Foucault, Sovereignty, and Governmentality in the Roman Republic

Foucault Studies, 2017

This introductory chapter situates the Classical within Foucault’s philosophical work and summarizes the complex reaction of Classical scholars to Foucault’s work. To do so, it considers the issue of freedom of the self in society as explored by Foucault. This issue is, we suggest, the axis around which the Classical works operate: we argue that Foucault’s Classical turn was an encounter with the problematics and possibilities of freedom for and in the self. The possibility of discovering in the antique (and especially the Roman) not just a philosophy of freedom but a praxis of freedom that might be reformulated within the modern gives political and philosophical importance to Foucault’s Rome. Consequently, and as a first step in assessing the viability of Foucault’s project, it becomes crucial to understand whether these ethical practices could provide a measure of freedom in Imperial Rome itself, and secondarily, whether those ethics are desirable modes for modern life.

Critical Horizons, 2021

The classical theory of sovereignty describes sovereignty as absolute and undivided yet no early modern state could claim such features. Historical record instead suggests that sovereignty was always divided and contested. In this article I argue that Foucault offers a competing account of sovereignty that underlines such features and is thus more historically apt. While commentators typically assume that Foucault's understanding of sovereignty is borrowed from the classical theory, I demonstrate instead that he offers a sui generis interpretation, which results from the application of his general strategic conception of power to sovereignty itself. In construing sovereignty through a "matrix" of civil war, Foucault thus deprives it of the absoluteness traditionally attributed to it. Instead he views sovereignty as constituted by conflictual and mobile power relations, a precarious political technology that deploys violence to restore its authority. I also motivate Foucault's contention that popular sovereignty remains fundamentally continuous with the absolutist sovereignty it succeeds, insofar as it masks and thereby perpetuates unequal power relations in conditions of social conflict. According to Foucault, sovereignty is not a fact of power but a contestory claim, a discourse whose mutability helps to explain its persistence today.

This book presents a novel conception of political freedom developed on the basis of the work of Foucault. Against the prevailing interpretations which disqualify a Foucauldian approach from the discourse of freedom, this study posits freedom as the primary axiological motif of Foucault's writing. Prozorov reconstructs an ontology of freedom in Foucault's textual corpus AND outlines the modalities of its practice in the contemporary terrain of global governance on the basis of a new interpretation of the relation of Foucault's approach to the problematic of sovereignty. Critically engaging with acclaimed post-Foucauldian theories of Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri, this book restores the controversial notion of the sovereign subject to the critical discourse on global politics. As a study in political thought, this book will be suitable for students and scholars interested in the problematic of political freedom, philosophy and global governmentality.

Foucault Studies

This essay argues that the engagement with Greece and Rome after The Will to Knowledge allowed Foucault to bring clarity to his conception of limited freedom in complex societies. The Classical fulfilled this function paradoxically by being jarringly different from and integral to the discourses of modern sexuality. Foucault’s engagement with the Classical in The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self continued his established method of uncovering the development of a discourse, or set of discourses, over time. He thereby demonstrated the historical specificity of understandings of sexuality and the self. It follows that if the ancient self was a historical construct, then the modern self must also be such. But Foucault’s Classical engagement leads him to an innovative position in which the disciplinary dynamics of ancient self-knowledge offer a practical philosophy. Foucault’s Greek philosophy could have effects through two related mechanisms: the care of the self through askesis...

Handbook of Governmentality

In this chapter, I retrace the emergence of the notion of governmentality in Michel Foucault’s work as both a way of prolonging his previous analyses of disciplinary and biopolitical power, and as a necessary condition for the development of his reflections on “ethics” and the techniques of the self. First, I show that the anatomo- and bio-political mechanisms of power that Foucault explores in the 1970s have a common goal: the government of human beings’ (everyday) life in its multiple, interconnected dimensions (Section 2). I then argue that Foucault elaborates the notion of governmentality as a response to the objection according to which his power/knowledge framework makes any attempt at resistance ultimately pointless. His genealogy of the government of human beings emphasizes that the point of articulation and clash between power and resistance is to be situated at the level of what he calls “subjectivity,” thus establishing a direct link between politics and ethics (Section 3). Indeed, defined as the contact point between coercion-technologies and self-technologies, subjectivity constitutes for Foucault both the main target of governmental mechanisms of power and the essential support for the enactment of counter-conducts and practices of freedom (Section 4). This, I argue, helps to explain the distinctively “anarchaeological” flair of Foucault’s lectures and writings post-1978: the study of governmentality goes hand in hand with the postulate of the non-necessity of all power, and hence with the ever-present possibility of critique and resistance. The political relevance of Foucault’s so-called “turn to ethics,” I claim, can only be understood in this light, since governmentality for him ultimately implies the relationship of self to self (Section 5).

In this paper I situate Foucault’s governmentality analytics between his first lecture course (On the Will to Know, 1970-71) and his first course after his two “governmentality” lectures (On the Government of the Living, 1979-80). The lectures are interconnected by a shared interpretation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex as well as by different but related obsessions with the production of truth: the earlier, with truth as fact; the latter, with truth as self-relation. The former analyses discourses of truth, law, inquiry and sovereignty in ancient Greece. The latter focuses on early Christian individual manifestations of truth (baptism, penance, and spiritual direction) forming a genealogy of confession and, Foucault suggests, of western subjectivity itself. This paper uses the analytical categories of governmentality, usually used to analyse regimes of government, to perform a comparative reading of the lecture courses, charting the continuities and ruptures in their various studies of episteme, techne, identities, ethos and problematisations. This suggests that the earlier lectures outline the birth of the sovereign-juridical compact that modern governmentalities would emerge through and against, while the later lectures use the term “governmentality” less, but enable the analysis of the conduct of conduct to progress to the ethical scale of self-formation.

Foucault Studies, 2010

With the translation of this 1983 lecture course, the first of two-parts, with the translation of a second, The Courage of Truth, expected in 2011, also devoted to the government of self and others, given in 1984, and concluded just before Foucault's death, we are now in a better position to grasp the significance of its author's ‚journey to Greece.‛ We do not read Foucault's focus on Greco-Roman antiquity after 1980 as a retreat from a concern with the problems of modernity. Indeed, it seems to us that Foucault's interpretation of ancient texts, Euripides's Ion, Thucydides's account of Pericles's call to arms against Sparta before the Athenian assembly, the figure of Socrates in Platonic dialogues such as the Apology, and the Gorgias, Plato's letters recounting his involvement in the politics of Syracuse, or the account of the Cynic Diogenes's dialogue with Alexander the Great, Foucault's focus on truth-telling or parresia in the ancient world, are all also directed to the issues confronting both political theory and philosophy in the modern world. Indeed, taking his point of departure in the lecture course from one facet of Kant's philosophy, not ‚the question of the conditions of possibility of true knowledge,‛ Kant's analytic of truth, his epistemology, but rather that other dimension of Kant's thinking, ‚what could be called an ontology of the present, of present reality, an ontology of modernity, an ontology of ourselves,‛ (20-21) Foucault explores the prospects of extricating ourselves from our ‚self-incurred‛ tutelage, our present mode of subjectivity through which we exist under the authority of others.

Sociological Problems (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences), Special Issue edited by Antoinette Koleva, Kolyo Koev, Michel Foucault: New Problematizations, 2016

Foucault’s lectures in 1976 open with the statement of an intellectual crisis. They proceed to a series of questions about the nature of power and the ways that he has conceived of it up to this point: what is power? How is it exercised? Is it ultimately a relation of force? Only some of these questions are answered in the course of these lectures. His answer to the conceptual questions about the nature of power and the appropriate means to analyze it is not forthcoming until after the discovery of ‘governmentality’ in 1978 and his lectures on liberal and neoliberal governmentality in 1979. This talk aims to retrace his answers to these questions in the light of the published lectures and to examine the consequences of these answers for his overall approach to the analysis power, and for his analysis of liberal and neoliberal governmental power.

International Conference | 6-8 March 2017 IFILNOVA - EPLab | FCSH - Philosophy Department