Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

JOHANNA OKSALA
liberalism and neoliberalism instead. A quick look at the index reveals that
the word biopolitics occurs in only four instances, and in two of these the
context is an apology for the fact that Foucault had spent too long on other
topics and had not been able to talk about it. 14 The lectures thus give no easy
or conclusive answer to the question of how biopolitics and neoliberalism
are related.
In the first lecture Foucault introduces biopolitics as the general topic of
the series and gives a general characterization of its relationship to
liberalism: the governmental regime of liberalisms must form the framework
for understanding biopolitics. “It seems to me that it is only when we
understand what is at stake in… this governmental regime called liberalism…
will we be able to grasp what biopolitics is” (BB 21-22). In the
course summary he again apologizes for the fact that the course ended up
being devoted entirely to what should have been the introduction. He insists
again, however, that biopolitical issues could not be understood as separate
from the framework of political rationality within which they appeared and
took on their intensity.
This means “liberalism,” since it was in relation to liberalism that they
assumed the form of a challenge. How can the phenomena of “population,”
with its specific effects and problems, be taken into account in a
system concerned about respect for legal subjects and individual free
enterprise? In the name of what and according to what rules can it be
managed? (BB, 317)
The demands of biopolitics thus posed a theoretical challenge to liberal
governmentality, and biopolitics and liberalism formed a historical intersection:
they were linked de facto, not de jure. Nevertheless, Foucault argues
that liberalism fundamentally determined the specific form that biopolitics
assumed in Western societies. Rather than being imposed by totalitarian
systems of coercion, it has, for the most part, developed as a complex
regime of power/knowledge in Western societies.
As I argued in the previous section, what characterizes liberal governmentality
is the idea that there can be no sovereign in economics. Economic
rationality is not only surrounded by, but also founded on the fundamental
unknowability of the totality of the economic process: the invisible hand is
invisible precisely because there can be no totalizing sovereign view. The
14 See e.g. BB, 185.
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