancière, uniquely based on
equality, which in its turn is rooted in the common fact of language: all
speech presupposes a mutual understanding and a belonging to a shared
community, and political action means to further this possibility and include
thereby those that “have no part” in the common. Against this, Lazzarato
pits Foucault’s understanding of parrhesia, a “truth-telling” that introduces
paradoxical relations into the formal equality of democracy, as well as
a difference of enunciation in the equality of language, and also implies an
“ethical differentiation.” To take a stand and speak the truth is to take a risk,
it pits equals against each other and may lead to hostility and even war; and
yet it is the precondition for the production of new forms of subjectivation
and singularity, which according to Lazzarato, are downplayed in Rancière’s
formal understanding of democracy.
Adeena May too looks at Rancière’s critique of Foucault, but with the
specific aim of readdressing claims made around autism as a form of
33