ISBN : 9782296545458
SAVING "POPULATION" FROM GOVERNMENTALITY STUDIES: TRANSLATING BETWEEN ARCHAEOLOGY AND BIOPOLITICS
The term "biopolitics" leads one to expect, minimally, a field of intervention that gives equal weight to life and politics, a field that is concerned with the modern process of the "speciation of the human" and the "recruiting of species life into the strategization of power relations" (Dillon 2004, 81). Yet in the lectures given in 1978-79 at the Collège de France by Michel Foucault under the course title of "The Birth of Biopolitics" - the only course that actually bears the title of "biopolitics", the central concern was not life per se, but the critique of political liberalism and political economy undertaken through the innovative concept of governmentality. Does this mean that governmentality constitutes the essential problem of biopolitics, or did Foucault's overwhelming...