Table of Contents
- 1 What does Foucault say about Governmentality?
- 2 What does Foucault’s concept of biopower add to our understanding of how power operates in modern societies?
- 3 What is the central argument in brief in Foucault’s essay Governmentality?
- 4 What’s the difference between biopolitics and biopower?
- 5 What did Michel Foucault argue?
- 6 How does biopower relate to Governmentality?
- 7 Is Foucault’s work on biopolitics incomplete?
- 8 Why a PhD in Foucault?
What does Foucault say about Governmentality?
In his lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault often defines governmentality as the “art of government” in a wide sense, i.e. with an idea of “government” that is not limited to state politics alone, that includes a wide range of control techniques, and that applies to a wide variety of objects, from one’s control …
What does Foucault’s concept of biopower add to our understanding of how power operates in modern societies?
The subject (the person, the self, one’s identity) is thus the product of history and power. Foucault’s concept of biopower describes the administration and regulation of human life at the level of the population and the individual body – it is a form of power that targets the population (Rogers et al 2013).
What argument did Foucault make about the connection of biopower and social movements?
In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault argues that biopower is almost necessarily racist, since racism, broadly construed, is an “indispensable precondition” that grants the state the power to kill (2003 : 25 6).
What is the central argument in brief in Foucault’s essay Governmentality?
Governmentality operates to produce a (governmentable) subject (hence the relation between ‘the subject and power’ and the continuation of Foucault’s broader and always central theme: ‘to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects’).
What’s the difference between biopolitics and biopower?
In the work of Foucault, biopolitics refers to the style of government that regulates populations through “biopower” (the application and impact of political power on all aspects of human life). Conceptualised as the opposite of biopower, which is seen as the practice of sovereignty in biopolitical conditions.
What is the difference between Governmentality and biopower?
is that governmentality is (sociology) the organized practices (mentalities, rationalities, and techniques) through which subjects are governed and influenced while biopower is (michel foucault) a political technology for managing entire populations as a group, essential to modern capitalism etc, contrasting with …
What did Michel Foucault argue?
Foucault argued that knowledge and power are intimately bound up. So much so, that that he coined the term “power/knowledge” to point out that one is not separate from the other. In his most important works, this included an analysis of texts, images and buildings in order to map how forms of knowledge change.
How does biopower relate to Governmentality?
In the context of neoliberal governmentality, biopower operates through mechanisms—specific sets of techniques and procedures for exercising power (Foucault, 2003: 32)—that administer life based on ‘natural and economic “laws” that provide human beings with security and subsistence’ but at the same time leave them free …
Is Foucault’s definition of governmentality clear?
Foucault’s definition of governmentality is widely quoted but rarely criticised. Yet as I argue in Part 1 of this two-part post, Foucault’s definition is unclear and inconsistent. This is not a major problem, because his later account is fairly clear and coherent.
Is Foucault’s work on biopolitics incomplete?
A good example of Foucault’s work on biopolitics being incomplete is the brief reference to biopolitics at the beginning of The Birth of Biopolitics course, only for the concept to receive no further direct attention. Foucault The Birth of Biopolitics (note 3 above).
Why a PhD in Foucault?
A central theme of the PhD course is the search for effective analytical strategies for critique of power (some perhaps less noticed) in the works of Foucault and other writers within and outside the governmentality tradition. Of particular interest is Giorgio Agamben’s recent critique and extension of Foucault’s genealogy of government.
What is Foucault’s theory of power?
In the 17 th century the sovereign-juridical form of power began to transform. Foucault traces the evolution of two forms of power which ‘were not antithetical’ to each other, constituting ‘two poles of development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations’. 26 Note 2 above, 139.