Foucault Studies

© Sverre Raffnsøe, Alan Rosenberg, Alain Beaulieu, Sam Binkley, Sven Opitz,
Jens Erik Kristensen; with Morris Rabinowitz & Ditte Vilstrup Holm 2009
ISSN: 1832‐5203
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 1‐4, February 2009

EDITORIAL

Neoliberal Governmentality
Sverre Raffnsøe, Alan Rosenberg, Alain Beaulieu, Sam Binkley, Sven Opitz, Jens Erik Kristensen; with
Morris Rabinowitz & Ditte Vilstrup Holm.

It is with great pleasure that we introduce issue 6 of Foucault Studies, which is a themed issue
on “neoliberal governmentality” that has been guest edited by Sam Binkley from Emerson
College, Boston, USA. This is the first special topic‐oriented issue of Foucault Studies, but we
are eager to do more special topic issues in the coming years, and thus invite our readers to
propose suitable topics and guest editors.

Before introducing the articles in this issue, we would like to share some news about the
recent development of Foucault Studies. Re‐launching the journal in 2007/2008 was not without
its problems, causing delays and a level of communication below our intended standards. The
Journal is experimental in its format as we are striving to make it the best publication on
Foucault’s thinking, but unfortunately our ambitions have not always met our or our
contributors’ expectations. However, we are confident that the problems of last year are now a
thing of the past, as we have developed new administrative procedures and secured a
renewed and dedicated Editorial Team.

First of all, we welcome as Co‐Editors of Foucault Studies Sam Binkley from Emerson College,
Boston, USA, and Sven Opitz from University of Basel, Switzerland. They join the Editorial
Team of Sverre Raffnsøe, (Editor‐in‐Chief); Alan Rosenberg (Managing Editor and Book
Review Editor), Alain Beaulieu (Co‐Editor), Jens Erik Kristensen (Co‐Editor), and Morris
Rabinowitz (Copy Editor).

Furthermore, we are pleased to introduce our new Journal Administrator, Ms. Ditte Vilstrup
Holm, who will assist the Editorial Team in the continuing development of Foucault Studies.
She has previously worked with journal publishing at Blackwell Publishing, managing and
developing editorial offices of scientific journals. Already, we are excited to announce that
EBSCO Publishing has agreed to include Foucault Studies in their library products. EBSCO
Publishing is the leading international electronic reference source owned by academic libraries
and will thus secure an effective exposure of articles published in Foucault Studies.

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Raffnsøe, Rosenberg, Beaulieu, Binkley, Opitz, Kristensen, with Rabinowitz & Holm: Editorial
We invite you to visit our new and improved website www.foucault‐studies.com and sign up
for E‐alerts to receive news of upcoming issues being published and “Calls for Papers” for
special issues of Foucault Studies. All articles in Foucault Studies continue to be published with
open access, and we are always interested in receiving high quality articles within the scope of
the journal. We strongly encourage our readers to submit articles that explore Foucault’s
conceptuality, comparative works involving Foucault’s thought, critical essays studying the
impact of Foucault on various fields of study, empirical works using some of Foucault’s ideas,
as well as critical works that involve material recently published, such as Foucault’s seminars
at the Collège de France or Foucault’s complementary thesis on Kant.

Foucault Studies is a forum committed to new approaches to Foucault’s thoughts, and thus we
are especially interested in attracting young, promising scholars to publish their articles in the
Journal. When the Journal was launched in 2004, one of its intended purposes was to create a
forum for the philosophical discussion of Foucault’s thinking that would also serve as a motor
for driving the interest of young philosophers towards Foucault as they now had a forum in
which to publish. This continues to be one of the ambitions of Foucault Studies.

The current issue of Foucault Studies includes works organized around the concept of
“neoliberal governmentality.” This notion today appears both timely and oddly dated. While
scholars have for many years responded to Foucault’s provocative treatment of neoliberalism,
it is only with the recent publication in English of Foucault’s lectures of 1978‐79, The Birth of
Biopolitics, that English language scholars now have direct access to his most succinct
statements about this term. Therein we find perhaps the most contemporary face of Foucault
scholarship, one uniquely appropriate to the most current formations of power, to modes of
subjectivity we readily identify in our own lives, and to proposals for resistance that have
already been taken up by the global left. At the same time, access to these pages occurs at an
odd moment, just as the broader global economic formation known as neoliberalism enters
into a convulsive spasm few had anticipated even a year earlier. As this issue goes to press,
newspapers openly declare the “End of American Capitalism,” the “New Depression” and
heap scorn on the policies of “deregulation” that produced the financial crises of 2008. Thus,
the timing of Foucault’s neoliberal engagement is doubly ironic. Foucault began this
discussion well before the neoliberalism we know today had come into existence — before, for
example, Margaret Thatcher famously shut her eyes to society, seeing only ”individuals and
families,” or before Ronald Reagan introduced us to his nine least favorite words; ”I’m from
the government and I’m here to help.” Our reception of Foucault’s theoretical apparatus for
the study of neoliberal governmentality may be too late, appearing on the scene, like another
owl of Minerva, only when the action is well over.

Whether this is really true, of course, remains to be seen. Yet the excitement generated by
Foucault’s engagement with neoliberalism is apparent in the four papers comprising this
themed issue, as it was at the conference from which these papers were solicited — the Fifth
annual meeting of the Social Theory Forum at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, in
April 2008. This event, titled A Foucault for the 21st Century: Governmentality, Biopolitics and
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Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 1‐4.
Discipline in the New Millennium, organized by Sam Binkley and Jorge Capetillo‐Ponce, was
marked by the presence of this new ”economic Foucault,” whose character and
contemporaneity we have still to explore. The four works comprising this themed issue
present only a critical opening on this project. First, Ute Tellman offers a broad and inclusive
treatment of the theme of economy in the works of Foucault, and comes away with a critical
view of the limitations of Foucault’s treatment of the problem. Providing, among other things,
a useful synthesis of Foucault’s various framings of economy in his earlier archaelogical works
and in his works of the late 1970’s, Tellman points to the limitations of his approach, which
derive from Foucault’s failure ultimately to deliver the promised goods in his analysis of the
economic field as a terrain of dynamic power relations. Foucault’s account of the ”invisibility”
of the market, Tellmann writes, as a remedy to the interventionist strategies of the disciplinary
state (long a justification invoked by liberal governments), fails to account for the manner in
which market mechanisms operate outside and beyond domains marked by the
epistemologies of state institutions.

Next, two articles, by Jason Read and Trent Hamann, provide treatments of neoliberal
governmentality as aspects of the production of subjectivity through everyday economic,
political and cultural life, particularly where these practices open themselves up to programs
of resistance and critique. Jason Read discusses Foucault’s lectures of 1978‐79, drawing key
insights into the analysis of neoliberalism as a mode of governmentality, as a means by which
subjectivity is inscribed and produced as a mode of conduct. This analysis benefits, in Read’s
paper, from its encounter with other authors, specifically Brown, Harvey, Negri and others.
The discussion moves beyond mere theoretical reconstruction to arrive at current critical and
political questions regarding the critique of neoliberalism, as theorized in various camps.
Similarly, the domain of neoliberal governmentality is taken up by Trent Hamann as one
linking the production of subjectivity with the problematics of economy. Hamann supplies a
rich empirical context to the discussion of the governmentality of neoliberal subjects, drawing
not only from a range of policy debates but also technological developments effecting
everyday conducts and the production of atomized selfhood through the reconfiguration of
distinctions between public and private space. Against the backdrop of conditions of
atomization, responsibilization and globalization, Hamann proposes linkages between the
analysis of neoliberal governmentality and contemporary challenges to global capitalism.
Finally, taking up the thread of subjectivation, Sam Binkley offers a genealogical account of
the specific practices of neoliberal governmentality as an undertaking in daily life. Binkley
seeks to broaden the palette typically employed in governmentality research, by addressing
the multi‐dimensional undertaking of self‐government, understood as the ”work” of
governmentality. This entails an analysis of the objects of neoliberal governmentality itself —
the resistant matter within embodied conduct upon which the work of governmentality is
performed. Taking as an example a popular self‐help manual — and visiting Jacques
Donzelot’s analysis of the origins of social government ‐‐ Binkley argues a view of neoliberal
governmentality as an active and practical undertaking of subjectivation.

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Raffnsøe, Rosenberg, Beaulieu, Binkley, Opitz, Kristensen, with Rabinowitz & Holm: Editorial
Following these articles are thirteen book reviews, providing a wide survey of recent
publications in the field of Foucault studies. Book Reviews continues to be a vital part of
Foucault Studies and we invite our readers to suggest publications that would be of interest to
the readers of Foucault Studies. On our website www.foucault‐studies.com we list books that
we want to have reviewed, and we invite all those interested in reviewing for the Journal to
consult this list and contact Alan Rosenberg.

In the Editorial Section of issue 5, we announced our intentions to organize an international
conference in Copenhagen, but we have not been able to secure the resources for this
conference. Instead we ask our readers to look forward to our upcoming issues, which
include: Foucault Studies 7 (September 2009), a general issue featuring new scholarship in
Foucault studies, and a special issue centered on comparative and critical dialogues between
the theoretical legacies of Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias. This issue will be guest‐edited
by Stefanie Ernst (University of Hamburg, Germany).

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 Ute Tellmann 2009
ISSN: 1832-5203
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 5-24, February 2009
ARTICLE
Foucault and the Invisible Economy

Ute Tellmann, Universität Basel
ABSTRACT: This paper discusses the extent to which governmentality provides a

critical visibility of the economy beyond its liberal imaginary. It argues that Fou-
cault’s conceptual and historical understanding of liberal governmentality has two
traits that encumber a de-centering of the economy from a Foucauldian perspective.
The first obstacle results from a persistent asymmetry of the concept of governmen-
tality as it remains solely geared towards replacing the monolithic account of the
state. Governmentality is therefore in danger of rendering the economic invisible in-
stead of advancing an analytics of power appropriate to the specificity of this field.
The second impediment relates to how Foucault reads the invisibility of the econo-
my asserted in liberal discourse. While Foucault emphasizes how the “invisible
hand” imparts a critical limitation towards the sovereign hubris of total sight, the
paper unearths a more complex politics of truth tied to the invisible economy. Draw-
ing on selected historical material, the papers shows that the liberal invisibility of the
economy rather functions as a prohibitive barrier towards developing novel and crit-
ical visibilities of the economy. A Foucauldian perspective on economy, the paper
concludes, benefits from piercing through this double invisibility of the economy.
Key words: liberalism, governmentality, invisible hand, economy, Foucault.
I. Promises of Governmentality
A profound re-articulation of the political and economic realm lies at the heart of the
notion of governmentality. Through the lenses of governmentality, the economy ap-
pears as an inextricable part of modern political rationalities. Foucault’s aspiration to
deconstruct the “cold monster” of the state led him—however inadvertently—to en-
gage simultaneously with notions of the market, the economy and economic man. In
doing so, he changed the very nature of these categories. Divested of their epistemo-
logical claims, these categories become intelligible as elaborations of liberal political
5
Tellmann: Invisible Economy
rationalities of governing. In effect, Foucault has taken up two “cold monsters” at

the same time: the economy and the state.
This article focuses on the simultaneous undoing of the inherited discourses
on the economy and the state that Foucault proposes. It takes the crossing of
boundaries between the economic and the political to be one of the most innovative
and intriguing aspects of the concept of governmentality. It is not doubted that Fou-
cault offers powerful tools and tremendous insights for posing and commencing
such a simultaneous de-centring of the state and the economy. But how far, this pa-
per asks, does the concept of governmentality answer to the insightful theoretical
agenda it implicitly and explicitly contains? Is the concept of governmentality useful
for challenging the prevalent conceptualization of the economy to the same extent as
that of the state? Unfortunately, as this article seeks to demonstrate, governmentality
does not keep the promise to undo both of these “cold monsters” at the same time.
In crucial ways, the conceptual architecture of governmentality stays strongly wed-
ded to the de-centring of the state, while the economy remains shielded from becom-
ing the proper object of a Foucauldian “analytics of power.” 1 The economy becomes
therefore, as it will be argued, in an important and critical sense analytically invisi-
ble. 2 Despite Foucault’s critical re-reading of economic discourse, the market ulti-
mately remains for him, as for liberalism itself, a space of invisibility, populated by
interested subjects, who are governed by the conditioning of their choices. One
hopes in vain for an analytics of the malleable forms of temporality, spatiality and
valuation inherent in the economic; Foucault provides us with no Economic Order of
Things, which would follow the epistemological authorities, legal frames and spaces
of comparison, which organize sociality through objects and money. Instead, the
governmental re-articulation of the economy ultimately leads us back to what turns
out to be a familiar liberal imaginary of the market. 3
The vantage point for measuring and problematizing the contended invisible
economy is provided by Foucault’s ethos of investigation itself. As is well known,
this ethos of investigation furthers two related analytical tasks: to pierce through the
1 For Foucault’s uses of this notion see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. An Intro-
duction. Volume I (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 82.
2 This article takes the two lecture courses, Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of
Biopolitics as its main references, for the simple reason that they feature most prominently
the question of economy as part of an analysis of relations of power (Michel Foucault: Se-
curity, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-78. (Houndsmill, ENG:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the
Collège de France 1978-79 (Houndsmill, ENG: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)).
3 For the necessity of probing deeper into Foucault’s account of economy and liberalism
see also William Walters, “Decentering the Economy.” Economy and Society, 28, 2 (1999):
312-323. His argument concentrates more on how governmentality fails to properly ac-
count for the birth of “the economy” as a distinct field of reality. Ricardo, rather than
Adam Smith, should be the proper anchor for such a discursive emergence.
6
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 5-24.
“systems of veridiction” and to unfold a novel and critical visibility of the social, in
which the lines of force and their fragility are brought to the surface. 4 By calling
himself a “cartographer”, Foucault emphasizes the importance of producing novel
and critical visibilities—a status which Gilles Deleuze affirms in his homage to his
friend. 5 As such, Foucault exposes a profound commitment to visibility, understood
as the effect of a critical operation. 6 The following argument takes this ethos of inves-
tigation and this quest for critical visibility as its vantage point for problematizing
the protracted invisibility of the economy within governmentality.
The argument pursued here contains two parts, both of which deal with the
question of how the economy and its discourse are opened to an “analytics of
power” and contextualized within a “politics of truth” through an analytics of gov-
ernmentality. 7 Throughout, the particular articulation of the political sphere and
economic discourse is paramount for understanding the invisibility of the economy.
4 The relevant part reads as follows: “Déchiffer une strate de réalité de manière telle qu’en
émergent les lignes de forces et de fragilité; les points de résistance et les points
d’attaques possible, les voies tracées et les chemins de traverse. C’est une réalité de lutes
possible que je cherche à faire apparaitre.” (Michel Foucault, Dits et Écrits II, 1976-1988
(Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 633). See also Wendy Brown’s account of genealogy for a discus-
sion of this understanding of knowledge-production (Wendy Brown, “Genealogical Poli-
tics,” in The Later Foucault: Politics and Philosophy, ed. Jeremy Moss (Thousand Oaks, CA:
Sage, 1998), 45).
5 He does so in an interview with Les Nouvelles Littéraires titled “Sur la sellette”, in March
1975 (Michel Foucault, Dits et Écrits I, 1954-1975. (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 1588). De-
leuze’s account of Foucault centers on this cartographic project. He speaks of ‘making see
and making hear’ what is determining our regimes of visibility and sayability (Gilles De-
leuze, Foucault (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1986), 42). That Foucault wanted the know-
ledge he produces to have a tactical and strategic use and had thus to present strategic
links and accounts of forces is a persistent theme in his interviews, lectures and writings.
See, for example, the lecture of January 7 in his lecture course Society must be defended
(Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76, ed.
Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, (New York: Picador, 2003).
6 The argument against the “hermeneutics of suspicion” as marshaled by Paul Ricoeur is
based on showing and exposing the superficiality of things in an “overview, from higher
and higher up, which allows the depth to be laid out in front of him in a more and more
profound visibility; depth is resituated as an absolutely superficial secret,” as Foucault
put it in an early work, Nietzsche, Freud, Marx (Foucault 1967, cit. in Hubert L. Dreyfus
and Paul Rabinow. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Second Edi-
tion. With an afterword by and an interview with Michel Foucault, (Chicago, IL: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1983), 107).
7 Foucault defined his form of doing philosophy as analyzing the politics of truth: “How-
ever, in one way or another, and for simple factual reasons, what I am doing is some-
thing that concerns philosophy, that is to say, the politics of truth, for I do not see many
other definitions of the word ‘philosophy; apart from this” (Foucault, Security, Territory,
Population, 3).
7
The first part argues that the economy remains invisible because a persistent asym-
metry in the concept of governmentality privileges the state vis-à-vis the economy as
the object of a Foucauldian critique. The economy never becomes an object of analy-
sis in its own right; therefore the mediation of relations of power through money
and objects drops from view. Consequently, the specificity of this distinct, yet im-
pure form of ordering, that we refer to as economic, disappears. Despite the aspira-
tion of governmentality to a simultaneous examination of the reciprocity and co-
constitution of economic and political discourses, the concept of governmentality
itself remains asymmetrical in its aim and critical weight. The first reason, then, for
the persistent invisibility of the economy within governmentality research, derives
from the failure of the concept to properly address the political within the economic.
The second reason for the lack of critical visibility of the economy leads us to a dis-
cussion of how Foucault understands the “politics of truth” implied within eco-
nomic discourse. The main point of contention is Foucault’s reading of the “invisible
hand”. According to this reading, the liberal understanding of the invisible economy
amounts to an epistemological limit posited against the aspiration of an “economic
sovereign”: it disturbs critically any presumption to see a social totality from a single
vantage point. 8 This reading of the invisible market has its merits, but attends only
insufficiently to the political problematique at stake in seeing the market as a space of
invisibility. The pervasive trope of invisibility is equally invested in regulating the
regimes of visibility circulating throughout the social body itself, determining what
can legitimately be rendered visible, and how. A more thorough genealogy of this
trope demonstrates that liberalism itself is in fact divided in respect to the politics of
visibility—a point that largely escapes Foucault’s genealogy of liberalism. Foucault,
who is usually inclined to demonstrate the “dispersion” and “minute deviations”
underneath a unified tradition, has unwittingly glossed over these differing liberal-
isms and the multiple politics of invisibility. 9 Too quickly, the invisibility of the
economy is taken as a “tool for the criticism of reality,” 10 rather than as a machine for
seeing, whose epistemological privileges, lines of exclusion and technologies of
knowledge need to be dissected.
II. Asymmetrical Views—Seeing like a State
In a sense, Foucault’s account of the economy has never outgrown the reluctance
with which he engaged this issue. Questions of economy were never Foucault’s pri-
mary concern; he rather aimed at circumventing and disturbing them. Since his early
8 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 283.

9 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice:
Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1977), 146.
10 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. 320.
8
writings, the struggle against the dominance of a Marxist form of economism led
him to establish his project to study power, conduct, subjectivity and truth as a field
clearly distinguishable and set aside from the study of economic relations proper. 11
Of course, he never denied that relations of power should not be understood as an
additional layer within the socio-economic field. 12 They reside instead in the very
interstices of other relations: “Mechanisms of power are an intrinsic part of all these
relations […]”. 13 Nevertheless, such relations continue to possess their own density
and distinctively non-economic imperatives as they are directed to shape the “con-
duct of conduct”, and call forth their own struggles and resistances: “These ‘revolts
of conduct’ have their specificity: they are distinct from political or economic revolts
in their objective and form.” 14 Whenever Foucault uses the notion of economy him-
self, this usage is usually a quite deliberate and strategic transposition of its meaning
into the field of power, playing with and countering the Marxist tradition: hence, he
speaks of “the economy of power” 15 or power as a “political economy of the body”
as in Discipline and Punish. 16 The materialist anchor usually associated with the econ-
omy is transposed into the notion of the governing of life—presented as a govern-
mental rather than an economic problematic. 17 It is thus in a way apt to say that Fou-
cault circumvents rather than takes up the issue of economy in his attempt to dis-
lodge the economistic and totalizing strands of the Marxist tradition. The lectures at
the College de France, in which he developed his notion of governmentality, con-
tinue with this strategic evasion. As indicated before, this time the circumvention led
paradoxically into the heart of economy. Transposing the question of the state into a
question of rationalities and technologies of governing entangled his argument in
economic discourses. Instead of the commonly assumed quasi-ontological difference
between the economy and the political horizon, Foucault suggests that an unbroken
plane of governmental strategies and reflections envelop both spheres. Hence, he
firmly treaded onto the territory of the economy itself, with the consequence of dis-
turbing its shape.
It is therefore justified to say that governmentality, however unwittingly,
proposes a simultaneous reading of the constitution of both the economic and the
11 Foucault, Dits et Écrits II, 629.

12 Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power”, in ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow,
Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Second Edition (Chicago, IL: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1983), 218.
13 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 2. See also his elaborations of his analytics of
power in an interview with Pasquale Pasquino in 1978 “Precisazioni sul potere. Riposta
ad alcuni critici” (Foucault, Dits et Écrits II, 625ff.).
14 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 196.
15 Foucault, Dits et Écrits II, 631.
16 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books,
1995).
17 See paradigmatically the last chapter in Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 140f.
9
political. In this respect, Foucault comes close to a certain theoretical program for
which Bruno Latour has long argued, which asks for going beyond the traditional
divisions assumed by modernity by unearthing their common and entangled consti-
tution. 18 What Latour suggests in respect to the division between society and nature,
Foucault suggests implicitly for the economic and the political sphere. 19 But while
Foucault might pose the question of the symmetrical making and envisioning of
economy and politics, his concept of governmentality retains a thoroughly asym-
metrical structure. For understanding this asymmetrical nature and the limits it en-
tails, we need to briefly revisit the basic elements of Foucault’s discussion of econ-
omy from the perspective of governmentality.
Foucault suggests that the emergence of the modern meaning of economy as
a “level of reality” should not be understood as the mere effect of a presumed differ-
entiation of the economy into a functionally coherent subsystem of society. 20 Instead,
it belongs to a political problematization of a particular rationality of governing that
aims at the social body as a whole. Foucault thus sees the conceptualization of econ-
omy as part of the “episode in the mutation of technologies of power and an episode
in the instalment of this technique of apparatuses of security that seems to me to be
one of the typical features of modern societies.” 21 These technologies take the popu-
lation as their main target of intervention. 22 Security, Population and Government—
this series defined modern politics for Foucault. The knowledge and rationalities of
economy prominently underlie this series. 23
The novel conceptualization of economy as a self-regulated reality and the
birth of the new collective subject of the population are, Foucault maintains at vari-
ous points, inextricably tied together in their common function of framing new ob-
jects, technologies and techniques of governing. 24 Evolving in tandem, the modern
concept of economy divests the object of population from the cameralist techniques
of the policey, with their administrative logic of minute control and encyclopaedic
18 Bruno Latour, "Postmodern? No, Simply Amodern! Steps Towards an Anthropology of

Science," Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 21, 1 (1990): 145-171.
19 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1993), 13ff.
21 Ibid., 34.
22 Ibid., 64f; 95.
23 Ibid., 76f.
24 The differentiation between the notion of technique and technologies in Foucault is noto-
riously indeterminate. In his lecture-course, Foucault suggests understanding technolo-
gies of power as the very “complex edifice” or “system of correlation”, in which different
specific techniques—as for example the “disciplinary techniques of putting someone in a
cell”—are aligned. While the history of techniques is precise and long-winded, the his-
tory of technologies is the “more fuzzy history of correlations” defining the “dominant
feature” (Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 8).
10
knowledge. 25 At the same time, the concept of population pushes the meaning of
economy outside of the narrow confines of the household. No longer referring to the
proper administration of the oikos or the prudential advice of saving on means,
economy projects a new social ontology: a plane of circulatory flows, naturalness
and internal forces, forging a complex causal intermeshing between a milieu and its
population.” 26 It is therefore the problem of circulation and causality that is at stake
in this notion of milieu…The milieu, then, will be that in which circulation is carried
out. The milieu is a set of natural givens—rivers, marshes, hills—and a set of artifi-
cial givens—an agglomeration of individuals, of houses, etcetera. The milieu is a cer-
tain number of combined, overall effects bearing on all who live in it.” 27 Very
prominently, the notion of the milieu and its circulatory structure articulate the
population as a composite figure comprising natural circumstances, habits, urban
settings or laws inter alia. Political economy thus appears as a form of knowledge in-
tegral to a new dispositif, whose outlines ignore the usual division maintained be-
tween the economy and the political sphere.
The conception of economy is thus firmly positioned within the field of gov-
ernmental reason and technique. To what extent does this transposition allow a con-
ceptualization of the economy and economic practices—now loosely referring to the
specificity of modes of ordering which rest upon the mediation through by money,
objects, valuations—as framed and shaped by a security-dispositif? Asking this ques-
tion is not a play on words, rather it posits and tests the viability of the security-
dispositif to function as a symmetrical analytical device capable of equally dislodging
both the state and the market. In other words: Does the discourse on economy suc-
ceed only in elaborating the new dispositif of power, being itself exclusively geared
toward the re-articulation of the state? Or does it allow the development of a chal-
lenging analytical perspective on the economy capable of addressing it in its specific-
ity?
Resolving this question requires a discussion of Foucault’s somewhat incom-
plete analysis of the technologies and techniques of the security-dispositif. 28 The out-
line, he presents, juxtaposes the security-dispositif with disciplinary techniques in
terms of their organization of space, time and norms. 29 The space of the security-
dispositif is no longer organized within the cells and grids of discipline, neither does
25 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 323f and 328.

26 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 94; 30f; 45.
27 Ibid., 21.
28 The cursory explication of the security-dispositif by Foucault has given rise to the com-
plaint that Foucault’s analytical strategies focus too much on purely theoretical or textual
material (Pat O’Malley, Lorna Weir and Clifford Shearing, “Governmentality, Criticism,
Politics,” Economy and Society, 26, 4 (1997): 501-517). The question posed here has a differ-
ent concern: it inquires about the fecundity of inspiration, which Foucault’s analysis con-
tains for developing a richer, more detailed or more material account.
29 Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 44f.
11
it rely on the temporality of homogeneous units of time, or impose the norms of dis-
ciplinary conduct on the individual body. Instead, it assumes a given milieu of circu-
lation, it assumes the aleatory occurrences of events, and it derives its norms from
statistical regularities calculated on the level of the population. It is, Foucault con-
cludes, an “idea of a government of men that would think first of all and fundamen-
tally of the nature of things and no longer of men’s evil nature.” 30
Foucault’s analysis of this dispositif is not comparable to the dense materiality
and detail he marshalled in describing the dispositif of sexuality or the disciplinary
arrangements of visibility, knowledge and sanctions. Still, his cursory remarks on
this subject are inspiring because they call attention to the ordering of spatiality,
temporality and norms as unique aspects of economic regimes of circulation. But de-
spite his invocations of the economic as modulated by a specific dispositif of organiz-
ing time, space and economic norms, this line of research is not pursued consistently
through his investigations. The analytics of the security-dispositif are not geared to-
wards understanding the circulation of things and money. They do not point to-
wards unearthing what might be called an “economic order of things” in its epis-
temic, juridical, spatial and strategic dimensions, and in terms of their unique effects.
Today, as genetic engineering, intellectual property regulation, derivatives and
techniques of transplantations refashion the very ontology, obligations and meas-
urements tied to the order of things, the omission of these orders becomes even more
accentuated. Instead, Foucault directs our attention to the interplay between a milieu
and the wills and interests of the subjects by which “one tries to affect the popula-
tion.” 31 Certainly, as Foucault states, within the security-dispositif, the “multiplicity
of individuals is no longer pertinent, the population is.” 32 However, the individual
still plays a decisive role in his analysis of the economic government of population
“to the extent that, properly managed, maintained and encouraged, it will make
possible what one wants to obtain at the level that is pertinent.” 33 Although the
population had been introduced as a composite figure including things and spatial
settings, this figure becomes more and more a composite of sentient, willing and in-
terested individuals responding with their calculations to given incentives. 34 The
“conduct of conduct” through the manipulation of interest becomes the single most
30 Ibid., 49.
31 Ibid., 21.
32 Ibid., 42.
33 Ibid.
34 Stuart Elden has discussed how territoriality has elapsed from the analytical perspective,
while being so prominently featured within the very title of the lecture-course: Security,
Territory, Population. He argues that this omission might be remedied within the very
framework proposed by Foucault, but remarks nevertheless this curious obliteration, at
the cost of an exclusive account of population analytically separated from territoriality
(Stuart Elden, “Government, Calculation, Territory,” Environment and Planning D: Society
and Space, 25 (2007): 562-580).
12
important key for rendering this dispositif analytically intelligible. As a consequence,

the analytical visibility given to the market-economy in Foucault’s perspective in-
creasingly resembles the well-known outlines of the prevalent liberal understanding
of the economy. Sifting through his lectures, one finds the following all too familiar
imaginary of the (market) economy as part and parcel of the governmental re-
articulation: it is a bounded space of circulation, it answers to the forces of reality
itself, it is regulated through incentives. It is about exchange or competition and it is
situated—repeating the usual oppositions—vis-à-vis the interventionist welfare
state. Traditionally, Foucault’s genealogies and archaeologies have drawn their ana-
lytical power from a disruption of the known oppositions and options, already pre-
figured at the surface of dominant discourses. In respect to the question of economy,
governmentality appears to fall short in attaining this expected “Foucault-Effect”.
It seems, then, that one is confronted with an asymmetrical conceptual anat-
omy of the security-dispositif: the discourse on economy elucidates a specific rational-
ity of the security-dispositif, which contains plausible suggestions for thinking of the
state “without entrails”, while the elaboration of this dispositif fails to elucidate the
order of the economic itself, or, as I have tentatively put it, the economic order of
things. A limit appears in how the elaboration of the techniques of governmentality
can indeed function as a complete heuristic to displace effectively and productively
the implicit universality of both the state and the market—which is not to say that it
does not re-articulate the economy to a certain extent. Detecting these specific gov-
ernmental strategies in different lieux sociaux, including firms, consumer programs
or bureaucracies, exposes how deeply this type of power is enmeshed within economic
forms. Nevertheless, Foucault’s approach is capable of identifying only those strate-
gies of governing that operate through incentives, without successfully conceptualis-
ing the economy beyond its liberal imaginary. Wendy Brown’s statement—that the
governmental account of neo-liberal strategies is not about the economy—while
foregrounding the market, is more fitting than one might have hoped. 35
At the end of the two courses at the Collège de France, Foucault summarizes
his “interpretation” of liberalism” as having pointed out those “types of rationality
that are implemented in the methods by which human conduct is directed through a
state administration.” 36 It is certainly surprising and misleading that Foucault re-
stricts the scope of his analysis to “state administration”. But Foucault’s approach
signals the awareness of the specificity of governmentality as it remains geared to-
ward dissecting the modes of “seeing like a state”—borrowing here somewhat po-
lemically the famous title by Scott. 37 Given that technologies of governing emanate
35 Wendy Brown, “Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.” Theory and Event, 7,
3 (2003). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tae/v007/7.1brown.html#copyright (accessed June
16, 2008).
37 James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have
13
throughout the social body, this allegation is misleading. But it captures nevertheless
the asymmetrical weight of the concept of governmentality. The point of contention
in respect to how Foucault draws the question of economy into the orbit of political
reason is not directed against the political horizon he spans over the economy. The
point of contention I am advancing here lies in how he does it: unearthing “the po-
litical” in economic forms of ordering could and should mean, from a Foucauldian
perspective, the development of an “analytics of power” appropriate to the specific-
ity of this field. But within governmentality, it means to excavate the economic, with
neither the mediations of relations through money or objects being fully addressed.
It is in this sense that the economy remains invisible within the political perspective
of governmentality.
III. Tropes of Invisibility—Seeing like a Market
The invisibility of the economy is not only an unwitting effect of Foucault’s elabora-
tion of the security-dispositif, it is also explicitly encoded within the genealogy of the
economic discourse that Foucault presents in his analysis. The invisible hand plays a
paramount and paradigmatic role in Foucault’s account of the liberal politics of
truth: key to this governmental interpretation of the invisible hand is the dispersion
of the epistemological authority it enforces, and its effect in undermining the author-
ity of the sovereign. But Foucault’s reading fails to account fully for the political prob-
lematique of visibility and invisibility in the social body; hence only a partial and one-
sided genealogy of the invisible hand emerges, one which privileges the critical
function of the invisible hand while underestimating the limitations imposed by this
trope. The question of what is determined as invisible or visible in respect to the so-
cial body, and to whom such visibility is accorded, has a far wider political texture
than Foucault is capable of conveying in his lectures. Furthermore, this wider politi-
cal texture correlates with the inner differences of the liberal tradition—a tradition
that, as McClure exemplifies in respect to John Locke, has always been guided and
disquieted by questions of knowledge and criteria of judgement. 38 Liberalism itself is
not unified in respect to the “politics of truth” inscribed within the visible hand. In
order to draw out these intrinsic differences within what passes as a purportedly
unified liberal tradition, the following discussion draws, if only cursorily, on histori-
cal select material. On the one hand, it takes up the short-lived radical democratic-
liberal thought of the eighteenth century (exemplified by Thomas Paine or Marquis
de Condorcet), and, on the other, it refers to the work of Friedrich A. Hayek, who
presents an important strand of liberalism prominent since the nineteenth century.
This division between strands of liberalism are not reducible to the historical gap
Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

38 Kirstie McClure, Judging Rights: Lockean Politics and the Limits of Consent, (Ithaca, NY: Cor-
nell University Press, 1996), 63; 69.
14
that divides them. Neither do these strands correlate with the distinction between
liberalism and neo-liberalism that Foucault discusses more prominently. Rather,
they foreground a difference within the politics of truth implicit within the liberal
tradition that has becomes particularly virulent at the end of the eighteenth century,
but exceeds this historical moment. Still, incorporating this particular historical mo-
ment is instructive, as Foucault knew, when he chronicled the break between the
classical and modern episteme at the turn of centuries in The Order of Things. Curi-
ously, for his account of liberal governmentality, this break plays no role. What he
disperses in The Order of Things, notably the discursive shifts in political economy,
remains surprisingly unified in the genealogy of the liberal account of economy he
offers in his studies of governmentality. 39 Pinpointing these inconsistencies is not
merely an exercise in scholarly erudition: these differences correlate with differences
in the “politics of truth” contained in the liberal tradition itself, and for this reason
their absence constitutes critical omissions. In order to recover these differences, an
explication of the trope of the invisible hand, as seen through Foucault’s limited
analysis, is required.
The question of visibility and its related epistemology is central to how Fou-
cault related the concept of economy to the liberal rationalization of government.
Foucault sought to understand the very boundary between the spheres of politics
and economy as a specific epistemological construction: “Political economy was im-
portant, even in its theoretical formulation, inasmuch as (and only inasmuch as, but
this is clearly a great deal) it points out to the government where it had to go to find
the principle of truth of its own governmental practice.” 40 The decisive issue is not
this or that particular economic theory or fact, nor does this truth exist within “the
heads of economists.” 41 Instead, of paramount importance is the very structure of
association established between political reason and truth. Political reason and the
sphere of politics are within liberalism, according to Foucault, tied to the market as a
“court of veridiction”.
The link established by liberalism between the truth of the market and the ra-
tionalities of governing does not constitute a straightforward relation. Key to liberal-
39 Adam Smith, who assumed in the former account a middling position between the mod-
ern and the classical age, turns later into a paradigmatic figure for the modern liberal po-
litical rationality. Also, the modern “finitude of men” Foucault diagnoses in the Order of
Things is not properly translated into his account of governmentality. Attending to this
shift towards finitude might help to provide answers to the question of the relation be-
tween biopolitics and economy—which is not sufficiently addressed by Foucault. See Ul-
rich Bröckling, Menschenökonomie, Humankapital. Eine Kritik der biopolitischen Öko-
nomie,“ in Disziplinen des Lebens. Zwischen Anthropologie, Literatur und Politik, ed. Ulrich
Bröckling et al. (Tübingen, GER: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2004) for an argument about the
missing link between biopolitics and economy.
41 Ibid., 30.
15
ism is the paradoxical nature of this relation as it refers political reason to an object
of knowledge that remains invisible. The economy, in other words, defies the aspira-
tions to know, resulting in a paradoxical epistemological ground. Paradigmatically,
the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith stands for this disruption of the authority of a
sovereign vision; it articulates the impossibility of seeing the whole of society from a
single vantage point. The singular most important point in respect to this invisibility
is the limit of power it produces, according to Foucault. The following words, which
Foucault puts into the mouth of the homo oeconomicus in a fictitious dialogue with the
juridical sovereign, nicely exemplify this stance: “He also tells the sovereign: You
must not. But why must he not? You must not because you cannot. And you cannot
in the sense that “you are powerless”. And why are you powerless, why can’t you?
You cannot because you do not know and you do not know because you cannot
know.” 42
Therefore, the figure of the invisible economy has a pivotal role for the dis-
cursive initiation of these limits and their governmental effects. Foucault distin-
guishes on this ground between liberal political rationality proper and its
Physiocratic predecessor. The Physiocrats, Foucault emphasizes, referred political
reason not to an invisible economy, but, on the contrary, they procured a tableau
économique, which enabled a sovereign vision over the whole. The truth of the socio-
economic body, transparent to sovereign eyes, was to guide the decision of the sov-
ereign, without dislodging him. Liberalism proper, on the other hand, according to
Foucault, begins by asserting a barred vision of the social body. 43 At several places
throughout these lectures, Foucault describes economic thought as the very discur-
sive stronghold that establishes such limits, which is in fundamental ways also an
epistemological limit. Hence, in contrast to the wisdom of political philosophy, Fou-
cault thus ties liberalism—in its essential aspects—not to the form of law, but to the
discourse on economy. 44 The “heretics” of the police-state with its “megalomaniacal
and obsessive fantasy of a totally administered society” 45 were, he points out, the
economists as they posed a reality, which had its own density and naturalness: “[…]
It was the économistes who mounted a critique of the police state in terms of the even-
tual or possible birth of a new art of government. 46 The discourse on economy, with
its attending notions of circulatory flows, milieus, interests and aleatory occurrences,
42 Ibid., 283.
43 Ibid., 285f.
44 To be precise, one has to add that Foucault’s argument here is strictly historical, as politi-
cal economy as a form of knowledge is not liberal “either by virtue or nature” (Foucault,
The Birth of Biopolitics, 321). For a more extensive discussion of the relation between law
in its function as a limit and the interpellation of the economy as a natural limit, see the
lecture from 17 January 1979 (Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics).
45 Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, “Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Gov-
ernment,” British Journal of Sociology, 43, 2 (1992): 189.
16
defies any aspiration to govern directly, minutely and en detail—to the same extent
that it made the sovereign vision over these processes impossible: “The possibility of
limitation and the question of truth are both introduced into governmental reason
through political economy:” 47 “I think that fundamentally it was political economy
that made it possible to ensure the self-limitation of governmental reason.” 48
We have thus arrived at the heart of Foucault’s reading of the trope of the invisibility
of the economy: The essential and politically relevant understanding of the famous
“invisible hand” centres on the very restriction it imposes on the sovereign hubris to
know and to rule the whole of society and its economy from a central position. With
an almost surprising verve, Foucault elaborates this point after having drawn paral-
lels between the limits Kant imposed on the proper uses of pure reason on the one
hand, and the self-limitation of political reason enacted by political economy on the
other: 49 “Thus the economic world is naturally opaque and naturally non-totalizable.
It is originally and definitely constituted from a multiplicity of points of view […]
economics is an atheistic discipline; economics is a discipline without God; econom-
ics is a discipline without totality; economics is a discipline that begins to demon-
strate not only the pointlessness, but also the impossibility of a sovereign point of
view over the totality of the state he has to govern.” 50 It is the invisible economy that
provides the tool for this limitation.
This account of the invisibility of the economy as an impossibility of a sover-
eign perspective is certainly kindred to the critiques of modern epistemological au-
thority and claims to universality presented by post-structuralism, feminism and
post-colonial theory. The sovereign ‘view from nowhere’ is de-authorized by refer-
ence to the multifarious and limited perspectives within the depth of the social body.
Hence, a certain proximity and fondness colours Foucault’s account of the trope of

48 Ibid., 13.
49 The comparison reads as follows: “Kant too, a little later moreover, had to tell man that
he cannot know the totality of the world. Well, some decades earlier, political economy
had told the sovereign: Not even you can know the totality of the economic process.
There is no sovereign in economics. There is no economic sovereign. This is a very impor-
tant point in the history of economic thought, certainly, but also and above all in the his-
tory of governmental reason“(Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 283).
50 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 282. The invisible hand is thus essential to liberalism,
which is, Foucault contends, pre-occupied with the question of limited or frugal govern-
ment and can be defined “as a technology of government whose objective is its own self-
limitation […]” (Ibid., 319). It is haunted by the constant question of why to govern at all
and subjects itself to the incessant critique of its own, [...] I would be inclined to see in
liberalism a form of critical reflection on governmental practice (Ibid., 321). The theme of
limited government and the motif of critique circumscribe, according to Foucault, the
Janus face of liberalism: as an elaboration of mostly indirect forms of rule - which might
paradoxically turn out to be quite extensive - and as a “tool for the criticism of real-
ity”(Ibid., 320).
17
invisibility. This fondness might never have stopped him from telling a story of lib-
eralism that chronicles the mechanisms undercutting this announced ethos of de-
limitation. But the present argument is less concerned with the merits of Foucault’s
analysis of liberalism tout court, than with the particular reading of the invisibility of
the economy and its theoretical effects and omissions.
That this reading omits decisive aspects can be perceived by revisiting the
historical record. A reworked genealogical perspective provides the clues for un-
earthing a much wider political problematique of visibility than Foucault’s narrative
presents. Emma Rothschild’s history of Economic Sentiments draws our attention to-
wards the contested tropes of invisibility at the end of the eighteenth century. It is a
time at which, she emphasizes, the boundaries between the economic and political
spheres were far from clearly drawn. 51 The turn towards the nineteenth century, in
the wake of the French Revolution, was rife with intense contestations of how and to
whom the social was visible. The political problematique at stake revolved in a much
more general sense around the uncertainty of vision within a situation defined by
the intense questioning of inherited structures of authority at a time of political up-
heaval. In contrast, if one follows Foucault’s account, one would expect the major
difference within the liberal tradition to reside between the nineteenth century and
the neoliberalism of the twentieth century respectively. But a more careful genea-
logical account, which intends to uncover the contestations, struggles and “the ap-
propriations of vocabulary,” 52 would find rather, that such fissures were pertinent
and present around 1800, when economic reason did not yet pose a strict limit for
the exercise of its counterpart. 53 Sheldon Wolin has remarked how easily these dif-
ferences in liberalism seem to slip from attention. 54 But around the time of the
French Revolution, they came to the fore in an intense contestation about the ques-
tions of seeing and knowing the socio-economic body. The following historical ma-
51 Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments. Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment,
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 50.
52 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, and Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, Histo-
ry”, 154f.
53 Rothschild, 38f.
54 Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought.
Expanded Edition, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 263. Sheldon Wolin
is more inclined to take such differences not as internal to liberalism, but as signaling two
different traditions easily “lumped together”: democratic radicalism and liberalism.
Thomas Paine would belong to the former, whereas Adam Smith to the latter. Emma
Rothschild tries to draw out the differences between Adam Smith and the liberalism of
the nineteenth century, which was ever more inclined to secure the foundations of un-
questioned (epistemological) order. These differences are here accounted for as they help
to distinguish the differences in respect to the politics of visibility or invisibility. But of
course, it is important to keep in mind that Adam Smith and David Hume’s skepticism
towards the democratization of judgment was profound.
18
terial does not only refer back to the end of the eighteenth century, it uses this mo-
ment to illustrate differences within liberalism between, on the one hand, thinkers
such as Thomas Paine, Condorcet and to some extend Adam Smith, and on the
other, Friedrich von Hayek.
We learn from the historical record that the socio-economic body was not
only, deemed invisible to the sovereign: the invisibility of society and its correlate
blindness were also prominently attested to those newly attending the political
stage, those who had but a limited “private stock of reason”, as Edmund Burke fa-
mously put it. It was allegedly they who could not see and to whom societal necessi-
ties and impending structures remained essentially invisible. Jacques Necker, Minis-
ter of Finance at the time, maintained that the people are like children, acting with-
out reflection, only enlightened by their instinct, as “in all this immense space which
is called the future… they never see more than tomorrow.” 55 Similarly, Adam Fergu-
son complained that “every step and every movement of the multitude are made
with equal blindness to the future.” 56 Only guided by the immediacy of their own
perceptions and failing to take the socio-economic rules properly into view, their po-
litical utterances lacked the intelligibility and vision necessary. “The mob”, as the
famous scholar of population and economy Thomas Robert Malthus has put it, was
“goaded by resentment for real sufferings but totally ignorant of the quarter from
which they originate.” 57 For that reason, they were easily led to “follow the chimeras
of thought” and “flights of the imagination” and were easily “deceived by appear-
ances”. But of course, so were the philosophers and radical liberals, such as Thomas
Paine, “who has shown himself totally unacquainted” with the structure of society. 58
Visibility and sight, blindness and ignorance, virtues and vices were attributed vari-
ously among the sovereign, the people, and those who allegedly deceived them with
their theories. Hence, even such limited historical snapshots draw attention to the
multiple, highly debated and heavily charged allegations with respect to claims of
knowledge.
Foucault himself has suggested that any writing of the genealogy of knowl-
edge in this period has to do away with the binaries of enlightenment posed be-
tween blindness and sight, night and day, knowledge and ignorance. Rather, it
should comprehend the extended struggle, not between knowledge and ignorance,
but between different forms of knowledge. 59 Following these lines of conflict, even
55 Cit. Rothschild, 39; 23.

56 Ibid., 123.
57 Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population. Sixth edition (London:
William Pickering, 1986), 501; 494.
58 Malthus, 526; 505.
59 Foucault elaborates this in a discussion about philosophy and science and the disciplin-
ing of knowledge. See the lecture of February 25 in the lecture course Foucault, Society
must be Defended.
19
minimally, shows that undoing the hubris of sovereign knowledge and asserting a
structural invisibility are two distinctive moves associated with invisibility and with
different effects.
One can observe a profound discursive break between the radical democratic
liberals of the eighteenth century such as Thomas Paine or Condorcet and the subse-
quently dominant form of liberalism since the nineteenth century. 60 To the latter, the
social body appeared “frighteningly complex” and uncertain in all its overlapping
relations. 61 This socio-economic ontology of countless interdependencies defied the
transparent tableau économique, just as Foucault would have expected. Yet, early lib-
eral political thought was busy producing certain forms of knowledge about the
socio-economic body that would answer to this complexity. Condorcet coined the
“social mathematics” in order to retrieve a probable truth amidst the uncertain and
changing opinions, while always remaining cautious in respect to proposing a truth
of society. 62 Thomas Paine was equally busy determining a calculative and political
knowledge about shares of civilisation to be distributed. It would be the task of a
more thorough historical epistemology to unpack the “politics of truth” associated
therewith. But more important for this discussion was the mere fact that neither a
general nor structural invisibility of society was asserted, nor was a secure position
from which to judge and to know ever assumed. They projected a “fatherless
world”—using a term Rothschild coined—of unfounded and uncertain epistemo-
logical authority, but did not assume a barred vision in respect to the socio-economic
complexity. Even Adam Smith, whose scepticism led him to assume that “politics is
the ‘folly of man,’” 63 did not venture to maintain the impossibility of any form of
theoretical visibility of the socio-economic. As Rothschild argues convincingly, the
assertion of the “invisible hand” had no deep prohibitive structure of vision in
Smith. For Smith, as for Condorcet, Rothschild argues, the “enlightened disposition”
was an uncertain condition. While no certain epistemological ground was to be had,
it entailed theorization and envisioning. 64 The “fatherless world” of uncertain
judgements offered no sovereign or certain vision, but neither did it impose any spe-
cific prohibition on rendering the economic visible per se.
But the trope of invisibility did turn into a prohibitive bar to the envisioning
of the socio-economic world later on. The liberalism of the nineteenth century, fil-
tered through the work of classical economists, was much more invested in estab-
60 Wolin and Rothschild.

61 Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human
Mind. (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1955), 131.
62 Johan Heilbron, The Rise of Social Theory, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 1995), 168, and Rothschild, 178f.
63 Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interest: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before its
Triumph, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 104.
64 Rothschild, 123.
20
lishing unquestioned foundations of order. Hayek’s liberalism, harking back more to

Edmund Burke than to Thomas Paine (contrary to what Foucault’s historical narra-
tive makes believe) is paradigmatic for the simultaneous assertion of invisibility and
foundation: 65 it is the very invisibility of the whole which demands, according to
Hayek, submission to those rules of conduct “that we have never made, and which
we have never understood.” 66 It is, he concedes, a “bitter necessity”, which is not
easily accepted by a “hubristic reason.” 67 The decisive moment of submitting to the
assumed rules and regularities of the given is founded on the grounds of this essen-
tial invisibility. 68 The extended order of the market answers to “that which far sur-
passes the reach of our understanding, wishes and purposes, and our sense percep-
tions, and that which incorporates and generates knowledge which no individual
brain or any single organisation, could possess or invent.” 69 Economics is for Hayek
a meta-theory about the “dispersal of information” 70 and hence it is the only form of
knowledge that informs us of our own limits to know in productive ways. Hayek
ties the impossibility of knowing the economy from a sovereign position to the pre-
scription of economics as the viable form of self-consciousness about this state of be-
ing; he intimately conjoins seemingly critical reflections about the limits of reason—
what Foucault associates with a Kantian operation—with a proscriptive ban on theo-
rization, that is, with the prohibition to envision the “extended order” (Hayek) in a
different light.
The paradox of the essential invisibility he posits lies not only in the wager-
ing between a critical impossibility to see and its prohibition. It also lies in the very
65 For the relations between the founder of conservatism Edmund Burke and the form of
neo-liberalism Hayek stands for, see Hayek’s own identification as an “old Whig”, draw-
ing parallels to Edmund Burke in the postscript The Constitution of Liberty titled "Why I
Am Not a Conservative." (Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1960), 399f, 409). This title is misleading. Hayek argues against a
conservatism that is indistinctively reluctant to any change. Thus, he attempts to distin-
guish himself, as well as Edmund Burke from a type of “Tory-conservatism” that tends
to allow less experimentation than he would embrace. “I am as little a Tory-conservative
as was Edmund Burke “ (Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Mysterious World of Trade and Mon-
ey“, in The Fatal Conceit. The Errors of Socialism. The Collected Works of Friedrich August
Hayek, Vol 1. (London: Routledge, 1988), 53). For the intimate links between a form of po-
litical conservatism and this strand of liberalism, see also William Scheuerman, “The Un-
holy Alliance of Carl Schmitt and Friedrich A. Hayek,” Constellations, 4, 2 (1997)) and also
John P. McCormick’s discussion of this type of conservatism (John P. McCormick, Carl
Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1997), 303f).
66 Hayek, “The Mysterious World of Trade and Money”, 14.
67 Ibid. 64; 76.
68 Ibid., 77.
69 Ibid., 71.
70 Ibid., 88.
21
reversal of the subject-positions of knowledge, which it effects. The general indict-

ment of the effort to see beyond the reach of one’s own interest has, as its underside,
the construction of the market as a site where the social body becomes legible: “It is
more than a metaphor”, asserts Hayek, “to describe the price system as a kind of
machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunications […]”. 71 In
Hayek’s account, it turns into a transmission belt for information, producing the
amount of knowledge functional to the whole. 72 “The whole acts as one market
…because their limited individual fields of vision sufficiently overlap so that
through many intermediaries the relevant information is communicated to all […]
The most significant fact about this system is the economy of knowledge with which
it operates, of how little the individual participants need to know .…” 73 Thus, the
market is “like a telescope”, a tool for knowing the relevant, but it is itself neither
understood, nor to be revised. 74 Without letting the market assume this epistemo-
logical position, Hayek threatens, we might develop a “different type of civilization,
like that state of termite ants” 75 or will simply sacrifice the “nourishment of the exist-
ing multitudes of human beings.” 76
Within this discursive construction, the market becomes the sole site legiti-
mately producing this knowledge of the whole. The invisibility of the market and the con-
struction of its epistemological authority go hand in hand. We have stumbled upon a
familiar construction: Only that which does not exhibit its particularity can be as-
sumed to be universal; only an invisible market can promise viable sight. In this con-
text, the invisible hand is not just about defying the hubris of “economic sover-
eignty,” as Foucault put it. It is more about defying the forms of critical visibility
commonly associated with Foucault’s work. The invisibility of the market is directed
against the very analytical perspective Foucault typically assumes, one aimed at de-
tecting the instruments, positions, and architectures that produce such epistemologi-
cal claims and privileges. A more typical Foucauldian approach would commence to
undo the invisibility of the economy and the market as an invisible “telescope” and
“information-machine”. This would mean rendering visible the market’s own “ma-
chine of seeing”, rather than seeing like the unseen market itself.
In sum: omitting the dispersion within the discourse of liberalism may have
led Foucault to embrace the invisibility of the economy with too much fondness. At-
tending to the different “politics of truth” related to the invisible economy requires
simply a more extended Foucauldian genealogy. But it also requires an emphasis of
71 Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society”, in The American Economic Review,
Vol. 35(4), 1945: 527.
73 Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society”, 526f.
75 Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society”, 528.
22
the lines of exclusion present in a discursive order, which Foucault is sometimes less
adamant about. 77 Searching for the political element within these figures of eco-
nomic discourse involves relating the surface of discourse itself to the positions and
forms of seeing they provide. Governmentality is right for deciphering the political
within the economic; it is right for positing a co-constitution of the world of politics
and of economic categories and practices. But the task of deciphering the political
and of understanding this common constitution exceeds the reach of this concept.
IV. Epilogue
The foregoing discussion sought to engage the unfulfilled promise of governmental-

ity. The concept of governmentality promises to displace the hypostatizing catego-
ries of politics and economics with the critical visibility of the lines of force and the
politics of truth. However inadvertently, it drew the economy into the orbit of its
critical reach. But while it engaged profoundly with economic discourse in this vein,
it had the paradoxical effect of excluding the economy from its critical operation.
The economy remains invisible if measured against the critical visibilities Foucault
has elsewhere produced. Two reasons for this invisibility have been singled out. The
first consists in the persistent asymmetry ingrained within the concept of govern-
mentality itself. While economic discourse is de-essentialized in the governmental
account of the state, the economy does not become the object of an “analytics of
power” in its own right. Of course, the proliferation of strategies of “conducting
conduct”—which work through techniques of responsibilization, evaluation, and
choice—can be detected within the public and private realm alike. This is not, how-
ever, equivocal to understanding the artifice of economic forms, which produce spa-
tialities, temporalities and epistemologies of valuation. The second argument about
the invisibility of the economy within governmentality has concerned itself with
Foucault’s reading of the “invisible hand”. The liberal trope of the invisible econ-
omy, as it turns out, answers to different “politics of truth”. While it might have ef-
fectively barred “economic sovereignty”, it has also been invested with a prohibition
to envision and to theorize, however uncertain and contested. In this regard, Fou-
cault accepts and operates within this view of the market as the paramount and in-
visible machine of knowledge production.
77 For remedying this aspect, Judith Butler has always argued that the orders of discourse
need to be prominently related to what is undone in their midst (Judith Butler, Bodies that
Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 8). Very similarly,
Jacques Rancière stressed the divisions between what is rendered intelligible and what is
delegated to mere noise. The political artifice resides in creating these divisions and or-
ders of the sensible, as he phrases it (Jacques Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics,” Theory &
Event, 5, 3 (2001). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.3ranciere.html
(accessed June 16 2008)).
23
If one were not afraid of overstating one’s case, one could say that the con-
cept of governmentality has to be guarded against the double danger of seeing like a
state and of seeing like a market. Fortunately, Foucault’s toolbox offers the appro-
priate safeguards itself.
24
 Jason Read 2009
ISSN: 1832-5203
ARTICLE
A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus:
Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity
Jason Read, The University of Southern Maine
ABSTRACT: This article examines Michel Foucault’s critical investigation of neoli-

beralism in the course published as Naissance de la biopolitique: Cours au Collège
de France, 1978-1979. Foucault’s lectures are interrogated along two axes. First, ex-
amining the way in which neoliberalism can be viewed as a particular production of
subjectivity, as a way in which individuals are constituted as subjects of “human
capital.” Secondly, Foucault’s analyses is augmented and critically examined in light
of other critical work on neoliberalism by Wendy Brown, David Harvey, Christian
Laval, Maurizo Lazzarato, and Antonio Negri. Of these various debates and discus-
sions, the paper argues that the discussion of real subsumption in Marx and Negri is
most important for understanding the specific politics of neoliberalism. Finally, the
paper argues that neoliberalism entails a fundamental reexamination of the tools of
critical thought, an examination of how freedom can constitute a form of subjection.
Keywords: Foucault, Neoliberalism, Governmentality, real subsumption, subjectivi-

ty.
In the opening pages of David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism we find the
following statement “Neoliberalism... has pervasive effects on ways of thought to
the point where it has become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us
interpret, live in, and understand the world.” 1 While Harvey’s book presents a great
deal of research on neoliberalism, presenting its origins in such academic institutions
as the “Chicago School,” its spread in the initial experiments in Chile, and its return
to the countries of its origin through the regimes of Reagan and Thatcher, as well as
its effects on China and the rest of the world, the actual process by which it became
hegemonic, to the point of becoming common sense, is not examined. While it might
be wrong to look for philosophy in a work which is primarily a work of history, a
“brief” history at that, aimed at shedding light on the current conjuncture, it is worth
1 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3.
25
Read: A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus
pointing out this lacuna since it intersects with a commonly accepted idea about
“neoliberalism,” that it is as much a transformation in ideology as it is a transforma-
tion of ideology. Neoliberalism, in the texts that have critically confronted it, is gen-
erally understood as not just a new ideology, but a transformation of ideology in
terms of its conditions and effects. In terms of its conditions, it is an ideology that is
generated not from the state, or from a dominant class, but from the quotidian expe-
rience of buying and selling commodities from the market, which is then extended
across other social spaces, “the marketplace of ideas,” to become an image of society.
Secondly, it is an ideology that refers not only to the political realm, to an ideal of the
state, but to the entirety of human existence. It claims to present not an ideal, but a
reality; human nature. As Fredric Jameson writes, summing up this connection and
the challenge it poses: “The market is in human nature’ is the proposition that can-
not be allowed to stand unchallenged; in my opinion, it is the most crucial terrain of
ideological struggle in our time.” 2
A critical examination of neoliberalism must address this transformation of
its discursive deployment, as a new understanding of human nature and social exis-
tence rather than a political program. Thus it is not enough to contrast neoliberalism
as a political program, analyzing its policies in terms of success or failure. An ex-
amination of neoliberalism entails a reexamination of the fundamental problematic
of ideology, the intersection of power, concepts, modes of existence and subjectivity.
It is in confronting neoliberalism that the seemingly abstract debates of the last thirty
years, debates between poststructuralists such as Michel Foucault and neo-Marxists
such as Antonio Negri about the nature of power and the relation between “ideolo-
gies” or “discourses” and material existence, cease to be abstract doctrines and be-
come concrete ways of comprehending and transforming the present. Foucault’s lec-
tures on neoliberalism do not only extend his own critical project into new areas,
they also serve to demonstrate the importance of grasping the present by examining
the way in which the truth and subjectivity are produced.
Homo Economicus: The Subject of Neoliberalism
The nexus between the production of a particular conception of human nature, a

particular formation of subjectivity, and a particular political ideology, a particular
way of thinking about politics is at the center of Michel Foucault’s research. As much
as Foucault characterized his own project as studying “…the different modes by
which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects,” this process has always in-
tersected with regimes of power/knowledge. 3 Thus, it would appear that Foucault’s
2 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1991), 263.
3 Michel Foucault, ”The Subject and Power,” Afterward to Michel Foucault: Beyond Structu-
26
work takes up exactly what writers on neoliberalism find to be so vexing: the man-
ner in which neoliberalism is not just a manner of governing states or economies, but
is intimately tied to the government of the individual, to a particular manner of liv-
ing. However, it is well known that Foucault’s research primarily views this relation
from ancient Greece through the nineteenth century, leaving modern developments
such as neoliberalism unaddressed. While this is the general pattern of Foucault’s
work, in the late seventies he devoted a year of his lectures at the Collège de France to
the topic of neoliberalism. These lectures, published as The Birth of Biopolitics, are
something of an anomaly in part because of this shift into the late-twentieth century
and also because unlike other lecture courses, at least those that have been published
in recent years, on “abnormals,” “psychiatric power” and “the hermeneutics of the
subject,” the material from these lectures never made it into Foucault’s published
works.
In order to frame Foucault’s analysis it is useful to begin with how he sees the
distinction between liberalism and neoliberalism. For Foucault, this difference has to
do with the different ways in which they each focus on economic activity. Classical
liberalism focused on exchange, on what Adam Smith called mankind’s tendency to
“barter, truck, and exchange.” It naturalized the market as a system with its own ra-
tionality, its own interest, and its own specific efficiency, arguing ultimately for its
superior efficiency as a distributor of goods and services. The market became a space
of autonomy that had to be carved out of the state through the unconditional right of
private property. What Foucault stresses in his understanding, is the way in which
the market becomes more than just a specific institution or practice to the point
where it has become the basis for a reinterpretation and thus a critique of state pow-
er. Classical liberalism makes exchange the general matrix of society. It establishes a
homology: just as relations in the marketplace can be understood as an exchange of
certain freedoms for a set of rights and liberties. 4 Neoliberalism, according to Fou-
cault, extends the process of making economic activity a general matrix of social and
political relations, but it takes as its focus not exchange but competition. 5 What the
two forms of liberalism, the “classical” and “neo” share, according to Foucault, is a
ralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago, IL: Universi-
ty of Chicago Press, 1982), 208.
4 As Foucault writes on this point: “The combination of the savage and exchange is, I
think, basic to juridical thought, and not only to eighteenth century theories of right—we
constantly find the savage exchange couple from the eighteenth century theory of right to
the anthropology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In both the juridical thought
of the eighteenth century and the anthropology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
the savage is essentially a man who exchanges.”(Michel Foucault, Society Must Be De-
fended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Pica-
dor, 2003), 194)
5 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, trans.
Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 12.
27
general idea of “homo economicus,” that is, the way in which they place a particular
“anthropology” of man as an economic subject at the basis of politics. What changes
is the emphasis from an anthropology of exchange to one of competition. The shift
from exchange to competition has profound effects: while exchange was considered
to be natural, competition is understood by the neo-liberals of the twentieth century
to be an artificial relation that must be protected against the tendency for markets to
form monopolies and interventions by the state. Competition necessitates a constant
intervention on the part of the state, not on the market, but on the conditions of the
market. 6
What is more important for us is the way in which this shift in “anthropolo-
gy” from “homo economicus” as an exchanging creature to a competitive creature,
or rather as a creature whose tendency to compete must be fostered, entails a general
shift in the way in which human beings make themselves and are made subjects.
First, neoliberalism entails a massive expansion of the field and scope of economics.
Foucault cites Gary Becker on this point: “Economics is the science which studies
human behavior as relationship between ends and scarce means which have alter-
nate uses.” 7 Everything for which human beings attempt to realize their ends, from
marriage, to crime, to expenditures on children, can be understood “economically”
according to a particular calculation of cost for benefit. Secondly, this entails a mas-
sive redefinition of “labor” and the “worker.” The worker has become “human capi-
tal”. Salary or wages become the revenue that is earned on an initial investment, an
investment in one’s skills or abilities. Any activity that increases the capacity to earn
income, to achieve satisfaction, even migration, the crossing of borders from one
country to another, is an investment in human capital. Of course a large portion of
“human capital,” one’s body, brains, and genetic material, not to mention race or
class, is simply given and cannot be improved. Foucault argues that this natural lim-
it is something that exists to be overcome through technologies; from plastic surgery
to possible genetic engineering that make it possible to transform one’s initial in-
vestment. As Foucault writes summarizing this point of view: “Homo economicus is
an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself.” 8
Foucault’s object in his analysis is not to bemoan this as a victory for capitalist
ideology, the point at which the “ruling ideas” have truly become the ideas of the
“ruling class,” so much so that everyone from a minimum wage employee to a
C.E.O. considers themselves to be entrepreneurs. Nor is his task to critique the fun-
damental increase of the scope of economic rationality in neo-liberal economics: the
assertion that economics is coextensive with all of society, all of rationality, and that
it is economics “all the way down.” Rather, Foucault takes the neo-liberal ideal to be
a new regime of truth, and a new way in which people are made subjects: homo eco-
6 Ibid, 139.
7 Ibid, 235.
8 Ibid., 226.
28
nomicus is fundamentally different subject, structured by different motivations and

governed by different principles, than homo juridicus, or the legal subject of the state.
Neoliberalism constitutes a new mode of “governmentality,” a manner, or a mentali-
ty, in which people are governed and govern themselves. The operative terms of this
governmentality are no longer rights and laws but interest, investment and competi-
tion. Whereas rights exist to be exchanged, and are some sense constituted through
the original exchange of the social contract, interest is irreducible and inalienable, it
cannot be exchanged. The state channels flows of interest and desire by making de-
sirable activities inexpensive and undesirable activities costly, counting on the fact
that subjects calculate their interests. As a form of governmentality, neoliberalism
would seem paradoxically to govern without governing; that is, in order to function
its subjects must have a great deal of freedom to act—to choose between competing
strategies.
The new governmental reason needs freedom; therefore, the new art of govern-
ment consumes freedom. It must produce it, it must organize it. The new art of
government therefore appears as the management of freedom, not in the sense of
the imperative: “be free,” with the immediate contradiction that this imperative
may contain…[T]he liberalism we can describe as the art of government formed
in the eighteenth century entails at its heart a productive/destructive relationship
with freedom. Liberalism must produce freedom, but this very act entails the es-
tablishment of limitations, controls, forms of coercion, and obligations relying on
threats, etcetera. 9
These freedoms, the freedoms of the market, are not the outside of politics, of go-
vernmentality, as its limit, but rather are an integral element of its strategy. As a
mode of governmentality, neoliberalism operates on interests, desires, and aspira-
tions rather than through rights and obligations; it does not directly mark the body,
as sovereign power, or even curtail actions, as disciplinary power; rather, it acts on
the conditions of actions. Thus, neoliberal governmentality follows a general trajec-
tory of intensification. This trajectory follows a fundamental paradox; as power be-
comes less restrictive, less corporeal, it also becomes more intense, saturating the
field of actions, and possible actions.10
Foucault limits his discussion of neoliberalism to its major theoretical texts
and paradigms, following its initial formulation in post-war Germany through to its
most comprehensive version in the Chicago School. Whereas Foucault’s early ana-
9 Ibid., 63.
10 Jeffrey Nealon has developed the logic of intensification in Foucault, arguing that this can
be seen in the transition from disciplinary power to biopower; the former operates
through specific sites and identities, while the latter operates on sexuality, which is dif-
fuse throughout society, coextensive with subjectivity (Jeffrey T. Nealon, Foucault Beyond
Foucault: Power and its Intensification Since 1984 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press),
2008, 46). A similar point could be raised with respect to neoliberalism.
29
lyses are often remembered for their analysis of practical documents, the description
of the panopticon or the practice of the confessional, the lectures on “neoliberalism”
predominantly follow the major theoretical discussions. This is in some sense a limi-
tation of the lecture course format, or at least a reflection that this material was never
developed into a full study. Any analysis that is faithful to the spirit and not just the
letter of Foucault’s text would focus on its existence as a practice and not just a
theory diffused throughout the economy, state, and society. As Thomas Lemke ar-
gues, neoliberalism is a political project that attempts to create a social reality that it
suggests already exists, stating that competition is the basis of social relations while
fostering those same relations. 11 The contemporary trend away from long term labor
contracts, towards temporary and part-time labor, is not only an effective economic
strategy, freeing corporations from contracts and the expensive commitments of
health care and other benefits, it is an effective strategy of subjectification as well. It
encourages workers to see themselves not as “workers” in a political sense, who
have something to gain through solidarity and collective organization, but as “com-
panies of one.” They become individuals for whom every action, from taking
courses on a new computer software application to having their teeth whitened, can
be considered an investment in human capital. As Eric Alliez and Michel Feher
write: “Corporations’ massive recourse to subcontracting plays a fundamental role
in this to the extent that it turns the workers’ desire for independence…into a ‘busi-
ness spirit’ that meets capital’s growing need for satellites.” 12 Neoliberalism is not
simply an ideology in the pejorative sense of the term, or a belief that one could elect
to have or not have, but is itself produced by strategies, tactics, and policies that
create subjects of interest, locked in competition.
Because Foucault brackets what could be considered the “ideological” di-
mension of neoliberalism, its connection with the global hegemony of not only capi-
talism, but specifically a new regime of capitalist accumulation, his lectures have lit-
tle to say about its historical conditions. Foucault links the original articulation of
neoliberalism to a particular reaction to Nazi Germany. As Foucault argues, the orig-
inal neo-liberals, the “Ordo-liberals,” considered Nazi Germany not to be an effect of
capitalism. But the most extreme version of what is opposed to capitalism and the
market—planning. While Foucault’s analysis captures the particular “fear of the
state” that underlies neoliberalism, its belief that any planning, any intervention
against competition, is tantamount to totalitarianism. It however does not account
for the dominance of neoliberalism in the present, specifically its dominance as a
particular “technology of the self,” a particular mode of subjection. At the same time,
Foucault offers the possibility of a different understanding of the history of neolibe-
11 Thomas Lemke, “Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique.” Rethinking Marxis, 14, 3

(2002), 60.
12 Eric Alliez and Michel Feher, The Luster of Capital, trans. Alyson Waters, Zone, 1, 2, (1987),
349.
30
ralism when he argues that neoliberalism, or the neo-liberal subject as homo economi-
cus, or homo entrepreneur, emerges to address a particular lacunae in liberal economic
thought, and that is labor. In this sense neoliberalism rushes to fill the same void, the
same gap, that Marx attempted to fill, without reference to Marx, and with very dif-
ferent results. 13 Marx and neo-liberals agree that although classical economic theory
examined the sphere of exchange, the market, it failed to enter the “hidden abode of
production” examining how capital is produced. Of course the agreement ends
there, because what Marx and neo-liberals find in labor is fundamentally different:
for Marx labor is the sphere of exploitation while for the neo-liberals, as we have
seen, labor is no sooner introduced as a problem than the difference between labor
and capital is effaced through the theory of “human capital.” 14 Neoliberalism scram-
bles and exchanges the terms of opposition between “worker” and “capitalist.” To
quote Etienne Balibar, “The capitalist is defined as worker, as an ‘entrepreneur’; the
worker, as the bearer of a capacity, of a human capital.” 15 Labor is no longer limited
to the specific sites of the factory or the workplace, but is any activity that works to-
wards desired ends. The terms “labor” and “human capital” intersect, overcoming
in terminology their longstanding opposition; the former becomes the activity and
the latter becomes the effects of the activity, its history. From this intersection the
discourse of the economy becomes an entire way of life, a common sense in which
every action--crime, marriage, higher education and so on--can be charted according
to a calculus of maximum output for minimum expenditure; it can be seen as an in-
vestment. Thus situating Marx and neoliberalism with respect to a similar problem
makes it possible to grasp something of the politics of neoliberalism, which through
13 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 221.

14 In The Birth of Biopolitics Foucault argues that Marx filled this void with an “anthropolo-
gy” of labor. This is similar to the critique that Foucault develops in “Truth and Juridical
Forms,” in which he argues that Marx posited labor as the “concrete essence of man.” As
Foucault writes: “So I don’t think we can simply accept the traditional Marxist analysis,
which assumes that, labor being man’s concrete essence, the capitalist system is what
transforms labor into profit, into hyperprofit or surplus value. The fact is capitalism pe-
netrates much more deeply into our existence. That system, as it was established in the
nineteenth century, was obliged to elaborate a set of political techniques, techniques of
power, by which man was tied to something like labor—a set of techniques by which
people’s bodies and time would become labor power and labor time so as to be effective-
ly used and thereby transformed into hyper profit” (Michel Foucault, “Truth and Juridi-
cal Forms,” in Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984: Volume Three, trans.
Robert Hurley et al. Ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000), 86). This idea, of
“capillary power relations” that turn man into a subject of labor, is an idea which Fou-
cault sometimes develops as a critique and at other times attributes to Marx, see for ex-
ample “Les Mailles du pouvoir”, in Dits et Écrits Tome IV: 1980-198, ed. D. Defert and F.
Ewald (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1994) and less explicitly Discipline and Punish.
15 Etienne Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After
Marx, trans. James Swenson (New York: Routledge, 1994), 53.
31
a generalization of the idea of the “entrepreneur,” “investment” and “risk” beyond

the realm of finance capital to every quotidian relation, effaces the very fact of ex-
ploitation. Neoliberalism can be considered a particular version of “capitalism with-
out capitalism,” a way of maintaining not only private property but the existing dis-
tribution of wealth in capitalism while simultaneously doing away with the anta-
gonism and social insecurity of capitalism, in this case paradoxically by extending
capitalism, at least its symbols, terms, and logic, to all of society. The opposition be-
tween capitalist and worker has been effaced not by a transformation of the mode of
production, a new organization of the production and distribution of wealth, but by
the mode of subjection, a new production of subjectivity. Thus, neoliberalism entails a
very specific extension of the economy across all of society; it is not, as Marx argued,
because everything rests on an economic base (at least in the last instance) that the
effects of the economy are extended across of all of society, rather it is an economic
perspective, that of the market, that becomes coextensive with all of society. As
Christian Laval argues, all actions are seen to conform to the fundamental economic
ideas of self-interest, of greatest benefit for least possible cost. It is not the structure
of the economy that is extended across society but the subject of economic thinking,
its implicit anthropology. 16
Resisting the Present: Towards a Criticism of Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism is thus a “restoration” not only of class power, of capitalism as the on-
ly possible economic system, it is a restoration of capitalism as synonymous with ra-
tionality. Thus, the question remains, why now, or at least why over the last thirty
years has capitalism taken this neo-liberal turn? If Foucault’s invocation of the spec-
ter of Nazi Germany is insufficient to account for the specific historical formation of
capitalism, the opposition to Marx does little to help clarify the dominance of neoli-
beralism now. Somewhat paradoxically this question can be at least partially ans-
wered by looking at one of the few points of intersection between Marx and neolibe-
ralism.
In the Grundrisse, Marx does not use the term “human capital,” but fixed cap-
ital, a term generally used to refer to machinery, factories, and other investments in
the means of production to refer to the subjectivity, the subjective powers of the
worker. In general Marx understood the progression of capital to be a process by
which the skills, knowledge, and know-how of workers were gradually incorporated
into machinery, into fixed capital, reducing the laborer to an unskilled and ultimate-
ly replaceable cog in a machine. This is “proletarianization” the process by which
capitalism produces its gravediggers in a class of impoverished workers who have
nothing to lose but their chains. In the Grundrisse, however, Marx addresses a fun-
16 Christian Laval, L’homme économique: Essai sur les racines du néolibéralisme (Paris: Galli-
mard, 2007), 17.
32
damentally different possibility, capital’s exploitation of not just the physical powers
of the body, but the general social knowledge spread throughout society and embo-
died in each individual. This is what Marx refers to as the “general intellect”—the
diffused social knowledge of society. This knowledge, the capacity to use various
languages, protocols, and symbolic systems, is largely produced outside of work. As
Marx writes: “The saving of labor time is equal to an increase of free time, i.e. time
for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the pro-
ductive power of labor as itself the greatest productive power. From the standpoint
of the direct production process it can be regarded as the production of fixed capital,
this fixed capital being man himself.” 17 Marx’s deviation from the standard termi-
nology of his own corpus, terminology that designates the worker as labor power (or
living labor), the machine or factory as fixed capital, and money as circulating capi-
tal, is ultimately revealing. It reveals something of a future that Marx could barely
envision, a future that has become our present: the real subsumption of society by
capital. This subsumption involves not only the formation of what Marx referred to
as a specifically capitalist mode of production, but also the incorporation of all sub-
jective potential, the capacity to communicate, to feel, to create, to think, into pro-
ductive powers for capital. Capital no longer simply exploits labor, understood as
the physical capacity to transform objects, but puts to work the capacities to create
and communicate that traverse social relations. It is possible to say that with real
subsumption capital has no outside, there is no relationship that cannot be trans-
formed into a commodity, but at the same time capital is nothing but outside, pro-
duction takes place outside of the factory and the firm, in various social relation-
ships. Because of this fundamental displacement subjectivity becomes paramount,
subjectivity itself becomes productive and it is this same subjectivity that must be
controlled.
For Antonio Negri there is a direct relationship between real subsumption as
a transformation of the capitalist mode of production and neoliberalism as a trans-
formation of the presentation of capitalism. It is not simply that neoliberalism works
to efface the fundamental division between worker and capitalist, between wages
and capital, through the production of neo-liberal subjectivity. After all this opposi-
tion, this antagonism has preexisted neoliberalism by centuries. Neoliberalism is a
discourse and practice that is aimed to curtail the powers of labor that are distri-
buted across all of society—at the exact moment in which all of social existence be-
comes labor, or potential labor, neoliberalism constructs the image of a society of ca-
pitalists, of entrepreneurs. As production moves from the closed space of the factory
to become distributed across all of social space, encompassing all spheres of cultural
and social existence, neoliberalism presents an image of society as a market, effacing
17 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nico-
laus (New York: Penguin, 1973), 712.
33
production altogether. 18 This underscores the difference between neoliberalism as a

form of power and the disciplinary power at work in the closed spaces of the factory.
If disciplinary power worked by confining and fixing bodies to the production appa-
ratuses, neoliberal power works by dispersing bodies and individuals through pri-
vatization and isolation. Deregulation, the central term and political strategy of neo-
liberalism, is not the absence of governing, or regulating, but a form of governing
through isolation and dispersion. 19 As more and more wealth is produced by the col-
lective social powers of society, neoliberalism presents us with an image of society
made up of self-interested individuals. For Negri, neoliberalism and the idea of hu-
man capital is a misrepresentation of the productive powers of society. “The only
problem is that extreme liberalization of the economy reveals its opposite, namely
that the social and productive environment is not made up of atomized individu-
als…the real environment is made up of collective individuals.” 20 In Negri’s analysis,
the relation between neoliberalism and real subsumption takes on the characteristics
of a Manichean opposition. We are all workers or we are all capitalists: either view
society as an extension of labor across all social spheres, from the factory to the
school to the home, and across all aspects of human existence, from the work of the
hands to the mind, or view society as a logic of competition and investment that en-
compasses all human relationships. While Negri’s presentation has an advantage
over Foucault’s lectures in that it grasps the historical formation of neoliberalism
against the backdrop of a specific transformation of capital, in some sense following
Foucault’s tendency to present disciplinary power and biopower against the back-
drop of specific changes in the economic organization of society, it does so by almost
casting neoliberalism as an ideology in the pejorative sense of the term. It would ap-
pear that for Negri real subsumption is the truth of society, and neoliberalism is only
a misrepresentation of that truth. As Thomas Lemke has argued, Foucault’s idea of
governmentality, is argued against such a division that posits actual material reality
on one side and its ideological misrepresentation on the other. A governmentality is
a particular mentality, a particular manner of governing, that is actualized in habits,
perceptions, and subjectivity. Governmentality situates actions and conceptions on
the same plane of immanence. 21 Which is to say, that any criticism of neoliberalism
as governmentality must not focus on its errors, on its myopic conception of social
existence, but on its particular production of truth. For Foucault, we have to take se-
riously the manner in which the fundamental understanding of individuals as go-
verned by interest and competition is not just an ideology that can be refused and
18 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, The Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State Form
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1994), 226.
19 Antonio Negri, The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century, trans.
James Newell (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989), 99.
20 Ibid., 206.
21 Lemke, 54.
34
debunked, but is an intimate part of how our lives and subjectivity are structured.
Despite Negri’s tendency to lapse back into an opposition between labor and
ideology, his object raises important questions echoed by other critics of neoliberal-
ism. What is lost in neoliberalism is the critical distance opened up between different
spheres and representations of subjectivity, not only the difference between work
and the market, as in Marxism, but also the difference between the citizen and the
economic subject, as in classical liberalism. All of these differences are effaced as one
relation; that of economic self-interest, or competition, replaces the multiple spaces
and relations of worker, citizen, and economic subject of consumption. To put the
problem in Foucault’s terms, what has disappeared in neoliberalism is the tactical
polyvalence of discourse; everything is framed in terms of interests, freedoms and
risks. 22 As Wendy Brown argues, one can survey the quotidian effects or practices of
governmentality in the manner in which individualized/market based solutions ap-
pear in lieu of collective political solutions: gated communities for concerns about
security and safety; bottled water for concerns about water purity; and private
schools (or vouchers) for failing public schools, all of which offer the opportunity for
individuals to opt out rather than address political problems. 23 Privatization is not
just neoliberalism’s strategy for dealing with the public sector, what David Harvey
calls accumulation by dispossession, but a consistent element of its particular form
of governmentality, its ethos, everything becomes privatized, institutions, structures,
issues, and problems that used to constitute the public. 24 It is privatization all the
way down. For Brown, neoliberalism entails a massive de-democratization, as terms
such as the public good, rights and debate, no longer have any meaning. “The model
neoliberal citizen is one who strategizes for her or himself among various social, po-
litical, and economic options, not one who strives with others to alter or organize
these options.” 25 Thus, while it is possible to argue that neoliberalism is a more flexi-
ble, an open form of power as opposed to the closed spaces of disciplines, a form of
power that operates on freedoms, on a constitutive multiplicity, it is in some sense
all the more closed in that as a form of governmentality, as a political rationality, it is
without an outside. It does not encounter any tension with a competing logic of
worker or citizen, with a different articulation of subjectivity. States, corporations,
individuals are all governed by the same logic, that of interest and competition.
Foucault’s development, albeit partial, of account of neoliberalism as go-
vernmentality has as its major advantage a clarification of the terrain on which neo-
22 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley
(New York: Vintage, 1978), 101.
23 Wendy Brown, “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and Democrati-
zation,” Political Theory, 34, 6 (2006), 704.
24 David Harvey, 154.
25 Wendy Brown, “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” in Edgework: Critical
Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 2005), 43.
35
liberalism can be countered. It is not enough to simply oppose neoliberalism as ide-

ology, revealing the truth of social existence that it misses, or to enumerate its vari-
ous failings as policy. Rather any opposition to neoliberalism must take seriously its
effectiveness, the manner in which it has transformed work subjectivity and social
relationships. As Foucault argues, neoliberalism operates less on actions, directly
curtailing them, then on the condition and effects of actions, on the sense of possibil-
ity. The reigning ideal of interest and the calculations of cost and benefit do not so
much limit what one can do, neoliberal thinkers are famously indifferent to prescrip-
tive ideals, examining the illegal drug trade as a more or less rational investment,
but limit the sense of what is possible. Specifically the ideal of the fundamentally
self-interested individual curtails any collective transformation of the conditions of
existence. It is not that such actions are not prohibited, restricted by the dictates of a
sovereign or the structures of disciplinary power, they are not seen as possible,
closed off by a society made up of self-interested individuals. It is perhaps no acci-
dent that one of the most famous political implementers of neoliberal reforms, Mar-
garet Thatcher, used the slogan, “there is no alternative,” legitimating neoliberalism
based on the stark absence of possibilities. Similarly, and as part of a belated re-
sponse to the former Prime Minister, it also perhaps no accident that the slogan of
the famous Seattle protests against the IMF and World Bank was, “another world is
possible,” and it is very often the sense of a possibility of not only another world, but
of another way of organizing politics that is remembered, the image of turtles and
teamsters marching hand and hand, when those protests are referred to. 26 It is also
this sense of possibility that the present seems to be lacking; it is difficult to imagine
let alone enact a future other than a future dominated by interest and the destructive
vicissitudes of competition. A political response to neoliberalism must meet it on its
terrain, that of the production of subjectivity, freedom and possibility.
26 Maurizio Lazzarato, Les révolutions du capitalisme (Paris: Le Seuil, 2004), 19.
36
 Trent H. Hamann 2009
ISSN: 1832-5203
ARTICLE
Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics

Trent H. Hamann, St. John’s University
ABSTRACT: This paper illustrates the relevance of Foucault’s analysis of neoliberal

governance for a critical understanding of recent transformations in individual and
social life in the United States, particularly in terms of how the realms of the public
and the private and the personal and the political are understood and practiced. The
central aim of neoliberal governmentality (“the conduct of conduct”) is the strategic
creation of social conditions that encourage and necessitate the production of Homo
economicus, a historically specific form of subjectivity constituted as a free and au-
tonomous “atom” of self-interest. The neoliberal subject is an individual who is mo-
rally responsible for navigating the social realm using rational choice and cost-
benefit calculations grounded on market-based principles to the exclusion of all oth-
er ethical values and social interests. While the more traditional forms of domination
and exploitation characteristic of sovereign and disciplinary forms of power remain
evident in our ”globalized” world, the effects of subjectification produced at the lev-
el of everyday life through the neoliberal “conduct of conduct” recommend that we
recognize and invent new forms of critique and ethical subjectivation that constitute
resistance to its specific dangers.
Key words: Foucault, neoliberalism, governmentality, biopolitics, homo economicus,

genealogy, ethics, critique.
Introduction
In his 1978-1979 course lectures at the Collège de France, The Birth of Biopolitics, 1 Mi-
chel Foucault offered what is today recognizable as a remarkably prescient analysis
of neoliberalism. In the thirty years since he gave these lectures their pertinence and
1 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, trans-
lated by Graham Burchell, edited by Arnold I. Davidson (New York: Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 2008). Henceforth, BB, with page numbers given in the text.
37
Hamann: Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics
value for a critical understanding of contemporary forms of political governance in

the United States have grown. As I illustrate below, everyday experiences reflect a
neoliberal ethos2 operative within almost every aspect of our individual and social
lives with consequences that are dire for many and dangerous for most if not all of
us. Indeed the central aim of neoliberal governmentality 3 is the strategic production
of social conditions conducive to the constitution of Homo economicus, a specific form
of subjectivity with historical roots in traditional liberalism. However, whereas libe-
ralism posits ”economic man” as a ”man of exchange”, neoliberalism strives to en-
sure that individuals are compelled to assume market-based values in all of their
judgments and practices in order to amass sufficient quantities of ”human capital”
and thereby become ”entrepreneurs of themselves”. Neoliberal Homo economicus is a
free and autonomous ”atom” of self-interest who is fully responsible for navigating
the social realm using rational choice and cost-benefit calculation to the express exclu-
sion of all other values and interests. Those who fail to thrive under such social con-
ditions have no one and nothing to blame but themselves. It is here that we can rec-
ognize the vital importance of the links between Foucault’s analyses of governmen-
tality begun in the late 1970’s and his interest in technologies of the self and ethical
self-fashioning, which he pursued until the time of his death in 1984. His analyses of
”government” or ”the conduct of conduct” bring together the government of others
(subjectification) and the government of one’s self (subjectivation); on the one hand,
the biopolitical governance of populations and, on the other, the work that individu-
als perform upon themselves in order to become certain kinds of subjects. While the
more traditional forms of domination and exploitation characteristic of sovereign
and disciplinary forms of power remain evident in our ”globalized” world, the ef-
fects of subjectification produced at the level of everyday life through the specifically
neoliberal ”conduct of conduct” recommend that we recognize and invent commen-
surate forms of critique, ”counter-conduct” and ethical subjectivation that constitute
resistance to its dangers. 4
2 Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose have observed that for Foucault libe-
ralism (and, by extension, neoliberalism) indicate something like an ethos of government
rather than a specific historical moment or single doctrine. See their introduction to Fou-
cault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and Rationalities of Government, edited
by Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose (Chicago, IL: The University of
Chicago Press, 1996), 8.
3 Foucault defines “governmentality” as an apparatus of administrative power “that has
the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and appa-
ratuses of security as its essential technical instrument.” See Michel Foucault, Security,
Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-1978, translated by Graham
Burchell, edited by Arnold I. Davidson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 108-9.
Henceforth, STP, with page numbers given in the text.
4 Throughout this paper I will follow the distinction made by Alan Milchman and Alan
38
I. Neoliberalism as Everyday Experience
One of the significant developments in contemporary life that might fall under the
heading of ”neoliberalism” can be recognized through the various ways that the tra-
ditional distinctions between the public and the private on the one hand, and the po-
litical and the personal on the other have been gradually blurred, reversed, or re-
moved altogether. The exposure of formerly private and personal realms of life has
occurred not only through the more striking examples of growing government and
corporate surveillance (think of the telecoms and the warrantless monitoring of elec-
tronic communications paid for with taxpayer dollars or the growing use of human
implantable radio-frequency identification [RFID] microchips), but, more subtly and
significantly, the extent to which activities of production and consumption typically
practiced in public spaces are increasingly taking place in the home, a space once
exclusively reserved for leisure time and housework. It has become more and more
common to find such activities as telecommuting, telemarketing, and shopping via
the Internet or cable television taking place within the home. Nearly ubiquitous
technologies such as the telephone, home computers with worldwide web access,
pagers, mobile phones, GPS and other wireless devices have rendered private space
and personal time accessible to the demands of business and, increasingly, the inter-
ests of government. To put it simply, it is no longer true, as Marx once claimed, that
the worker “is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at
home.” 5 Reality television, social networking sites, personal webcams and confes-
sional blogging have all contributed toward exposing the private realm in ways un-
foreseen by the well-known feminist adage from the 1960’s: ”the personal is politi-
cal”.
Within this formerly public realm we now find that private interests or pub-
lic/private amalgams have gained greater control and influence. In major urban
areas Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) have appropriated many traditional
Rosenberg between 1) “subjectification” (assujettissement) or the ways that others are go-
verned and objectified into subjects through processes of power/knowledge (including
but not limited to subjugation and subjection since a subject can have autonomy and
power relations can be resisted and reversed), and 2) ”subjectivation” (subjectivation) or
the ways that individuals govern and fashion themselves into subjects on the basis of what
they take to be the truth. Subjectivation can take either the form of self-objectification in
accord with processes of subjectification or it can take the form of a subjectivation of a
true discourse produced through practices of freedom in resistance to prevailing appara-
tuses of power/knowledge. See Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, “The Final Foucault:
Government of Others and Government of Oneself” (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Pub-
lishing, forthcoming 2008). Henceforth, FF.
5 Karl Marx, “Estranged Labor,” in The Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, edited
by Dirk J. Struik (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 110.
39
governing functions from financially strapped municipalities including taxation, sa-

nitation, and policing. For years the U.S. federal government has given away tradi-
tional public goods such as parklands, water, and the airways to profit-making
businesses, often in exchange for shallow and unfulfilled promises to serve the pub-
lic interest. Many formerly public or government institutions such as hospitals,
schools, and prisons are now managed privately as for-profit corporations as in-
creasing numbers of people go without healthcare, education levels drop, and prison
populations increase. An ongoing effort has been made to further privatize if not
eliminate traditional social goods such as healthcare, welfare, and social security. In
addition, problems once recognized as social ills have been shifted to the personal
realm: poverty, environmental degradation, unemployment, homelessness, racism,
sexism, and heterosexism: all have been reinterpreted as primarily private matters to
be dealt with through voluntary charity, the invisible hand of the market, by culti-
vating personal ”sensitivity” towards others or improving one’s own self-esteem.
Corporations, churches, universities and other institutions have made it part of their
mission to organize the mandatory training of employees in these and other areas of
personal development and self-management. Just as illness and disease are more of-
ten addressed in the mainstream media as a problem of revenue loss for business
than as an effect of poor environmental or worker safety regulations, corporations
have stepped up the practice of promoting full worker responsibility for their own
health and welfare, offering incentives to employees for their participation in fitness
training, lifestyle management and diet programs. We can also find a sustained ex-
pansion of ”self-help” and ”personal power” technologies that range from the old
“think and grow rich” school to new techniques promising greater control in the
self-management of everything from time to anger. 6 These and many other examples
demonstrate the extent to which so much that was once understood as social and
political has been re-positioned within the domain of self-governance, often through
techniques imposed by private institutions such as schools and businesses.
On a broader scale, there is clear evidence that government policymaking has
increasingly fallen under the influence of private corporate and industry interests,
for whom the next quarter’s bottom line routinely trumps any concern for the long
term common or public good. Transnational organizations such as the World Bank,
International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization commonly use
their global reach in order to dictate what are often austere social policies through
”Structural Adjustment Programs” (SAPs), practices that have been linked to the on-
going expansion of slum populations worldwide. 7 While the various discourses of
”ownership” and the like have promoted the populist ideals of choice, freedom, au-
tonomy and individualism, the reality is that individuals worldwide are more and
more subject to the frequently harsh, unpredictable, and unforgiving demands of
6 See Binkley, this volume.

7 See Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2006).
40
market forces and the kinds of impersonal judgments that evaluate them in terms of
a cost-benefit calculus of economic risk, financial burden, productivity, efficiency,
and expedience. The recent collapse of the U.S. housing market, the rising costs of
fuel and food, and record-breaking increases in unemployment rates perhaps illu-
strate, not the failure of what sometimes has been called the ”ownership society”,
but rather its success in instituting a moralizing principle of punishing those who
haven’t amassed sufficient ”human capital”. Examples such as these do suggest that,
to at least some extent, the neoliberal strategy of infusing market values into every
aspect of social life and shifting responsibility onto individuals has succeeded.
II. Neoliberalism As Governmentality
In his 1978-79 course lectures, Foucault analyzed liberalism as a historical form of

biopolitical governmentality, that is, as a form of political rationality concerned with
the government of populations and the conduct of individual conduct in accord with
“the internal rule of maximum economy” (BB, 318). His genealogical analysis of libe-
ralism led him to examine the West German Ordo-liberalism of the period from 1942
to 1962 and the American neoliberalism of the Chicago School, which developed lat-
er on. Foucault noted that both forms of neoliberalism were conceived from the very
beginning as interventionist and critical responses to specific forms of governmen-
tality. For the West Germans, who were faced with the daunting task of building a
new state from scratch it constituted a critique of the excessive state power of Naz-
ism and for the Americans it was a reaction to the overextended New Deal welfare
state and its interference in market mechanisms. In this regard both schools were
linked from the start to classical liberalism insofar as they were forms of “critical go-
vernmental reason,” or political rationality that theorized government as immanent-
ly self-limiting by virtue of its primary responsibility for supporting the economy.
Whereas the pre-modern state had utilized the economy to serve its own ends, the
emergence of political economy within the liberal reason of state reversed the tradi-
tional relationship between government and economy (BB, 12-3). What fascinated
Foucault about the American neoliberals in particular, and distinguished them from
the West German Ordo-liberals, was their unprecedented expansion of the economic
enterprise form to the entire social realm. The Americans sought “to extend the ra-
tionality of the market, the schemes of analysis it offers and the decision-making cri-
teria it suggests, to domains which are not exclusively or not primarily economic: the
family and the birth rate, for example, or delinquency and penal policy” (BB, 323).
Government is also reconceived as an enterprise to be organized, operated, and sys-
tematically critiqued according to an “economic positivism” (BB, 247). Within the
reason of state of American neoliberalism, the role of government is defined by its
obligations to foster competition through the installation of market-based mechan-
isms for constraining and conditioning the actions of individuals, institutions, and
41
the population as a whole. In fact, the government’s ability to operate under the
cost-benefit rule of maximum economy while simultaneously “hard selling” this
“way of doing things” becomes its one and only criterion of legitimacy (BB, 318).
Another significant feature of neoliberalism is its explicit acknowledgment of
the fact that neither the market nor economic competition between individuals is a
natural reality with self-evident or intrinsic laws. Rather, the rationality of neolibe-
ralism consists of values and principles that must be actively instituted, maintained,
reassessed and, if need be, reinserted at all levels of society (BB, 120). While neoli-
beral governmentality seeks to minimize state power as much as possible, it also re-
cognizes that the market can only be kept viable through active governmental and
legal support. Likewise, it explicitly acknowledges that competition between indi-
viduals can only be fostered through social mechanisms that are exclusively en-
coded, ordered and reassessed by market values. The point here is that within the
rationality of neoliberal governmentality8 it is clear that Homo economicus or “eco-
nomic man” is not a natural being with predictable forms of conduct and ways of
behaving, but is instead a form of subjectivity that must be brought into being and
maintained through social mechanisms of subjectification. As I will illustrate below,
”economic man” is a subject that must be produced by way of forms of knowledge
and relations of power aimed at encouraging and reinforcing individual practices of
subjectivation.
III. Homo Economicus as Everyday Experience
Governing people is not a way to force people to do what the governor wants; it
is always a versatile equilibrium, with complementarity and conflicts between
techniques which assure coercion and processes through which the self is con-
structed or modified by himself. 9
Foucault’s analysis in The Birth of Biopolitics notes that one of the concerns of the neo-
liberals was with identifying the reasoning involved in leading an individual to de-
dicate his or her life’s finite capacities and limited resources toward pursuing one
goal or agenda rather than another. Referring to the work of the economist Gary
Becker, Foucault discussed the neoliberal theories of human capital and criminality,
both of which focus on economic principles of rationality for determining decision-
making processes and action. For example, instead of interpreting the wage earner
as an individual who is obliged to sell his or her labor power as an abstract commod-
ity, neoliberalism describes wages as income earned from the expenditure of ”hu-
8 Here and for the remainder of this article my discussion of “neoliberalism” will refer
primarily to the historical and contemporary American variant.
9 Michel Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at
Dartmouth,” Political Theory, 21, 2 (May 1993), 203-4.
42
man capital”, which consists of both an individual’s innate genetic qualities as well
as his or her acquired skills, abilities, tastes, and knowledge. This accumulated ”hu-
man capital” is interpreted as the result of prior and ongoing investments in goods
like education, nutrition, and training, as well as love and affection. In this recon-
struction of the wage earner, workers are no longer recognized as dependent on an
employer but instead are fashioned as free and autonomous entrepreneurs fully re-
sponsible for their presumably rational self-investment decisions. Foucault notes
that this definition of economics gives itself the task of analyzing a form of human
behavior in terms of its internal rationality. Economics is no longer viewed as the
analysis of processes but rather, as the analysis of “the strategic programming of in-
dividuals’ activity” (BB, 223). For Pierre Bourdieu, the institution of these new forms
of entrepreneurial activity has meant that levels of competition traditionally charac-
teristic of relations between businesses and corporations are now deeply entrenched
at the level of the workforce itself:
Competition is extended to individuals themselves, through the individualiza-

tion of the wage relationship: establishment of individual performance objec-
tives, individual performance evaluations, permanent evaluation, individual sal-
ary increases or granting of bonuses as a function of competence and of individ-
ual merit; individualized career paths; strategies of ‘delegating responsibility’
tending to ensure the self-exploitation of staff who, simple wage laborers in rela-
tions of strong hierarchical dependence, are at the same time held responsible for
their sales, their products, their branch, their store, etc. as though they were in-
dependent contractors. This pressure toward ‘self-control’ extends workers’ ‘in-
volvement’ according to the techniques of ‘participative management’ consider-
ably beyond management level. All of these are techniques of rational domina-
tion that impose over-involvement in work (and not only among management)
and work under emergency or high-stress conditions. And they converge to
weaken or abolish collective standards or solidarities. 10
Within the apparatus (dispositif) 11 of neoliberalism every individual is considered to

be “equally unequal”, as Foucault put it. Exploitation, domination, and every other
form of social inequality is rendered invisible as social phenomena to the extent that
each individual’s social condition is judged as nothing other than the effect of his or
her own choices and investments. As Wendy Brown has pointed out, Homo economi-
cus is constructed, not as a citizen who obeys rules, pursues common goods, and ad-
dresses problems it shares with others, but as a rational and calculating entrepreneur
10 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Essence of Neoliberalism,” translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro, Le

Monde diplomatique (December 1998),
http://mondediplo.com/1998/12/08bourdieu (accessed April 30, 2008).
11 Henceforth I will refer to this or that “apparatus,” insofar as I read Foucault’s term dispo-
sitif to indicate the set-ups or apparatuses of knowledge-power-subjectivity that condi-
tion, shape, and constrain our everyday actuality.
43
who is not only capable of, but also responsible for caring for him or herself. 12 Brown
points out that this has the effect of “depoliticizing social and economic powers” as
well as reducing “political citizenship to an unprecedented degree of passivity and
political complacency.” She writes:
The model neoliberal citizen is one who strategizes for her- or himself among
various social, political, and economic options, not one who strives with others to
alter or organize these options. A fully realized neoliberal citizenry would be the
opposite of public-minded; indeed, it would barely exist as a public. The body
politic ceases to be a body but is rather a group of individual entrepreneurs and
consumers . . . (E, 43).
Within this practically Hobbesian (anti-)social landscape the ”responsibility” of in-

dividuals constitutes a form of market morality 13 understood as the maximization of
economy through the autonomous rational deliberation of costs and benefits fol-
lowed by freely chosen practices. Neoliberal subjects are constituted as thoroughly
responsible for themselves and themselves alone because they are subjectified as
thoroughly autonomous and free. An individual’s failure to engage in the requisite
processes of subjectivation, or what neoliberalism refers to as a “mismanaged life”
(E, 42), is consequently due to the moral failure of that individual. Neoliberal ratio-
nality allows for the avoidance of any kind of collective, structural, or governmental
responsibility for such a life even as examples of it have been on the rise for a num-
ber of decades. Instead, impoverished populations, when recognized at all, are often
treated as ”opportunities” for investment. 14
On June 15, 2006 the UN released a report, “State of the World’s Cities
2006/7,” on the alarming worldwide growth of urban slum dwellers. 15 The report
12 See Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays On Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2005). Henceforth, E, with page numbers given in the text.
13 I use the term “morality” here in the formal sense used by Foucault. Generally speaking
it is the code (or codes) that determines which acts are permitted or forbidden and the
values attributed to those acts. These codes inform the ethical relationship one has to
one’s self. See Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in
Progress,” in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism
and Hermeneutics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 237-8. Henceforth,
OGE, with page numbers given in the text.
14 We see this, for example, in the high interest rates increasingly attached to micro-credit
issued to poor “entrepreneurs” in the developing world. Viewing poverty as an invest
ment opportunity also frequently leads to other problems such as forced evictions when
lands are appropriated for commercial development. Examples of this can be found eve-
rywhere from New Orleans to Nairobi.
15 The full report “State of the World’s Cities 2006/7” press release, and other related docu-
44
estimated that by the year 2007 the majority of human beings would, for the first
time ever, be living in cities. One third of those city dwellers, that is one billion of
them, will live in slums. The report also projected that the growth in slum popula-
tions will amount to twenty-seven million people per year—an increase that will
continue for at least the next two decades. In 1996 one hundred and seventy-six
leaders from around the world met at the World Food Summit and pledged to cut
the number of undernourished and starving people in half within twenty years. 16
Over a decade later, the number of people going hungry around the world has in-
creased by eighteen million, bringing the worldwide total to eight hundred and fifty-
two million, with an average of six million children dying of hunger each year. In
the United States, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of homeless in-
dividuals in the last twenty-five years, attributable mainly to an increase in poverty
and a growing shortage of affordable rental housing. 17 Although the nature of home-
lessness makes it difficult to obtain accurate and timely statistics, it is estimated that
an average 3.5 million people experience homelessness annually with the fastest
growing segment of this population being families with children. As of 2003 the
number of homeless who are children under the age of 18 is nearly 40%. In New
York City children constitute nearly half of the homeless population while children
and their families make up 75% of the total. And although we sometimes hear of
employment figures going up across the United States, so too has the number of
working poor and those forced to work multiple jobs without adequate healthcare
and other benefits.
The neoliberal approach to dealing with growing poverty, unemployment,
and homelessness is not simply to ignore it, but to impose punitive judgments
through the moralizing effects of its political rationality. For example, the former
Commissioner of the NYC Department of Homeless Services, Linda Gibbs famously
vowed to “change the meaning of homelessness” by emphasizing “better manage-
ment” and “client responsibility.”18 “My expectation” she stated “is that you can ac-
tually manage this in a way that people change their behavior.” Of course, what
never factors into this construction of “client responsibility” are any of the structural
constraints imposed by the city’s endemic social problems, such as unfair housing
practices or the lack of adequate education and employment opportunities. Instead,
ments can be accessed in PDF format at the UN-HABITAT webpage: http://hq. unhabi-
tat.org/content.asp?cid=3397&catid=7&typeid=46&sub MenuId=0 (accessed April 30,
2008). I have not found an updated version of this report at the time of this writing.
16 See Phillip Thornton’s article, “More are Hungry Despite World Leaders’ Pledge,” The
Independent/UK, October 16, 2006.
17 All statistics, facts, and figures on homelessness are taken from the National Coalition for
the Homeless publications website:
http:://www.nationalhomeless.org/publications/facts.htm (accessed April 30, 2008).
18 Linda Gibbs, as quoted by Robert Kolker in his January 6, 2003 New York magazine ar-
ticle: “Home for the Holidays.”
45
one of the Commissioner’s greatest concerns, as she put it, was that “the city has to
be careful that people don’t abuse the system.” Another example of punitive subjec-
tification is the criminalization of homelessness. A joint report issued at the begin-
ning of the year in 2006 by the National Coalition for the Homeless and The National
Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty described the growing practice of crimina-
lizing the homeless in urban America even while homelessness increases and cities
are consistently unable to meet the heightened demand for more shelters. As the re-
port indicates:
An unfortunate trend in cities around the country over the past 25 years has been
to turn to the criminal justice system to respond to people living in public spaces.
This trend includes measures that target homeless people by making it illegal to
perform life-sustaining activities in public. These measures prohibit activities
such as sleeping/camping, eating, sitting, and begging in public spaces, usually
including criminal penalties for violating these laws.
In a nation with the highest worldwide rate of incarceration of its citizens, this
means increased profits for the corporate owned prison industry.19 Treated as crimi-
nals by the police for their desperate efforts to keep themselves alive, the homeless,
who are arguably the most vulnerable segment of the population, have more and
more frequently found themselves the target of violent attacks that have resulted in
injuries and in many cases death. 20 A report by the NCH in 2005 found that in a re-
cent period of four years, homeless deaths had increased by 67% while non-lethal
attacks increased by 281%. Living and dying in accord with the neoliberal rule of
maximum economy, the homeless find themselves subject to the harshest and cruel-
est effects of its domestic governance. They are the disowned of the ownership socie-
ty. Neoliberalism’s rationality treats criminality in a manner that departs from pre-
vious “disciplinary” (human or social science-based) analyses of crime. Here again,
the criminal is subjectified as a free, autonomous, and rationally calculating subject
who weighs the uncertain risk of having to pay a cost in the form of punishment
against the generally more certain benefits of crime. As the story goes, Gary Becker
hit upon this notion one day when he was confronted with the choice of either park-
ing his car illegally, and thereby risking getting a ticket, or parking legally in an in-
convenient spot. After carefully calculating his options he opted for the former
‘criminal’ choice. As Becker himself has pointed out, this rational choice approach to
criminality fails to acknowledge any significant difference between a murder and a
19 See the February 29, 2008 Washington Post article “New High in U.S. Prison Numbers,”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/story/2008/02/28/ST2008022803016.htm
l (accessed April 30, 2008).
20 See the press release entitled: “Hate Crimes and Violence Against Homeless People In-
creasing,”
http://www.nationalhomeless.org/hatecrimes/pressrelease.html (accessed April 30, 2008).
46
parking offence. Or, at best, and since crime is identified as “any action that makes
the individual run the risk of being condemned by a penalty” (BB, 251), the differ-
ence between committing a murder and parking illegally is nothing other than the
kind of penalty one risks incurring. In its attempt to displace legal judgments in fa-
vor of economic ones, this approach to human behavior rules out any possibility for
an ethical evaluation of actions that would extend beyond simply judging them as
unfortunate miscalculations in light of what is expedient.
IV. Foucault and Neoliberalism Today–Three Concerns
While quite a number of scholars and critics have used Foucault’s ”toolbox” to great
advantage in describing and analyzing many of the same trends I have discussed
above, 21 a number of questions have been raised about the viability or effectiveness
of doing so. I will briefly describe three of what I take to be the most significant con-
cerns here as a means toward developing my own attempts to address them, albeit
somewhat indirectly, in the remainder of this paper.
The first concern is that the use of the concept of neoliberalism as a descrip-
tive term in a critical analysis of contemporary society might be ”insufficiently ge-
nealogical”. 22 That is, it seems to claim a bird’s-eye view of things, it tends to gene-
ralize too much, and it consequently moves too quickly in reaching conclusions. In
other words, it risks bypassing the kind of patient and detailed genealogical analyses
that would give us insightful descriptions of the specific local forms of power and
knowledge that are to be found at work in our everyday lives. I have already gone
some way towards offering empirical descriptions of contemporary experiences that
reflect neoliberal governmentality at work. In the next section I will offer a brief ge-
nealogy of neoliberalism that begins by noting the specificity of Foucault’s own
analysis within an examination of liberalism as the framework of intelligibility of
biopolitics.
A second and closely related concern is that by focusing on neoliberalism’s
economization of society and responsibilization of individuals some critics have mis-
takenly offered it up as a new paradigm of power that would supersede older forms
just as disciplinary power is sometimes mistakenly thought to have entirely replaced
21 In addition to Wendy Brown, cited above, see for example Jeffrey T. Nealon’s Foucault
Beyond Foucault: Power and its Intensifications Since 1984 (Stanford, CA: Stanford Universi-
ty Press, 2008), and the work of Nikolas Rose, in particular his Powers of Freedom: Refram-
ing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
22 While he does not raise the problem specifically in relation to neoliberalism, Todd May
expresses a similar concern about the use of the concept of ”globalization” to describe
our present. See his article “Foucault Now?” in Foucault Studies, 3 (November 2005). Also
see the last chapter, “Are we still who Foucault says we are?” in his book The Philosophy
of Foucault (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 132-59.
47
sovereign power in one great historical shift. 23 Careful readers know that Foucault
warned against making this kind of mistake by indicating the complex ways in
which different forms of power have co-existed and complimented one another. 24
One can point, for example, to the alarming explosion of U.S. prison populations and
the worldwide escalation of the use of surveillance technologies as contemporary
manifestations of disciplinary and panoptic forms of power. Likewise the open ac-
knowledgment of the use of torture by the U.S. government can be recognized as
one of the signal characteristics of sovereign power. In the next section I will offer
examples of the presence of sovereign, disciplinary, and panoptic forms of power in
neoliberal governmentality while also noting what I find to be significant differences
or modifications.
A third and final concern is that Foucault’s emphasis on the care of the self
and aesthetics of existence in his later works lends itself quite nicely to neoliberal-
ism’s aim of producing free and autonomous individuals concerned with cultivating
themselves in accord with various practices of the self (education, healthy lifestyle,
the desire to compete, etc.). 25 That is, Homo economicus is a good example of Foucaul-
dian self-fashioning. Consequently, one might conclude that, rather than contribut-
ing toward a critical analysis of neoliberalism, Foucault’s work on self-care and
technologies of the self at best provides us with no useful tools for doing so, or
worse, actually provides a kind of technical support manual for the neoliberal agen-
da of recoding society and its subjects. Indeed we might be mistaken to read Fou-
cault as critical of neoliberalism at all. It could be that his sole interest in it was as a
historically situated critical alternative to the biopolitical model of the welfare state.
In this regard he might even have been a somewhat naive advocate of neoliberalism,
for all we know. In the genealogy that follows I will give particular attention to the
history of Homo economicus because of its central place in neoliberal governmentality.
I have already described how neoliberalism encourages individuals to engage in
23 Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg locate this problem in much of Anglo-Saxon go-
vernmentality theory [FF]. Nancy Fraser has described disciplinary power as a ”Fordist
mode of social regulation” that is no longer very useful for describing contemporary so-
ciety. See her article “From Discipline to Flexibilization? Rereading Foucault in the Sha-
dow of Globalization,” in Constellations, 10, 2 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 160-
71.
24 During a discussion of Rousseau in his lecture of February 1, 1978 Foucault suggests:
“…we should not see things as the replacement of a society of sovereignty by a society of
discipline, and then of a society of discipline by a society, say, of government. In fact we
have a triangle: sovereignty, discipline, and governmental management…” (STP, 107).
25 Jeffrey T. Nealon’s Foucault Beyond Foucault offers a characterization of this prevalent but
mistaken reading in which “the late Foucaultian turn to the self-creating subject and its
artistic agency can only remind us of present-day American military recruiting posters
(‘Become an Army of One’) or the corporate slogan of Microsoft: ‘Where would you like
to go today?’” (p. 11).
48
self-forming practices of subjectivation through processes of social subjectification.

In the last section of my paper I will discuss the possibility of recognizing and in-
venting other forms of subjectivation that critique and resist neoliberal subjectifica-
tion.
V. A Brief Genealogy of Neo-Liberalism
I begin this section by establishing a few points for consideration. The first is that the
question as to whether Foucault thought neoliberalism was a good thing or a bad
thing seems to me to be misguided for two reasons. His analyses of governmentality
sought, to a large extent, to analyze historical relations between power, knowledge,
and subjectivity in order to better understand the present, to identify its dangers,
and to perhaps locate possible opportunities for critical resistance. The judgment
”good” or ”bad” is something I am sure he would have refused in this context as he
consistently did in many others. In addition, if it can be argued that the way many of
us think, act, and speak has, over the past couple of decades, become increasingly
shaped in a manner consistent with the articulations of neoliberal governmentality,
this is nothing Foucault could have anticipated nearly twenty-five years ago. We
cannot know what he would have thought of the actuality of our present. What we
do know is that Foucault found neoliberalism important enough to examine and dis-
cuss it in his 1978-79 lectures at far greater length than he had originally planned
(BB, 185). Although neoliberalism has frequently been used as one of the ”tools”
Foucault offers, perhaps it is not always the case that enough attention is given to his
own treatment of it. We should bear in mind that his discussion of it occurs within
the context of an analysis of liberalism as “the general framework” or “condition of
intelligibility” of biopolitics (BB, 327-8). In fact, at the end of his first lecture on Janu-
ary 10th, he suggested that: “only when we know what this governmental regime
called liberalism was, will we be able to grasp what biopolitics is” (BB, 18). Consider-
ing this analytical framework we might pause for a moment over the ”neo” of neoli-
beralism. A genealogical approach should perhaps first seek to establish its possible
links with some of the older disciplinary and panoptic forms of power described by
Foucault as constituting the history of our present.
Many of the contemporary practices that can be defined in terms of neolibe-
ralism have historical precedents that we can locate in Foucault’s archaeologi-
cal/genealogical analyses. It is hard to argue with those who would point to today’s
exploding prison populations, the use of prison labor and the training of both stu-
dents and prisoners in ”entrepreneurialism”, 26 the replacement of welfare with
26 See, for example, the transcript of the PBS News Hour report aired January 15, 2007 on
the NIFTY programs at a Providence, Rhode Island high school and the Rikers Island jail
facility.
49
workfare, the pervasive use of surveillance, training, and testing, etc. as instances of
the contemporary manifestation of something that appears to be disciplinary power.
For example, as was true in ”the great confinement” described by Foucault in Mad-
ness and Civilization, 27 the present incarceration of unprecedented numbers of the
population in the U.S. is not simply a negative act of exclusion aimed at protecting
and preserving a pre-given social order. Rather, it is a positive means of producing
certain kinds of subjects in accord with a certain biopolitical apparatus implemented
by the police (understood here in the broad governmental sense of the term used
during the eighteenth century as outlined by Foucault) 28 with the aim of producing a
certain kind of social order. What may be unique about neoliberal forms of punish-
ment is that they recognize a certain continuum between those subjects who are in-
carcerated and those who are not. Whereas the Hôpital Général described by Fou-
cault served to constitute a division between normal and pathological subjects, neo-
liberal governmentality aims toward producing something like a graduated social
plane by constituting all subjects as ”equally unequal”. Incarcerated or not, all neoli-
beral subjects are presumed ”equal” and ”free”. Social divisions no doubt exist, in-
deed many of them (such as economic disparity) have been increasing steadily, but
as we have seen, neoliberalism attributes those divisions to failures of individual
choice and responsibility. When Foucault discusses the neoliberal conception of cri-
minality, he concludes, “there is an anthropological erasure of the criminal” and
“what appears on the horizon of this kind of analysis is not at the ideal or project of
an exhaustively disciplinary society in which the legal network hemming in indi-
viduals is taken over and extended internally by, let’s say, normative mechanisms”
(BB, 258-9). In contrast to traditional forms of disciplinary power, these contempo-
rary instances posit a continuum that begins with a conception of individuals as al-
ready rationally calculating, individualized atoms of self-interest. Once those prin-
ciples are incorporated within governing institutions, social relations, academic dis-
ciplines, the workplace, and professional organizational policies, individuals are en-
couraged and compelled to fashion themselves (their practices, understanding, and
manner of speaking) according to its rules, often out of practical necessity. On the
other hand it seems that a number of Foucault’s descriptions of nineteenth-century
society and government find echoes in contemporary society, such as docile bodies
being subject to continuous training and judgment, or the poor being criminalized
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education/jan-june07/entrepreneurs_01-15.html (ac-
cessed April 30, 2008).
27 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans-
lated by Richard Howard (New York: Random House, 1965), 38-64.
28 Michel Foucault, “The Political Technology of Individuals,” in Luther H. Martin, Huck
Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (eds.), Technologies of the Self (Amherst, MA: The Univer-
sity of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 145-62. Henceforth, PTI, with page numbers given in
the text. Foucault explains here that: “The police govern not by the law but by a specific,
a permanent, and a positive intervention in the behavior of individuals” (p. 159).
50
and cast out of the cities. It does not require much imagination to hear in Bourdieu’s
description of today’s entrepreneurial work culture, quoted above, a repetition of
Foucault’s description of one of the effects of panopticism:
The efficiency of power, its constraining force have, in a sense, passed over to the
other side—to the side of its surface of application. He who is subjected to a field
of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of
power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself
the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the
principle of his own subjection. 29
We find significant precedents such as this one in the past, but, as Bourdieu makes
clear, the new values promulgated in this contemporary form of panopticism are ex-
clusively entrepreneurial ones. We find here no references to traditional Christian
morality or descriptions of ”idleness” as a sin. If the panopticon as described by
Foucault was a vast experiment using various techniques in order to find what
worked best, today’s corporate work environments may very well be one of a num-
ber of practical applications of its results. If one of the effects of panopticism is to
produce free subjects, then the critical issue is not so much a matter of liberating in-
dividuals from this or that constraint, but rather examining the apparatuses within
which subjects are conditioned and constrained as free subjects. The workers de-
scribed by Bourdieu, the homeless who are treated as both ”clients” and criminals,
those who are poor due to their own ”mismanagement” and those citizens described
by Brown who can strategize for themselves among available options but play no
role in determining those options—they are all free. But their freedom is shaped,
conditioned, and constrained within a form of subjectification characterized by in-
creasing competition and social insecurity. It is an apparatus that produces only cer-
tain kinds of freedom understood in terms of a specific notion of self-interest, while
effectively preempting other possible kinds of freedom and forms of self-interest (in-
cluding various collective, communal, and public forms of self-interest) that neces-
sarily appear as impolitic, unprofitable, inexpedient and the like. Rather than
representing a new paradigm of power, neoliberalism perhaps constitutes a sove-
reign-disciplinary-governmental triangle of power.
Turning again to Homo economicus, who might best be described as the subject
who would be ”the principle of his own subjection” because of the conditions of his
environment, we recognize that this prescribed form of subjectivity also has its his-
torical precedents within the biopolitics of liberalism. In his article “The Ethology of
Homo Economicus” Joseph Persky traces the original use of the term Homo economicus
29 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan
(New York: Random House, 1979), 202-3.
51
to the late nineteenth century. 30 There he locates the term in a series of critical res-
ponses to John Stuart Mill’s work on political economy, in particular his 1836 essay
“On the Definition of Political Economy; and on the Method of Investigation Proper
to It.” 31 There and in later writings Mill made use of an abstract hypothetical human
subject useful for the purpose of economic analysis. Mill himself never used the
term, and so “economic man” first came into being as a satirical rebuke to what was
caricatured as Mill’s “money-making animal,” an imaginary being who was only
interested in the selfish accumulation of wealth. In fairness to Mill, his actual de-
scription of this self-interested man also included the desire for luxury, leisure, and
procreation. Interestingly, the problem of labor didn’t enter into this picture except
insofar as he was concerned that the presumably natural desire to avoid work and
give one’s self over to costly indulgences threatened to hinder the accumulation of
wealth. Rational calculation, a central feature of today’s Homo economicus was, of
course, also absent. Persky notes that Mill’s approach was basically laissez-faire but
that he also introduced ownership and profit sharing as motivating factors. While
he sometimes treated Homo economicus as something of a natural being, he was also
aware that the constitution of individual preferences, passions, and the overall de-
velopment of character needed to be studied through a “political ethology.” As
Persky explains:
Strictly speaking, Mill viewed efforts to analyze the development of character as

the proper task of ethology, a science he placed logically subsequent to elementa-
ry psychology. Ethology, according to Mill, was that science ‘which determines
the kind of character produced in conformity to those general laws [of psycholo-
gy], by any set of circumstances, physical and moral’. In terms of Mill’s grander
scheme of sciences and arts, ethology (like political economy) produced axiomata
media, or middle-level theory—logically precise deductions from admittedly
shaky first principles that then could be applied in useful arts. Thus, the art cor-
responding to ethology was ‘education’, or what today might be called ‘character
building’ (EHE, 226).
While this brief example is no substitute for a thorough genealogy of Homo economi-
cus, Mill’s interest in this ”art” of ”character building” is a provocative indication
that while the political rationality of classical liberalism may have appealed to ”na-
ture” and the “human propensity to ‘truck and barter’” (E, 41), it was also concerned
with the governmental problem of the conduct of conduct. 32 What Persky is describ-
30 Joseph Persky, “The Ethology of Homo Economicus,” Journal of Economic Perspectives. 9, 2

(Spring 1995), 221-31. Henceforth, EHE, with page numbers given in the text.
31 John Stuart Mill, “On the Definition of Political Economy; and on the Method of Investi-
gation Proper to It,” in Collected Works. vol. 4 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967),
120-64.
32 Here I am in at least partial disagreement with Wendy Brown when she suggests that, in
52
ing in this article is Mill’s interest in a technology of subjectification. Specifically, he

finds in Mill an inquiry into the techniques made available through various forms of
scientific knowledge for producing a certain form of subjectivity with a certain ethos
to serve the interests of political economy. Homo economicus, in other words, is histor-
ically introduced as a modern subject of governmentality, a biopolitical subject of
power/knowledge.
Foucault describes the classical version of Homo economicus as ”the man of ex-
change”. He appears as a figure that must be analyzed in terms of a utilitarian
theory of needs. His manner of behavior and mode of being must be broken down
and analyzed in terms of his needs, which lead him to engage in a utilitarian process
of exchange (BB, 224). By contrast, in neoliberalism, Homo economicus is no longer a
partner in exchange but instead is fashioned as “an entrepreneur and an entrepre-
neur of himself.” As such he is his own capital, his own producer, and the source of
his own earnings. Even in terms of consumption (and here again Foucault refers di-
rectly to Becker) the neoliberal Homo economicus is recognized as a producer of his
own satisfaction. In place of all the old sociological analyses of mass consumerism
and consumer society, consumption itself becomes an entrepreneurial activity ana-
lyzable solely in terms of the individual subject who is now recognized as one
among many productive enterprise-units (BB, 225). Insofar as the enterprising indi-
vidual is not directly subject to disciplinary and normalizing forms of power, neoli-
beralism is more ”tolerant” of difference. Instead, society is to be arranged such that
it can be divided or broken down not in terms of the ”grain” of individuals, but ac-
cording to the ”grain” of enterprises.
Foucault demonstrated that, from its origins, biopolitics has constituted mod-
ern subjects in empirically verifiable scientific and economic terms. Discipline and
Punish provides detailed accounts of the training of individuals with imperatives of
expedience, efficiency, and economy. It also illustrates the importance of constant
surveillance and examination as the subject moves from one institutional space to
another. As I have illustrated above, Foucault’s analysis of panopticism describes
how the disciplined biopolitical subject is made to internalize particular forms of re-
sponsibility for him- or herself through practices of subjectivation. One of the tasks
required for producing genealogies of neoliberalism and Homo economicus is to iden-
tify the specific forms of knowledge that both inform and are produced by neoliberal
practices, both individual and institutional. If the historical forms of disciplinary
contrast to classical economic liberalism, “neoliberalism does not conceive of either the
market itself or rational economic behavior as purely natural” (E, 41). She is right about
neoliberalism but I am not sure this feature distinguishes it from classical liberalism.
First and most importantly, liberalism is explicitly an art of governing concerned with the
conduct of conduct despite its appeals to “nature”. Second, neoliberalism also has the ef-
fect of making competition among individuals appear “natural” or a matter of ”common
sense” as a result of its active interventions in the social realm.
53
power and subjectivation made use of the human and social sciences and related
disciplines (psychology, anthropology, political science, pedagogy, etc.), a study
must be made into the forms of knowledge that presumably have either taken their
place or infiltrated them. The most obvious development in this regard would be the
extent to which rational choice theory, the lynchpin of contemporary Homo economi-
cus, has made its way into the various disciplines from micro-economics to sociolo-
gy, political science, and philosophy. As Foucault put it in his last lecture from 1979:
Hence there is a new problem, the transition to a new form of rationality to

which the regulation of government is pegged. It is now a matter not of model-
ing government on the rationality of the individual sovereign who can say ‘me,
the state’, [but] on the rationality of those who are governed as economic subjects
and, more generally, as subjects of interest in the most general sense of the term
[BB, 312].
VI. Ethics and Critical Resistance
[T]here is no first or final point of resistance to political power other than in the
relationship of self to self. 33
Whether neoliberalism will ultimately be viewed as having presented a radically

new form of governmentality or just a set of variations on classical liberalism, we
can certainly recognize that there are a number of characteristics in contemporary
practices that are new in the history of governmentality, a number of which I’ve al-
ready discussed. Another one of these outstanding features is the extent to which the
imposition of market values has pushed towards the evisceration of any autonomy
that may previously have existed among economic, political, legal, and moral dis-
courses, institutions, and practices. Foucault notes, for example, that in the sixteenth
century jurists were able to posit the law in a critical relation to the reason of state in
order to put a check on the sovereign power of the king. By contrast, neoliberalism,
at least in its most utopian formulations, is the dream of a perfectly limitless (as op-
posed perhaps to totalizing) and all-encompassing (as opposed to exclusionary and
normalizing) form of governance that would effectively rule out all challenge or op-
position. This seems to be the kind of thing that Margaret Thatcher was dreaming
about when she claimed that there is “no alternative”. 34 Such formulations of what
might be called “hyper-capitalism” seem to lend themselves to certain traditional
forms of criticism. However, critical analyses that produce a totalizing conception of
33 Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981-82,
translated by Graham Burchell, edited by Frédéric Gros (New York: Palgrave MacMillan,
2005), 252. Henceforth, THS, with page numbers given in the text.
34 This comment was made at a press conference for American correspondents in No. 10
Downing Street in London on June 25, 1980.
54
power and domination risk the same danger, noted above, of overlooking the some-
times subtle and complex formations of power and knowledge that can be revealed
through genealogical analyses of local practices. Important for any genealogical
analysis is the recognition that, while there is no ”outside” in relation to power, re-
sistance and power are coterminous, fluid, and, except in instances of domination,
reversible. There is an echo of this formulation in Foucault’s understanding of go-
vernmentality as ”the conduct of conduct”. Governmentality is not a matter of a
dominant force having direct control over the conduct of individuals; rather, it is a
matter of trying to determine the conditions within or out of which individuals are
able to freely conduct themselves. And we can see how this is especially true in the
case of neoliberalism insofar as it is society itself and not the individual that is the
direct object of power. Foucault provides examples of this in “The Subject and Pow-
er”, in which he discussed a number of struggles of resistance that have developed
over the past few years such as “opposition to the power of men over women, of
parents over children, of psychiatry over the mentally ill, of medicine over the popu-
lation, of administration over the ways people live”. 35 Despite their diversity, these
struggles were significant for Foucault because they share a set of common points
that allow us to recognize them as forms of resistance to governmentality, that is,
”critique”. Through the examples he uses Foucault notes the local and immediate
nature of resistance. These oppositional struggles focus on the effects of power expe-
rienced by those individuals who are immediately subject to them. Despite the fact
that these are local, anarchistic forms of resistance, Foucault points out that they are
not necessarily limited to one place but intersect with struggles going on elsewhere.
Of greatest importance is the fact that these struggles are critical responses to con-
temporary forms of governmentality, specifically the administrative techniques of
subjectification used to shape individuals in terms of their free conduct. 36 These
struggles question the status of the individual in relation to community life, in terms
of the forms of knowledge and instruments of judgment used to determine the
”truth” of individuals, and in relation to the obfuscation of the real differences that
make individuals irreducibly individual beings.
Tying all of these modes of resistance together is the question “Who are we?”
While some might be concerned about exactly who this we is suggested by Foucault,
both here and in his discussions of Kant and enlightenment, I think the question is in
some ways its own answer. In other words, it is meant to remain an ongoing critical
question that can never be definitively answered, or, as John Rajchman has sug-
gested, it is a question that can only be answered by those who ask it and through
35 Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Mi-
chel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1983), 211. Henceforth, TSP, with page numbers given in the text.
36 As Foucault put it: “Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they
are free” (TSP, 221).
55
the process of asking it. In his introduction to The Politics of Truth he writes:
The ‘we’ always comes after, emerging only through the on-going light its activi-
ties shed on the habits and practices through which people come to govern
themselves—and so see themselves and one another. Indeed in this lies precisely
the originality of the critical attitude, its singular sort of universality, its distinc-
tive relation to ‘today’—to ‘now’, ‘the present’, l’actuel. 37
This ”critical attitude” that Foucault repeatedly refers to in all of his discussions of
Kant from the 1970’s and 1980’s is inseparable from both his analysis of governmen-
tality and his discussions of ethics and the history of the experience of the relation-
ship between the subject and truth. What fascinated Foucault about the ”care of the
self” he discovered in Greek and Roman ethics was the ”spiritual” relationship that
existed between the subject and truth. In order to gain access to the truth, that is, in
order to acquire the ”right” to the truth, individuals had to take care of themselves
by engaging in certain self-transformative practices or ascetic exercises. Here we find
critical and resistant forms of subjectivation where, rather than objectifying them-
selves within a given discourse of power/knowledge, individuals engaged in prac-
tices of freedom that allowed them to engage in ethical parrhesia or speak truth to
power. In modernity, however, following what Foucault identified as ”the Cartesian
moment” the principle ”take care of yourself” has been replaced by the imperative
to “know yourself” [THS, 1 - 24]. In contemporary life that which gives an individual
access to the truth is knowledge and knowledge alone, including knowledge of one’s
self. In this context knowledge of the self is not something produced through the
work individuals perform on themselves, rather it is something given through dis-
ciplines such as biology, medicine, and the social sciences. These modern forms of
knowledge, of course, become crucial to the emerging biopolitical forms of govern-
mentality. Whereas individuals were once urged to take care of themselves by using
self-reflexive ethical techniques to give form to their freedom, modern biopolitics
ensures that individuals are already taken care of in terms of biological and econom-
ic forms of knowledge and practices. As Edward F. McGushin puts it in his book
Foucault’s Askesis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life,
Power functions by investing, defining, and caring for the body understood as a
bioeconomic entity. The operation of biopower is to define the freedom and truth
of the individual in economic and biological terms. Reason is given the task of
comprehending the body in these terms and setting the conditions within which
it can be free. ...The formation of the disciplines marks the moment where askesis
itself was absorbed within biopolitics. 38
37 John Rajchman, “Introduction: Enlightenment Today,” in Sylvère Lotringer (ed.) The Poli-
tics of Truth (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2007), 14-5.
38 Edward F. McGushin, Foucault’s Askesis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life (Evanston,
56
Foucault explicitly identified critique, not as a transcendental form of judgment that

would subsume particulars under a general rule, but as a specifically modern ”atti-
tude” that can be traced historically as the constant companion of pastoral power
and governmentality. As Judith Butler points out in her article “What is Critique?
An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue”, 39 critique is an attitude, distinct from judgment, pre-
cisely because it expresses a skeptical or questioning approach to the rules and ra-
tionalities that serve as the basis for judgment within a particular form of gover-
nance. From its earliest formations, Foucault tells us, the art of government has al-
ways relied upon certain relations to truth: truth as dogma, truth as an individualiz-
ing knowledge of individuals, and truth as a reflective technique comprising general
rules, particular knowledge, precepts, methods of examination, confessions, inter-
views, etc. And while critique has at times played a role within the art of government
itself, as we’ve seen in the case of both liberalism and neoliberalism, it has also made
possible what Foucault calls “the art of not being governed, or better, the art of not
being governed like that and at that cost” (WC, 45). Critique is neither a form of ab-
stract theoretical judgment nor a matter of outright rejection or condemnation of
specific forms of governance. Rather it is a practical and agonistic engagement, re-
engagement, or disengagement with the rationalities and practices that have led one
to become a certain kind of subject. In his essay “What is Enlightenment?” Foucault
suggests that this modern attitude is a voluntary choice made by certain people, a
way of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of be-
longing and presents itself as a task. 40 Its task amounts to a “historical investigation
into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as
subjects of what we are doing, thinking, [and] saying” (WE, 125). But how can we
distinguish the kinds of resistance Foucault was interested in from the endless calls
to ”do your own thing” or ”be all you can be” that stream forth in every direction
from political campaigns to commercial advertising? How is it, to return to the last
of the three concerns raised above, that Foucault does not simply lend technical sup-
port to neoliberal forms of subjectivation? On the one hand, we can distinguish criti-
cal acts of resistance and ethical self-fashioning from what Foucault called ”the Cali-
fornian cult of the self” (OGE, 245), that is, the fascination with techniques designed
to assist in discovering one’s ”true” or ”authentic” self, or the merely ”cosmetic”
forms of rebellion served up for daily consumption and enjoyment. On the other
hand we might also be careful not to dismiss forms of self-fashioning as ”merely”
IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 239.

39 The Political: Readings in Continental Philosophy edited by David Ingram (London: Basil
Blackwell, 2002).
40 Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in The Politics of Truth, edited by Sylvère Lo-
tringer (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 1997), 113. Henceforth, WE, with page numbers
given in the text.
57
aesthetic. As Timothy O’Leary points out in his book Foucault and the Art of Ethics,
Foucault’s notion of an aesthetics of existence countered the modern conception of
art as a singular realm that is necessarily autonomous from the social, political, and
ethical realms, at least as it pertained to his question of why it is that a lamp or a
house can be a work of art, but not a life. O’Leary writes:
Foucault is less interested in the critical power of art, than in the ‘artistic’ or ‘plas-
tic’ power of critique. For Foucault, not only do no special advantages accrue
from the autonomy of the aesthetic, but this autonomy unnecessarily restricts our
possibilities for self-constitution. Hence, not only is Foucault aware of the specif-
ic nature of aesthetics after Kant, he is obviously hostile to it. 41
What O’Leary rightly identifies here is Foucault’s interest in an aesthetics of exis-

tence that specifically stands in a critical but immanent relation to the ways in which
our individuality is given to us in advance through ordered practices and forms of
knowledge that determine the truth about us. The issue is not a matter of how we
might distinguish “authentic” forms of resistance (whatever that might mean) from
“merely” aesthetic ones. Rather it is a matter of investigating whether or not the
practices we engage in either reinforce or resist the manner in which our freedom—
how we think, act, and speak—has been governed in ways that are limiting and into-
lerable. In short, critical resistance offers possibilities for an experience of de-
subjectification. Specifically in relation to neoliberal forms of governmentality, this
would involve resisting, avoiding, countering or opposing not only the ways in
which we’ve been encouraged to be little more than self-interested subjects of ra-
tional choice (to the exclusion of other ways of being and often at the expense of
those “irresponsible” others who have “chosen” not to amass adequate amounts of
human capital), but also the ways in which our social environments, institutions,
communities, work places, and forms of political engagement have been reshaped in
order to foster the production of Homo economicus. Endless examples of this kind of
work can be found in many locations, from the international anti-globalization
movement to local community organizing.
It may be too early to determine the viability of neoliberalism as a form of
governmentality and “grid of intelligibility” for thinking about our present, particu-
larly as it continues to coexist with other more disciplinary and normalizing forms of
power/knowledge/subjectivity. Certainly it seems to have expanded and become
more prevalent than when Foucault analyzed it in the late 1970’s. In any case, the
proof will be in our practices, that is, a better understanding will emerge by attend-
ing to our everyday activities, what we say and how we think, our commitments
and obligations as well as the kinds of truths about ourselves we rely upon and rein-
force in the process of doing so. Critical attention should continue to be paid to how
41 Timothy O’Leary, Foucault and the Art of Ethics (London: Continuum, 2002), 129.
58
neoliberal forms of governmentality continue to reinforce and expand Homo economi-

cus as a form of subjectivation that can be directly linked to greater wealth disparity
and increasing poverty, environmental degradation, the evaluation and legitimation
of governance through market values alone, growing rates of incarceration, the in-
creasing intervention of private corporate values and interests into our everyday
lives, the disappearance of the public square and an increase in the political disen-
franchisement of citizens. All of this might best be attended to while bearing in mind
Foucault’s cautionary suggestion that “People know what they do; they frequently
know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do
does.” 42
42 Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, ”Power and Truth” in Michel Foucault: Beyond
Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), 187.
59
 Sam Binkley 2009
ISSN: 1832-5203
ARTICLE
The Work of Neoliberal Governmentality:

Temporality and Ethical Substance in the Tale of Two Dads
Sam Binkley, Emerson College
ABSTRACT: This paper considers debates around the neoliberal governmentality,

and argues for the need to better theorize the specific ethical practices through
which such programs of governmentality are carried out. Arguing that much theo-
retical and empirical work in this area is prone to a “top down” approach, in which
governmentality is reduced to an imposing apparatus through which subjectivities
are produced, it argues instead for the need to understand the self-production of
subjectivities by considering the ethical practices that make up neoliberal govern-
mentality. Moreover, taking Robert T. Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad/Poor Dad as an illustra-
tive case, the point is made that the work of neoliberal governmentality specifically
targets the temporalities of conduct, in an attempt to shape temporal orientations in
a more entrepreneurial form. Drawing on Foucault’s lecture courses on liberalism
and neoliberalism, and Jacques Donzelot’s work on the social, the case is made that
neoliberal governmentality exhorts individuals to act upon the residual social tem-
poralities that persist as a trace in the dispositions of neoliberal subjects. Moreover,
the paper concludes with a discussion of the potentials for resistance in this relation,
understood as temporal counter-conducts within neoliberalism.
Key words: neoliberalism, governmentality, temporality, the social, Foucault, Don-

zelot, counter-conduct.
Every day with every dollar, you choose to be rich, poor or middle class. 1
Rich Dad Poor Dad is a best selling book on financial advice written by Robert T.
Kiyosaki. Originally self-published in 1997 as supporting material for Kiyosaki’s fi-
1 Robert T. Kiyosaki, Rich Dad/Poor Dad, (New York: Business Plus, 2000), 197.
60
Binkley: The Work of Neoliberal Governmentality
nancial advice lectures, and later picked up by Warner Business Books in 2000, the
text relates a rich allegorical narrative about the mental hard wiring required for fi-
nancial success, and the concealed “ways of thinking” practiced by the wealthy.
Kiyosaki’s method is comparative: he tells of his childhood relationships with two
fathers; one a biological parent, the other a friend’s father who undertook the task of
young Robert’s financial education. Each father presented radically distinct outlooks
on financial life. His own father, the poor dad, was a government man, head of the
Department of Education for the state of Hawaii who, in spite of his impressive qua-
lifications and career accomplishments, remained “poor” his whole life, snarled in a
plodding, credentialist faith in institutional advancement as a slow climb up the
ladder of bureaucratic hierarchy. The rich dad, on the other hand, was a self-made
millionaire with an eighth grade education who held a deep distain for the naïve ap-
proach to wealth generation practiced by the majority of Americans—one that con-
ceived of earned reward in terms of educational credentials and the patient advance
to higher salaried positions within a single firm. Throughout the book, poor dad’s
dour lectures on the virtues of patience, loyalty and circumspection were contrasted
with rich dad’s exhortations to swashbuckling fiscal adventurism, self-interest and
self-responsibility. Kiyosaki compares the advice offered by his two dads:
My two dads had opposing attitudes in thought…

One dad recommended, “study hard so you can find a good company to work
for.” The other recommended, “study hard so you can find a good company to
buy.”
One dad said, “the reason I’m not rich is because I have you kids.”
The other said, “the reason I must be rich is because I have you kids.”
One said “when it comes to money, play it safe, don’t take risks.” The other said,
“learn to manage risk.” 2
At first blush, the case of Rich Dad Poor Dad might seem innocuous enough: another
proselytizing tome in a long tradition of entrepreneurial boosterism extending from
Horatio Alger through Norman Vincent Peale to Donald Trump—a discourse on fis-
cal self-realization extolling the virtues of entrepreneurship and voluntarism as a
personal ethic. Yet what distinguishes this example is not just its timeliness given the
current zeal for anti-welfarist, anti-statist rhetoric, and its veneration for market
cowboyism, (nor it’s stunning popularity, becoming a New York Times best selling
title in 2002), but the specific way in which it dramatizes the dynamism within this
space, what we might describe as the inner life of the neoliberal subject. This space is
characterized by a specific tension between the inertia of social dependency and the
exuberance and vitality of market agency—a tension that is, in Kiyosaki’s prose,
barbed with exhortations to mobilize the latter against the former.
2 Ibid, 15-16.
61
Foucault Studies, No. 6, pp. 60-78.
In what follows, the provocations posed by Kiyosaki’s tale of two dads will
provide a backdrop for an inquiry into debates around what has come to be termed
“neoliberal governmentality.” 3 I take this term to indicate the ways in which subjects
are governed as market agents, encouraged to cultivate themselves as autonomous,
self-interested individuals, and to view their resources and aptitudes as human capi-
tal for investment and return. 4 Neoliberal governmentality presumes a more or less
continuous series that runs from those macro-technologies by which states govern
populations, to the micro-technologies by which individuals govern themselves, al-
lowing power to govern individuals “at a distance,” as individuals translate and in-
corporate the rationalities of political rule into their own methods for conducting
themselves. 5 However, in much recent work on governmentality, the emphasis has
fallen on the institutional logics, the assemblages, technologies and dispositifs, as
Foucault called them, through which the rationalities of neoliberal governmentality
invest populations, while less emphasis has been placed on the practical, ethical
work individuals perform on themselves in their effort to become more agentive,
decisionistic, voluntaristic and vital market agents. 6 The tale of Rich Dad Poor Dad
reminds us of the dynamic practices by which neoliberal governmentalities are in-
corporated. Moreover, it suggests that these practices are ethical, in the sense that
Foucault used the term in his later work: they involve daily work performed upon
specific objects or features of the self held to be problematic—“ethical substances,”
as Foucault called them, which in this case implicates and acts upon the embodied,
moribund collectivist dependencies and dispositions that are the legacy of poor
dad’s mode of existence.
3 Michel Foucault, “Governmentality” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed.

Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Michel
Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France. Translated by Graham
Burchell. (New York: Palgrave, 2008). Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose,
“Introduction” in Foucault and Political Reason, ed. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and
Nikolas Rose (London: UCL Press, 1996). Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule
in Modern Society (London: Sage, 1999). Graham Burchell, “Liberal Government and
Techniques of the Self” in Foucault and Political Reason, ed. Andrew Barry, Thomas Os-
borne and Nikolas Rose. (London: UCL Press, 1996). Thomas Lemke, “’The Birth of Bio-
Politics”–Michel Foucault’s Lecture at the Collège de France on Neoliberal Governmen-
tality” Economy & Society, 30, 2 (2001): 190-207.
4 Nikolas Rose, “Governing `Advanced’ Liberal Democracies” in Foucault and Political Rea-
son, ed. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (London: UCL Press, 1996).
5 Sam Binkley, “Governmentality and Lifestyle Studies” Sociology Compass, 1: 1 (July 2007):
111-126. Nikolas Rose, Pat O’Malley and Mariana Valverde, “Governmentality” Annual
Review of Law and Social Science, 2 (2006): 83-104.
6 Sam Binkley, "The Perilous Freedoms of Consumption: Toward a Theory of the Conduct
of Consumer Conduct” Journal for Cultural Research, 10: 4 (October 2006): 343-362. Barbara
Cruikshank, The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects. (Ithaca, NY: Cor-
nell University Press, 1999).
62
In short, governmentality expresses a certain series or relation between pow-

er and the subject, yet it is important to remember that this series is not seamless and
complete. Instead, governmentality represents what Foucault called an unstable
“contact point” between techniques of domination (or subjection), and the actual
practices of subjectification by which neoliberal subjects govern themselves. Or, as
Foucault put it in his 1980 lecture at Dartmouth College:
The contact point, where the individuals are driven by others is tied to the way
they conduct themselves, is what we can call, I think government. Governing
people, in the broad meaning of the word, governing people is not a way to force
people to do what the governor wants; it is always a versatile equilibrium, with
complementarity and conflicts between techniques which assure coercion and
processes through which the self is constructed or modified by himself. 7
In other words, the relation of the subject before power is not reducible to the simple
production of neoliberal subjects: what is involved is the production of self-
producing subjects—subjects whose own self-production is prone to reversals and
appropriations, to “mis-productions” through which the subject produces herself
differently than is intended by power itself. By considering the specific ethical prac-
tices through which individuals isolate and act upon certain elements within them-
selves, as they work to transform themselves from socially dependent subjects into
neoliberal agents (or from poor dads into rich ones), it is possible to draw out the
ambivalence that operates in this point of contact. Between dispositifs and ethical
practices, or between techniques of coercion and the processes by which subjects
construct themselves, there is, implicit within neoliberal governmentality, an inde-
terminacy that leaves open the possibility of doing things differently. Toward this
end, I will attempt a theoretical reconstruction of the ethical dynamism that consti-
tutes the work of subjectification, drawing anecdotally and for illustrative purposes
on the allegory of the two dads, and the specific kinds of work on the self related in
Kiyosaki’s gentle exhortation.
More precisely, in seeking to emphasize these practical dimensions, I will
highlight the precise object of everyday conduct that appears as the ethical sub-
stance, or the specific material upon which ethical practices work—that part of the
self that is made the object of the transformative work of neoliberal governmentality.
This substance is defined by time and the changing practices of temporal calculation
and practical orientation by which everyday conduct is undertaken. Considering the
temporal sensibility of social dependence as the substance of an ethical problemati-
zation within the practice of neoliberal governmentality, it is possible to consider
how neoliberal subjects work to optimize, individualize and entrepreneurialize
7 Foucault 1993: 203-4, cited in Thomas Lemke “Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique”
Rethinking Marxism, 1, 3, (2002): 49-64(16).
63
themselves and their conduct—a program of subjectification centered on the vitali-

zation and responsibilization of a dependent subjectivity, but also one shadowed by
a certain ambivalence and instability, a technique of subjectification that remains
open to the potential for being otherwise practiced.
1. Governmentality, Subjection and Subjectification
I will begin with the question of this ambivalence within governmental practices.
While it is not my intention to expand the already voluminous exegetical literature
on Foucault’s oeuvre (much less evolve a prescriptive template for how “resistance”
might be strategized), it is nonetheless helpful to locate my project within the famili-
ar reference points of his scholarship.
By considering governmentality not as a political rationality in a technical
sense, but as an everyday ethical undertaking, I am attempting to incorporate ele-
ments from what are considered distinct moments of Foucault’s intellectual trajecto-
ry, drawing from his later work of the 1980’s on the ethics of the self, in order to re-
solve problems posed elsewhere, in the late 1970’s, in his studies of governmentality,
biopower and discipline. 8 Indeed, between these two moments are distinct and con-
trasting understandings of how it is that subjects are produced in relationship to the
larger structures they inhabit. In a general sense, Foucault’s work of governmentali-
ty occupies a position between his genealogical studies of dispositifs, (or the appara-
tuses of power by which modern societies organize their populations through state
apparatuses and institutional structures), and his studies of the ethical practices of
the Ancient world, where the emphasis falls on the specific creativity of the individ-
ual in fashioning a unique relation to herself. 9 At the risk of over-simplification, it
can be argued that, while in the case of the former, the subject is produced by power,
in the case of the latter, the subject is produced by power as a self-producing subject.
Foucault arrives at a discussion of the latter relation, the production of self-
production, with the term assujetissement—a term that is variously translated in Eng-
lish as subjection, subjectification or subjectivation, each term shaded with subtle
differences of meaning. “While such a meaning implies the passivity of the subject,”
Rosenberg and Milchman write, “Foucault also sees assujetissement as entailing more
8 Foucault, “Governmentality”. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the

Collège de France, 1975-76. Trans. David Macey, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fonta-
na (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2003). Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population.
Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78. Trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave,
2007) and Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics.
9 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Vintage Books, 1979) and Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume II: The
Use of Pleasure. Trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1984).
64
than relations of domination, as involving the autonomy, and the possibility of resis-
tance, of the one who is assujetti [subjected] as well.” 10
Such shifts of emphasis become important in the pivotal lectures of the late
1970s, where Foucault began to unfold his notion of governmentality, the elabora-
tion of which developed against the backdrop of his wider efforts to reform and ex-
pand the analysis of power he had developed earlier, largely under the banner of
discipline. Here power is a phenomenon of those “complete and austere institu-
tions” so richly described in Discipline and Punish, whose power was the power to act
on subjects, through the optimization of forces and the perpetual exercise of their ca-
pacities. Foucault attempted to attenuate this constraint in the first volume of the
History of Sexuality and later in his lecture course of 1976-77, Society Must Be Defended,
through an engagement with biopower as a broader exercise of power encompass-
ing a range of extra-institutional societal deployments, centered on the very life of
the population. 11 However, in the lecture course of the following year, Security, Terri-
tory, Population, the concept of biopower is quickly abandoned for an analysis of go-
vernmentality, understood not as a medico-juridical deployment, but as a state ap-
paratus, first of popular security, and later, in his lectures of 1978-’79, The Birth of
Biopolitics, as a technology of political and economic liberalism.12 While there are
strong arguments to be made both for a marked shift of emphasis in Foucault’s work
during this time (a case recently put forward by Eric Paras in Foucault 2.0) and for
the persistence of underlying themes (as Jeffrey Nealon argues in Foucault Beyond
Foucault), it is certainly the case that an incremental drift from discipline to biopower
and ultimately governmentality is one which increasingly describes the production
of subjectivity before power, or assujetissement, as a practice of self-formation, as the
production of self-production. 13 Or as Graham Burchell has argued: “the introduc-
tion of the idea of techniques of the self, of arts or aesthetics of existence, etc. seems
to imply a loosening of the connection between subjectification and subjection”. 14
Such loosening notwithstanding, within the framework of governmentality,
there remains, I would argue, the powerful imprint of Foucault’s genealogical study
of power, and a depiction of the production of the subject before power as a funda-
mentally top-down process of subjection/subordination—the production of subjects
but not the production of self-producing subjects. 15 This is not to force a overhasty
10 Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, “The Aesthetic and Ascetic Dimensions of an Ethics
of Self-Fashioning: Nietzsche and Foucault” Parrhesia, 2 (2007): 55.
11 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended.
12 Foucault, Security, Territory and Population and Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics.
13 Eric Paras, Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge (New York: Other Press, 2006) and
Jeffrey Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and its Intensifications Since 1984 (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).
14 Burchell, 20.
15 Ben Goldner, “Foucault and the Genealogy of Pastoral Power” Radical Philosophy Review,
10: 2 (2007): 157–176.
65
reduction on these two moments in Foucault’s work, nor to assume that, in his work
on dispositifs, Foucault left no room at all for a reflection on the self-forming activities
of discipline, for indeed he did. Yet there is undeniably a shift of emphasis in the
passage from his middle to later works, one which gradually gives increasing weight
not only to the autonomy of these practices, but to the uncertainty of their outcomes.
In this regard, this tendency has carried over into the expanding field of governmen-
tality research that has emerged in recent years, wherein, as Katharyne Mitchell has
argued: “the work often seems top heavy and seamless, with an inexorable and ines-
capable quality to the situations and transformations depicted by governmentality
scholars.” 16
An alternative, bottom-up approach to governmentality, it would seem,
would describe the negative operation of ethical work by which the rationalities of
domination are extended into a program of self government itself—the actual prac-
tices of shaping, changing or negating some feature of the self. Writing several years
after his pivotal lectures on governmentality, and to a very different set of concerns,
Foucault described these ethical practice as processes in which “the individual deli-
mits that part of himself that will form the object of his moral practice, defines this
position relative to the precept he will follow, and decides on a certain mode of be-
ing that will serve as his moral goal.” 17 Moreover, an important element of such an
operation could be identified in the “ethical substance,” the “prime material of his
moral conduct,” or the raw material upon which the ethical practitioner works. 18 For
it is in operating on this ethical substance that the subject is both subjected to power,
and enacts a practice of subjectification—an active shaping of the self as a subject. To
locate the specific ambivalence operative in this point of contact, it is necessary to
consider the active dynamics of self-governmental practices, the active negation of a
prior ethical substance, or the work one performs on that dimension of the self one
seeks to transform through government. In the case of neoliberal governmentality,
this element appears, I have suggested, in the sedimented residue of earlier inscrip-
tions of power, in the lazy predispositions to social welfare and institutional depen-
dency that characterize the specific temporality of the poor dad.
2. The Work of Neoliberal Governmentality
For Kiyosaki, the path to riches is one that leads us through a difficult labor of self-
transformation. Ostensibly written for children of poor dads, or readers who were in
16 Katharyne Mitchell, “Neoliberal Governmentality in the European Union: Education,

Training, and Technologies of Citizenship” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space,
24 (2006): 390.
17 Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume II: The Use of Pleasure, 28.
18 Ibid., 26.
66
fact poor dads themselves, the text gently exhorts us to go to work on ourselves, to
transform our poor dad habits into rich ones. The outlooks of the dads are described:
One dad believed in a company or in the government’s taking care of you and
your needs. He was always concerned about pay raises, retirement plans, medi-
cal benefits, sick leave, vacation days and other perks. He was impressed with
two of his uncles who joined the military and earned a retirement and entitle-
ment package for life after twenty years of service. He loved the idea of medical
benefits and PX privileges the military provided its retirees. He also loved the te-
nure system available through the university. His idea of job protection for life
and job benefits seemed more important, at times, than the job. He would often
say, “I’ve worked hard for the government, and I’m entitled to these benefits.”
…The other believed in total financial self-reliance. He spoke out against the “en-
titlement” mentality and how it was creating weak and financially needy people.
He was emphatic about being financially competent. 19
Poor dad’s sedentary life is embodied in the flabby matter of sedimented habits and
unthought routines, shaped around social trust, institutional norms and the organi-
zational protocols of managerial hierarchy. While poor dad plodded through life in a
resigned, faithful spirit, seldom questioning the doxa of financial common sense,
rich dad’s self-reflexive, hyper-voluntaristic outlook emphasized choice, agency, the
examination of life and exercise of self-control on all levels. The transformative task
to which Kiyosaki exhorts us takes the form of an exercise, the effect of which would
effectively invigorate the body and the spirit by dissolving dependency and assum-
ing full autonomy, injecting a vital life force into otherwise inactive material.
Although both dads worked hard, I noticed that one dad had a habit of putting
his brain to sleep when it came to money matters, and the other had a habit of
exercising his brain. The long term result was that one dad grew stronger finan-
cially and the other grew weaker. It was not much different from a person who
goes on to the gym to exercise on a regular basis versus someone who sits on the
couch watching television. Proper physical exercise increases your chances for
health, and proper mental exercise increases your chances for wealth. Laziness
decreases both health and wealth. 20
Exercise, in this regard, indicates the work that is performed to facilitate the circula-
tion of vital forces within the mind and the body—a vitality that is at once a funda-
mental biological drive, and also a dispositional pre-requesite for neoliberal conduct.
In his lectures of 1978-79, The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault spelled out the radi-
cally different ways in which classical and neoliberal thought confronted basic ques-
19 Kiyosaki, 16.
20 Ibid., 15.
67
tions of autonomy and constraint. 21 These differences can be briefly summarized:

while classical liberalism viewed the agencies and initiatives constitutive of market
conduct as generic to social life itself, from the standpoint of neoliberalism, such dis-
positions had to be actively fostered through state interventions. The problem con-
fronting early liberalism in the eighteenth century was how to establish a market
within and against an existing state, and how to limit the interventions of that state
in order that the market could assume the dynamism and rationality to which it was
naturally inclined—a process which would, if allowed to occur, enrich the state eco-
nomically and militarily through the practice of governing less. 22
What distinguishes neoliberalism from classical liberalism, then, is their dif-
fering views on the naturalness of these market rationalities, and consequently their
contrasting views on the role of the state in creating the conditions for market activi-
ties. In his discussion of the German post-war liberalism of the Ordo School, Fou-
cault described how the problem facing liberalism in the aftermath of the Second
World War was not to carve out a space of freedom within an existing state, as it was
for classical liberalism.23 Instead, the task was to devise a state capable of creating,
through its own programs and initiatives, the voluntaristic, entrepreneurial and self-
responsible dispositions, upon which market forms depend. Neither the market nor
the competitive dispositions upon which market rationality draws, were considered
sui generis features of social life: they had to be actively fostered through the inter-
ventions of a liberal state, whereby individuals were brought to cultivate an entre-
preneurial disposition within their own modes of conduct. From this perspective,
neo-liberalism is seen to invert problems long attended to by the agencies of Key-
sianism and the welfare state: against the Schumpeterian orthodoxy which holds
monopolistic tendencies of capitalism as an intrinsic consequence of capitalism’s
economic logic, Ordo liberals consider this a fundamentally social problem, whose
remedy is open to forms of social intervention, which target the tendencies toward
collectivism by aiming to ignite competitive conducts. 24 Blockages to economic activ-
ity originating in the social fabric, the Ordo liberals argued, could be negated
through programs of state intervention, aimed at suppressing collectivism, and sti-
mulating entrepreneurial, market behaviors. Practices of neoliberal governmentality
express the extension of these interventionist strategies into the social field, but also
into the very domain of subjectivity itself, where, as Graham Burchell has put it:
“Neo-liberalism seeks in its own ways the integration of the self-conduct of the go-
21 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics and Lemke, “’The Birth of Bio-Politics”–Michel Foucault’s
Lecture at the Collège de France on Neoliberal Governmentality”.
22 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 27-51.
23 Ibid., 183-5.
24 Ibid., 185.
68
verned into the practices of their government and the promotion of correspondingly
appropriate forms of techniques of the self.” 25
Yet while Burchell and others quite adequately account for this practice of
self government by which market actors produce themselves through the inscription
of a certain economic rationality, he does not say what stands in the way of this op-
eration, what inner constraints within the individual have to be broken or what ma-
terial was in need of work in order that such an ethical program be realized. In other
words, the work of neoliberal governmentality entails important negative programs,
undertaken through an active practice of self-transformation, requiring the break up
and dissolution of those sedentary collectivist dispositions and anti-competitive ha-
bits that were the accidental and periodic consequence of capitalist life itself—those
very same forms of cooperative collective social life that Keynsianism and the wel-
fare state actively sought to foster and solidify. “There is a clear sense,” writes Bur-
chell, “in which neoliberalism is anti-society.” 26 To understand this negation as the
active inner principle of a mode of ethics, we must better understand the ethical sub-
stance upon which this work is carried out—a substance rooted in the collectivist
dispositions fostered by social government. Moreover, it is in this collectivist dispo-
sition that we discover the specific temporality, the time consciousness by which
specific forms of conduct are oriented, and which appears, in the work of neoliberal
governmentality, as the unique ethical substance of a practice of self-government.
3. Docility and Social Time
Clearly, rich dads and poor dads conduct themselves within radically distinct tem-
poral frames: while poor dads practice a docile compliance to the prescribed
rhythms and schedules of the institutions within which their faith is invested and
their trajectories marked (poor dads, we recall, count sick days and look forward to
earned vacations), rich dads, or neoliberal agents, take this docility as the specific
object of an ethical program, assuming full responsibility for the temporality of their
own conduct, managing risks and projecting their futures against opportunistic ho-
rizons tailored to their own unique projects. To grasp this process, we must under-
stand the emergence of the temporality of the social both as a historical event, and as
a residue accumulated in the bodies and dispositions of contemporary individuals.
Such collectivist dispositions originate with a figure of power characterized
by Jacques Donzelot as “the social”—a mode of government which arose in the in-
tervening period between classical and neoliberal forms of rule. 27 The social
25 Burchell, 29-30.
26 Ibid.,27.
27 Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families. Trans. R. Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1979).
Jacques Donzelot, L’Invention du Social (Paris: Fayard, 1984). Jacques Donzelot, “The
Promotion of the Social” Economy and Society, 17:3 (1988): 394–427. Jacques Donzelot,
69
represents a problem-space wherein the excesses of liberalism (in the form of an ac-
celerated capitalist economy and the over-extension of market sovereignty) are held
to be problematic, identified and acted upon as a force eroding other forms of popu-
lar solidarity and creating fertile ground for revolutionary challenges to capitalism
itself. From the early nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century, social gov-
ernment developed through a technology of rule entailing, as Mitchell Dean has de-
scribed, “a set of problematizations of the liberal governmental economy (e.g., the
‘social question’, social problems, social issues), a set of institutions and practices
(e.g., social welfare, social insurance, social work), a set of laws and legal jurisdic-
tions (e.g., the juvenile court, family law) and a variety of actors, agencies and au-
thorities (e.g., social workers, schoolteachers, police officers, general practitioners).”28
The solution proposed to the problem of too much liberalism was, as Donzelot has
argued in his genealogical analysis of the welfare state, the production, through state
programs, of new social solidarities and new collectivist units. 29 Through the tech-
nology of welfare, the state assumed a function described by the French legal theor-
ist Charles Gide as the “visible expression of the invisible bond”—an instrument for
the fostering of a normative moral order amid conditions of social disintegration re-
sulting from the atomizing effects of industrialization. 30 Two important features of
this new technology of rule must be understood if we are to apprehend it in terms of
its specific temporal dimension: first, we must point out the capacity of social gov-
ernment to shift responsibility for risks from individual to collectivist forms, and
second, we must understand the resulting durational temporal sense that emerges
from this allocation. These points will be discussed in turn.
In his L’invention du Social, (1984) Donzelot traces social government to a spe-
cific set of policy debates and legislative initiatives that developed in France during
the nineteenth century. With an increasingly militant labor movement and the inci-
pient threat of socialism, liberal legislators sought policies that would mitigate anta-
gonism between labor and capital without mandating too radical an agenda of social
reform. The resulting “social rights” legislation was a specific instrument of social
government meant to foster solidarity, both among workers and between labor and
capital more generally, as a means of ensuring social integration while blunting the
specific indictment of the social order emerging from the socialist camp. Appropriat-
ing key Durkheimian themes, Donzelot describes the welfare state as one in which
“The Mobilization of Society.” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Gra-
ham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
1991), 169-179. Jacques Donzelot, “Pleasure in Work” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Go-
vernmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (Chicago, IL: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1991), 251–280.
28 Dean, 53.
29 Donzelot, “The Promotion of the Social.
30 Ibid., 403.
70
“this concept of solidarity serves to define not only the framework but also the spe-
cific mode of state intervention, one which affects the forms of the social bond rather
than the structure of society itself.” 31
Social rights legislation, Donzelot argues, extended a set of protectionist
measures to workers, meant first to mitigate the specific risks and uncertainties aris-
ing from the industrial labor process (principally workplace accidents), but later ap-
plied more generally to a range of social and personal risks associated with health,
fiscal security and social well being. 32 In its incipient form, this displacement ad-
dressed the question of culpability for workplace accidents, whose occurrence typi-
cally became flashpoints between labor and capital. In the industrial firm of the nine-
teenth century, industrial accidents immediately raised difficult and often irresolva-
ble questions of responsibility, with both bosses and workers seeking to blame each
other in squabbles over compensation payments, the award of which could alter-
nately drive owners into bankruptcy, or abandon injured workers to pauperism. The
solution arrived at by social legislators was that of the “insurance technique”—a sys-
tem successfully applied in Germany under Bismarck, wherein regular individual
payments into a common fund served to finance compensation paid to the injured in
the event of accidents. 33 Such a seemingly simple policy measure, reproduced and
disseminated across a range of institutional settings, carried with it a more subtle
realignment in the practice of government: the insurance technique succeeded in
shifting culpability from individuals (workers or managers) to the institutional con-
ditions of work itself. Donzelot writes:
With so many cases remaining unresolved due to the characteristic difficulty of

ascribing fault to anyone, wouldn’t it be better to regard accidents as effects of an
unwilled collective reality, not of an individual will but effects arising from the
general division of labour which, by making all actors interdependent, results in
none of them having complete control over their work, or consequently being in
a position to assume full responsibility. 34
The institutionalization of such an “unwilled collective reality” entailed the sociali-

zation of risk, relieving individuals and management of responsibility for unfore-
seen outcomes of their own conduct. 35 A swarming of welfarist agencies and services
throughout the industrializing world variously seized upon this model, fashioning
solutions to the problem of social disintegration and strife resulting from too much
liberalism, and particularly the profusion of risks, in the form of a renewed solidari-
ty capable of absorbing those risks into itself. Moreover, this entailed state interven-
31 Donzelot, “The Mobilization of Society”, 173.

32 Donzelot, “The Promotion of the Social,” 400 and Donzelot, “Pleasure in Work,” 256.
33 Donzelot, “The Promotion of the Social,” 399.
34 Ibid., 400.
35 Ibid., 398.
71
tion aimed at the normalization and regulation of workplace conditions (and later of
social conditions more generally), as it became these conditions themselves, and not
the owners of capital, that were ultimately liable for risks incurred. 36 The application
of Taylorism to the French industrial economy in the years preceding World War I is
a process aimed at enhancing worker productivity, not only through the technical
division of labor for which it is best known, but through the adjustment of the work-
er to the mosaic of normalized interpersonal relationships into which work and its
risks are socialized. 37 Better adjustment of the worker to the normalized conditions of
production reduced the risk of accidents—a key governmental objective of welfar-
ism, yet one that substituted a collectivist, institutional responsibility for the indi-
vidual culpability for output and risks. As such, life under social government was
characterized by a certain docility of conduct under the normalized conditions of an
engineered solidarity—a “unwilled collective reality” in which individual agency
was itself no longer willed, but instead suspended within a socialized horizon of ex-
pectation, futurity and temporality.
Of course, the docile conduct into which the solidarities of social government
induced its members did not originate with social rights themselves, nor did they
appear with the normalized social units into which such individuals were adjusted.
Such modes of conduct, and the specific temporalities through which they were
enacted, were for two centuries already being quietly insinuated into the conducts of
modern people through those disciplinary institutions Foucault so well documented
in Discipline and Punish—the schools, prisons, hospitals and military barracks. In-
deed, there is a specific link between the forms of social government by which risk
was transposed from individual conduct to the collective responsibility of the social
totality and the docile temporality of the disciplinary institution. Foucault has de-
scribed the specific manner in which the production of docility is accomplished
through technologies of temporalization, and specifically with the deployment of
“duration” as a temporal frame. 38 As a durational act, the temporality of an action is
not bound to its immediate outcome—the risks it entails—which have become re-
mote from the actor, incorporated into the institutional totality within which it is ex-
ecuted. The time of the docile body (and by extension, the time of socialized risk) is
measured simply as “duration”—as abstract, homogenous time, whose ultimate mo-
tivation and endpoint is “unwilled,” remote from the responsibilities of the actor,
fixed in the remote planning schemes of the institution.
The emergence of durational time is often tied to the dissemination of clock-
time in the labor process. 39 Linked with a wider rigidification of the intrinsic volun-
36 Ibid., 412.
37 Donzelot, “Pleasure in Work,” 255.
38 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, 151.
39 E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past and Present, 38
72
tarism and spontaneity that characterizes personal and social life, the notion of dura-
tion is, in historical literature on temporality, associated with the reification of the
natural rhythm and meter of everyday practice, specifically for the purposes of a
more thorough exploitation of the productive capacity invested in the temporality of
the act. 40 E. P. Thompson’s well-known study of this process uncovers the manner in
which a task-oriented temporality takes over and displaces traditional temporal sen-
sibilities tuned to the rhythms of natural processes, such as the seasonal regularities
of agriculture. 41 However, durational temporality is not simply a medium for the ex-
ploitation of labor: it is a means through which labor power is produced and sus-
tained as a force, both within the individual and within the social unit as a whole. 42
Thompson shows how the disciplining of work-time functioned as much to fashion
the basis for collectivist opposition to capitalist exploitation as to ensure the condi-
tions for the extraction of profits from the bodies or workers. Similarly, durational
time is, as Donzelot has shown, a mechanism of social integration and for the forma-
tion of unwilled collective realities and de-responsibilized conducts, wherein risk is
socialized and the agency of individuals is transposed from to the horizons of indi-
vidual actions to those of institutional norms.
Foucault provides such an account in his detailed discussion of the produc-
tion of docility in the incipient institutional temporalities of early modern societies.
He describes the inscription of durational temporality as a positive operation, one
that entails the decomposition of modes of conduct into administratively discreet
moments, and their simultaneous recomposition in the sequence of a disciplinary
practice. Foucault’s account of the “temporal elaboration of the act” describes the
precise manner in which an increasingly refined demarcation and segmentation of
temporal units takes place in the marching instructions given to French foot soldiers
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, wherein the simple step of the soldier is
subjected to an increasingly precise division that expands from one to four basic
movements in the course of a century. 43 “The act is broken down into its elements;
the position of the body, limbs, articulations is defined; to each movement are as-
signed a direction, an aptitude, a duration; their order of succession is prescribed.
Time penetrates the body and with it all the meticulous controls of power.” 44
This segmentation is not without aim, but neither is it specifically teleological.
It is not completed with the exploitation of labor for profit, but is instead ongoing
and productive, seeking as much to produce labor power as a permanent potential
(1967): 56-97 and Evitar Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), 1985.
40 Zerubavel, 2-5.
41 Thompson, 61.
42 Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, 159.
43 Ibid., 151.
44 Ibid., 152.
73
of the individual and to articulate this potential together with the ongoing function-
ing of the factory, as to secure its exploitation. 45 Foucault describes the production of
durational temporality: for the French foot soldier of the eighteenth century, bodily
practice was reintegrated into a new docile temporality—the military march—which
is directed to a new endpoint or goal, characterized by the general enhancement of
productive forces, both for the individual himself, and for the institution of which he
is a member. In other words, durational time acquires meaning as a permanent and
ongoing exercise. “Exercise, having become an element in the political technology of
the body and of duration, does not culminate in a beyond, but tends toward a sub-
jection that has never reached its limit.” 46 As such, duration, measured by the
rhythms of military training, the educational calendars of the public schools or the
pay schedules imposed by the wage system, has no specific beginning and no end,
and thus inscribes no agency or telos—no will. For the worker, the prisoner, the stu-
dent or the soldier, the performance of a task is ongoing and often without purpose.
Temporality itself has been socialized.
It was precisely this durational temporal orientation, the unwilled faithful-
ness to the rat race of a salaried job, that rich dad took as the object of the ethical
work to which he exhorted his young student. He chastised this durational disposi-
tion for the flaccid spirit it exuded, but also for the lack of reflective awareness, the
truncation of the horizons of economic action it imposed. The way out was first
through the renunciation of the mind- numbing comforts supplied by such conduct,
from which would follow an revitalization of one’s willingness to confront risk, and
a vast expansion of the horizon of economic opportunity. One of rich dad’s lessons
involved inducing the two ten-year olds to work without pay for several weekends,
under the argument that the experience would teach them that salaried labor reflect-
ed a lazy and dull-minded faith in a structured reward system, and that the true re-
ward of work lay beyond the narrow rewards of the wage system. Rich dad ex-
plained his rationale:
Keep working, boys, but the sooner you forget about needing a paycheck, the
easier your adult life will be. Keep using your brain, work for free, and soon your
mind will show you ways of making money far beyond what I could ever pay
you. You will see things that other people never see. Opportunities right in front
of their noses. Most people never see these opportunities because they’re looking
for money and security, so that’s all they get. The moment you see one opportu-
nity, you will see them for the rest of your life. 47
The awakening intended by this exercise was one that was meant to turn the two
boys to work on themselves—on the traces and residues, the inscribed habits and
45 Ibid., 161.
46 Ibid., 162.
47 Kiyosaki, 50.
74
dispositions remaining from an earlier deployment of a collective social reality, and

the displacement of responsibility and risk it entailed. The social, durational tempo-
ralities that are the residue of docility and durational time can be identified, not just
in the generational rift between poor dads and their sons, but in the historical sedi-
mentations accumulated in the bodies of those sons themselves, and in the readers to
whom Kiyosaki appeals—a body that, as Foucault wrote in his essay Nietzsche, Gene-
alogy, History, can be understood as the repository of historical inscriptions, or as he
put it, the “inscribed surface of events.” Indeed, it is in this work that the ambiva-
lence between the institutional forms of self-government, and the individual practic-
es of self-rule, or subjection and subjectification, becomes operative.
4. Conclusion: Temporality and Counter-Conduct
The emphasis placed here on the work of neoliberal subjectification has indicated the
need to consider the ambivalence between subjection and subjectification, or the
“loose fit” between power and the subject. So far, however, little has been said of the
specific content of this ambivalence, or of the general forms it might take. Of what,
then, might this ambivalence consist? How is the work one performs on residual du-
rational temporalities, the ethical substances of social conduct, or the residual in-
scriptions of Donzelot’s “unwilled collective reality” to be practiced differently? I
will close with a very general and brief suggestion for the direction in which such a
study might move—a purpose for which it is useful to consult Foucault’s discussion
of what he termed “counter-conduct,” or the tactical reversals to which rationalities
of governmentality are prone.
Arguments for the tactical reversibility of clock-time as a technology of do-
mination in the capitalist labor process are not unfamiliar: Thompson has described
the process by which, a generation after the appearance of clocks in the labor
process, struggles increasingly took place within the framework of scheduled labor:
“[workers] had accepted the categories of their employers and learned to fight back
within them. They had learned their lesson, that time is money, only too well.” 48 Yet
the notion of a temporal counter-conduct within neoliberal governmentality requires
that we move beyond Thompson’s analysis of time as an instrument in the exploita-
tion of labor, to a consideration of temporality as an object in the ongoing and open-
ended practice of government, or as the self-forming work of subjectification itself.
Foucault’s many statements on practices of resistance need not be rehearsed
here, save to point out some elements that are relevant to our effort to understand
the neoliberal government of temporality as a practice characterized by ambivalence
and tactical reversal. Toward this end, two points will be made, the first concerning
the persistence of earlier temporal sensibilities in the conducts of individuals. In his
48 Thompson, 91.
75
statements on counter-memory and counter-history, Foucault describes the manner

in which “subjugated knowledges” are carried over from previous, now forgotten
struggles, “left to lie fallow, or even kept at the margins” of the body and in every-
day rationalities that shape conduct, yet which contained “the memory of combats,
the very memory that had until then been confined to the margins.” 49 What I have
described here as the residual temporalities of social conduct that appear as ethical
substances in the work of neoliberal governmentality, share important features with
such subjugated knowledges: to do the work of neoliberal governmentality diffe-
rently is to engage differently the sedimented memory of social time that is the ethi-
cal substance of neoliberal governmentality, to engage this trace, not through a prac-
tice of disaggregation and responsibilization, but through a reactivation and redep-
loyment of the “unwilled collective reality” that is the fabric of social time.
A second point derives from the idea of “counter-conducts,” or revolts of
conduct, which Foucault elaborated in his lectures of 1977-78, and through which
practices of government can be understood in terms of their own potential for rever-
sal. Counter-conducts, Foucault explains, are distinguished from economic revolts
against power (such as those described by Thompson), by their emphasis on the
government of the self as the stake of revolt, and the specific rejection, through in-
version and reversal, of the precise ways in which one is told that one should govern
oneself. Counter-conducts emerge from within the specific logics of a given mode of
conduct, inverting the series that runs from the macro-level technologies of rule to
the specific ethical practices by which individuals rule themselves. Foucault de-
scribes the “pastoral counter-conducts” developed in opposition to ecclesiastical rule
during the medieval period, illustrated by the Flagellants, for whom extreme forms
of asceticism took up specific features of Christian pastoral governance, while redep-
loying them in practices that were ultimately antagonistic to the pastoral establish-
ment itself. 50
Similarly, temporal counter-conducts within neoliberal governmentality
might choose to practice differently certain tenets of neoliberal rule, specifically the
mandate to assume agency, to responsibilize oneself and to orient one’s actions with-
in a temporal horizon specifically conceived around one’s own enterprising conduct.
In doing so, such conducts might operate upon the ethical substance defined by the
residual docility of social time in a manner opposed to that which it was intended by
power. Rather than inscribing an individualizing responsibility through the tempo-
rality of personal conduct, neoliberal counter-conduct might undertake to transpose
that responsibility elsewhere, to undertake the work of an unwilled conduct, of not
acting, or withholding agency, of refusing to project one’s conduct into the opportu-
nistic temporal horizons that characterize the entrepreneurial outlook—the initiative
to which rich dad inspired us. The temporal counter-conducts of neoliberalism
49 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 8.

76
might, instead of shaping new temporalities around the radical responsibilizing of

one’s own conduct, remobilize the subjugated memory of poor dad’s unique pen-
chant for the unwilled life, recovering the capacity for inaction, irresponsibility and
the refusal to seek out opportunity. Indeed, it is possible that such moments of coun-
ter-conduct punctuate the everyday lives of individuals in contemporary neoliberal
societies. An illuminating example comes from the rising psycho-social phenomenon
of procrastination—a cresting lifestyle affliction affecting larger numbers every year
and garnering around itself an ever more verbose clinical discourse and practice,
suggests some ways in which exhortations to self-responsibilization might provoke
unique counter-conducts. Procrastination, recent studies have shown, is increasingly
evident in public and private life, ever more present in the lives of students, spouses,
taxpayers, politicians and professionals. 51 In a 2007 study published in Psychological
Bulletin, Piers Steel describes the growing prevalence of procrastination: among the
general population, 15%-20% consider themselves procrastinators, while among col-
lege students the figure is much higher, reaching 75%, almost 50% of whom procras-
tinate “consistently and problematically.” 52 Within the clinical literature on procras-
tination, the phenomenon is defined in strictly utilitarian terms: “procrastination is
most often considered to be the irrational delay of behavior,” where rationality en-
tails “choosing a course of action despite expecting that it will not maximize your
utilities, that is, your interests, preferences, or goals of both a material (e.g., money)
and a psychological (e.g., happiness) nature.” 53
Indeed, procrastination has become a growing topic in the self-help literature
category, described in books with suggestive titles such as Do It Now: Breaking the
Procrastination Habit, 54 and The Procrastination Workbook: Your Personalized Program for
Breaking Free from the Patterns That Hold You Back; 55 The Now Habit: A Strategic Program
for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play, 56 and The Procrastinator's
Handbook: Mastering the Art of Doing It Now. 57 A description of the procrastinator’s
disposition is offered:
The power of procrastination erupts from deep within. It often masquerades as a

friend. “Let it wait,” we hear ourselves say, “for when you feel rested, you‘ll fly
51 Piers Steel, "The Nature of Procrastination: A Meta-Analytic and Theoretical Review of

Quintessential Self-Regulatory Failure" Psychology Bulletin, 133, 1 (2007): 65–94.
52 Ibid., 65.
53 Ibid., 66.
54 William Knaus, Do It Now: Breaking the Procrastination Habit, revised edition (New York:
Wiley, 1997).
55 Ibid.
56 Neil Fiore, The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying
Guilt-Free Play, revised edition (New York: Tarcher, 2007).
57 Rita Emmet, The Procrastinator's Handbook: Mastering the Art of Doing It Now (New York:
Walker & Company, 2000).
77
through these tasks to create a tomorrow that all will envy.” This is one of those
procrastination paradoxes, where a soothing idea has hidden barbs. You feel re-
lief when you think you can later gain command over what you currently don’t
want to do. The barb is found in practicing a negative pattern of retreat. When
you procrastinate you needlessly postpone, delay, or put off a relevant activity
until another day or time. When you procrastinate, you always substitute an al-
ternative activity for the relevant one. The alternative activity may be almost as
timely or important as the one you put off. But more likely, it will be irrelevant,
such as daydreaming instead of writing a report. 58
In closing, and by way of illustration, I offer procrastination as just one opening into
the wider question of the contemporary practice of temporal counterconduct within
the context of neoliberal governmentality. It is possible to read the choice to “let it
wait,” so antithetical to the rich dad’s swaggering self-responsibility, as a specific
ambivalence within the production of the neoliberal subject as a self-producing sub-
ject. The unwilling of procrastination calls back to the unwilled realities of duration-
al temporality, cultivated in the collectivist time of social governance, and in the do-
cile time of the disciplinary society, here worked differently, mobilized as a day-
dream, against the writing of reports.
58 Knaus, 8.
78
 Alan Milchman 2009
ISSN: 1832-5203
REVIEW
Timothy Rayner, Foucault’s Heidegger: Philosophy and Transformative Expe-

rience (New York: Continuum, 2007), ISBN 978-0-8264-9486-3.
Timothy Rayner has written an important book on a topic that has not been explored
in great depth thus far: the profound impact of Martin Heidegger on Foucault’s
thinking over the course of more than thirty years, from the early 1950’s to his death
in 1984. Rayner’s point of departure is Foucault’s own claim, in his final interview,
“The Return of Morality,” that: “For me Heidegger has always been the essential
philosopher.” Rayner takes Foucault at his word here and proceeds to defend a pro-
vocative, but compelling hypothesis, “that, in the course of his career, Foucault ap-
propriated, modified and began to articulate a quasi-Heideggerian transformative
philosophical practice.” (p. 35) Before elaborating on this hypothesis, it is important
to point out that Rayner has already told his readers that his approach “does not
centrally involve comparing and contrasting Foucault and Heidegger’s work,” with
the risk that such an approach entails of providing “a reductively Heideggerian (and
thus misrepresentative) reading of Foucault ….”(p. 5) Instead, intending his title
quite literally, Rayner is determined to focus on Foucault’s Heidegger, the Heidegger
that Foucault probably read; the Heidegger that he claims shaped the Foucauldian
project through all its turns. That means that a great deal of Heidegger’s writings,
unpublished during Foucault’s lifetime, especially the lecture courses, including all
of the courses given by the early Heidegger at Freiburg from 1919-1923, as well as
the manuscripts from the mid-1930’s to 1945, are excluded, even where their analysis
would shed light on Foucault’s own project and understanding of philosophy, inas-
much as they were not part of Foucault’s Heidegger. However, the result of that fo-
cus is a compelling portrait of the philosophical trajectory of Michel Foucault, and
the genealogy of his conceptual toolbox.
What then is this “transformative philosophical practice,” which Rayner
claims links Foucault to Heidegger? Indeed, in what sense can one even designate
Foucault as a philosopher? According to Rayner, at the very outset of his career, Fou-
cault sought to distinguish his own project from the philosophical tradition of phe-
nomenology. Whereas the philosophical tradition of which phenomenology is ex-
emplary focused its gaze on some facet of lived experience in order to grasp its
79
Milchman, review of Foucault’s Heidegger
meaning, another philosophical tradition, one linked to Nietzsche or Blanchot, for

example, focused on how experience could itself be transformative, on how expe-
rience could be implicated in a project of desubjectivation. Rayner situates the Hei-
degger of Being and Time “within the phenomenological tradition that Foucault
claims he has sought to avoid. Later Heidegger—the philosopher of Ereignis, the crit-
ic of modern technology and the advocate of a turn (Kehre) in thinking—is at least
intuitively aligned with the style of desubjectifying post-philosophy that Foucault
has sought to engage.” (pp. 2-3) While I have significant reservations about such a
periodization of Heidegger’s thinking, especially in light of the publication of the
writings of the early Heidegger, on the way to Being and Time, in terms of Foucault’s
Heidegger, such a demarcation is perhaps reasonable. Rayner then sees Heidegger’s
thinking evolving “from a phenomenological critique of subjectivity into a radical
‘other’ thinking,” one that is “a more or less codified practice specifically intended to
transform the experience of being.” (p. 12) Heidegger’s philosophical practice, so un-
derstood, is seen by Rayner as “the key to understanding Foucault’s conception of
philosophy as a vehicle of transformation. This … is why Foucault cites Heidegger
as his essential philosopher in his final interview.” (p. 36) And that is the case,
whether Foucault at the moment is focusing on knowledge and truth, on power, or
on ethics, on the relation of self to self, the rapport à soi.
Within an overall perspective that sees the historical transformations in
games of truth, power relations, and modes of subjectivity, as having their bases in
events, thereby “transforming their status from universals to particulars within a vo-
latile history of struggles for power” (pp. 74), I want to specifically address aspects
of Rayner’s treatment of knowledge/truth, power, and ethics that seem to me to be
both illustrative of his method, and to raise interesting issues of interpretation.
Foucault’s understanding of philosophy as a transformative experience is
concretized in the kinds of books that he writes, what he designates as experience
books, works of ficto-criticism. According to Rayner, “… experience books have the
function of transforming the subject in relation to truth;” “… the objective of the ex-
perience book is to open a radical perspective on the history of truth that transforms
the experience of being.” (p. 60) In contrast to “demonstration books,” which seek
veridical “truth,” Foucault’s experience books are examples of ficto-criticism, which
aim “to construct—or at least facilitate the construction of—a ficto-critical anti-
world” (p. 66), one in which established truths, and modalities for arriving at truth,
deeply embedded power relations, and long instantiated subjectivities, can all be
transgressed.
In situating forms of true knowledge within a context of historical events,
Rayner discusses the influence of Heidegger on Foucault in terms of the latter’s dis-
tinction between two forms of knowledge: savoir and connaissance, with the latter re-
ferring to subject-object relations, and the “specific forms of intentional knowledge”
(p. 70) and the rules that govern it. Yet given Rayner’s concern with Foucault’s Hei-
80
degger, something seems to be missing here. Is there not perhaps a link between
connaissance and savoir and the distinction that Heidegger makes in Being and Time
between understanding beings as “present-at-hand” [Vorhanden] and “ready-to-
hand” [Zuhanden], with the latter, our pre-ontological understanding of the “envi-
roning world” or “work world” [the Umwelt], corresponding to savoir, as in savoir-
faire? While Foucault acknowledged that he had not made a detailed study of Being
and Time, it is likely that in the early ‘50’s he would have been struck by Heidegger’s
important distinction between our knowledge of a world of objects and that of our
work-world.
Though somewhat skeptical—and perhaps not without good reason—of the
expansiveness of Hubert Dreyfus’s claim that power for Foucault plays the same
role that being plays for Heidegger, Rayner convincingly shows how both thinkers
construe modern techno-power as objectifying, organizing, and managing the real,
thereby permitting “a heightened measure of mastery and control over object-
domains,” and how both “situate all forms of [modern] life within a domain of tech-
nical manipulation. (p. 100). Rayner situates Foucault’s vision of biopower, and the
management of a whole population, within a world in which rationalities and tech-
nologies “render collective bodies knowable and controllable.” (p. 96) However,
when he discusses contemporary neo-liberalism, which he acknowledges to be a va-
riety of biopolitics, Rayner tells us that “liberal technologies of government work to
create self-directing, entrepreneurial subjects” (p. 108), thereby, in my view, obscur-
ing what Gilles Deleuze saw as another dimension of biopolitics, its instantiation in
the form of a control society, in which the space for the elaboration of technologies of
the self was restricted by the imposition of new and more effective mechanisms of
control.
It is with his ethical turn, around 1980, that Foucault’s confrontation with
Heidegger assumes its most dramatic form, according to Rayner. In a series of pro-
vocative and, indeed, scintillating moves, Rayner demonstrates how Foucault’s Hei-
degger came to assume an ever-increasing importance in the French thinker’s elabo-
ration of the themes of critique, subjectivity and desubjectivation, “spirituality,” and
problematization.
Foucault’s concept of critique is linked to his reading of Kant, not the Kant of
the analytics of truth, of “the formal conditions under which true knowledge is poss-
ible” (p. 135), but the Kant of “What is Enlightenment?” who sought an exit from the
immaturity of subjection to authority. Critique, for Foucault, then, is tied to de-
subjugation and desubjectivation, escaping from the prevailing modes of subjectivi-
ty, precisely what Heidegger’s other thinking and his vision of Ereignis entail. In-
deed, the final Foucault’s preoccupation with the subject is no return to some kind of
philosophical anthropology, inasmuch as he is clear that he is not speaking of a
“substantive subject,” an a-historical or constitutive subject. Rayner claims—and his
claim is a powerful one—that his “interpretation enables us to see how, in Foucault’s
81
Milchman, review of Foucault’s Heidegger
later years, the quasi-Heideggerian practice that had previously remained in the
background of his critical activity moves to the foreground to become the philosoph-
ical activity of ‘thinking otherwise’ by getting free of, or ‘disassembling’, the self.”
(p. 142) That mode of philosophical activity, in which access to the truth entails a
process of self-transformation is what the final Foucault designates as “spirituality,”
in contrast to the philosophical tradition that has shaped the modern West, that is
based on self-knowledge and is a hermeneutics of the subject. As Rayner points out,
there is another modern tradition, a counter-tradition, that includes Nietzsche, Hei-
degger, and, of course, Foucault: “Foucault calls this the ‘critical ontology of the
present and ourselves.’ This second tradition, Foucault maintains, resituates ancient
spirituality in a modern context by linking the activity of knowing the present to a
transformation in the subject’s being.” (p. 135) That transformation proceeds
through what Foucault terms “problematizations,” by which one can “transform
everyday difficulties into coherent, problematic experiences” (p. 124) in which the
historical crises of our experience in a domain of knowledge, power relations, or self-
practices, provoke us to explore new ways of being, an event of thought that Rayner
sees “as an ontologically tempered version of Heidegger’s concept of Ereignis, which
is also an event of thought.” (p. 125)
Timothy Rayner’s Foucault’s Heidegger, through its thesis that Foucault’s
search for a transformative practice, for an experience that transgresses the prevail-
ing games of truth, power relations, and modes of subjectivity, is closely linked to
Heidegger’s own philosophical project and constitutes a link in a chain of thinking
that seeks to construct a viable anti-world.
Alan Milchman, Queens College of the City University of New York
82
 Margaret A. McLaren 2009
ISSN: 1832-5203
REVIEW
Amy Allen, The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Con-
temporary Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) ISBN:
9780231136228.
Feminist critical theory needs both an account of domination that reflects the reality
of women’s subordination in societies pervasively structured by gender asymmetry,
and a theory that provides the possibility for resistance to this domination and re-
sources for social transformation. In her new book, The Politics of Our Selves, Amy
Allen aims to provide just such an account. She attempts this ambitious project by
demonstrating that the differences in the critical projects of Foucault and Habermas
have been sharply overdrawn, and she carves out a middle ground between them.
She argues that Foucault’s insights on power as an ineliminable part of human social
life are indispensable for feminist theory. But admitting the pervasiveness of power
appears to compromise the autonomy necessary to critically reflect upon and resist
social norms. Allen does not completely agree with this common criticism of Fou-
cault, and emphasizes his discussions of autonomy in his later work. But she argues
that he fails to provide an adequate account of social life, one that includes mutual
recognition and reciprocity. For this, she turns to Habermas whose discourse ethics
is based upon a non-instrumental mutuality. She looks to Habermas for a more ro-
bust conception of autonomy. However, in order to reconcile Habermas’s ideas with
Foucault’s insights on power, one has to rethink Habermas’s distinction between va-
lidity and power and recognize the entanglement of power and validity. Ultimately,
she concludes that feminists should take the best insights from the work of both
Foucault and Habermas to craft a feminist critical theory capable of explaining both
the ways in which subjectivity is constituted through relations of power (including
gender, race and sexual subordination) and of resisting and transforming those
power relations.
In chapter one, Allen sets out the parameters of her project. Foucault’s politics
of the self has two aspects: it is constituted through power relations, and is capable
of critical reflection and self-transformation (characteristic features of autonomy).
Yet these two aspects of the politics of the self are usually seen as incompatible; the
task of Allen’s book is to demonstrate that they are not. The Foucault-Habermas de-
83
McLaren: review of Politics of Our Selves
bate has cast Foucault as anti-Enlightenment and Habermas as continuing the En-
lightenment project of rational critique. This polarization construes Foucault as re-
jecting reason, subjectivity and norms which critics argue leaves him few, if any, re-
sources for social transformation. Critical social theorists such as Habermas, on the
other hand, overemphasize the power and purity of rationality. This debate contin-
ues in the positions of Judith Butler and Seyla Benhabib, with Benhabib claiming
that emancipation requires a regulative principle, and Butler invoking Foucault’s
claim that there is no outside to power. 1 Amy Allen takes up the task set out by
Nancy Fraser of integrating “the Foucaultian account of subjection with the Haber-
masian account of autonomy.” 2 Allen believes, however, that the two accounts can-
not simply be integrated, but need to be substantially re-worked. Through her meti-
culous and insightful readings, she mines the best insights of Foucault, Butler, Ha-
bermas and Benhabib, and provides a promising new account of subjectivity, one
that accounts for both power and autonomy.
After introducing her overall project in chapter one, Allen provides a reading
of Foucault in chapters two and three that emphasizes his engagement with Kant
and with the critical project of Modernity. Chapter two reassesses Foucault’s rela-
tionship to Kant. Allen addresses the criticism raised by feminists and critical theor-
ists that in his early work Foucault argues for the death of the subject. A closer look
at Foucault’s early work reveals that his criticisms of the subject are directed toward
the dominant philosophical notions of subjectivity, Kant’s transcendental subject
and the subsequent phenomenological-existential notion of subjectivity. By carefully
examining Foucault’s engagement with Kant from his early work (his “thèse
complémentaire”) on Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View) through his
latest work, Allen provides a reading of Foucault as a “continuation through trans-
formation of the Kantian critical project.” 3 Having established that Foucault does not
abandon the subject in his early work, in chapter three Allen turns to Foucault’s later
work on autonomy and technologies of the self. Foucault’s analysis of power and
subjection seems to undermine autonomy, but this is only true if one conceives of
power and autonomy as diametrically opposed. However, “Foucault conceives of
autonomy—both in the sense of the capacity for critical reflection and in the sense of
the capacity for deliberate self-transformation—as always bound up with power.” 4
Accepting the interrelatedness of autonomy and power means we must transform
Kant’s notion of autonomy. Foucault inverts the relationship between necessity and
freedom. Rather than viewing freedom as resulting from the necessity of giving one
self the moral law as Kant does, Foucault urges us to call “into question that which is
1 See Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell and Nancy Fraser, Feminist Conten-
tions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York: Routledge, 1995).
2 Allen, The Politics of Our Selves, 8.
3 Ibid., 44.
4 Allen, The Politics of Our Selves, 47.
84
presented to us as necessary, thus opening up the space for possible transgression of

those limits that turn out to be both contingent and linked to objectionable forms of
constraint.”5 Allen carefully articulates a Foucaultian notion of the subject that re-
tains autonomy even while constituted through power relations, but in the end she
concludes that Foucault’s work does not provide the resources necessary for an ac-
count of autonomy capable of resistance and self-transformation. What is needed for
a stronger conception of autonomy, she claims, is a broader conception of the social,
specifically a conception of social life that includes non-strategic social relations such
as reciprocity and mutual recognition. For this she turns to Habermas in chapters
five and six.
Before turning to Habermas, Allen examines Butler’s work to see how it ex-
tends and supplements Foucault’s account of subjection. Chapter four takes up a
central question for feminists: How do women resist gender norms, given our ambi-
valent attachment to them? Butler offers an account of subjection that goes some
way toward explaining why women become attached to normative gender roles in
spite of the fact that they perpetuate women’s subordination. Because identity is
constituted through recognition and attachment, painful attachment is better than no
attachment at all. Allen argues that although Butler’s account of subjection rounds
out Foucault’s theory by integrating psychoanalytic insights, it does not provide the
resources to explain how resistance is possible, or how to ensure that a resignifica-
tion transforms social norms, rather than simply reinscribing them. With her charac-
teristically careful reading of texts, Allen points out that Butler conflates dependency
and subordination, noting that we need an account of dependency that is not subor-
dination for resistance to be possible. As Allen says, “whereas we might have good
reasons for accepting the view that gender identity under current social and cultural
conditions requires some individuals to become attached to their own subordina-
tion, there do not seem to be good reasons for accepting the view that becoming a
subject necessarily involves such an attachment to subordination.” Butler moves to-
wards a fuller and more positive account of social relations in her more recent work,
Giving An Account of Oneself acknowledging that dependency and vulnerability are
part of a “fundamental relationality that supports and nurtures us as physical (not to
mention physic) beings.” 6 While Allen agrees with Butler that recognition by others
constitutes identity, she believes that recognition does not always involve subordi-
nation. Following Jessica Benjamin she believes in the possibility of mutual recogni-
tion (though dynamic and fleeting).
Chapters five, six and seven flesh out the Habermas side of the Foucault-
Habermas debate. Chapter five takes a closer look at the ideas of power and auton-
omy in Habermas, and questions the distinction between power and validity. Allen
5 Ibid., 65.
6 Ibid., 87.
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McLaren: review of Politics of Our Selves
does a remarkable job of synthesizing and explaining Habermas’s wide-ranging cor-

pus. She delineates three aspects of power in Habermas’s work: the colonization of
the lifeworld, systematically distorted communication, and individuation through
socialization. While Habermas himself acknowledges the first two aspects of power,
Allen develops the third as the most promising for explaining the role that power
plays in the lifeworld, for instance, in structuring gender subordination. Because
power is present in the lifeworld, including in familial relationships where identity
and the capacity for autonomy are formed, Allen argues that Habermas cannot
maintain the distinction between power and validity in light of his own acknowl-
edgment of the important role that socialization plays in the formation of identity.
Allen clearly demonstrates that power is a necessary condition for individuation
through socialization. But does this undermine autonomy and the possibility of cri-
tique entirely?
As she argues in the following chapter, even though admitting power col-
lapses the empirical/transcendental distinction that Habermas’s wishes to maintain,
it does not undermine his project entirely. The possibility of critique, and of appeal-
ing to a normative framework still exists. But instead of assuming that validity
stands apart from power and socio-historical circumstances, we need a more modest
position. Allen suggests that the pragmatic turn advocated by Thomas McCarthy
and Maeve Cooke allows for a reconceptualized idea of validity, one that allows for
the appeal to norms in light of the impurity of reason. A more contextualist and
pragmatic critical theory would advocate a context transcending validity, rather than
a context transcendent validity. This approach salvages the concern with norms so
important to the Habermasian project, while acknowledging the ever-present role of
power in the social world. Blending the best insights of Foucault and Habermas, Al-
len says we need to develop a “principled form of contextualism that emphasizes
our need both to posit context-transcending ideals and to continually unmask their
status as illusions rooted in interest and power-laden contexts.” 7
In chapter seven Allen takes up feminist critical theorist Seyla Benhabib’s
work. Benhabib’s interactive universalism gives more credence to particularity than
Habermas’s communicative ethics, and this goes some way toward establishing a
critical social theory that retains a strong notion of autonomy, and the ability to ap-
peal to norms while adding sensitivity to cultural and historical particularity. How-
ever, in spite of Benhabib’s own concerns about Habermas’s excessive rationalism,
Allen discovers a “rationalist residue” in Benhabib’s account of the self. Namely, de-
spite Benhabib’s attention to gender in her work, she holds the “implausible view
that there is an ungendered core to the self, and that gender is like clothes we can
outgrow or shoes we can leave behind.” 8 For Benhabib, gender is just one of the
7 Ibid., 148.
8 Ibid., 159.
86
narratives that we weave into our narrative conception of the self. But Allen cites
empirical evidence that gender identity precedes our ability to construct a narrative
account of the self. And, of course, the formation of gender identity takes place with-
in power relations. Allen’s main criticism of Benhabib mirrors her earlier criticism of
Habermas that power goes “all the way down,” structuring not only our options, but
also the very selves who choose.
In her conclusion she discusses the implications for feminism: How can
women resist normative femininity given that our very selves are structured by it?
Allen suggests two sources for such self-transformation, the conceptual and norma-
tive resources offered by social movements, such as the women’s movement or
queer movement. And new possibilities found in the social and cultural imaginary
via literature, film and art. One might wish that she had developed these sugges-
tions further: How do the alternatives to gender and sexuality norms already pro-
duced by these historic social movements play a role in individual self-
transformation? Although Foucault shied away from prescriptive accounts of social
and political change, in his later essays and interviews he discussed how the alterna-
tive social arrangements among gay men could inspire new possibilities for social
relationships for everyone.
Allen’s nuanced and careful readings of Foucault, Butler, Habermas and
Benhabib demonstrate that both subjection and autonomy are necessary for an ade-
quate theory of the self, and that the tension between Foucault’s position and Ha-
bermas’s has been exaggerated. She offers us a Kantian reading of Foucault, and a
contextualized, historicized version of Habermas that brings their projects together
in interesting and productive ways, illuminating both sides of the politics of our-
selves, autonomy and subjection.
Margaret A. McLaren, Rollins College
87
 Bradley Kaye 2009
ISSN: 1832-5203
REVIEW
Cressida J. Heyes, Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bo-

dies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) ISBN: 0195310543
A stunning array of references burgeon forth from this text. Heyes has clearly done
her homework. If the stated purpose of Oxford University Press’s “Studies in Femin-
ist Philosophy Series” was to showcase cutting-edge feminist approaches to philoso-
phy, then it has accomplished this goal with Cressida J. Heyes’s Self-Transformations:
Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies. For the most part the book utilizes a Foucaul-
dian understanding of ethics that is not less concerned with producing a moral
judgment of rights and wrongs, than it is with producing an “askesis of freedom.”
This means creating a notion of self-becoming that is a product of what we desire
ourselves to become, implying a power relation that is productive rather than re-
pressive. As Heyes tells us, transforming the self entails a disciplined, meditative
perseverance that is less achieved by turning the body into a perfect form than it is
by an affirmation of the process itself. Heyes says that she rejects “teleological con-
ceptions of the body,” and this book approaches ethics in this provocative, cutting-
edge manner. Rather than evaluating whether or not weight loss programs are
“good” or “bad” Heyes challenges readers to view the dieting process as being an
expression of great self-control. Fusing her text with Buddhist thinking, Heyes says
that if there is such a thing as a human essence it is a “vessel of joy-- a joy that comes
not from the ego’s achievements, but from a deep sense of unity and connection with
all things.” (p.4) Obsessing over one’s body often distracts from this basic human
desire to experience joy, but the process of self-transformation can often result in an
extremely intense focus of the mind and body that can both generate and deepen
feelings of joy. She remarks on the great sense of relief in accomplishing a goal after
a long, concerted effort. The dark side of this approach is that it can turn into a mo-
nomaniacal obsession.
Heyes has a deep sense of empathy with the transgendered subject, the
weight-watchers subject, and the vulnerable woman who chooses to undergo the
radical transformation that accompanies plastic surgery. She does not lump all of
these subjectivities under one classification, as she is aware of difference; more im-
portantly, Heyes is unafraid to explore the biopolitical underpinnings of these trans-
formative phenomena. She shows how people are guided by doctors and health offi-
88
Kaye: review of Self Transformations
cials into believing that without these life-altering self-transformations their psycho-
logical well-being, even their lives, may be at stake. The message doctors too often
give to patients pressuring them to shave off poundage is often, “lose weight and
your future morbidity may decrease.” (p.5) She also shows how with the recent in-
vention of online discussion boards, these varied subjectivities are becoming a spe-
cies all to themselves. Keeping track of one’s weight loss progress and knowing the
nuanced art form of calorie counting are ways of gaining acceptance in the world of
dieters.
Confronted by a deluge of books discussing “normalization,” Heyes is also
extremely careful in the way she uses the term. She sees this term as being a manife-
station of disciplinary power, which is not a substance, but rather a series of circulat-
ing relations that cannot easily be located in an individual or an institution. Discipli-
nary power is constitutive rather than external to the subject it creates, rather than
being imposed upon a type of individual. Its functioning is based on a productive
power relation, creating the self, rather than being a repressive hypothesis, and there
is a power relation that consists of liberating a person’s inner-self: saying “yes” to
what is within rather than “no.” This disciplinary type of power holds the possibility
of exhilarating people to the point of incredible joy and euphoria while achieving
ones goals, or to obsessions that manifest in subjects who can think of nothing but
changing their body. She insists that obsessing over transforming one’s body is most
often the result of a culture industry that insidiously permeates society with images
of what the desirable female body type should be. The problem is that she insists on
the one hand that women are not “mere dupes” of a patriarchal culture, yet also in-
sists that media play a crucial role in shaping social norms, media that are still pre-
dominantly run by men. From here she goes on to show the fallacies in glamorizing
a skinny female body type because it limits a woman’s ability to defend herself, pre-
sumably from the aggression of stronger male bodies, and also limits a woman’s
ability to take on manual labor, traditionally a male line of work. Although a cardi-
ologist would undoubtedly disagree, Heyes shows how desiring a thin female body
is not causally related to health problems. Surprisingly, Heyes says that there is no
link between obesity and poor health, which runs contrary to dominant medical and
governmental discourse on the subject. These institutions presumably form a pow-
er/knowledge nexus that propagates a message that there is an obesity epidemic,
and that weight reduction leads to better health. For Heyes, obesity is instead linked
to social functionalism regarding what is a proper woman’s role within a patriarchal
society, even if we are not to believe that women are dupes of this system.
One of the bright spots for scholars of Foucault comes toward the end of the
book. Heyes holds steadfast to the legacy of Foucault as a thinker who was deeply
concerned about the way technologies of the self constitute a subjectivity within a
nexus of power/knowledge, but from the perspective of an ethical agent who must
establish a relation to his or her own subjectivity as a supplement of a larger histori-
89
cal viewpoint. Heyes is rightly disturbed by various culture warriors working inside
and outside of the academy who have made a cottage industry out of slandering
Foucault in the hopes of discrediting his entire body of work. She says, “some ad ho-
minem and possibly homophobic readings of Foucault’s biography generate the im-
pression that he became, eventually, a decadent dilettante (i.e., promiscuous, unre-
morseful, eclectic, queer), rather than a serious scholar (i.e., dogged, earnest, narrow-
ly focused, straight). As a colleague in philosophy once rhetorically asked me, “Fou-
cault? Wasn’t he some kind of crackpot?” Undoubtedly, most Foucault scholars have
more than likely dealt with this uninformed view of the Foucault, which is based
more on gossip than serious engagement with his texts. Heyes meets this critique by
saying, “By remaining feisty, unpredictable, radical and critical, Foucault exempli-
fies a political personality and an ethical attitude that does not crumble in the ab-
sence of self-certainty.” In her view, Foucault stands in stark contrast to other cano-
nized philosophers such as Nietzsche, who, Heyes says, epitomizes a certain type of
academic aura-building that goes into creating a “heroic male intellectual.” Foucault
is a different kind of philosopher, whose writings, according to Heyes, are absolute-
ly conducive to a feminist interpretation primarily because of his concern regarding
transformations of all bodies. That makes Foucault’s work anti-programmatic and a
joy to interpret and discuss.
As a feminist scholar Heyes is disconcerted by the lackadaisical manner in
which early feminist interpretations explained such self-transformations as dieting
and plastic surgery in simplistic terms. Often these feminists concluded that the fe-
male was an oblivious dupe of patriarchy and then proceeded to paint a bleak pic-
ture of society with broad brushstrokes that showed it to be male-dominated. Heyes,
inspired by Foucault, instead proposes that feminists and intellectuals in the social
sciences and humanities take into account the personal narrative behind a self-
transformation. Such an approach will help us better understand why an individual
desires to alter her/his body, instead of producing universal theories to encompass
all vaguely similar alterations. She is also sympathetic to the view that subjectivity is
always created out of inter-connected relations of power.
The self is always caught up in these interconnected networks of gender
normalization, but that is not to say the subjects are simply victims without hope of
extrication. There is hope, Heyes maintains; in fact, one of her own ethical tenets is
that feminists must not give in to intellectually-inflected despair (p. 112), and to real-
ize that hope cannot be generated by means of a discourse of political or ethical con-
demnation.
Bradley Kaye, SUNY Binghamton
90
 Adrian Switzer 2009
ISSN: 1832-5203
REVIEW
The Revolution Cannot Be Televised

Tamara Chaplin, Turning on the Mind: French Philosophers on Television (Chi-
cago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), ISBN: 0-226-50991-5
Near the end of Sans Soleil (1982), Chris Marker’s experimental, filmic meditation on
memory, the political history of imperialism, cultural identity, and the incursion of
appearances into reality, and, conversely, fact into storytelling, Alexandra Stewart
the narrator reads from one of the letters by Sandor Krasna that run through the
film:
“I remember that month of January in Tokyo, or rather I remember the images I

filmed of the month of January in Tokyo. They have substituted themselves for
my memory. They are my memory. I wonder how people remember things who
don’t film, don’t photograph, don’t tape. How has mankind managed to remem-
ber?” 1
Succinctly, the narrator articulates a central question of modernity: as the

archive grows, and as the means of record-keeping are perfected, culturally (and col-
lectively) we suffer a lapse in memory: “Everything works to perfection, all that we
allow to slumber, including memory. Logical consequence: total recall is memory
anesthetized.”
If it is the rapid, technological advance in recording media that precipitates
such amnesia, so the rise of new media simultaneously announces the end of history:
“I’m writing you all this from another world, a world of appearances. In a way the
two worlds communicate with each other. Memory is to one what history is to the
other: an impossibility.” In light of this situation, the narrator contrasts the “deli-
rium” and “drift” with which memory must make do, given its modern circums-
tances, against the traditional, memoirist’s wont to simplify history by treating mo-
ments as isolated evidence: “A moment stopped would burn like a frame of film
blocked before the furnace of the projector.” To remember, or to do history, is to en-
gage in a kind of rambling enterprise; any appeal to traditional, historical practices
1 Sans Soleil, Chris Marker, director (Irvington, NY: Criterion Collection, 2007).
91
Switzer: review of Turning on the Mind
signals the anesthesia of modern memory.

The great, “delirious” aim of Sans Soleil is thus to remember; further, or what
is the same, the film also practices history, and revolutionary, political history, in the
only way that remains: by fits and starts, discontinuities and excisions. Marker’s film
on memory and history thus shares something with Foucault's own work on history
(as a phenomenon and discipline): both are conducted in the wake of history as an
institutionalized practice; or, as Friedrich Kittler notes in Gramophone, Film, Typewri-
ter: “Foucault [is] the last historian or the first archeologist.” The historian’s craft that
Foucault still wields in his archeological period, and that he culminates and over-
comes with his turn to the “jolts ... surprises ... unsteady victories and unpalatable
defeats” of genealogy, 2 recognizes the medium of writing while ignoring the tech-
niques of its production. It is for this reason, Kittler continues, that Foucault’s arc-
haeological “analyses end immediately before that point in time when other media
penetrated the library’s stacks. For sound archives or towers or film rolls, discourse
analysis becomes inappropriate.” 3 Generalizing over the specifics of Foucault’s ge-
nealogical turn, what Kittler presses us to think is the possibility of remembering
and of doing history—and how one might engage in these paired practices—in the
era of the audio-visual archive. This is the main political question that threads
through Marker’s film.
Consider in this regard the history of Guinea-Bissau’s war of independence
against Portugal (1956-1974). In Sans Soleil, stock footage is shown of the leader of
the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), Amilcar
Cabral, waving from the bow of a small motor boat as it pulls off the shore of Bi-
jagós; Marker then cuts fifteen years forward to Cabral’s half-brother Luis recreating
the scene. Except that the video record misleads: despite appearances, Luis Cabral is
not leaving the shores of Bijagós but coming to them: “In an old film clip Amilcar
Cabral waves a gesture of good-bye to the shore; he’s right, he’ll never see it again.
Luis Cabral made the same gesture fifteen years later on the canoe that was bringing
us back.”
The film lingers for a while on the Amilcar (half-)brothers and the history of
Guinean independence. The narrator reflects on the guerilla tactics employed against
the occupying Portuguese army; she notes, with regret, the use of the term “guerilla”
to describe a “certain breed of film-making.” Such reflections are synched to old,
black and white film showing the advance—or is it a retreat?—of liberation fighters
pouring over a dusty meadow, crushing beneath them as they go the parched un-
dergrowth. Then, once more, a cut forward in time: “And now, the scene moves to
Cassaque: the seventeenth of February, 1980.” Guinea and Cape Verde are in the full
2 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul
Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 76.
3 Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, translated by Geoffrey Winthrop-
Young and Michael Wutz (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 105.
92
flush of independence. Luis Cabral is president of the new nation; he is shown at a

ceremony decorating a soldier for his contributions to the insurgency. Once more,
though, things are not as they seem: “But to understand it properly one must move
forward in time. In a year Luis Cabral the president will be in prison, and the weep-
ing man he has just decorated, Major Nino, will have taken power. The party will
have split, Guineans and Cape Verdeans separated one from the other will be fight-
ing over Amilcar’s legacy.”
We begin to feel the vertigo of the moving-image; or, better, since the feeling
is more a temporal than a geographical disorientation, what we succumb to is the
inertia of what Deleuze terms the “time-image [L’image-temps]”: 4 the uniquely
modern form of audio-visual representation—and experience—that comes with the
rise of the modern cinema. Yet, to identify the vertiginous relationship we moderns
have to time with the medium of film is to overlook the more immediate influence of
television. This insight lies at the heart of Sans Soleil. Krasna writes in one letter,
which is read at length, of his experience watching Japanese television: he refers to
the set as “that memory box”; the programming that follows is fittingly historical in
character.
Cloistered away in a Tokyo hotel, hemmed in on all sides by oppressive black
frames, we watch through Marker’s lens a numbing day of television programming:
first, there are the sacred deer of Nara; then a cultural program on NHK about the
nineteenth-century French writer and dandy Gérard de Nerval; the Nerval program
carries us to the grave of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, followed by an evening program on
the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia; later still, after the killing fields, there is adult pro-
gramming: “I did it all. All the way to the evening shows for adults—so called.” Im-
ages from the day spent before Japanese television recur throughout the film; the
persistence of the images suggests that the temporal vertigo of film—the “insane
memory,” as one Krasna letter describes the temporality of modern, cinematic and
televisual imagery—is borrowed from the small screen. The narrator senses as much.
In trying to juxtapose the Nerval/Rousseau show against images of Pol Pot, the
voiceover wonders aloud: “From Jean-Jacques Rousseau to the Khmer Rouge: Coin-
cidence? Or, the sense of history?”
This tentative speculation unfolds into the streets of Tokyo: the narrator voic-
es Krasna’s sense that the fine line between representation on television and life in
the city has blurred. In one hypnotizing scene in particular, Marker shoots what
seems an endless stream of commuters handing in their travel tokens to board the
train; the transit official collecting the passes is at this moment indistinguishable
from a ticket-taker at a movie theater. The further implication, which Marker cap-
tures on the faces of the commuters, is that they see themselves in a similar light.
4 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
93
Switzer: review of Turning on the Mind
Watching modern life as if through the small screen of the television set—with a
kind of senseless, disjointed exchange of images—is a matter of watching persons
watch themselves in the same manner. To underscore this point, Marker takes foo-
tage from one of the adult programs from late night television and inserts it into the
furtive glances young men cast on women on the train. Continuous, lived experience
is a montage drawn from an ever-expanding store of footage. The metonymic prin-
ciple of association and dissociation by which experience is thus edited together
would seem to favor a Lacanian, psychoanalytic approach to a people and culture
that has been televised.
Yet, to exploit this point of convergence between contemporary theory and
modern media by isolating Lacan’s actual appearance on television—and this is the
strategy, generally, of Turning on the Mind, Tamara Chaplin’s history of French phi-
losophers on television 5—is to miss the question(s) that Marker’s film, for example,
or Foucault’s genealogy puts to us. With the rise of the machinery of recordkeeping
is it still possible to remember? Is it still possible to have, and to do, history? And the
political question that follows from these first two questions: In what manner—or in
what "style" in a Nietzschean sense—are we to conduct an historical research that
must call itself into question? Marker and Foucault may not offer ready answers to
these questions, but in their non-narrative film-making and genealogical efforts, re-
spectively, they acknowledge that they are "unable not to ask them today," as Fou-
cault puts it in The Order of Things. 6
Lacan—as Sartre and Camus before him and Lyotard and Foucault after him
in their own ways—is always “on” television insofar as his theoretical questions of
subjectivity and sexual difference are at the same time questions of the possibility of
theory and how such theory can and should be conducted. Lacan puts the point
plainly at the opening of Television, the transcript of his 1974 appearance on the cul-
tural magazine show Un certain regard: “[T]here’s no difference between television
and the public before whom I’ve spoken for a long time now, a public known as my
seminar. A single gaze in both cases: a gaze to which, in neither case, do I address
myself, but in the name of which I speak.” 7 Lacan recognizes that his work, his ideas,
and he himself are implicated in the changed circumstances of a modern culture that
is used to being recorded/remembered and that is used to watching itself through
such technologies. It is for this very reason, in turn, that Lacan is able to insist on the
political character of his television appearance. The relations of power and desire
that exist between the institutions of psychoanalysis and state-governed television
5 Tamara Chaplin, Turning on the Mind: French Philosophers on Television (Chicago, IL: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2007).
6 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York:
Vintage Books, 1994), 307.
7 Jacques Lacan, “Television”: Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, translated by Denis Hollier,
Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990), 3.
94
are gestured at or intimated throughout the broadcast. In playfully punning on the

language of therapy and television, Lacan effectively draws the viewer’s attention to
the political space of this institutional exchange without thereby bringing it into full,
televisual view.
Chaplin’s book is at its finest—and indeed is at these points utterly captivat-
ing—when it allows theory and media to run together, mutually and reciprocally
illuminating (and obscuring) one another. Two long passages stand out in this re-
spect, though generally she is at her best in narrating the particulars of the pro-
grams. The first is a description of Foucault’s December 1976 appearance on Apo-
strophes; the second is her subsequent treatment of Lyotard’s March 1978 segment on
the short-subject program Tribune libre. It is here that the two intra-statist institutions
of academic philosophy and public television are put in dialogue with one another;
the great store of power coded in this exchange is exercised through the figures on
the screen.
Rather than fitting these scenarios to the extrinsic demands of an historical
narrative that is variously divided between how television helped the French “con-
struct a post-War, national identity” and naturalize its growing immigrant popula-
tion, and how select programs disproved the going assumption—though whose as-
sumption this is, we are never sure—that “serious,” philosophical discussion can not
reach the masses through television, Chaplin simply lets the scenes unfold. For a
moment, we are left to glimpse the broad, affecting personality of Foucault and the
knowing wit of Lyotard. In short, we are witness to performances on television of
television. Yet, such performances are not unique to the modern theorist (or to the
theorist of modernity); these just happen to be two occasions that the audio-visual
archive has remembered.
This brings us back, finally, to Marker's successes in Sans Soleil in filming the
political circumstances of modernity: the political can not be explicated, as Marker
recognizes, but rather only suggested by editing. It is by cutting back and forth be-
tween the insurgent Amilcar Cabral and his presidential half-brother, Luis Cabral,
that Marker projects the revolutionary politics of power-relations between a gov-
ernment and its radical elements. Marker's achievement in engaging the political in
this way stands in sharp contrast to Chaplin's failure. Committed as she is to a gen-
eral, historical positivism, Chaplin isolates French philosophers on television and in
so doing enervates the political potency of a theory as it connects with other forms of
discourse, other practices, and other institutions. To put this last point more con-
cretely: it is not, as Chaplin comments at one point in the book, that the events of
May and June of 1968 were not broadcast over the airwaves. Rather, it is that politics
in the distinctly modern sense of relations of power, desire or force—and this is the
politics of les événement de Mai—can not be televised.
Adrian Switzer, Western Kentucky University
95
 Adrian Switzer 2009
ISSN: 1832-5203
REVIEW
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books,
2007). ISBN: 1890951781
Time is out of joint: permanently so, it seems. What struck Walter Benjamin with
such force nearly a century ago in borrowing Klee’s image of the Angelus Novus—
the angel’s eyes are cast back over centuries of historical ruin as he is flung into the
future by paradise’s tempest1—is for us familiar, all too familiar. Life without inter-
ruption, or a smooth, homogeneous life-experience is differentiated by a multitude
of group identities, and a periodized biography. Whether in response to, or as a con-
tributing factor in, the modern fact of a fragmentary, divided time, history is theo-
rized as such.
In this regard, consider how Thomas Kuhn’s once novel thesis of disrup-
tive—or eruptive—scientific revolutions has effectively replaced the idea of conti-
nuous historical development. 2 Whether adopted in the work of a particular histo-
rian or rejected in the name of a different model of historical change, at the very least
the Kuhnian model serves as a touchstone for all subsequent histories; it bulks par-
ticularly large for those who would undertake to write a history of science after
Kuhn.
Implicitly, it is Kuhnian history that Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have
in mind in the following passage from their work on the history of scientific objectiv-
ity:
[T]his history is one of innovation and proliferation rather than monarchic suc-
cession ... Instead of the analogy of a succession of political regimes or scientific
theories, each triumphing on the ruins of its predecessor, imagine [the history of
objectivity being akin to] new stars winking into existence, not replacing old ones
but changing the geography of the heavens. 3
1 Walter Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte.” Walter Benjamin Gesammelte Schrif-
ten, Erste Band, Erste Teil (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), 697.
2 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1996).
3 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2007), 18.
96
Adrian Switzer: review of Objectivity
Imagining the firmament of scientific history dotted with all different theories both
past and present is a challenging response to Kuhn, for whom each new theory
burns so brightly as to blot out all that precede it. Again, with Kuhn implicitly in
mind, Daston and Galison write: “In contrast to the static tableaux of paradigms and
epistemes, this is a history of dynamic fields, in which newly introduced bodies re-
configure and reshape those already present, and vice versa.” 4
Though they would rework the specifics of a Kuhnian, disruptive history to
include a multitude of scientific theories within a changing, dynamic landscape,
Daston and Galison nevertheless conceive of the advance of historical time as irregu-
lar; throughout the book, their preferred metaphorical image of historical change is
that of the avalanche.
Just as in the case of the avalanche, preconditions must coincide with contingent
circumstances ... Rather than razor-sharp boundaries between periods, we
should therefore expect first a sprinkling of interventions, which then briskly in-
tensify into a movement, as fears are articulated and alternatives realized—the
unleashing of an avalanche. 5
Later, in discussing “mechanical objectivity” as the episteme, ethos, and guiding

principle of scientific practice in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, Daston and Ga-
lison again imagine the icy convulsions of historical change: “Like the spring melt of
an ice-bound northern river, the change begins with a crack here and there; later
comes the explosive shears that throw off sheets of ice, echoing through the woods
like shotgun blasts.” 6
Trading in metaphors of revolutionary versus avalanche-like historical
change serves a purpose: it hones the language by which the historian reports on his
or her findings. In the social sciences, and in theory in general, clarifying terms is in
many ways an end in itself. Yet, re-fashioning the terminology of an older theoretical
model to fit different data, while useful, also tends to be something of a distraction.
Clarifying the model of historical change distracts those who would theorize par-
ticular, disjointed histories from the more embracing issue of the ethics of such theo-
rization. Let us be clear on this last point. There will be inter-historical ethical ques-
tions that arise within a field of social, scientific study. For example, in writing a his-
tory of the American Civil War, ethical questions will almost certainly arise concern-
ing race and the institution of slavery. Yet, these are not the ethical issues that face
the modern historian as historian. For their part, Daston and Galison acknowledge
the ethical questions that arise within their chosen fields of study, namely, the bio-
4 Ibid., 19
5 Ibid., 50.
6 Ibid., 124.
97
logical and physical sciences. They note, for example, the seeming “heartless[ness] of
technocrats” and the “indifferen[ce]” of scientific objectivity to “familiar human val-
ues.” 7 Daston and Galison raise the specter of ethical failings within the science just
long enough to set them aside in the name of conducting a (Foucault-like) historical
study of scientific norms and practices.
In concluding the text, Daston and Galison reflect, briefly, on the larger ethi-
cal import of their own history: “To claim that there are multiple virtues, be they ep-
istemic or moral, is very different from the claims that all virtues (or none) are equal-
ly well- (or ill-) grounded and that whim may decide among them.” By historicizing
scientific epistemologies, and thereby multiplying their epistemic virtues, Daston
and Galison conceive of their history as preparatory to, but absent from, the ensuing
ethical debate of such virtues. As far as the ethical tasks, responsibilities—or even,
questions—that face the historian given her epistemology (of historical time as dis-
jointed), and given the practices that emanate from and articulate that epistemology
(e.g., framing a history of objectivity in terms of the images that illustrate scientific
atlases over time), Daston and Galison are unequivocal: “All history can do is to
demonstrate the possibility of alternatives,” which is to say, in matters of epistemic
virtues, “history ... clarif[ies] what they are, how they work, and how much hangs in
the balance if one is obliged to choose among them.” 8
It is this last set of claims that causes hesitation: “All history can do” is to
show an episteme as it is; all history can do is to demonstrate which practices follow
from the ethos of a particular episteme; all history can do is present, without decid-
ing, the ethical import of an episteme and its attendant virtues. History as a social
scientific discipline is thereby exempted from the questions that confront a science
when its epistemology is historicized; in short, history is conceived of as disinte-
rested, non-evaluative, and therefore as an objective observation and reportage of
facts as they are given in the historical record. In this way, the historian with one
hand unsettles the seeming givenness of objectivity as a fixed or grounding scientific
principle, and unsettles it by way of its historicization, while with the other hand re-
cuperates into history itself a basic or founding objectivity: in the name of disconti-
nuous historical time, objectivity is dissolved in a field of social, scientific study only to be
precipitated out again in the discipline of history itself. Consequently, the value-laden
choices and the virtues and practices that grow out of an historical epistemology get
covered over. In other words, questions concerning the ethical implications and en-
tanglements—and, more importantly, the ethical responsibilities and possibilities of
doing history—are skirted.
But there is great ethical potential in an historical epistemology that treats
time as disjointed or fragmentary; Benjamin’s unique sense of the messianic, for one,
7 Ibid., 52-53.
8 Ibid., 376.
98
attests to the ethical potency of such an epistemology. Here it is instructive to follow

a different approach to answering the question of the ethical task and promise of
doing modern history. Further, it is instructive to do so by availing ourselves of the
same Kantian and Foucauldian resources Daston and Galison employ in their own
historical study. After all, it is in part through his engagement with the Kantian no-
tion of critique that Foucault is led, methodologically, toward a historical genealogy.
In turn, though it is unacknowledged, it is by a kind of Foucauldian genealogy that
Daston and Galison conduct their study of the virtues and practices of the biological
and physical sciences.
What Foucault gains by this methodological turn to genealogy, and what he
lacked in his archaeology, is a means of coordinating his theorization of a particular
field of knowledge with the practices that define and articulate that field: the interac-
tion between the practices being theorized and their (practical) theorization is trace-
able through a genealogical method in a way that is not possible for an archaeology. 9
Given Foucault’s insight into how knowledge and power are related, an ethics of
theory follows naturally from the preceding, epistemological point: the interaction
between theorized practices and their theorization is not ethically neutral; again, a
genealogy is methodologically keyed to the ethical consequences of theory in a way
that archaeology is not.
To begin our brief reconstruction of the ethics of theory in general—and the
ethics of history in particular—we must first insist on the modernity of such history
since it is based upon the modern epistemological view of historical time as disrup-
tive, disjointed, and out-of-sync with itself. Historical time in disrepair now seems to
be a settled matter; what has lapsed since Benjamin discerned this structure a cen-
tury ago is its vibrancy. No longer do we survey history in the stark hues of Klee’s
reds, blues, and sharp angles. We are instead awash in grey news-copy famines, pla-
gues, wars, and/or natural catastrophes; or, more simply, the high-gloss arrhythmia
of digital media. With the entrenchment of an historical epistemology comes a quiet-
ism concerning the questions raised by that epistemology and a diminishment of its
possible claim on us: change and disruption are learned by rote; they are unthin-
kingly treated as synonymous with historical time.
We need look no further than ourselves to find out how history has settled in-
to such a state. It is through the lens of modern subjectivity that we view history; it is
from the same, subjective vantage that history shows up in its modern disfigure-
ment. The modern subject is active—or characterized by “spontaneity [Spontaneität]”
in the Kantian sense—it is self-determining, autonomous, self-reflexive, and yet it
remains opaque to itself upon reflection. To date the arrival of this modern self is to
look back into the written philosophical record and note the terminological drift to-
9 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” Translated by D. F. Bouchard & S.

Simon. In The Foucault Reader. Edited by Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984). 76-
100.
99
ward a recognizable objective/subjective distinction: as is the case with all linguistic

histories, so too with “subject” and “object” the change is gradual. While Descartes,
writing in the mid-seventeenth century, continues the traditional, scholastic usage
according to which “object” refers to a mental artifact—a concept or representation
in the mind—a hundred years later, in the pages of Kant, “subject” as referring to
cognitive and/or perceptual operations and faculties is clearly distinguished from
the “object” as the shared reference of such operations for all rational beings.
In making their case that changes in ideas and practices of subjectivity inform
changes in the ideas and practices of scientific objectivity, Daston and Galison note
that by the mid-nineteenth century, “dictionaries and handbooks in English, French,
and German credited Kantian critical philosophy with the resuscitation and redefini-
tion of the scholastic terminology of the objective and subjective.” 10 The implication
is that changes in the textual or linguistic record correspond with extra-discursive
changes in society in general (it is just this transition from discursivity to extra-
discursive practices that Foucauldian genealogy tracks). Just as subjectivity and ob-
jectivity are written about differently in texts from the end of the nineteenth century
compared to how they are addressed in texts from the beginning of the same period,
so subjectivity and objectivity are experienced, lived, or practiced differently by the
generation that spans the same time period.
In invoking Kant’s idea of an active, willful subject to make the correlative
point that scientific objectivity, as it is modernly understood and practiced, is histor-
ically situated—and only recently acquired—Daston and Galison avail themselves of
part of Kant’s modernism while neglecting another, related part: an active or “spon-
taneous” subject is for Kant also a self that is concealed from itself. For Daston and
Galison, Kant’s notion of a self-determining subject prefigures what they term the
“scientific self,” which appears in the mid-nineteenth century (at just the moment
the Kantian terminology of subject and object enters into the official, textual record).
Once Kant has drawn the distinction between what is merely subjective in the cogni-
tive and perceptual operations of human beings, and what is objective in those same
operations and as such verifiable, epistemologically warranted, and communicable,
the scientist’s task is to diminish by strength of will the former in the name of the
latter.
The mid-nineteenth century historical record bears out this development in a
number of ways. For instance, there is suddenly a new literary genre; or, at least, a
marked change in the tone of an older genre. What appears at this time is the intel-
lectual biography of “the scientist, der Wissenschaftler, le scientifique” 11 as self-
disciplined, steel-willed, and self-abnegating. Consider the following excerpt Daston
and Galison provide from an 1878 British guide to research methods in physics and
10 Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 206.

11 Ibid., 217.
100
chemistry: “[The will is] the strong central authority in the mind by which all its
powers are regulated and directed as the military forces of a nation are directed by
the strategist who arranges the operations of a war.” 12 Such an idealized image of the
scientist as self-denying and (militarily) self-disciplined is absorbed into the practic-
es of the common, laboratory under-laborer. Meticulous journals are now kept, with
detailed record not only of the objects of study but of the state of the observer; Das-
ton and Galison reproduce a page from the Sudelbücher—or “waste books”—of the
scientist, poet and philosopher Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: observations of
changes in barometric pressure are woven into reflections on Lichtenberg’s own
mental and physical state. 13
As rooted in Kant as these developments in (scientific) subjectivity are, still
there is a crucial piece of the Kantian story that is overlooked: it is just this missing
piece that accounts for the way history appears to us moderns; it is this same piece
that problematizes the idea and practice of an objective history (and makes apparent
the ethical task that confronts the historian). At precisely the juncture in the Critique
of Pure Reason from which one can extract the (modern) notion of an active and ref-
lective subject, one also finds Kant insisting on the opacity of such subjectivity to it-
self. In acknowledging an active self as the condition of the possibility of a unified
object of experience, Kant is careful to situate such a subject at the inaccessible level
of the transcendental; this is the significance, in Kant, of identifying the self as the
“transcendental unity of apperception.” 14
The representation of an object (of experience) as a synthetic achievement ra-
ther than as an empirical given is rooted in a self that is itself a synthetic achieve-
ment. Yet, as the transcendental condition of the possibility of an object (of expe-
rience), the synthesis of the unity of apperception cannot itself be conditioned. As
unconditioned, the synthetic unity of apperception is not determinable, that is, it is
not cognizable or knowable to consciousness. All objects of experience are thus
tinged with a degree of opacity, which is inherited from the opacity of their tran-
scendental condition; Kant in this way inclines toward empiricism and away from
the rationalist, Leibnizian hope that objects might be fully determined (or cognized)
by thought alone. To put the same point in more familiar Kantian terms, an object (of
experience) is for Kant an appearance; the object as it is in-itself is not knowable (just
as/because the self as it is in-itself is unconditioned and thus unknowable).
Stepping back from the Kantian trees in which it is all too easy to lose the for-
est, what follows is that if modern objectivity is rooted in the Kantian critical project,
it is so at the considerable price of a ready and complete access to the object. Given
12 Ibid., 229.
13 Ibid., 236-237; Cf. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books. Translated by Reginald
J. Hollingdale (New York: New York Review of Books, 1990).
14 Immanuel Kant, “Kritik der reinen Vernunft.” Akademieausgabe von Immanuel Kants Ge-
sammelten Werke, Band III (Berlin, GER W.: de Gruyter, 1902). B139-140.
101
the opacity of the self to itself—and here we should recall that Freud, a century later,
will have Kant in mind in developing psychoanalysis—if an object is approached
through the lens of modern subjectivity it will appear with just the same imperfec-
tions that mar the lens. This same disfigurement marks every possible object on
which the modern observer would turn a probing eye. Given our present interest in
the study of historical time by history as a social, scientific discipline, we can specify
the preceding conclusion: historical time appears to history as disjointed, dis-
articulated, or incomplete just because it is viewed through and from the vantage
point of the modern subject. The great tragedy—or comedy, depending on one’s
Nietzschean sensibilities—of modern life is that the subject becomes acutely self-
interested at the very moment of falling into obscurity to itself.
The first generation of nineteenth-century modern theorists was unaware, to
various degrees, of the significance of all of this for theory itself. For instance, Kant
conceives of the Critique of Pure Reason methodologically as a process of reason sit-
ting in self-judgment. In at least this one important respect, Kant is thus blind at the
time of the first Critique to the broader theoretical exigencies of his own account of
subjectivity: critique as a methodology of reasoned self-reflection must need be fru-
strated by the same obscure fate that faces modern subjectivity. Later modern theor-
ists—and Kant himself by the end of his career—come to appreciate the theoretical
(or methodological) problems that arise from the idea of a (Kantian) transcendental
subjectivity. In response to Kant, Nietzsche and Marx exemplify the modern theorist
in working out, in their own distinct ways, theoretical models adjusted to the mod-
ern realities of subjectivity, time, and society. And here we should note one further,
more recent close-reader of Kant: Michel Foucault.
Like Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx before him—to all of whom Foucault dedi-
cates an early, eponymous essay15—Foucault acknowledges the great theoretical po-
tential of Kantian critique; with these same early modern theorists, Foucault also rea-
lizes that critique in its traditional, Kantian form is no longer viable given the differ-
ent structure of modern, historical time. 16 By privileging practices and techniques
over discursive formations, Foucault replaces in theory the Kant-like regulative
ideas that modern sciences and institutions erect on grounds that have been razed
by a process of analysis and critical investigation. What Foucault instead attends to
in his genealogical approach is site- and time-specific phenomena that resist the
(temporally) pre-modern approach of most discursive analyses. Leaving aside the
formidable theoretical challenges that in turn confront a study of historically si-
tuated practices and norms, it here suffices to note that in a genealogy both the ob-
15 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx.” Translated by Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan
D. Schrift. In Transforming the Hermeneutic Context: From Nietzsche to Nancy (Albany, NY:
State University of New York Press, 1990), 59-67.
16 Cf. Michael Kelly, Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate (Cambridge,
MA; MIT Press, 1994).
102
ject of study and the means of its study are specific, deeply contextualized, and loca-
lized in time and place. As might be expected, the ethics of theorizing in this fashion
is comparably site-specific and particular in its focus.
Thus, the ethical burden we shoulder as theorists with a new, modern
epistemology of history—one that treats historical time as a fractious, unsteady ad-
vance from past into future—is that of the specific, particular, or individual. The fo-
cus of Foucault’s genealogical studies bear out this point; the late works occupy the
space between an uneven, disjointed history, the imperatives that accrue in the in-
terstices of historical time, and the ethical possibilities open to those who have
slipped into those dead spaces. Texts like Discipline and Punish and The History of
Sexuality also aim to fit the resources available from the western, intellectual tradi-
tion into the margin (and in so doing empower those who have been marginalized
by the [un]steady advance of history).
At the level of theorizing modern, historical time and its attendant systems of
knowledge and regimes of power, Foucault moves in his later work from an arc-
haeological retrieval of the discursive traces of change left in the knowledge systems
of the sciences to a genealogy of the practices of those same systems. What Foucault
gains in this methodological change is a theoretical proximity to his particular field
of study and, more importantly, a way of gauging the intrusion of his own theoreti-
cal practices into whichever topic is under investigation. Though Foucault would
appeal to the language of knowledge and power to describe the theory-level implica-
tions of his genealogical approach, the language of an ethics of theory seems equally
apt given the point at which Foucault arrives at the end of his career. We might, ac-
cordingly, read Foucault’s interest in the ancient practices surrounding the hupom-
nemata as self-referential: if there is an ethics of the self being practiced in this ancient
writing perhaps it reflects the ethics of writing about such matters in an historical
study of antiquity. 17
An epistemology that treats of historical time as disjointed, demands, as
noted above, a matching theory that is sufficiently pliable to adjust to the uneven
terrain of such a history. A theory like Foucauldian genealogy reflects such pliability
in its value-bias toward what is local, specific, or marginal. To put the same point in
the above Kantian language, a genuinely modern theory attends to what is con-
cealed or obscured in its field of study; a modern theory approaches what is liminal
within a particular field of knowledge or what tends toward and anticipates a differ-
ent set of practices and norms. In short, marginality and difference are the epistemic
virtues of all modern theory as modern. Given the very insubstantiality of the notion
of the marginal by which a modern, theoretical epistemology operates, the ethics
that attends modern theory is normatively biased toward adopting alternate theoret-
ical approaches and re-orienting historical studies by various different arrangements
17 Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981-1982.
Translated by Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2005), 367.
103
of site- and time-specific practices. Again, we see just this point being practiced in
Foucault’s late works: the move from studying incarceration in the early modern pe-
riod to Victorian-era practices of sexuality to the ethics of self-care in late-antiquity
attests to an ongoing ethical concern with how one theorizes history.
By keeping the theory-level, ethical implications of social, scientific study
alive in this way, Foucault avoids darkening still further the obscure corners and
blind-spots that form within an historical time in disrepair. Whatever ones sensibili-
ties are about the dangers of letting whole sections of historical time fall into obscuri-
ty—and with them, the populations that occupy those times—it is nevertheless true
that in adopting a modern epistemology of uneven historical time one is ethically
committed to just those times and those populations. Here, then, is the real ethical
danger of practicing history in an objective guise while appropriating an historical
epistemology that is anything but objective: Daston and Galison in their history sev-
er a modern epistemology from its ethical implications (while still attending in their
study to site- and time-specific historical practices). Specifically, what Daston and
Galison fail to realize in their objective history (of objectivity) is that only a non-
objective history avoids presenting theory as ethically neutral. Our modern situation
is such that our subjectivity, our history, our claims of knowledge and our social
practices are all obscure; the ethical responsibility of the theorist in the face of this is
to pay constant (and vigilant) attention to her own contributions to such obscurity.
Adrian Switzer, Western Kentucky University
104
 Denis Duez 2009
ISSN: 1832-5203
REVIEW
Leonard M. Hammer, A Foucauldian Approach to International Law: Descrip-

tive Thoughts for Normative Issues (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Hardcover.
ISBN: 978-0-7546-2356-4.
Since the early 1980s, international studies have sustained a theoretical dynamism.
The demise of the empiricist-positivist promise for a cumulative science has forced
scholars to re-examine the ontological and epistemological foundations of their dis-
cipline. 1 After the first great debate that pitted idealism against realism in the 1940s
and the second debate confronting behaviouralism and traditionalism in the 1950s-
1960s, this so-called “third debate” has lead to an increasing criticism of the domi-
nant realist paradigm in international relations. Foucault’s work unquestionably fu-
els this third inter-paradigm debate and the rise of the post-positivist approach to
international relations. 2 His concern with historically specific conditions in which
knowledge is generated allowed poststructuralists to offer an alternative conception
of international relations. It brought new blood to international relations by ques-
tioning the realist image of the world, especially its state-centrism, its obsession with
political-military power and its blindness to various sub-national or trans-national
actors.
While international relations scholars have been trying for more than twenty
years to address contemporary changes in world politics by debating the key con-
cepts structuring political science, public international law is obviously stuck within
a largely unquestioned and outmoded statist approach. A Foucauldian Approach to
International Law is a noticeable exception to this general assertion. In his book,
Hammer points out that international law essentially failed to acknowledge the
emergence of new international actors such as non-governmental international or-
ganisations and sub-national political entities or individuals. Moreover, interna-
tional law has been struggling since its very origins with some inherent ambiguities
1 Yosef Lapid, “The Third Debate: on the Prospects of International Theory in a Post-
Positivist Era,” International Studies Quarterly, 33, 3, 1989, 235-254.
2 Pierre Anouilh, Emmanuel Puig, “Les relations internationals à l’épreuve du
poststructuralisme : Foucault et le troisième ‘grand débat’ épistémologique”, in Sylvain
Meyet, Marie-Cécile Naves, Thomas Ribémont (eds.), Travailler avec Foucault. Retours sur
le politique (Paris, L’Harmattan, 2004), 141-159.
105
Duez: review of Foucauldian Approach to International Law
and inconsistencies regarding the link between law and political processes. Accord-
ing to Hammer, the main problem is that, unlike in national jurisdictions, within the
international system there is no actual legal system. Since the states are creating the
law for their own regulation, aspects of enforcement are usually lacking. Interna-
tional law has thus been caught between three different discourses: first, the realist
assertions that international law does not exist as such, but only as a tool of states
and as a reflection of their particular interests; second, institutionalism that accords
some role for international law-making organisations; third, cosmopolitan assump-
tions of moral state behaviour with a view towards the identification of an existing
social order.3
Referring to Foucault as a means of understanding and enhancing interna-
tional law, Hammer tries in the second chapter of the book to move away from the
traditional dichotomous battle between normative objectivity and consensual under-
standing of international law. He suggests “a transformative understanding of the
international system and a transgressive approach to one’s perception of interna-
tional society.” 4 The underlying assertion is that the “transgressive” Foucauldian
conception of power can help international legal theory to address the on-going
changes that have developed within the international system: the growth of interna-
tional and regional organisations, the move towards globalisation and the rise of
new actors. Since the state is not maintaining full and complete control but rather
part of a matrix of power, Hammer considers that what begs attention is not the
state as the central actor in the international system, but “an understanding of the
variety of actors’ use of techniques and tactics of domination to understand the
framework and forms of relations.” 5 The influence of international law is not solely a
matter of sovereign command, but is one of resistance among social forces. It is a
part of the social power system. The law does not serve a regulatory role between
the state and the individual, but rather functions as part of the process in shaping
individuals and allowing for their reactions that in turn further serve to shape and
influence social process.
Starting from these general assumptions, each chapter of the book addresses
a fundamental problem within international law, with each chapter following the
same pattern. After discussing the underlying problems posed by traditional legal
doctrines regarding the topic of the chapter, Hammer offers an alternative approach
pursuant to Foucault’s understanding of power and governmentality.
The third chapter considers the manner by which a state might acquire stand-
ing and personality within the international system via international recognition.
Recognition is at a crossroads between a state according another entity some form of
3 Leonard M. Hammer, A Foucauldian Approach to International Law: Descriptive Thoughts for

Normative Issues (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 8.
4 Ibid., 9.
5 Ibid., 19.
106
legitimacy such as to deem it a state, while also making a statement regarding policy
and desire. The legal doctrine recognizes that the explanation for this decision is not
to be found in a specific normative framework but essentially in the will of the state.
Recognition is always a political decision reflecting interests and treatment accorded
by one entity to another with little legal fallout. It is linked to the circumstances. By
introducing the Foucauldian notion of “regime of truth,” Hammer shows that “even
with the recognition decision being considered within a political context and at the
mercy of the states, there are still other forms of influence that hold sway over the
state to the extent of influencing its decision as well as altering the position and
status of the entity at question.”6 Recognition is an ongoing pattern of changing
standards for a recognized entity, such that the truth of an entity’s status is subject to
the regime of understanding as understood by the actors involved in the process.
This regime of truth within the context of recognition is thus a contingent notion. It
emanates not only from other states, but also from their relationship with such other
bodies as international organisations. It reflects an ever-changing conception of the
criteria for statehood. Therefore, what is important is to understand why an idea is
understood to be the truth and how that came about. 7
The fourth chapter addresses a key source of international law, that being
customary law. Adhering to the transgressive approach to custom, Hammer pro-
poses to turn one’s attention from the question of identifying the contents of custom
towards the surrounding events and developments that have led one to declare a
norm as achieving customary status. Once again, the questions are why and how a
customary norm has emerged. Reflecting Foucault’s approach to governmentality,
Hammer’s goal is to rethink rules and aspects of state behaviour by considering how
the state and other actors envision custom. Customary international law then is not
considered as a final source of law, but as part of the ongoing discourse that tends to
influence and affect pattern of relations and actions. This discourse incorporates a
broad gamut of international and domestic actors, including the individual, non-
governmental organisations, the state and international bodies.
The fifth chapter is probably the most original of the book, and potentially the
most controversial too. It considers international human rights via a reference to the
right of freedom of religion and belief. The purpose of the author in this chapter is to
“examine modes by which human rights can maintain some form of social role
within society in a manner that does not necessarily eviscerate the surrounding cul-
ture, but becomes part of the ongoing social discourse.” 8 According to Hammer, it is
important to acknowledge the social function of beliefs—especially minority beliefs
and their manifestations—both in forming avenues of understanding and recognis-
ing the necessity for social development. Starting from Foucault’s approach to
6 Ibid., 41.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid., 71-72.
107
Duez: review of Foucauldian Approach to International Law
power, Hammer interprets human rights as the means by which a state subjugates
the individual to pre-conceived notions regarding the desired structure of society.
Rights can serve to entrench the state and create a strict framework of operation at
the expense of individual development. As a result, autonomy and free-thinking can
be stymied rather than enhanced by human rights. Incorporating Foucault’s under-
standing of truth, Hammer argues that the actual content of the belief or the poten-
tial contradictions between a belief and other rights are not the key issues. Since
truth and belief are contingent, one should understand belief as a matter of ongoing
discourse within society and ever-shifting understanding of truth. As a result, he
suggests that states and judicial tribunals “must look beyond the temptation to en-
gage in some form of social balancing by considering the broader social interplay
that is at work.” 9
Somewhat less original in content, the sixth chapter engages the relatively re-
cent notion of human security. Unlike the state-centric approach, the human security
approach views the individual as a subject of the international legal system and con-
siders the notion of security in a more human-orientated manner. It allows a variety
of programs and initiatives that meet the needs of populations in distress. In this
chapter, Hammer evaluates the merits of such a reference to human security within
the framework of international law. Regarding the work of Michel Foucault, Ham-
mer points out that the focus on the welfare of the populations is, in a broad sense,
pursuant to Foucault’s notion of bio-politics, which shifts attention away from the
state as the central figure. He suggests that a transformative approach enlightened
by Foucault’s conception of power allows for a conceptualization of human security
in a manner that need not rely upon existing normative systems, but rather allows
for human security to develop in a descriptive sense, as the needs of the population
or group shift and sway, depending on necessities and surrounding changes.
The seventh chapter turns towards the Foucauldian framework as a means of
addressing the rise of non-governmental organisations within an international legal
framework. Recognising the problems associated with non-governmental organisa-
tions, especially internal and external accountability issues, Hammer examines the
conditions necessary for a new approach to international law that incorporates vari-
ous non-state entities as viable actors. His goal is to demonstrate how the global civil
society process reflects the power/knowledge relationship proposed by Foucault. In
this perspective, global civil society is not presented as a movement of resistance
emanating from below, but as a reflection of changes in power relations between ac-
tors, all of whom maintain some form of influence, as well as being subject to influ-
ential drives of the other participating actors. Global civil society is not considered as
a democratic ideal, but rather as a reflection of emerging forms of governmentality.
Leonard Hammer’s book is a very good piece of scholarship. It challenges the state-
centric paradigm that dominates international legal theory and questions both the
9 Ibid., 94-95.
108
realist and cosmopolitan interpretations of international law. Hammer emphasizes

the ever-changing character of truth and the importance of analyzing the broader
context within which international norms and practices emerge. Pursuant to Fou-
cault’s “toolbox approach”, Hammer does not intend to propose a new global expla-
nation for the international legal system. He invites us to use the intellectual devices
offered by Foucault to better explicate international law. Nevertheless, while the
book is an excellent contribution to the epistemological debate in the field of interna-
tional law, the author nonetheless falls short of offering a satisfactory analysis of any
of the issues that he has selected for investigation. Therefore, although the book by
Hammer is a breakthrough in international legal theory, it does not bring any new
perspectives to political science or Foucauldian studies. The book is a new exam-
ple—a quite good one indeed—of how Foucault’s political thought can usefully be
re-appropriated in support of renewed analysis of the social power system.
Denis Duez, Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, Bruxelles
109
 Mike Jolley 2009
ISSN: 1832-5203
REVIEW
Jeffrey. T Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and its Intensifications

since 1984, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), ISBN
9780804757027.
In Foucault Beyond Foucault Nealon draws out some of the most important and often
ignored aspects of Foucault’s approach to power. He explicates elements such as the
productive aspects of power and the connections between discipline, biopower, and
the subject while critiquing interpretations that see Foucault as outlining a repres-
sive, “iron cage” approach to power or as being a converted humanist in his later
work. While many Foucaultian commentators have pointed out the importance of
productivity rather than repression, multiplicity rather than centralization, in their
discussions of power, Nealon takes the important step of applying these ideas to a
range of different topics including popular culture and capitalism. One of the most
important concepts for Nealon’s interpretation of the Foucaultian approach to power
is “intensity” 1. While many readers will recognize this term as Deleuzian, Nealon
draws mainly upon Foucault’s “middle” works in his discussion of the ways that
“intensity” and intensification’ can be useful tools of analysis. In addition to reading
key texts such as Discipline & Punish 2 through the lens of the intensification of power
relations, Nealon also uses it as a way to describe historical change, specifically the
change in dominance of one mode of power over another. 3
While I find the concept of intensity as utilized by Nealon to be a useful con-
ceptual tool, I am not quite prepared to apply it in such a ubiquitous fashion. In his
review of this book Todd May also voices some concern over intensification, specifi-
cally over its “transhistorical” appearance and the way it “cuts a wide swath across
Foucault’s work, perhaps too wide a swath”. 4 Unlike May I do not so much take is-
1 Jeffrey T. Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and its Intensifications since 1984 (Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). See chap. 2.
2 Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage/Random
House, 1995).
3 Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault, 25-31.
4 Todd May, Review of Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and its Intensifications since 1984,
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (2/14/2008).
110
Jolley: review of Foucault Beyond Foucault
sue with intensity as a concept that more or less accurately describes historical
change but rather with the way it tends to shift our focus away from power as a
“multiplicity of force relations” 5 and towards less useful questions such as which
mode of power we are currently “in”. Nealon also does not seem to be overly con-
cerned with periodization but does use intensification along with the (also Deleu-
zian) concept of threshold to account for historical change from one mode of power
to another (from discipline to biopower, for example). It is not my contention that
this is the “wrong” reading of Foucault; however, I do believe that this more broadly
historical application of intensity may in effect result in an overemphasis on: 1) the
distinction between different modes of power rather than their simultaneous and
often interweaving character; and 2) the internal unity of different modes of power
rather than their heterogeneity.
Despite this broader historical application, Nealon continues on to emphasize
the different “infiltrations” or connections between different modes of power even
shifting from one meaning of the word “intensity” to another. He states, “The gru-
esomely painful intensity of Damien’s torture and execution gives way to another
sense of the word: intensity as the maximizing imperative of efficiency.” 6 In this de-
scription of the transition from sovereignty to discipline as the dominant mode of
power, Nealon reveals that he is actually tracing Foucault’s shifting use of this con-
cept, citing somewhat different usages in Discipline & Punish (the body) and in Histo-
ry of Sexuality, Volume 1 (biopower, life). This would seem to indicate a question of
emphasis rather than of accuracy. While one may or may not accept Nealon’s use of
intensification as historically causal, it is difficult to deny that he has opened up a
much more interesting and potentially productive series of questions regarding Fou-
cault’s different uses of this concept.
Along with intensity another concept Nealon sees as connecting discipline to
biopower is the “norm”. Much of Nealon’s discussion of norms echoes his approach
to power; they are constituted in practice, are productive rather than repressive, and
attempt to account for rather than to exclude the abnormal. 7 While Nealon’s discus-
sion of the “norm” as productive and inclusive in its effects is useful and serves to
connect discipline and biopower, it also raises some difficult questions. 8 These ques-
5 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol.1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage/Random

House, 1990), 92-93.
6 Jeffrey T. Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault, 36-37.
7 Ibid., 48-51.
8 Of course, there is also an issue of what Link refers to as “semantic turbulence”. In the
many variations of this term (norm, normativity, normal, normalize, etc.) there is ample
space for slippage in meaning, which raises another set of questions about the relations
between these different variations. See Jürgen Link translated by Mirko Hall, “From the
‘Power of the Norm’ To ‘Flexible Normalism’: Considerations After Foucault,” Cultural
Critique 57 (Spring 2004).
111
tions begin with the fact that Nealon bases his discussion of the “norm” almost en-
tirely on Discipline & Punish with an occasional reference to The History of Sexuality.
While these are obviously not inaccurate or inappropriate sources, I believe that
Nealon’s emphasis on these texts leads to a somewhat individualized account of the
norm, one that sidesteps issues of population, risk, and security. This is evident in
his references to Discipline & Punish, which are almost entirely focused on the terms
individual, individuality, or identity as well as in the absence of any discussion of
the importance of population, a central concept in Foucault’s later work. 9
This is not to say that the individual is unimportant to biopower; it is rather
to point out that the connection between individuals and the population is key. Fou-
cault explored this connection in his lectures on the eighteenth-century concept of
Polizeiwissenschaft, which he saw as “…at once an art of government and a method
for the analysis of a population on a territory.” 10 In his discussion of Von Justi’s ap-
proach to this concept, Foucault states, “He [Von Justi] perfectly defines what I feel
to be the aim of the modern art of government, or state rationality, namely, to develop
those elements constitutive of individuals’ lives in such a way that their development also
fosters the strength of the state.” 11 [emphasis added].
Nealon’s focus on the individual is also carried over in his discussion of con-
temporary capitalism. In this text he points out a number of interesting connections
between biopower and certain aspects of contemporary capitalism, especially con-
sumption and the Marxian issue of the “real subsumption” of labor. In his engage-
ment with several neo-Marxist perspectives 12 Nealon again makes use of the concept
of intensity to describe how money is “intensified” in what he refers to as “the glo-
balized logic of finance capital”. 13 While I find this to be a useful way of thinking
about speculation and finance, it also refers to culture and the tendency of contem-
porary capitalism to proliferate and embrace differences. This tendency, of course,
resonates with and is an important connection to biopower. It is here that Nealon’s
overemphasis on the individual is again revealed but with somewhat different ef-
fects. In his discussion of the increasing investment in “everyday life”, 14 mostly
9 For a discussion of the conceptual and historical importance of population see

Francois Ewald, translated by Marjorie Beale, “Norms, Discipline, and the Law,”
Representations,” 30, Special Issue: Law and the Order of Culture. (Spring 1990).
10 Michael Foucault, “’Omnes et Singulatim’: Towards a Critique of Political Reason,” in
Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984. Edited by James D. Faubion (New York: The
New Press, 1994), 322-323.
11 Ibid.
12 Most notably Fredric Jameson and Michael Hardt & Toni Negri. Nealon, Foucault Beyond
Foucault, chap. 3.
13 Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault, 62-63.
14 This term itself carries with it quite a bit of ambiguity and invokes a number of different
debates on the status of the “everyday”. Nealon’s footnote on this (chap. 4, footnote 25)
112
Jolley: review of Foucault Beyond Foucault
based on autonomist Marxists like Hardt and Negri, Nealon points to the impor-
tance of the private:
If there is something that we might call the realm of the contemporary “com-
mon”, that vector of power that directly connects the cultural to the economic,
for better or worse Foucaultian biopower will show us that this common takes
up residence in the private realm, not the public sphere. 15
While privatization has become one of the most important foci of any discussion of
neoliberalism and contemporary capitalism, there is a curious slippage in Nealon’s
choice of examples. These range from individualistic rap lyrics and popular memoirs
to market-based solutions and the transfer of public assets to private corporations. 16
This mix of examples, which would seem to invoke different conceptions of the pri-
vate, raises important questions about the conflation of the individual or self and the
private, not to mention its relationship to the public. 17 Thus the importance of Nea-
lon’s analysis lies not only in its linking of the individual and the private to neoliber-
al capitalism but also in its registration of a more general set of issues related to the
contemporary status of the private and the public. 18
Overall I found Foucault Beyond Foucault to be a very useful text in its applica-
tion of a Foucaultian approach to contemporary culture and capitalism. Nealon skill-
fully walks the difficult line between being relevant to a number of different impor-
tant theoretical discussions as well as to contemporary culture and politics. In addi-
tion to applying Foucault’s ideas about power in an innovative way, Nealon raises
some important questions about specific concepts and the way they structure the
is fascinating, especially his mention of Paulo Virno as Aristotelian contrasted with Toni
Negri as Spinozan.
15 Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault, 83.
16 Ibid., 86-88.
17 In my view Nealon’s critique of the Deleuzian literature on value and affect
(Brian Massumi, specifically) as being overly focused on the experiential or phe-
nomenological raises similar questions. While much of this scholarship engages
with biopower in a broad manner, I see Nealon’s more rigorously Foucaultian
critique as an important contribution to this debate. For a more in-depth discus-
sion see Patricia Clough’s “Introduction to Patricia Clough and Jean Halley”, The
Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
18 The problem of the private and public in relation to biopower has been raised by
Tiziana Terranova in “Futurepublic: On Information Warfare, Bio-racism and
Hegemony as Noopolitics,” in Theory, Culture, & Society, 24(3): 125-145 (Sage,
2007). I find her discussion of the ways in which public opinion is reconfigured
in biopower to become a surface of intervention along with Nealon’s discussion
here, a way to open an important theoretical conversation.
113
way we read Foucault. His attempt to construct a “more useful” reading of Foucault
opens up a number of important theoretical conversations and encourages us to do
the same.
Mike Jolley, Doctoral Candidate in Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center
114
 David Konstan 2009
ISSN: 1832-5203
REVIEW
Sandra Lynch, Philosophy and Friendship (Edinburgh: University of Edin-

burgh Press, 2005) ISBN 0 7486 1727 2.
Sandra Lynch's book is something of a hybrid. On the one hand, it surveys various
philosophical views of friendship, from Aristotle down through postmodern writers
such as Derrida and Lacan, stopping along the way to discuss Cicero, Montaigne,
Kant and Hegel on the master-slave relation, Buber's I-Thou, Sartre on love (since he
"does not specifically discuss friendship," 69), Bataille, Blanchot, Colin Turnbull's The
Mountain People (1971), which narrates the dysfunctional society of the Ik tribe of
Uganda, and many others. She also devotes several pages to Goethe's Elective Affini-
ties, Sándor Márai's Embers, and Toni Morrison's Sula, among other texts, thereby
taking account of literary treatments of friendship as well as formal philosophical
analyses.
On the other hand, Lynch has a thesis of her own to defend on the nature of
friendship, which her survey is designed to support. The following quotations illu-
strate the main idea of her argument.
Nietzsche, Blanchot and Derrida are theorists of friendship who appreciate the
place of uncertainty in relations between friends. By comparison with these
modern theorists, Aristotle avoids the discomfort of uncertainty by aligning the
socio-political structures of the polis with his ethical prescriptions: the free male
citizens of the polis are good men united by virtue in the communal civil life of
the polis. However, the nexus created between the ethical and the social-political
spheres of life determines that Aristotelian civic friendship obscures the demand
for indirection in friendship as well as the recognition of difference between
friends (101).
More specifically, "Aristotelian civic friendship simply conceals the possibility that
citizens may have differing conceptions of what constitutes the good for the com-
munity of which they are members" (107). The ancient view of friendship,
represented by Aristotle, Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, Montaigne, and others, put the
emphasis on social unity, and hence treated friendship as primarily a relationship
among the better class of people, who held a common view about the society and the
nature of the good. Modern, or at all events postmodern views, on the contrary,
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Konstan: review of Philosophy and Friendship
stress difference and the ultimate uncertainty that inhabits friendship. According to
the modern view, which Lynch evidently shares, "friends have the potential to re-
spond to one another in unreserved and inventive ways" (145). Allying herself with
the approach of object-relations psychologists such as Donald Winnicott and Heinz
Kohut, Lynch affirms that "the process of constituting a self is a precarious one
which places us in an ambiguous relation to the other" (151). But we need others,
nevertheless, to achieve selfhood as it is understood by thinkers such as Jacques La-
can: "the ability to take account of the perceptions and expectations of others is cru-
cial to the development of a coherent or stable conception of self". Lynch uses "psy-
choanalytic perspectives on the formation of identity and the constitution of the self
... to emphasise the creativity that is implicit in relations between friends. Friendship
emerges as a creative and uncertain synthesis of the play of forces that create identi-
ty and difference between friends" (165). This, finally, is Lynch's strategy for defeat-
ing Derrida's insistence on "the impossibility of any complete or sustained connec-
tion between friends" (95), given that "the possibility of friendship rests on our ac-
ceptance of a fiction ... of connection" (93). For "the connection between friends can
be seen as one that is intersubjectively created and nurtured" (187)—it resides in a
process of maturation and self-formation, and if the result is a "fragile connection," it
is friendship for all that.
Such is the gist of Lynch's argument. The ancient or classical view, associated
principally with Aristotle, serves as a foil to the modern: whereas Aristotle stresses
identity among friends, and obscures "the recognition of difference between friends"
in the service of a larger ideal of civic solidarity, the modern view acknowledges and
indeed relishes difference, both on the personal and the social level: Lynch adduces
Georg Simmel for the view that "modern culture, society and personality are by na-
ture fragmented" (166). But if ancient and modern societies are indeed so different,
and so too, correspondingly, the dominant conception of friendship in each, it is legi-
timate to ask whether Aristotle, Derrida, and Winnicott are talking about the same
thing when they speak of "friendship". The very decision to translate a term into
another language as "friendship" already presupposes a view about what the idea
means for the speakers of that language. The Greek term philia, which is often trans-
lated as "friendship," basically means "love"; it only signifies "friendship" in contexts
in which love obtains among those designated as friends (in Greek, philoi), as dis-
tinct from kin, spouses, or amatory (including pederastic) relations. Latin amicitia,
however, specifically means "friendship." Love of all sorts, whether familial or erotic,
was amor in Latin; in Greek, however, passionate love was designated by the term
erôs. Thus, when Lynch equates erôs with philia (12-13), I see a red flag: although
Aristotle says the erotic passion an adult man feels for a boy may turn into friend-
ship when the boy matures, provided he has a suitably virtuous character, the two
categories were distinct in classical Greek.
Leaving aside technical points of philology, one may inquire whether earlier
116
views of friendship, which are predicated upon such disparate conceptions of the
self and society, can have anything to offer us moderns. Lynch affirms, rather surpri-
singly: "Putting aside the criticisms of Aristotelian and Kantian accounts of friend-
ship, my argument is that both philosophers provide a theoretical structure for the
maintenance of relations in the broader social context within which intimacy devel-
ops" (108). Very possibly, but this idea is not (so far as I can tell) put to use in
Lynch's discussion of modern friendship. Indeed, if ancient and modern societies are
as different as Lynch says, it is difficult to see how Aristotle's or Kant's theories con-
cerning social relations can be of much help, or how such disparate views of friend-
ship can illuminate one another; I had the sense, as I followed Lynch's discussion,
that they simply pass each other by, as though Aristotle and Derrida were speaking
different languages (which of course they are).
I believe that Lynch is broadly right to hold that Aristotle's conception of
friendship was conditioned, at least in part, by his vision of a society run by virtuous
men, and that postmodern notions of friendship are, on the contrary, disposed to
celebrate difference, although I do not share Lynch's view that developmental psy-
chology can help resolve the paradoxes of friendship that Derrida identifies. Never-
theless, I am afraid that she sometimes misrepresents the classical view, and more
particularly that of Aristotle and Cicero, which allows more scope for difference, in-
timacy, and self-development than Lynch concedes. In what follows, I shall concen-
trate on these two thinkers, but before proceeding, I must indicate a certain parti
pris. I am the author of a book entitled Friendship in the Classical World (Cambridge,
1997), not mentioned by Lynch, in which I discuss friendship in a wide context, in-
cluding philosophical treatments. What is more, my views, while respectable
enough, are not universally shared. Some of Lynch's comments on ancient friend-
ship reflect interpretations advanced by other scholars with which I disagree. I can-
not in the space of this review present all the arguments on either side of these dis-
putes, but the reader should be alert to the fact that such differences exist, and de-
serve to be recognized.
To take an example from a non-philosophical text: I do not agree with
Lynch's claim that in Homer we find "a relatively unquestioning depiction of friend-
ship as a formal relationship" (7), and that "relations between warrior-chieftains did
not involve ties of an emotional kind" (9). The relationship between Achilles and Pa-
troclus, the principal friends in the Iliad, is intensely emotional, as Lynch herself ob-
serves (11). Lynch is here following a conception, which I regard as dated though
many scholars still subscribe to it, according to which Greek philia, whether in Hom-
er or later, had an objective, quasi-contractual character. So too, when Lynch avers
that "amicitia was once used interchangeably with factio to refer to a band of friends"
(55-56), but that it degenerated into the sense of mere political faction, she is appeal-
ing to the view promoted more than half a century ago by Lily Ross Taylor, but deci-
sively refuted (as I believe) by Peter Brunt, who demonstrated that party loyalties
117
Konstan: review of Philosophy and Friendship
seem to have had virtually no impact at all on the formation or dissolution of friend-
ships in ancient Rome.
Proceeding now to philosophical treatments, Lynch observes that Aristotle
identifies three types of friendship, predicated on recognition of virtue in the other,
or else "motivated by the friend's usefulness or pleasure to me, rather than by con-
cern for the friend's good" (16). I maintain, however, that for Aristotle all three kinds
of friendship involve concern for the welfare of the other. Indeed, in the definition of
friendship that Aristotle provides in the Rhetoric (2.4), as opposed to his ethical trea-
tises, he affirms: "Let to philein [loving] be wishing for someone the things that he
deems good, for the sake of that person and not oneself, and the accomplishment of
these things to the best of one's ability"; and he adds: "A philos is one who loves and
is loved in return". This is a description of love generally, not just that based on
appreciation of virtue. The affection that arises as a result of mutual commerce, for
example, is still a kind of love; to be sure, it is less durable than virtue friendship, but
while it lasts it entails (in my view) caring for the friend, just like friendships formed
in the workplace today. Lynch observes: "Modern individuals might feel a degree of
affection for business associates or work colleagues and yet not regard them as
friends" (17); true enough, but so too might ancient Greeks. Aristotle nowhere sug-
gests that all persons who are useful to each other are, by that token, friends.
Was Aristotle's conception of friendship conditioned by the social world of
the classical city-state, which he saw, according to Lynch, as "an arena of like-
minded citizens who agree about their interests, adopt the same policy and act on
their common resolutions" (24)? There is no doubt that Aristotle valued concord or
homonoia among the citizen body, and that he believed that a kind of communal af-
fection or friendly feeling went a good way toward securing civic solidarity. Lynch
supposes that such an ideal, involving "a harmony of interests, ideas and activities,"
is one that "we today would regard as impossible" (ibid.). It is true enough that we
do not typically speak of friendship as the bond between fellow citizens, but we do
refer to brotherhood in this connection, precisely in order to emphasize equality of
rights and a kind of familial warmth of feeling. Lynch also finds problematic Aris-
totle's emphasis on regard for virtue as a basis of friendship or love: "From the pers-
pective of the modern reader it seems that in Aristotle's highest form of friendship
we like our friend for the sake of his goodness—rather than for himself" (27). Lynch
notes that any account of why we like someone "suggests liking for the sake of some-
thing else"; this is in contrast with what she identifies as the modern view, "that
friends are loved for what it is that makes them unique" (28), a fuzzy concept that
hardly lends itself to analysis at all. I agree on the latter point, but Aristotle makes it
clear that, for friendship to arise, one must have intimate knowledge of the other,
deriving from long acquaintance; he also specifies that one can have only a very few
friends, whereas, were regard for virtue the only factor, we should be friends with
all the virtuous people we know.
118
Finally, I differ with Lynch's interpretation of the role of maternal love in

Aristotle (32): this love is, according to Aristotle, natural (he uses the term phusei, "by
nature"): animals too experience it, whereas they do not form friendships based on
regard for virtue or utility. Whether parental love "provides the child with a sense
that she is loved for her own sake" (34) is perhaps questionable, but it does offer a
model of unconditional affection, in which respect it differs from friendship, which
responds to causes.
Turning briefly to Cicero, it is true that Cicero recognized that politics could
divide friends, at least if it came to the point of seriously endangering the republic,
for example participating in or covering up a conspiracy out of loyalty to one's com-
rades; but this does not mean that Cicero shared the Epicurean credo of abstention-
ism in regard to politics (54). On the contrary, Cicero was both active in politics and
maintained friendships with people of all political stripes, even in the dire condi-
tions of civil war. Nor would I say that Cicero's ideal of concordia was "based on a
similarity of rights" (55): it is debated whether there existed a concept of "rights" in
classical antiquity, but for Cicero, at all events, concordia was first and foremost a re-
lationship across class lines. The concordia ordinum that he sought to foster was hie-
rarchical rather than egalitarian.
Lynch covers, as I have indicated, a great deal of territory in this book, with
the result that the argument sometimes races over points that in my view deserve
more attention. Treating the various conceptions of friendship from Aristotle on
down as the prolegomenon to an argument about the nature of modern friendship
further complicates the presentation. Whether modern friendship is predicated on
an acknowledgment of difference and the development of a stable self through mu-
tual exchange and recognition is in my view moot, but more could have been done
to historicize this notion, which is very much a product of our own culture. While it
is not for me to dictate the book that Lynch should have written, I could have
wished that she had conceived her task in this more critical vein.
David Konstan, Brown University
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 Michael Maidan 2009
ISSN: 1832-5203
REVIEW
Michel Foucault, Introduction à l’«Anthropologie présenté par Daniel Defert,

François Ewald et Frédéric Gros, suivi de Anthropologie du point de vue
pragmatique d’Emmanuel Kant, traduit et annoté par Michel Foucault (Paris :
Vrin « Bibliothèque des Textes Philosophiques », 2008)
Michel Foucault, Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, Edited and with an af-

terword and critical notes by Roberto Nigro, translated by Roberto Nigro and
Kate Briggs, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, CA, 2008.
The recent publication of the complete text of Foucault’s “Complementary Thesis” is

an important and welcome development for anybody interested in his work because
this text was known more by hearsay than by direct acquaintance. The history of the
Introduction is well known. The regulations of the French university in the 1960’s
required the submission of two works for a Doctorat d’´Etat: a major thesis, which
had to be published, and for which Foucault presented Madness and Civilization; the
translation and introduction of Kant’s Anthropology was his secondary submission.
This “Thèse Complémentaire” was up to now only accessible at the Sorbonne’s library
in a microfiche of the original typescript or through unauthorized transcriptions on
the Internet. In 1964 Foucault published his translation of Kant’s Anthropology to-
gether with a Notice historique which reproduced a few of the initial pages of his the-
sis, the full text of the Introduction having been considered too interpretative to be
published together with the translation. 1 At the end of the Notice, Foucault an-
nounced that “The relationships of the critical thinking and the anthropological ref-
lection would be studied in a subsequent work”. 2 Instead of reworking the Introduc-
1 Didier Eribon reproduces in his Michel Foucault (1926-1984), 2nd edition (Paris: Flamma-
rion, 1991), 138-139, the official report of the thesis examination, which includes the ob-
jections of the Jury both to the Introduction and to the translation.
2 Michel Foucault, Dits et Écrits, 1954-1988, Bibliotheque des sciences humaines. (Paris:
Editions Gallimard, 1994). I, 293.
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Maidan: review of Kant’s Anthropology
tion, Foucault went on to write a new book altogether, which would become The Or-
der of Things. 3
Beyond the fact of the availability of the text, a positive event in itself, there is
an additional reason to rejoice, because we may see in its publication a relaxation of
the policies enforced up to now by Foucault’s literary executors. According to the
prevalent interpretation to Foucault’s will, only writings that he himself had revised
and approved for publication would be released to the public. This rule has been
somewhat tweaked for some materials in the Dits et Ecrits collection, and the “Lec-
tures in the Collège de France”. Coincidently, this year a new volume of the “Lec-
tures” was released, and this time the editors reported that the transcript of the au-
dio tape had been supplemented to some extent with Foucault’s original notes. 4
Such information was not given in the other volumes, which were supposed to be
actual transcripts. Furthermore, in the editors’ presentation to the Introduction, they
refer to a course given at the University of Lille in 1952-1953, with “ninety-seven
manuscript pages, Foucault’s oldest surviving philosophical text” (8; 10) 5, a text not
listed in the inventory of the IMEC where Foucault’s papers have been deposited. A
recent article by Foucault’s long-time companion and literary executor Daniel Defert
seems to indicate that we could see more releases in the future. 6
Although no official text of the Introduction à l’Anthropologie was available un-
til now, a number of doctoral theses, papers and books had already discussed Fou-
cault’s text. 7 This, and the fact that the existing transcriptions were considered unre-
3 Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris :
Éditions Gallimard, 1966). Chapter. ix : (“L’Homme et ses doubles”) is closely related to
the Introduction.
4 Michel Foucault, Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres : Cours au Collège de France, 1982-1983
(Paris : Gallimard - Le Seuil, 2008), 7-8.
5 Parenthetical references indicate first the pages of the original French text, followed by
the corresponding page number in the English translation. If only one set of pages is
mentioned, it corresponds to the French edition, except in the last section, where it would
refer to the English translation.
6 Cf. « Je crois au temps… »: Daniel Defert légataire des manuscrits de Michel Foucault,
interview by Guillaume Bellome, Revue Recto/Verso, no. 1, Juin 2007.
7 S. Watson, “Kant and Foucault: on the Ends of Man”, Tijdschrift voor philosophie, 1985, 47,
1, 71-102; Frederic Gros, Théorie de la connaissance et histoire des savoirs dans les écrits de M.
Foucault, Université de Paris XII, 1995 (unpublished PhD thesis); Béatrice Han. L'ontologie
manquée de Michel Foucault: entre l'historique et le transcendantale,. Grenoble, SP: Millon,
1998 (English translation: Béatrice Han, Foucault’s Critical Project (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2002); Ricardo Ribeiro Terra, "Foucault lecteur de Kant: de
l'anthropologie à l'ontologie du présent", In Ferrari, J., éd., L'année 1798. Kant et la
naissance de l'anthropologie au Siècle des Lumières (Paris, Vrin, 1997), 159-171; Amy Allen,
“Foucault and Enlightenment: A Critical Reappraisal”, Constellations, 10, 2, 2003, pp. 180-
198; Arianna Bove, A Critical Ontology of the Present : Foucault and the Task of our Times,
University of Sussex, 2007 (unpublished PhD thesis). See additional references in Roberto
121
liable, seems to have influenced the editors and executors to finally publish this text,
together with Foucault’s translation of Kant’s Anthropologie. The volume comprises a
short editorial presentation, followed by Foucault’s introduction (pp. 11-79), his
translation of Kant’s Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (pp. 83-262), and con-
cludes with a discussion of textual differences between the manuscript and Kant’s
published text (263-267).
This book will mainly interest the student of Foucault’s work since it docu-
ments Foucault’s interest in and attachment to the philosophy of Kant, the extent of
Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s influence in shaping his understanding of Kant, and
one of the earliest formulations of the ideas further developed in The Order of Things.
It will also be of interest to historians of philosophy interested in the reception of
Kant, Heidegger and Nietzsche in postwar French philosophy.
How did Foucault present the Anthropology to his readers? His text—which
does not have any heading or titles and is only separated into sections marked in the
French version with asterisks—begins by discussing the origins of the Anthropology
in the lectures given by Kant for more than twenty years. Only upon reaching re-
tirement did Kant decide to publish this text, of which Foucault wishes we could
have more information about its “geology” or “archaeology”. What is at stake here
is, according to Foucault, whether underlying the development of Kant’s philosophy
there is a certain concept of man already shaped in the pre-critical period that re-
mained basically unchanged and unchallenged during the elaboration of the critical
philosophy, only to surface again in his last published work (12; 19). Or, maybe Kant
modified his Anthropology over the years, while elaborating his overall philosophy.
Foucault seems to adopt a mixed and three-pronged position regarding the text. He
claims that, from a chronological as well as a structural point of view, the Anthropol-
ogy is “...contemporary with what come before the Critique, with what the Critique
accomplishes, and with what would soon be rid of it” (14; 22). To substantiate the
first remark, Foucault points out the similarities between the Anthropology and other
texts of the pre-critical period. Regarding the second, he stresses that the Anthropolo-
gy not only belongs to the period in which Kant begins developing his critical posi-
tion (17; 28), but at least in one major point, it already evidences a post-Copernican
turn. The Anthropology studies man not from a cosmological but from a cosmopolitan
perspective, i.e., one in which the world is a city to be built rather than a cosmos al-
ready given (20; 33). In the Anthropology, man “is neither homo natura nor a purely
free subject” (34; 54-55). Man, in Kant’s Anthropology, is always entangled with the
word. And regarding Foucault’s third remark, it finds its briefest and most poignant
formulation in Foucault’s final sentence: “The trajectory of the question: was ist der
Mensch? in the field of philosophy reaches its end in the response which both chal-
Nigro, “Afterword”, 152-153.
122
lenges and disarms it: der Übermensch “(79; 124). This last remark points out the is-
sues central to The Order of Things and supports the thesis of continuity between this
essay and the later claims about the “death of man” and the criticism of the human
sciences. It also shows that Foucault already at this stage embraced and was fond of
waving a Nietzschean flag.
What is the relationship between Anthropology and Critical Philosophy? Fou-
cault points out the apparent lack of contact between the two aspects of Kant’s work.
This Anthropology is not the answer to the question ‘What is man?’ that Kant pre-
sented in his Logic. In these sections, Foucault’s interpretation seems to echo Hei-
degger’s Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Both the notion of finitude as an essen-
tial problem (67; 105), and the recurrent use of the word “repetition” lead in that di-
rection. But even if Foucault was inspired by Heidegger, their philosophical objec-
tives seem to diverge. Heidegger wants to show that Kant was unable or unwilling
to take the step of grounding metaphysics, thereby mapping his own philosophical
direction simultaneously as a continuation of and also a break with Kant’s enter-
prise. Foucault’s concern, already at this stage, is more historically oriented. Accord-
ing to Foucault, if Kant’s Anthropology is related to Critical philosophy, it is also re-
lated to a “whole series of anthropological researches being undertaken, primarily in
Germany, in the second half of the eighteenth century” (69; 109). This is a complex
relationship, one by which Kant was influenced, but also in which he was himself a
very influential figure, well before his lectures were finally printed. In this section
(68-79; 108-124) Foucault is developing an archeological reading (in the sense Fou-
cault gives to this term in his later works 8). Methodologically, this is a break with an
“internalist” reading, one in which the text itself, in its internal inconsistencies, in the
failure to draw a conclusion, and in other “symptoms”, provides a key to its own
interpretation. Foucault proceeds by locating Kant’s argument in a complex web of
contemporary arguments and discussions. The meaning of the Anthropology is estab-
lished not (or not solely) on the basis of its place in Kant’s work, but primarily in re-
lationship to the general discussion about a science of man which is unfolding at that
time. Foucault claims that there is a fundamental ambiguity in this attempt to con-
sider man: “it is the knowledge of man, in a movement that objectifies man on the
level of his natural being and in the content of his animal determinations; at the
same time, it is the knowledge of the knowledge of man, and so can interrogate the
8 While Foucault is here doing “archaeology” in the sense of his later work, he uses the
word “archaeology” in a different way: “Leaving aside the archaeology of a term the
form of which, if not the fate, had already been fixed by the sixteenth century. What can
these new anthropologies mean in relation to a science of man of the Cartesian type?”
(71). Cf. also the following utterance: “Would the archaeology of the text, if it were possi-
ble, allow us to see the birth of ‘homo criticus’, whose structure would essentially differ
from the man who preceded him?” (13). For a contemporaneous use of “archaeology”,
see Foucault’s 1961 preface to Histoire de la Folie (Cf. Dits et Écrits, I, 160).
123
subject himself, ask him where his limitations lie, and about what he sanctions of the
knowledge we have of him” (74; 117). The Anthropology is not “applied pure reason”
and does not have the same status as Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural
Science, an essay that applies the concepts of pure reason to physics. On the contrary,
the entanglement between object and subject seems endemic in the science of man;
furthermore, the accomplishments of Kant’s philosophical revolution seem to have
tightened this entanglement. To offer the appearance of a solution is the role of the
Anthropology, and for Foucault that explains Kant’s stubborn attachment to this
work, his patient repetition of the lectures over the years, and their final publication
at the end of his life.
* * *
While the editors did an important job delivering this text to a wide audience, they
fell short in a number of areas that one hopes will be corrected in a second edition.
First, if the original text was difficult to read and transcribe as we are told in the
presentation (9; 12), the absence of footnotes explaining possible alternative readings
or editorial decisions is surprising. We also regret the lack of an index to this vo-
lume. A discussion of Foucault’s translation of Kant, the extent of changes between
the original 1961 typescript and the 1964 edition, an index to the translation and a
glossary discussing choices made by Foucault would also have been useful. But
these are minor matters when compared to the joy of finally being able to read Fou-
cault’s text in its authorized version.
***
It is unusual for a translation to be published almost simultaneously with the origi-

nal. The translation of the Introduction by Roberto Nigro and Kate Briggs not only
allows a wider public to gain access to this early work by Foucault, but also im-
proves on the original publication. Nigro based his translation both on the published
French version and on the original, annotated, and with a few missing references in
the text inserted. The English translation also has a very useful “Afterword” that
places this work in context.
In a short Introduction, Nigro shares with the reader some of the underlying
assumptions guiding the translation. The Introduction refers to Kant in three different
ways, all of which represent a challenge for the potential translator. Foucault quotes
Kant in the original German language, paraphrases him, and also quotes him in his
own translation, which this work was supposed to introduce. Nigro and Briggs
choose to leave the original German, but to use a standard English translation for
both the translations and the paraphrasing, trying at the same time not to lose alto-
gether the flavor of Foucault’s rendering of the Kantian text.
124
The translation itself is very down to earth, making great efforts to deliver
Foucault’s ideas if not his somewhat convoluted style in a clear and readable prose.
Sometimes they underplay Foucault’s rich prose a little too much. Where Foucault
writes : “...celle d’une structure qui s’offre, en ce qu’elle a de plus radical que toute
‘faculté ‘ possible, a la parole enfin libérée d’une philosophie trascendentale”, the Eng-
lish text renders : “…that of a structure, more radical than any possible ‘faculty’
lends itself to transcendental philosophy, liberated at last” (54; 86 emphasis added).
The notes to the text (142-150) give a glimpse of the difficulties involved in
reading and transcribing Foucault’s original. The French edition silently corrected
or glossed over such problems as missing, illegible words and typos. Nigro also
provides information on some of the less known thinkers who corresponded with
Kant during the period in which he was writing the Anthropology and to which Fou-
cault refers as background for Kant’s project.
Finally, the “Afterword” deals with the history of Foucault’s Introduction.
This short essay (127-139) deals with the history of the text, and provides useful
hints for his interpretation. Nigro warns the reader not to see in the Introduction the
source of Foucault’s later ideas, because these took “unforeseen directions and reso-
nated with each other in different ways” (130). He notes the often-discussed influ-
ence of Heidegger, in particular, of his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, which
Heidegger dedicated to the memory of Max Scheler, one of the leading figures of
philosophical anthropology in the early twentieth century. But he also notes that the
Introduction can best be understood in the context of contemporaneous philosophical
discussions. In particular, he stresses Foucault’s closeness to Althusser. Nigro sees a
parallelism between Foucault’s interest in Kant’s anthropology and Althusser’s re-
search on Feuerbach (133). This is an interesting lead, which need to be developed
further. Nigro concludes his essay by suggesting that Hyppolite’s criticism of Fou-
cault’s complementary thesis as being too Nietzschean points to Foucault’s combat
against “the immense all-encompassing resources of Hegelian thinking” (137), a
combat for which he enlisted as allies not only Nietzsche but also Artaud, Bataille,
Roussel and many others.
Michael Maidan
125
 Trent H. Hamann 2009
ISSN: 1832-5203
REVIEW
Edward F. McGushin, Foucault’s Askesis: An Introduction to the Philosophical

Life. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007). ISBN: 9780810122833.
At the heart of Edward F. McGushin’s book is his original reconstruction of a

Foucauldian history of philosophy. Relying to a significant extent on Foucault’s
lectures at the Collège de France (most of which were either unpublished or not
translated at the time he was writing), McGushin’s history makes good use of
Foucault’s blend of philosophical reading techniques, derived from both ancient and
modern practices. What holds together the diversity of Foucault’s readings, which
span a period of four decades, is McGushin’s re-reading of Foucault’s earlier
archaeological and genealogical writings on modern forms of power/knowledge
through the lens of his later work on subjectivity, the ethical care of the self and
aesthetics of existence. 1 The result is a compelling Foucauldian genealogy of
philosophy presented as a history of our present. It begins where Foucault ended, in
the ancient world, and concludes with Descartes and Kant, two figures of great
significance both in Foucault’s earliest works and in lectures he gave in the last few
years of his life. Along the way, McGushin’s genealogy serves two closely related
purposes, one explicit and the other more implicit. First, it allows him to illustrate
how Foucault eventually came to recognize his own life’s work as comprising a
critical and self-transformative askesis that constituted a distinctly philosophical life.
In this regard McGushin succeeds in bringing to life Foucault’s claim in the
Introduction to The Use of Pleasure that he had made use of experimental forms of
writing in order to think differently and thereby become different, an exercise that
constituted for him the “living substance” of philosophy:
1 While this is an original aspect of McGushin’s reading, there is some precedence for
doing so in Foucault’s own later assessments of his earlier work. For example, in a 1983
discussion with Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow Foucault suggested that all three
axes, knowledge, power, and ethics, could be found, “albeit in a somewhat confused
fashion,” in Madness and Civilization, which was originally published as Histoire de la Folie
in 1961. See Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in
Progress,” in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism
and Hermeneutics (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), 237.
126
Hamann, review of Foucault’s Askesis
The ‘essay’—which should be understood as the assay or test by which,

in the game of truth, one undergoes changes, and not as the simplistic
appropriation of others for the purpose of communication—is the living
substance of philosophy, at least if we assume that philosophy is still
what it was in times past, i.e., an ‘ascesis’, askesis, an exercise of oneself in
the activity of thought. 2
To those who might be tempted to find here a thinly veiled attempt at appropriating
Foucault to the philosophical fold against all competing disciplinary claims, it
should be pointed out that McGushin is certainly aware of Foucault’s longstanding
ambivalence toward philosophy. Of course, as Foucault well knew, we generally do
not “assume that philosophy is . . . an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought,”
nor do we tend to read the history of philosophy from the perspective of such a
framework. But, as McGushin emphasizes, Foucault identified the eclipse of the
ancient imperative to ”take care of oneself” in favor of the imperative to ”know
oneself” as an extremely significant event in the history of thought. 3 It is here that I
find what I take to be the second and more implicit purpose of McGushin’s
genealogy. By tracing the history and consequences of this event, he raises anew
Foucault’s question, ”Who are we in our actuality today?” At stake is nothing less
than the ways we think, write, act, and speak when we engage in contemporary
philosophical practices, especially those of us who have been trained to work within
the disciplinary confines of professional academic philosophy. Rather than making a
proprietary claim on behalf of the discipline of philosophy, McGushin is raising the
critical questions ”What is philosophy?” and ”Who is a philosopher?” in a most
powerful way. Joining together the two purposes of McGushin’s genealogy is
Foucault’s examination of the practice of parrhesia or ethical truth telling. Using
diverse examples from the ancient world and extending them in provocative ways
into the modern, Foucault offered a general description of parrhesia as a
philosophical form of etho-political resistance to the dangers of self-neglect that
emerge as the result of taking for granted the established relations between power,
subjectivity and truth.
In the first four chapters of the book, which comprise the first of its two parts,
“Philosophy As Care of the Self,” McGushin traces Foucault’s interpretation of the
history of the concern with the self and parrhesia in the ancient world. Beginning
with the work of Euripides, Foucault identified parrhesia as a political right and duty
of aristocratic Athenians to speak one’s mind. However, as Athens became more and
more democratic, a certain anxiety developed around the practice of parrhesia and
the problem of Athenian governance. In his reading of Plato, Foucault highlighted
2 Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Random
House, 1990), 9.
3 McGushin, 31.
127
Socrates’ concern with the susceptibility of his fellow Athenians to flattery and
rhetoric. Socrates identified this vulnerability as a form of self-neglect insofar as they
failed to take care of themselves by being concerned with the truth. In this context
parrhesia appears as a political problem of truth that is also ethical insofar as it
involves a concern with both self-governance, that is, the work one must perform
upon oneself in order to not succumb to ignorance, as well as the governance of
others. McGushin notes that this convergence of truth, ethics, and politics was
important for Foucault in thinking about our present because he found in it “a way
of isolating the dynamic interplay between relations of power, discursive or
epistemic forms, and practices of ethical subjectivization.” 4 In the ancient texts
interpreted by Foucault he revealed examples of philosophy as a way of life
consisting of spiritual exercises focused, not primarily on the acquisition of objective
knowledge, as orthodox interpretations have insisted, but on practices of self-
transformation aimed at truthful living. In his readings of Hellenistic and Roman
philosophy he discovered a rich diversity of practices of care of the self that led to a
wide range of forms of subjectivity with various relations to different forms of truth.
Of particular significance is Foucault’s interest in the Cynics, not only because their
practices constituted an especially radical form of resistance to orthodoxy, but also
because their particular exercises of self-care were eventually appropriated and
redefined by early Christian forms of asceticism. It was these practices that later led
to ethical self-renunciation and the forms of pastoral power that Foucault had
already begun to describe in his earlier work. As a result of these historical
transformations philosophy became divorced from spiritual practices and made to
become a purely theoretical activity. Here we find an example that illustrates the
crucial genealogical point that no set of practices, discourses, or forms of subjectivity
can be accepted as definitively true, universal, or final. They all arise as specific
forms of resistance to specific historic problems. However, to the extent that they
succeed, there is always the danger that they will solidify into a new form of
orthodoxy.
The second part of the book, “Care of the Self and Parrhesia in the Age of
Reason,” is a rereading of Foucault’s earlier work on modern thought in light of his
later work. Specifically, McGushin examines the modern forms of power/knowledge
elaborated by Foucault in his works from the 1960’s and 1970’s in terms of the
problematic of care of the self and ethical truth telling. Although it is arguable that
Kant remains the most important modern philosopher throughout the entirety of
Foucault’s career (at least as important as Nietzsche and Heidegger), it is Descartes
who stands as a pivotal central figure here. His most famous work consisted of a
series of meditations that made use of self-transformative exercises that resulted in
the production of an entirely new form of subjectivity positioned in a new
4 Ibid., 14.
128
Hamann, review of Foucault’s Askesis
relationship to truth. In this regard Foucault interprets Descartes as the creator of a

modern form of philosophical askesis and parrhesia developed in order to resist the
pastoral forms of power/knowledge that dominated the Renaissance era. Here again,
however, we find an example of a philosophical care of the self that successfully
emerged as a specific form of resistance to a prevailing apparatus of truth and
subjectivity only to be rigidified into a new form of orthodoxy. As we saw in the case
of the Christian appropriation of Hellenistic practices, once philosophical askeses are
abstracted from their original historical context of problematization and resistance,
they lose their ”truth effects” as parrhesia. The emergence of this ”Cartesian
moment,” as Foucault described it, ultimately proved to be perfectly congruent with
disciplinary power and biopolitics, particularly as they took hold through the
development of the human sciences. McGushin is right to suggest that it may be
because we continue today to live under the shadow of this ”Cartesian moment,”
particularly in terms of our philosophical understanding of subjectivity and truth,
that we tend to have a blind spot in regard to the initial spiritual aspect of Descartes’
work.
Through his reading of Foucault’s repeated encounters with Kant, McGushin
suggests that Kant’s critical philosophy failed to recognize its own complicity with
disciplinary power, at least in part because of his ahistorical approach to questions
of knowledge and subjectivity. Kant was unaware of the philosophical practice of
care of the self that had been abandoned by Descartes only to be picked up by the
new pastoral forms of biopolitical governance. Even in his article ”What Is
Enlightenment?” in which he focused on the importance of maturity, autonomy, and
the courage to know, Kant insisted on a private obligation to obey governmental
power even while encouraging free engagement in public critique. Nietzsche, of
course, is the modern figure who allowed Foucault to extend his critical project
beyond Kant’s limitations by way of his recognition that subjectivity and truth are
historical formations inextricably interwoven with the contingencies of power.
It was at this point of convergence between his earlier archaeological and
genealogical work and his later work on the ancient care of the self that Foucault
was able to propose the possibility for a modern form of parrhesia that would
constitute a re-spiritualization of philosophy practiced as a way of life. The
parrhesiastic role of philosophy proposed by Foucault is comprised of two moments.
Its first task is to produce truth in the form of a critical diagnosis of who we are in
our present actuality. The key element here is the use of what McGushin calls a
”genealogical circle.” It begins by using a contemporary apparatus of power,
knowledge, and subjectivity as a lens for examining historical texts. The goal of such
an interpretation is not to produce a history of ideas and practices, but to
problematize the apparatus as a historically contingent formation. By
problematizing what is presently taken for granted as given or natural, this critical
form of parrhesia reveals the manner in which we engage in self-neglect. In
129
modernity this neglect manifests itself in the extent to which we allow ourselves to
be taken care of by disciplinary or biopolitical forms of power and discourse. To the
extent that these modern forms of power, knowledge, and subjectivity present us
with the task of discovering or liberating our true or authentic selves, the second
task of parrhesiastic philosophy is to offer us the possibility of a flight from the self by
way of truths that are etho-poetic. Philosophical discourses and ways of living
constitute a work of freedom that can produce truths experienced through their
transformative effects on life. These effects register as new ways of thinking,
speaking, and acting in the world. However, as Foucault often pointed out, the work
of freedom is something that can never be completed because, as McGushin puts it,
there is “no natural form of human life; the most natural thing about us is that the
problem of being human always requires new responses and new forms of life.” 5 In
this way, McGushin’s depiction of Foucault’s journey to the philosophical life is also
a call and invitation for those of us willing to hear it and respond.
Trent H. Hamann, St. John’s University
5 McGushin, 287-88.
130
 Ellen K. Feder 2009
ISSN: 1832-5203
REVIEW
Margaret A. McLaren, Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity (Albany,

NY: SUNY Press, 2007). ISBN: 0791455149
Beginning in the mid-1980s and extending through the 1990s, feminists grappled
with the question of whether postmodernism was a positive development for femin-
ist theory. The central concern was whether the challenges presented by thinkers
such as Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault—most saliently concerning the denial of a
metaphysical ground for truth—would undermine the basic aims of feminist politics
that depended on this ground for its own claims for justice and equality. The nature
of the worry and of the stakes involved was succinctly put by Nancy Hartsock in the
important collection, Feminism/Postmodernism (1990). “Why is it,” she asked, “that
just at the moment when so many of us who have been silenced begin to demand the
right to name ourselves, to act as subjects rather than objects of history, that just then
the concept of subjecthood becomes problematic?” 1 Feminists have by now engaged
postmodern theory in innumerable ways, but Michel Foucault has been perhaps the
most important single figure in feminist theorizing about issues of power, identity
and embodiment ever since. This should not be surprising, for, as Susan Bordo
points out, the focus on the body that came to preoccupy Foucault in his “middle” or
“genealogical” period in fact coincided with feminist contentions that the “‘defini-
tion and shaping’ of the [gendered] body is ‘the focal point for struggles over the
shape of power.’” 2 But if disagreements over whether Foucault should be regarded
as friend or foe to feminism spanned almost two decades, Margaret A. McLaren’s
Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity should be the last word on the useful-
ness of Foucault’s work for feminist theory.
McLaren’s book opens its first chapter, “The Feminism and Foucault Debate,”
with an overview of the range of feminist perspectives (liberal, radical, socialist,
etc.), and brief treatments of the position of each with respect to postmodern theory,
1 Nancy Hartsock, “Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women?” in Feminism/

Postmodernism, edited by Linda Nicolson (New York: Routledge 1990), cited in McLaren,
Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity, 55.
2 Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1993), 17.
131
Feder: review of Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity
before turning to the extended engagement with what she takes to be the productive
contribution of Foucault’s work for feminism that occupies the rest of the book. In
chapter two, “Foucault, Feminism, and Norms,” she provides another kind of intro-
duction to what she makes clear is the complex relationship between Foucault and
feminism with a characteristically helpful discussion of Foucault’s “ambivalent” re-
lation to Enlightenment thought. Famous for his damning criticism of the Enligh-
tenment postulation of a universal truth, Foucault nevertheless “endorses [the] criti-
cal impulse of the Enlightenment in the mode of thinking he calls ‘critique.’” 3 Prom-
inent contemporary critics of Foucault like Jürgen Habermas or Charles Taylor can-
not reconcile what appears to be Foucault’s ambivalence toward truth, that is, his
suspicion of a timeless truth, the very criticism of which appears itself to rely on
some normative framework. But this reconciliation, McLaren explains, is precisely
the project of her book, namely, to understand and apply the Foucaultian critique
that has as its aim the unmasking and undermining of domination, the task she takes
to be the heart of a feminist praxis.
What Foucault provides, according to McLaren, is a framework for criticizing
domination that does not rely on a metaphysical ground for truth. Instead, Foucault
appropriates critique, which he redefines as “the movement by which the subject
gives himself the right to question truth on its effects of power and question power
on its discourses of truth…. Critique will be the art of voluntary insubordination,
that of reflected tractability.” 4 If this condemnation of domination appeals to a Kan-
tian notion of freedom, Foucault claims that what he calls the “critical attitude” must
be understood instead as “condemned to…dependency and pure heteronomy.” 5 It
is, in other words, a product of history.
What then appears to be a “normative confusion” in Foucault’s work, McLa-
ren explains, “functions productively…to criticize traditional Enlightenment norms
and social norms while allowing for a reconceptualization of normative notions such
as freedom and critique.” 6 This reconceptualization will have important implications
for understanding subjectivity, which is the focus of the third chapter, “Foucault and
the Subject of Feminism.” Feminist critics cast Foucault’s understanding of the sub-
ject as a destruction of subjectivity or its complete determination. Either way, these
accusations finally amount to the same denial of agency. Complaints such as these
provide McLaren an opportunity to advance her argument for the fundamental
compatibility of Foucault’s theory and feminist aims. What is particularly notewor-
thy about this discussion is her development of a feminist engagement with Fou-
cault’s thought that extends beyond the genealogical works into the final “ethical”
3 McLaren, Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity, 21.

4 Michel Foucault, “What is Critique?” in The Political, edited by David Ingram (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers), 194.
5 Foucault, “What is Critique,” 192.
132
work on “care of the self.” McLaren here, as elsewhere in her wide-ranging book, is
entering lightly trodden conceptual ground, 7 anticipating and inspiring the rich de-
velopment of work in this area of feminist Foucault studies which would follow in
subsequent years. 8 This analysis is notable not only for its contribution to feminist
applications of Foucault, but to the development of Foucault studies more generally.
In the years preceding the publication of McLaren’s book, most commentators gave
the later work short shrift, and McLaren’s is among the very first works—guided, as
she was, by her extensive work in the Foucault archives—to address its significance
and its rightful place in Foucault’s thought .
The new direction of Foucault’s analysis marked by the second and third vo-
lumes of The History of Sexuality comes to define, McLaren writes, a different concep-
tion of subjectivity, one that “ruins” or “rejects” not the concept of the subject itself,
but rather, as McLaren puts it, “a particular formation of it,” 9 namely, the “subjectifi-
cation” that is conveyed by the term assujettissement, the making of the subject that is
also making subject. Rather than relying on Enlightenment notions of the subject,
which he takes to remain active, though recast, in existentialism and phenomenolo-
gy, 10 Foucault turns to ancient Greek conceptions of the self. It is here that McLaren
locates what she argues is the guiding thread connecting the genealogical and ethical
in Foucault’s work. As she writes, Foucault’s genealogies
reveal the normalizing character of the disciplines that constitute subjectivity;

this should prompt us to investigate nonnormalizing ways of existence. In Fou-
cault’s view, refusing what we are would enable us to liberate ourselves from the
type of individuality (subjectivity) that has imposed itself on us through the dis-
ciplines and practices for the last several centuries. The refusal to be what we are,
to be subject and hence subjected, opens up new possibilities for being. 11
McLaren will return to Foucault’s final work in the sixth and final chapter, “Practices
of the Self: From Self-Transformation to Social Transformation,” where she provides
a compelling case for understanding the feminist movement-defining practice of
consciousness raising in Foucaultian terms as a “practice of freedom.” 12 The personal
and political transformation effected by consciousness-raising, she provocatively
7 In addition to McLaren, Ladelle McWhorter was among the very few feminist theorists to
substantively engage this work. See Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual
Normalization (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999).
8 See e.g., Dianna Taylor and Karen Vintges, editors, Feminism and the Final Foucault
Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Cressida Heyes, Self-Transformations:
Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
10 Ibid., 62.
11 Ibid., 62.
12 Ibid., 160.
133
Feder: review of Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity
suggests, may be located in the contemporary psychotherapeutic movement asso-

ciated with the Australian therapist Michael White, whose work has been signifi-
cantly shaped by both Foucaultian and feminist perspectives. White’s narrative ther-
apy locates individuals’ problems not “in” them, as traditional psychoanalysis does,
but in the subjectifying apparatus of social systems. As a result, narrative therapy
understands individual change to be bound up with political change, or at least, the
understanding—the deconstruction—of the messages that individuals have interna-
lized.13
To apply the approach outlined here also sheds important light on the aims
of the preceding chapter which focuses more specifically on “Identity Politics: Sex,
Gender, and Sexuality.” The very category of “Woman,” as so many feminist theor-
ists—Judith Butler most importantly—have now argued, must be understood as a
normative category, one that promotes exclusion, but has also been an effective ral-
lying point for sociopolitical change. McLaren carefully walks the reader through the
discussion of identity politics that has, she writes, been problematically understood
as a matter of “essentialism” (proponents of identity politics) versus “social con-
struction” (critics of identity politics). For new students of feminism this discussion
will be tremendously instructive, but it also lays the ground for McLaren’s elucidat-
ing discussion of the contribution of Foucault’s theory in the consolidation of the
“social constructionist” critique. And yet, McLaren’s discussion clarifies, in Foucaul-
tian terms, precisely how the characterization of the debate itself is misconstrued.
Even as categories of identity are exclusionary—failing, as they must, to “represent
the diversity of group members”—and naturalizing—reifying the existence of
“types” of people and concealing their historical production14—McLaren makes the
case that this recognition can nevertheless be compatible with the strategic deploy-
ment of these categories. In Foucault’s own work of course, “the homosexual” is the
exemplary model of how a category of identity can be deployed to “define and sub-
ject individuals,” 15 but it was also by means of this category that a resistance move-
ment, “gay liberation,” was born. 16 Acknowledging Foucault’s refusal to address the
specific production of gender, McLaren here extends Foucault’s own analysis of
hermaphroditism, providing a new analysis of Herculine Barbin, and offers a novel
treatment of the bisexual identity politics that peaked in the early 1990s.
The employment of these last examples locates McLaren’s own work histori-
cally, as the situated analysis it must be. Throughout the book, McLaren offers an
extremely helpful overview of the history of feminist engagement with Foucault’s
work that also moves feminist Foucaultian scholarship forward in ways that mark its
13 Ibid., 162.
15 Ibid., 122.
16 See e.g., Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, translated by
Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 101.
134
own production. The discussion of bisexuality would, if published in the fast-

moving landscape of sexual identity politics today, likely be a discussion of trans-
sexuality or “trans” identities, and the discussion of intersex politics—only a few
years old at the time of publication—would be far richer as that movement has ma-
tured and diversified. This is not a criticism so much as it is a caution to readers for
whom the history of feminist theorizing should be marked off from the contribu-
tions McLaren here makes, which are already historical moments.
Several years after its publication, Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivi-
ty remains invaluable for its rendering of a thoroughgoing account of feminist theor-
ists’ interaction with Foucault through the late 1990s. As McLaren rightly points out,
no single philosopher since Marx has garnered as much attention from feminists 17
and recent feminist work on Foucault 18 is testament to feminists’ ongoing engage-
ment.
Ellen K. Feder, American University

18 See e.g., Amy Allen, The Politics of Ourselves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary
Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Heyes, Self-Transformations.
135
 Alex Means 2009
ISSN: 1832-5203
REVIEW
Mitchell Dean, Governing Societies: Political Perspectives on Domestic and In-

ternational Rule (New York: Open University Press, 2007). ISBN: 0335208975
In the January 2008 issue of Foucault Studies, Colin Gordon and Jacques Donzelot of-
fer an evaluation of governmentality scholarship since the landmark 1991 publica-
tion of The Foucault Effect. In this conversation, Gordon and Donzelot articulate con-
cerns over how Foucault’s perspectives on liberalism and government have been
taken up over the past two decades. Donzelot claims that while the analysis of neo-
liberal governmentality has yielded many important insights it has also tended to
flatten the innovative and critical potential of Foucault’s approach. They both agree
that in some cases this has lead to an exaggerated focus on the “technical” as op-
posed to the “political” aspects of neo-liberalism, as well as a kind of “ambivalent”
“rationalization” of its central rationalities. 1
Mitchell Dean’s book represents an attempt to address these concerns. For
readers not familiar with Dean, he has been one of the leading scholars in govern-
mentality studies since the early 1990s. In Governing Societies he moves away from
the more systematized “analytics of government” approach developed within his
previous work and instead embarks on a detailed engagement with the political di-
mension of liberal powers. His overarching claim within Governing Societies is that
mainstream social science narratives as well as perspectives in governmentality have
failed to adequately apprehend the rapid changes in domestic and international go-
vernance in the post 9/11 era due to their failure to engage it politically -- that is, “as
something concerned with power, confrontation and appropriation, with struggle
resistance and combat, and with the use and threat of force”. 2
On the one hand, Dean is interested in producing a sober counter-narrative to
social and political theorists who have claimed that neo-liberal globalization has
thrown the historical project of governing societies into doubt. On the other hand, he
seeks to revive the relevancy of studies in governmentality, which he argues have in
many cases become complicit in reproducing instead of challenging the normative
1 Jacques Donzelot and Colin Gordon, “Governing Liberal Societies: the Foucault Effect in
the English Speaking World,” Foucault Studies 5 (2008), 48-62.
2 Dean, 1.
136
Means, review of Governing Societies
logics of neo-liberal rule. He argues that this is the result of a general failure of go-
vernmentality studies to attend to the continuing salience of sovereignty and its
complex relation to matters of life and death. Through an appropriation of insights
from Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Giorgio Agamben, Dean foregrounds the politi-
cal in order to critically account for the assemblages of governmental, biopolitical,
and sovereign powers, which, he argues, are intrinsic to liberalism itself.
Governing Societies is divided into three thematic sections. In the first section
entitled Dilemmas, Dean outlines the historical conditions that gave rise to the project
of governing societies. He argues that since the origin of the modern state and state
system with the Treaty of Westphalia, the liberal project of governing societies has
been defined by two distinctions. First, by respecting the quasi-natural processes of
a domain separate from the state within civil society, liberal “arts of security” have
employed governmental forms of expertise in order to optimize economic and social
efficiency within particular national frameworks. Second, these liberal “arts of secu-
rity” have worked to maintain this order by defeating and punishing enemies who
violate or threaten it both within and outside the borders of the nation. Dean argues
that one of the mistakes realist political theory has made is to treat the liberal state as
a concrete arrangement as opposed to a discursively constituted tendency, or “aspi-
ration”, which must be continually made and remade through legal, economic, and
social and cultural processes in accordance with shifting historical conditions. This
misrecognition has led to a fundamental misinterpretation of liberal rule within the
contemporary era. He claims that while neo-liberal globalization has presented vari-
ous challenges to the traditional alignments of governing societies it has not effaced
them.
In the third and final chapter of the Dilemmas section, Dean expands this ar-
gument through a critique of mainstream social science narratives of globalization.
Drawing on Manuel Castells, Anthony Giddens, and Ulrich Beck, he raises questions
concerning the presumed decline of state power and the corollary rise of a more flex-
ible, reflexive, and cosmopolitan subject of government. Dean contends that this as-
sumes a “deterritorialized political sphere” and a “detraditionalized social sphere”
leading to the displacement of governmental authority onto a host of technologies
that work primarily through the freedom and ethical culture of individuals. 3 He ar-
gues that these narratives are teleological in that their normative articulations pre-
sume the very outcomes that they prescribe. In contrast, he uses the notion of “divid-
ing practices” in order to describe how governmental rationalities work to differen-
tiate populations based upon exceptions to liberal norms which determine those
who are capable of government through freedom, those in need of obligation, and
those requiring coercion and violence. He suggests that we need “to ask when, in
what contexts, how, and for which individuals and groups, governance conducted
with the aim of activating individuals comes to place obligations above freedom,
3 Dean, 73.
137
and the use of sanctions and coercive measures in the establishment of a particular
form of life”. 4 Such questions help to foreground the variegated relations of know-
ledge and power defining the terrain in which political struggles over economic
provision and social recognition necessarily take place. They also destabilize dis-
courses that situate neo-liberal government as primarily governing through free-
dom, as governmental programs such as welfare reform, zero tolerance policies, and
immigration enforcement apply heavy-handed modes of obligation and physical
force against those positioned outside the norms of autonomy and full citizenship.
In section two, entitled Diagnostics, Dean shifts his analysis to perspectives on
governmentality. In these two chapters he emphasizes a “critical” as opposed to a
“descriptive” side of a governmentality perspective. This represents an attempt to
extend governmentality beyond concerns with the “conduct of conduct”, which he
locates as only one potential zone of liberal power. Dean argues that a “critical” go-
vernmentality approach to liberalism entails diagnosing the disjuncture between li-
beralism’s normative claims to provide a safeguard against authoritarian forms of
rule, and the operation of biopolitical and sovereign powers that often take illiberal
and despotic forms. This leads to one of Dean’s most provocative suggestions, that
liberalism has an intrinsic “authoritarian” dimension inherent in a liberal under-
standing of government itself. He locates this “authoritarian” dimension in the traf-
fic between a “legal political-order” and a “liberal order of police” that works to de-
fine what constitutes accepted frames of life that may be, if necessary, defended
against their exceptions through coercion and violence. Here, biopolitics, sovereign-
ty, and government are conceived as overlapping complexes of power that may be-
come operable in variable combinations within the social field, perhaps even falling
into what Agamben has called a “zone of indistinction”. This refers to situations
where decisions over life and death blur the boundaries of biopolitics and sovereign-
ty, such as in cases concerning bioethics and human reproduction, or geopolitically,
when a nation seeks to defend and promote its “way of life” through war, such as in
the United States invasion of Iraq.
In the third section of the book entitled Departures, Dean draws on Carl
Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben in order to engage questions concerning sovereignty
and the state of exception. Here, Dean expands Schmitt’s conception of the sovereign
as “he who decides the exception” in two key ways. First, he argues that Schmitt’s
view of sovereignty does not account for the multidimensional processes of domina-
tion and contestation whereby legal, cultural, institutional, and technological norms
are produced. “Thus while it might be said that the sovereign can decide when a
normal legal order exists, it does not readily follow that he thereby decides what
constitutes a ‘normal’ social existence”. 5 Second, against the notion that the sove-
reign decision resides only or even primarily within the juridical-legal and constitu-
4 Ibid., 77.
5 Dean, 163.
138
Means, review of Governing Societies
tional authority of the state, Dean seeks to widen the field of sovereign decision by
analyzing how sovereign powers and the localization and diffusion of the decision,
are “delegated” and “arrogated” within local-global regimes of institutional and so-
cial practices. He claims that “if the governmentality perspective misses the sove-
reign decision imbricated within regimes of practices, Schmitt misses the normaliz-
ing practices that surround the exception”. 6
Building on his analysis of Schmitt, Dean offers an extended engagement and
critique of Giorgio Agamben. He reads Agamben’s work as a “totalizing critique of
the present” in which the camp becomes the central spatial-(extra)legal construct of
the contemporary moment, or, in Agamben’s language, the “new biopolitical nomos
of the planet”. 7 While finding much theoretical value in Agamben, he contests the
overly generalized logic of the camp on the grounds that its focus on the most ex-
treme and sensational examples limits possibilities for conceiving the full range of
political, economic, legal, and social conditions in which decisions on the exception
are made. In contrast, Dean argues that decisions on the exception are integrated at
multiple and overlapping scales and become “delegated” and “arrogated” through-
out “the very fabric of normal life”. 8 In other words, decisions on the exception occur
at all scales involving individuals, institutions, and political formations.
While Governing Societies offers a series of provocative challenges and insights
for governmentality studies it is not without its weaknesses. At times it appears that
Dean is guilty of overplaying his argument against social science accounts of globa-
lization. Throughout the book he directs his critique against theorists, most notably
the aforementioned Manuel Castells, Anthony Giddens, and Ulrich Beck, who, Dean
claims, have prematurely asserted the death of governing societies and the rise of a
networked cosmopolitan world, without ever delving very deeply into the nuances
of their arguments and/or, the significant differences between them. Moreover, his
lengthy commentary and critique of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben at least par-
tially belies the recent widespread scholarly interest in the configuration and
(re)assertion of contemporary forms of sovereignty. Additionally, while acknowl-
edging that the “dividing practices” of liberal rule position subjects and groups on a
scale of worthiness for full autonomy, and that the most violent forms of power are
most often directed toward “minority populations”, Dean misses the opportunity to
deepen his analysis by delving more specifically into how various registers of social
difference operate within liberal rule. In particular, how distinctly political matters
involving access and struggles over social provision and symbolic recognition be-
come re-routed through various discursive and material processes to enforce obliga-
tions and to coerce through race, class, ethnic, gender, and sexual differences.
These criticisms aside, Governing Societies offers a wide range of theoretical
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., 177.
8 Ibid., 194.
139
insights for those interested in the continuing saliency of Foucault’s thought for
grappling with modern governance on both a domestic and international scale. In
particular, it offers invaluable tools for rethinking governmentality through the lens
of the political: as something concerned with the complex realities of antagonism,
resistance, and struggle. Furthermore, by analyzing the depth at which biopolitical
and sovereign powers operate within contemporary liberal rule, Dean has provided
much needed insight for re-engaging governmentality on a more creative and criti-
cal level.
Alex Means, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto
140
 Timothy O’Leary 2009
ISSN: 1832-5203
REVIEW
Paying Attention to Foucault’s Roussel
Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel.
Translated by Charles Ruas. Introduction by James Faubion. Postscript by
John Ashbery (London: Continuum, 2006) ISBN: 0826464351.
“No one has paid much attention to this book, and I’m glad; it’s my secret affair.
You know, he was my love for several summers…no one knew it” (187).
This new edition by Continuum Press of one of Michel Foucault’s earliest books is a
perfect illustration of the idea that a book (just like power or the subject) is not a sub-
stance. On its first publication in French in 1963 (the same year as Naissance de la Cli-
nique), the book entered a world in which Raymond Roussel (1877-1933), who had
been a figure of minor interest (mostly associated with Surrealism), was finally be-
coming significant for readers of the then-emerging nouveau roman. Foucault himself,
who had published work on Ludwig Binswanger, the book on madness, and a series
of literary articles in Critique and Tel quel was also a minor figure, one who seemed to
have a strong attraction for the exceptional, the marginal, and the transgressive. It is
difficult to judge what impact the book had upon publication, but we can take as in-
dicative the fact that it did not appear in an English translation until 1986. At that
time, the book was published with an interview that the translator, Charles Ruas,
had with Foucault in September 1983. In addition, a “Postscript” was added, consist-
ing of an essay written by the American poet and critic John Ashbery in 1961 (hence,
a “pre-script”?); an essay that introduced Roussel to an American audience pre-
sumed to have no knowledge of his work. And this “Postscript” to the book had it-
self another “Postscript” that was added by Ashbery in 1986. Finally, the English
translation changed the title significantly, from the simple French title Raymond
Roussel to the more elaborate, interpretive title Death and the Labyrinth: The World of
Raymond Roussel. Now, in 2006, Continuum Press have re-published Foucault’s
book, with all the apparatus from the 1986 edition, but this time adding yet another
layer; an “Introduction” by James Faubion that situates the original book, the Inter-
view and the “Postscript” in the context both of the study of Roussel’s work and the
141
O’Leary: review of Death and the Labyrinth
subsequent development of Foucault’s work. At the centre of this multiplicity is

Foucault’s 1963 book (originally conceived as an article for Critique), which itself be-
gins as a commentary on Roussel’s posthumous book, How I wrote Certain of my
Books, 1 which is itself of course, also a commentary on some of Roussel’s books. As if
this Rousselian madness was contagious, this review will now comment on the re-
cent re-edition as a twentieth-first century event in “Foucault studies,” an event that
gives us a chance to reconsider some of the often forgotten aspects of Foucault’s
work.
Today, forty-five years after the book’s initial publication, the first question to
be asked is, how should we read this book? Well, since we are talking about the ver-
sion of the book that has recently been re-published, I would say that we should
read it backwards and, not only that, but we should begin by reading something
else, by which I mean, we should begin by reading some Raymond Roussel (the no-
vels Locus Solus and Impressions of Africa would be good places to start 2). Then we
should read this edition, but beginning with John Ashbery’s 1961 essay, working
back through the 1983 interview with Foucault, then reading the “book” itself, and
finally ending with James Faubion’s Introduction.
But why make the effort to read this difficult book at all? If there is any justi-
fication for the proliferating apparatus that surrounds Foucault’s book, it is precisely
because that book is essentially difficult, obscure, and, as Foucault himself admits,
convoluted. 3 The first source of difficulty is the fact that it assumes the reader al-
ready has a detailed knowledge of Roussel’s works and is also familiar with the
work of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, et al. For example, Foucault has a ten-
dency to weave references and allusions to events in the novels, poems and plays
without alerting the reader to their origins or significance. A second difficulty arises
from the style of the writing itself. It is a curious and striking fact that much of Fou-
cault’s writing on literature from the first half of the 1960’s seems to be deliberately
opaque. In some cases, such as his essays on Bataille and Blanchot, 4 one has the sus-
picion that his writing style is a form of homage to the subject of the essay. The essay
on Blanchot, in particular, is strongly reminiscent of Blanchot’s own allusive, and
elusive, style. However, it would perhaps be wrong in the case of this book to think
that the difficulty stems from Foucault’s mimicking of Roussel’s style. After all
Roussel, like Robbe-Grillet, his nouveau-roman admirer, could write prose with ex-
1 Raymond Roussel, How I Wrote Certain of My Books, translated and edited by Tre-
vor Winkfield (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 1995).
2 Raymond Roussel, Locus Solus, translated by Rupert Copeland Cunningham
(London: John Calder, 1983); and Raymond Roussel, Impressions of Africa, trans-
lated by Lindy Foord & Rayner Heppenstall (London: John Calder, 2001).
3 See this volume, “An Interview with Michel Foucault”, 187.
4 Michel Foucault, “The preface to Transgression” and “The Thought of the Out-
side”, both in Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984, Volume 2, Aesthetics,
Method and Epistemology, edited by James D. Faubion (London: Penguin, 2000).
142
treme clarity. In this case, it may be closer to the truth to simply accept Foucault’s
own explanation: that this book was written by him in a matter of two months, it
was a pleasure, a “secret pleasure”, and he didn’t subject it to his usual process of re-
writing, simplifying, and clarifying. 5
Perhaps the greatest source of difficulty for a Foucauldian reader today,
therefore, does not come from a mirroring of style, but from the mirroring of the cen-
tral concerns of Roussel’s work. Foucault sees in Roussel a writer who is anxiously
obsessed with language and who is constantly exploring the intimate connection be-
tween language and death. This concern is mirrored and amplified by a similar con-
cern on the part of Foucault. In fact, in the 1983 interview, he admits that his own
“obsessional side” (174) may partly explain his fascination with these works. In the
last line of his book, Foucault generalises this experience by saying that what we
share with Roussel is this “anguish of the signified” (169). A shared anxiety in the
face of language is both what allows us to understand Roussel’s works and what al-
lows us (Foucault) to speak of them. However, it may also be what contributes to
giving the book its labyrinthine opacity, its relentless turning around the question of
what Foucault sees as the void that opens up at the heart of language and connects it
inexorably with death.
For potential readers of the book today, therefore, the question remains: giv-
en its difficulty, its apparent marginality in Foucault’s oeuvre, and the fact that few
people today read Roussel, why should we read this book? Assuming that this ques-
tion is addressed to those whose interest is primarily in Foucault, rather than in
Roussel, I think there are two important, connected reasons. First, this book is the
only extended example of Foucault’s engaging in a form of discourse in which he
was highly skilled, but which he had abandoned by the late 1960’s, what we could
call the formalist analysis of literary or artistic works. Striking examples of this form
of discourse include his analysis of “Las Meninas” in The Order of Things, his short
book on Magritte and his extended essay (now a book) on Manet;6 and of course his
essays on Bataille, Jules Verne, and the nouveau-romanciers. The second reason has to
do with the nature of this engagement itself, or at least with the literary side of this
engagement. Foucault’s deep involvement with literary analysis in the early to mid-
1960s was a function of his interest in a range of fundamental questions about the
nature of language and its relation to the world. The second reason for reading his
book on Roussel, therefore, has to do with the contribution it can make to help us
understand the form his questioning of language took at this time. However, it also
has to do with helping us to pose, if not answer, a question about Foucault’s subse-
quent turning away from using works of literature as a privileged access to the prob-
lem of the relation between words and things.
5 “An Interview…”, 187.

6 Michel Foucault, La Peinture de Manet, suivi de “Michel Foucault, un regard”. Edited
by Maryvonne Saison (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 2004).
143
Insofar as we read the book, firstly, as an example of Foucault’s powers of li-

terary analysis and insight, we have to recognise that for both Foucault and the
reader the primary interest will be one of pleasure. Not only the pleasure for us of
reading Foucault’s convoluted, but at times dazzling, analyses; but also the sense we
have of the pleasure Foucault himself is taking both in the writing of the book and in
the reading of Roussel. Convolution, repetition, and mirroring were key features of
Roussel’s work and they obviously find a strong resonance in the Foucault of the
early 1960s. In one of Roussel’s last works, Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique, a long
poem that re-works some of the themes of the earlier novel Impressions of Africa,
there is a complicated layering of parentheses within parentheses within parenthes-
es. Foucault clearly enjoys calculating that, at one point, if we include the parenthes-
es inside the footnotes to the poem, this layering extends to the ninth degree (130). It
would clearly be next-to-impossible for a reader to navigate this complexity without
confusion, and that is something that we will see could also perhaps be said of Fou-
cault’s book itself.
This kind of convolution and layering is a constant feature of Roussel’s work.
And, a significant part of the pleasure of those works comes from the fact that, at one
level, they can be approached as a kind of mystery that both resists and invites ex-
planation; in fact, as a mystery which is constantly being explained, but in ways
which we cannot quite accept as reliable. In Locus Solus (“solitary place”), for exam-
ple, we are introduced to the extraordinary garden of Martial Canterel. A group of
visitors is led by Canterel through a series of marvels which he has assembled (liter-
ally) using his incomparable powers of engineering and chemistry. These include a
series of vignettes, inside large glass-fronted refrigerators, in which cadavers that
have been temporarily re-animated using two substances invented by Canterel (“re-
surrectine” and “vitalium”) re-enact the most highly charged moments of their lives,
before collapsing again into a state of death. Before any explanation is given, the vis-
itors (and the reader) are taken from window to window to observe the curious ac-
tions of the inmates of each refrigerated cell. The scenes are described in meticulous,
but baffling detail; neither we nor the visitors to the garden have any idea of the sig-
nificance of the actions we are witnessing. After the eight scenes, Canterel explains
both his discovery of the chemical compounds “resurrectine” and “vitalium” and,
once again in great detail, describes the context of the moments that we had seen be-
ing recreated inside the refrigerated cells. This second description is, then, an expla-
nation of the original description, but it is one that is almost as mysterious and inex-
plicable as the first.
One way of understanding these narratives, which bring together extraordi-
nary machines with complicated plots, has been to see them as the product of a rich-
ly surreal imagination. Roussel was, in fact, a cause célèbre of the Surrealists who, for
example, came to some of his plays to noisily support them against the attacks of
bored and frustrated audiences. However, another approach would be to assume a
144
hidden meaning behind the inventions of plot and language, and to connect these
with the singularities of Roussel’s own life. According to this approach, Roussel’s
works would be seen as containing a hidden message that would be decipherable if
we could find its key. In a 1963 review of Foucault’s book, 7 the novelist Philippe Sol-
lers makes the point that whether or not this approach is legitimate, we should not
(and Foucault does not) therefore think of Roussel as an initiate of an occult lan-
guage to which we too would try to gain access. But this does not mean that we do
not still try to find a key to the works; or, to adopt a recurrent metaphor, that we do
not still try to find a thread that will lead us both into and out of the labyrinth that
Roussel constructs.
And in fact, Roussel himself gave us just such a key – the posthumous text in
which he explained how he had written certain of his books. For Foucault, this text
demonstrates the sense in which Roussel’s work should be read, not as a series of
flights of the imagination, but as an experiment that is carried out on language, in
order to expose both the labyrinth that it constructs for us and the abyss on which it
rests. In How I Wrote Certain of My Books, Roussel explains some of the basic tech-
niques upon which he built “certain” of his books (principally Locus Solus and Im-
pressions of Africa). The first technique consisted of choosing two almost identical
words – for example billard (billiard table) and pillard (plunderer). To these he would
add identical words capable of two meanings in order to produce two almost iden-
tical sentences with radically different meanings. Hence: “les lettres du blanc sur les
bandes du vieux billard” [the white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table];
and, “les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard” [the white man’s letters on the
hordes of the old plunderer]. His task was then to construct a narrative that would
begin with the first sentence and end with the second sentence. It was this story,
Roussel tells us, that was the basis for his novel Impressions of Africa. A second tech-
nique was to take two words, link them with the preposition à [to/with], and
attribute two meanings to each word, taking, for example, the word “palmier,” which
is both a kind of tree and a kind of pastry, we can get “palmier à restauration”, which
is both a restaurant serving pastries, and a tree that commemorates the restoration of
a dynasty. It was from this play of words that Roussel derived the palm tree in Im-
pressions of Africa that commemorates the restoration of the dynasty of Talou (the old
plunderer).
The third technique that Roussel unveils moves even more in the direction of
the use of found language. In this case, he would choose a random sentence from a
song or a poem and modify it in order to produce a series of images that then consti-
tute one part of a narrative. Hence, the line from the traditional song “Au clair de la
7 Philippe Sollers, “Choix Critique: Logicus Solus”, Tel quel, 1963, 14, 46-50. Repub-
lished (untranslated) in Michel Foucault: Critical Assessments 1: Situating Foucault: Archaeo-
logy, Genealogy and Politics, 3 volumes, edited by Barry Smart (London: Routledge, 1994),
349-354.
145
lune mon ami Pierrot” becomes “Eau glaire (cascade d’une couleur de glaire) de là
l’anémone à midi négro” [Glairy water (glairy-coloured waterfall) from whence the
anemone with noon Negro]. In another example, Roussel takes a product name from
an advertisement – “Phonotypia” – and produces “fausse note tibia” [false note tibia],
from which he invents a Breton character that plays a flute that has been made from
his own amputated tibia. 8
As we have seen, the point to be made about these inventions is that they are
not primarily the product of a rich, surreal imagination. Rather, they are the prod-
ucts of a process which extracts wonders (in a Jules Verne sense) from the limitless
fecundity of language itself: “the reader thinks he recognises the wayward wander-
ings of the imagination where in fact there is only random language, methodically
treated” (40). For Foucault, this is the key to the locked doors of Roussel’s work: not
so much the mechanics of the process itself, and certainly not the psychopathology
of the author, but the sense in which the equal poverty and richness of language are
capable of generating a world of crystal clarity and impossible mystery. However,
this is by no means a naïve celebration of literary language. For Foucault, what un-
derlies all of these experiments is an anxiety about words and their relation to
things. Roussel’s work both conveys and instills this anxiety, a “formless anxiety”
relating to “the stifling hollowness, the inexorable absence of being…[the] expanse
that Roussel’s narratives cross as if on a tightrope above the void” (13, 21).
For Foucault, the significance of this process is that it gives a mechanism for
spanning the gap between the everyday repetitions of language and the poetic anni-
hilation of those patterns. If, as Foucault suggests, poetic language exposes an emp-
tiness at the heart of the labyrinthine constructions of language, then Roussel’s work
is of interest for the way it allows us to see these two aspects at play. On the one
hand, the incredibly rich and detailed descriptions of worlds that seem to be so real;
on the other hand, the uncanny evocation of an emptiness that not only undercuts
the descriptions themselves, but also seems to reach out and undermine our expe-
rience of the undoubtedly real worlds in which we live. In Roussel, therefore, as in
the work of Robbe-Grillet, the effect of the incredibly precise descriptions of the
world of things is, paradoxically, to undermine our faith in a direct and faithful rela-
tion between words and things.
One of the central features of this relation is that there are, quite simply, few-
er words than things and that is why words take on meaning. If there were as many
words as things, language would be a useless mirror of the world. Jonathan Swift
has reduced to absurdity the dream of a language that would neatly and rigidly fit
over the world of things. In his travel to Laputa, Gulliver meets the members of an
academy who, instead of using words, carry around with them all the things to
which they wish to refer. The only problem is that the more things they wish to
speak about, the more things they must carry around, until finally they are weighed
8 Roussel, Impressions, 67-8.
146
down with heavy burdens that must be packed and unpacked for every conversa-
tion. 9 For us, however, the poverty of language is the source of its richness. Out of its
essential poverty springs the possibility for words to repeat in forms that appear to
be the same, but are actually different. Hence, the point for Roussel is not to say the
same things differently, but to say different things using the (almost) same words.
For Roussel, as for Foucault, therefore, the relation between words and things can
never be a straightforward one of reflection or adequate expression. The value of de-
scriptive language lies not in its fidelity to the object. Instead of following and trans-
lating perceptions, language opens up a path for our subsequent perceptions; it is
only then that “things begin to shimmer for themselves, forgetting that they had first
been ‘spoken’”. 10
Today, more than forty five years after its first publication, what does this
book mean for our understanding of Foucault? Projecting forward from 1963, we can
clearly see that Foucault is already immersed in the set of questions that animate Les
mots et les choses (1966). Foucault famously attributes the seed of that book to his
laughter at Borges’ account of the Chinese encyclopedia; that makes a nice story, but
we should also add that Foucault’s entire interest in modern literature (from Mal-
larmé to Robbe-Grillet, via Roussel) also turns around similar concerns. Projecting
backwards, we can say that Foucault’s earlier History of Madness was also written
within a constellation of influences in which Roussel shone. In the 1983 interview,
Foucault acknowledges that his intense reading of Roussel occurred while he was
writing the book on madness. Both provoked him to search for a way of understand-
ing the connections between language, madness, and history.
But how does this book fit into Foucault’s trajectory, as it unfolded in the
twenty years after its publication? In the 1983 interview, Foucault seems to be happy
that his “secret affair” with Roussel has not attracted much attention, and he even
goes so far as to say that the Roussel book “does not have a place in the sequence of
my books” (187). For a thinker who was constantly telling new narratives that would
make sense of the sequence of his books, this is a surprising assertion. Is Foucault
disowning the book? Is it something that he can no longer integrate into his sense of
his own intellectual project? One way to make sense of the claim would be to see it
in the light of Foucault’s undoubted turn away from literature by the end of the
1960s. While the early to mid-1960s had been a time of continuous engagement with
literature, by the time of his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1969 Fou-
cault had finally relegated literature to an area of marginal interest. And it is not just
the Roussel book that gets forgotten in this shift; for example, in the pseudonymous
entry he wrote on his own work for a dictionary of philosophy, he does not once
9 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Part III, chap. 5 (London: Penguin Books, 2003).
10 Michel Foucault, “Pourquoi réédite-t-on l’oeuvre de Raymond Roussel? Un
précurseur de notre littérature moderne”, in Dits et Écrits, vol. 1 (Paris: Galli-
mard, 1994), 422.
147
mention his work on literature. Instead, he characterises his work of the 1960s as in-
volving the study of those discourses about the human being that take the form of
scientific knowledge. 11
We could speculate that one of the reasons both for this turn and for the sub-
sequent tendency to forget what had gone before is the fact that Foucault’s overall
approach to literature at this time was based on a philosophy of language which he
was later to reject. In one of his Tel quel articles also from 1963, Foucault suggests the
possibility of outlining a “formal ontology of literature”.12 This ontology would be
based, primarily, on the observation that literary language involves a mirroring ref-
lection on death and a consequent construction of a virtual space in which language
repeats itself “to infinity”. 13 From Homer and Scheherazade, to Borges and Roussel
(although Roussel is not mentioned in this article), literature would then be a unique
practice of language in which we create for ourselves a world that in some way goes
beyond the world in which we live and will die. But for the Foucault of this era, this
fairly simple position is always expressed in an almost tortuous evocation of laby-
rinths, eternal mirroring, yawning voids, and transgressive repetitions. At the very
least, it is clear that the metaphysical, almost mystical, style of Foucault’s exploration
of language and literature at this time quickly gave way to the more sober, and polit-
ically grounded, analyses that followed in the 1970s. And that is not something we
should regret.
One of the important things about the Roussel book, however, is that it shows
that approach to literature in full flight. And reading it is a pleasure, but a pleasure
that is not unmixed with pain. Foucault’s own enjoyment, not only of the texts of
Roussel, but of the process of producing his analyses of those texts, is contagious.
And if that makes us go back and read some of Roussel’s work, then the book has
served an important function. But, on the other hand, if we read the book today,
having read so much of Foucault’s later work, we may find it frustratingly obscure
and unnecessarily convoluted. And that may be why Foucault was happy that it had
not received much attention. But given Foucault’s own fondness for subjugated
knowledges and forgotten histories, we would be well justified in uncovering this
secret love of an anguished and obsessive young philosopher.
Timothy O’Leary, University of Hong Kong
11 Michel Foucault, “Foucault”, in Essential Works, Volume 2, 460-61.

12 Michel Foucault, “Language to Infinity”, in Essential Works, Volume 2, 92-93.
13 Ibid., 90-91.
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Foucault and the Invisible Economy

ABSTRACT: This paper discusses the extent to which governmentality provides a

Key words: liberalism, governmentality, invisible hand, economy, Foucault.

rationalities of governing. In effect, Foucault has taken up two “cold monsters” at

II. Asymmetrical Views—Seeing like a State

8 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 283.

11 Foucault, Dits et Écrits II, 629.

18 Bruno Latour, "Postmodern? No, Simply Amodern! Steps Towards an Anthropology of

25 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 323f and 328.

important key for rendering this dispositif analytically intelligible. As a consequence,

III. Tropes of Invisibility—Seeing like a Market

Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

47 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 17.

55 Cit. Rothschild, 39; 23.

60 Wolin and Rothschild.

lishing unquestioned foundations of order. Hayek’s liberalism, harking back more to

reversal of the subject-positions of knowledge, which it effects. The general indict-

The foregoing discussion sought to engage the unfulfilled promise of governmental-

ABSTRACT: This article examines Michel Foucault’s critical investigation of neoli-

Keywords: Foucault, Neoliberalism, Governmentality, real subsumption, subjectivi-

Homo Economicus: The Subject of Neoliberalism

The nexus between the production of a particular conception of human nature, a

nomicus is fundamentally different subject, structured by different motivations and

11 Thomas Lemke, “Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique.” Rethinking Marxis, 14, 3

13 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 221.

a generalization of the idea of the “entrepreneur,” “investment” and “risk” beyond

Resisting the Present: Towards a Criticism of Neoliberalism

production altogether. 18 This underscores the difference between neoliberalism as a

liberalism can be countered. It is not enough to simply oppose neoliberalism as ide-

26 Maurizio Lazzarato, Les révolutions du capitalisme (Paris: Le Seuil, 2004), 19.

Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics

ABSTRACT: This paper illustrates the relevance of Foucault’s analysis of neoliberal

Key words: Foucault, neoliberalism, governmentality, biopolitics, homo economicus,

value for a critical understanding of contemporary forms of political governance in

I. Neoliberalism as Everyday Experience

governing functions from financially strapped municipalities including taxation, sa-

6 See Binkley, this volume.

II. Neoliberalism As Governmentality

In his 1978-79 course lectures, Foucault analyzed liberalism as a historical form of

III. Homo Economicus as Everyday Experience

Competition is extended to individuals themselves, through the individualiza-

Within the apparatus (dispositif) 11 of neoliberalism every individual is considered to

10 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Essence of Neoliberalism,” translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro, Le

Within this practically Hobbesian (anti-)social landscape the ”responsibility” of in-

IV. Foucault and Neoliberalism Today–Three Concerns

self-forming practices of subjectivation through processes of social subjectification.

V. A Brief Genealogy of Neo-Liberalism

Strictly speaking, Mill viewed efforts to analyze the development of character as

30 Joseph Persky, “The Ethology of Homo Economicus,” Journal of Economic Perspectives. 9, 2

ing in this article is Mill’s interest in a technology of subjectification. Specifically, he

Hence there is a new problem, the transition to a new form of rationality to

VI. Ethics and Critical Resistance

Whether neoliberalism will ultimately be viewed as having presented a radically

Foucault explicitly identified critique, not as a transcendental form of judgment that

IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 239.

What O’Leary rightly identifies here is Foucault’s interest in an aesthetics of exis-

neoliberal forms of governmentality continue to reinforce and expand Homo economi-

The Work of Neoliberal Governmentality:

ABSTRACT: This paper considers debates around the neoliberal governmentality,

Key words: neoliberalism, governmentality, temporality, the social, Foucault, Don-

My two dads had opposing attitudes in thought…

3 Michel Foucault, “Governmentality” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed.