Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

TOWARDS AN AFFIRMATIVE BIOPOLITICS
discourses in which the relation of war to life was understood as something
avowedly affirmative.
Inevitably this argument, if we accept it, has significant implications for
any desire to restitute from Nietzsche an affirmative biopolitics based on his
understanding of war as a constitutive condition for life. Elsewhere I have
underlined how important it is to understand this critique, which Foucault
developed with regard to the connections between war and discourses on
political subjectivity in the context of his own growing hostility surrounding
the direction in which many of his philosophical contemporaries were
tending, those who thought that the fundamental question of politics was
Nietzschean, namely how to assume war as a condition of possibility for the
constitution and generation of resistance to biopolitical regimes of power. 7
Against such polemological theorizations of political subjectivity, Foucault
posed the problem of war in starkly different terms. The problem being not
how can war be restituted in generation of the political subject but when
was it that war first came to be conceived as the source of political subjectivity?
8 Given the importance of the Nietzschean legacy for such polemological
theorizations it is impossible not to read these lectures as an attempt
by Foucault to distance himself from the Nietzschean conception of relations
between life and war, and which had so inspired him up until that
point. 9 The Nietzschean idea, which had previously animated Foucault,
finds expression in the following, namely that there is “always something in
the social body, in classes, groups and individuals themselves which in some
sense escapes relations of power, something which is by no means a more or
less docile or reactive primal matter, but rather a centrifugal movement, an
inverse energy, a discharge...a plebeian quality or aspect.” 10 It is precisely
this polemological materialism that we can read Foucault locating, problematizing
and attempting to think beyond in those lectures. There he
identifies a deep complicity between such a position with biopolitical
7 See Reid, The Biopolitics of the War on Terror.
8 See Reid, “Life Struggles.”
9 It is also important to read the critique of the function of modern discursive relations
between politics and war in framing biopolitical accounts of subjectivity in the context of
his critique of the function of the discourse of war in shaping Nietzsche’s theory of
knowledge, and its importance for Deleuze. See Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms,”
in Foucault, Power: The Essential Works 3, ed. James D Faubion (London: Allen Lane
2000).
10 Foucault, “Powers and Strategies,” in Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews
and other Writings, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 138.
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