Foucault’s Analysis of Modern Governmentality: A Critique of Political Reason

Description

Lemke offers the most comprehensive and systematic account of Michel Foucault's work on power and government from 1970 until his death in 1984. He convincingly argues, using material that has only partly been translated into English, that Foucault's concern with ethics and forms of subjectivation is always already integrated into his political concerns and his analytics of power. The book also shows how the concept of government was taken up in different lines of research in France before it gave rise to "governmentality studies" in the Anglophone world. Foucault's Analysis of Modern Governmentality provides a clear and well-structured exposition that is theoretically challenging but also accessible for a wider audience. Thus, the book can be read both as an original examination of Foucault's concept of government and as a general introduction to his "genealogy of power." Preface to the English-Language Edition Introduction: Paradoxes, Contradictions, Aporias: The Order of Discourse as the Discourse of Order PART I: THE MICROPHYSICS OF POWER 1. From the Archaeology of Knowledge to the Problem of Power 1.1 The Problem of Knowledge 1.2 A General Theory of Discursive Practices 1.3 Discourse and Power 2. The Genealogy of Power 2.1 ‘Daily Struggles at the Grass-Roots Level’: May 1968 2.2 Le Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons 2.3 Critique and Crisis: The Prison Question 3. Discipline: The Political Anatomy of the Body 3.1 The Prison as Technology: Discipline 3.2 The Prison as Strategy: Delinquency 4. Nietzsche’s Hypothesis 4.1 Beyond Repression and Ideology: The Concept of Power-Knowledge 4.2 The King’s Head: The Juridical Conception of Power 4.3 War and Struggle: The Strategic Conception of Power 5. The ‘Disciplination’ of Power Analysis 5.1 Subjectivity and Resistance 5.1 The Microphysics and Macrophysics of Power PART II: GOVERNMENTALITY 6. From Discipline to Government 6.1 The Repressive Hypothesis 6.2 The War Hypothesis 6.3 The Problematic of Biopower 6.4 The Concept of Government 7. The Genealogy of the Modern State 7.1 The Government of Souls: The Christian Pastorate 7.2 The Government of Human Beings 7.2 The Liberal Art of Government 7.3 Dispositives of Security 8. The Government of Society: The Invention of the Social 8.1 The Government of Poverty: The Social Question 8.2 The Birth of Security Society 8.3 The Defence of Society 9. The Government of Individuals: Neoliberalism 9.1 ‘Inequality Is Equal for All’: Ordoliberalism and the German Model 9.2 The Social as a Form of the Economic: The Chicago School 9.3 Autonomy and Self-Government PART III: POLITICS AND ETHICS 10. From the History of Sexuality to the Genealogy of Ethics 10.1 Technologies of the Self 10.2 Subjectivity and Experience 10.3 Morality and Ethics 11. The Genealogy of the Modern Subject 11.1 Aesthetics of Existence: The Art of Living in Classical Greece 11.2 The Culture of the Self: Hellenistic-Roman Ethics 11.3 The Hermeneutics of Desire: Morality and Ethics in Christianity 12. Subjectivity and Power 12.1 Unholy Subjectivism? 12.2 Power as ‘Conducting Conducts’ 12.3 Excursus: The Iranian Revolution 13. The Problem of Truth 13.1 The Politics of Truth 13.2 A History of Truth: Historical Nominalism 13.3 The Concept of Problematization 13.4 Fiction and Construction 14. An Answer to the Question: What is Critique? 14.1 The Genealogy of Critique 14.2 What Is Enlightenment? 14.3 The Critical Attitude 14.4 What Is Maturity? 14.5 ‘By Way of Conclusion’