ABSTRACT: This article discusses the current legacy of Michel Foucault in relation to the current political situation. It is articulated in three parts. The first insists on the fact that Michel Foucault has been and still is significant for discussions concerning political sciences and international relations by the way he has discussed them and by his own academic politics. The second part highlights the key role of his attempt to define a dispositif of security in the 1977–78 lecture course ‘Security, Territory, Population’ and the various interpretations given after his death. The third part introduces my own research on the subject and its development. Twenty years ago, I called this dispositif of security surveillance a ban-opticon dispositif. This is only partly relevant since the violence of the effects on individuals has been intensified by a multifocal construction of “suspects” by various transnational guilds of security professionals who systematise profiling and weak correlations as an alternative method of seeking the truth about causalities and facts attributed to an individual. Because of this systematicity of “suspicion first”, which jeopardises the principle of innocence, I call this dispositif of security a transnational dispositif of suspicion-prediction, which is organised both as a rearticulation of the modern episteme with suspicion back at its core and as a “legitimate” one, thus allowing a “preventive” violence to be re-enacted in the name of scientific predictions of a future so deadly that it is necessary to act violently now in order to prevent even more violence. This question of inverted temporality, in which the imagined future dominates the present, leads to the belief that the future can already be known under a grammar of the future perfect. Combined with the strategic orientation of right-wing parties to abandon the celebration of the past in order to mobilise the fear of apocalyptic futures, this characteristic of the ‘future-perfect’ explains a series of contemporary developments in security and surveillance, re-framing the attachment of the population to a new form of conservatism that captures the imagination of the future, including some contemporary discourses of war. Resisting this attraction to the future-perfect is possible by reinventing hope.

ABSTRACT: In this article, I make the case that the reception of Foucault’s politicpal thought by different authors linked to the Frankfurt School tradition (J. Habermas, N. Fraser, A. Honneth, A. Allen and M. Saar) allows us to discern a series of transformations within the tradition itself. In general terms, it is argued that the fundamental change concerns the gradual abandonment of the problem of social rationalization in favor of a perspective focused on the question of processes of subjectivation, a change that calls into question the very meaning of the tradition.

ABSTRACT: Michel Foucault’s essay ‘The Subject and Power’ has seen four decades. It is the most quoted of Foucault’s shorter texts and exerts a persistent influence across the social sciences and humanities. The essay merges two main trajectories of Foucault’s research in the 1970s: his genealogies of legal-disciplinary power and his studies of pastoral power and governance. This article connects these two trajectories to Althusser’s thesis on the ideological state apparatuses, demonstrating affinities between Althusser’s thesis and Foucault’s diagnosis of the welfare state as a ‘matrix’ of individualising and totalising power. The article suggests that Foucault’s essay straddles between two different concepts of subjectivation. First, one encounters the citizen ‘internally subjugated’ by disciplinary and pastoral power, whereas, at the end, we find a ‘flat’ subject of governance; a form of power which intervenes only in the environment in which individuals make their rational, self-fashioning choices. The implication of Foucault’s newfound concept of governance is a weakening of the link between subjectivation and the formation of the state, which also meant that the state’s role in reproducing capitalism receded into the background of Foucauldian scholarship. Finally, the article suggests extending Foucault’s analytical ‘matrix’ to current techniques of subjectivation associated with the advent of big data and artificial intelligence, which buttress the expansive technique of predictive profiling.

This essay situates Foucault`s ideas of ‘biopower’ and ‘governmentality’ within the Indian context of the Covid emergency, analysing how the excesses of ‘biopolitical’ and the authoritarian forms of ‘governmentality’ evoke a radical re-reading of Foucault within Covid-infested India. We argue how pre-existing ‘discursive’ conditions of biomedical, digital, and neoliberal India facilitated more majoritarian and undemocratic forms of (bio)politics during the Indian experience of the pandemic, exposing the migrant workers in particular to tremendous ‘precarity’ and turning them into pandemicariat. To meet our theoretical ends, we investigate through forging links between Foucauldian theory – consisting of a set of concepts like biopolitics, anatomo-politics, governmentality etc— and ideas like transmuted biosociality, truncated sociality, will to live, pandemicariat etc. Current conditions of truncated sociality render human bodies more ‘discursively’ available for ‘biomedical’ and ‘biopolitical’ interventions, disempowering people’s capacity to sustain the more synthetic biosocial substances of conviviality. However, following Agamben’s early controversial stance for braving the virus, we would like to envisage “life” to be more than “survival” alone. We would also argue that the hard times of the pandemic invoke a new grammar of the “will to live” that was practised by the pandemicariat against heavy odds.

Book review of: Jussi Backman and Antonio Cimino (ed.), Biopolitics and Ancient Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 240. ISBN:9780192847102)

This article examines the legitimization process of the public health preventive measures implemented in many Western countries following the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak. Through concepts such as governmentality, disciplinarization and security mechanisms proposed by Foucault, we trace some of the basic principles and implications of the relationship between biopower and medicine, as well as the media dissemination of an official narrative on scientific truth. These reflections are complemented by the contributions of Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard. Lyotard reflects on the relationship between science and a “performative game”, whose own staging is the core of its criteria of truth. Baudrillard shows the relevance of a “hyperreality” in which the signs presented by the media take precedence over the experience of the subjects. We argue that a mediatized version of science, defined through a strong disciplinarization of knowledge and the censorship of dissident voices, played a key role in the establishment of consensus and the legitimization of policies that granted extraordinary power to governments and transnational elites. Although the work of Foucault in this demonstration is essential, the contributions of Lyotard and Baudrillard provide additional elements to understand a fundamental problem: the public acceptance of “truth” as an instrument of governmentality on a global scale.

Abstract: In a 1978 lecture in Tokyo, Foucault drew a comparison between his own philosophical methodology and that of ‘Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy’, claiming the label ‘analytic philosophy of politics’ for his own approach. This may seem like a somewhat surprising comparison given the gulf between contemporary analytic and continental philosophy, but I argue that it is a very productive one which indeed might help us reconsider this gulf. I proceed through a comparison between Foucault and the speech act theory of J. L. Austin, one of the analytic philosophers Foucault had in mind in his Tokyo lecture. By focusing on the methodological commonalities between Foucault and Austin, this article identifies the core of a philosophical methodology that cuts across the analytic/continental divide in philosophy in general while constituting a powerful alternative to the methods applied by analytic political philosophers specifically. This approach, which I term ‘analytic critique’, is one that starts from a critical analysis of what happens in ordinary lived experience and theorises ‘bottom-up’ in an avowedly politically engaged way – thereby challenging the conceptual and political aloofness of contemporary political philosophy in the liberal-Rawlsian tradition. Foucault’s appropriation of the label ‘analytic philosophy’, it is argued, ought to function as a call to more imaginative methodological-theoretical engagement across the traditional division between continental and analytic approaches.

Abstract: Although Foucault presented History of Sexuality Vol. 4: Confessions of the Flesh as a crucial part in the study of the genealogy of the subject of desire, Foucault’s analyses of early Christian doctrine and pastoral technologies do not support the claim that an analytic of the subject of desire was established in early Christianity. This can be shown through a reconstruction of his readings of Augustine and Cassian. Augustine’s doctrinal views of the human condition and the association of libido and disobedience to law are not accompanied by the production of technologies for the hermeneutics of desire. Cassian’s pastoral technologies of obedience and subjection to the will of the spiritual director are organized around the hermeneutics of thoughts, and they aim at establishing an inner detachment from misleading thoughts through examination of conscience. This reconstruction opens new trajectories for a genealogy of the subject of desire and for a genealogy of pastoral power and governmentality.