The Government of Life: Foucault, Biopolitics, and Neoliberalism

Foucault's late work on biopolitics and governmentality has established him as the fundamental thinker of contemporary continental political thought and as a privileged source for our current understanding of neoliberalism and its technologies of power. In this volume, an international and interdisciplinary group of Foucault scholars examines his ideas of biopower and biopolitics and their relation to his project of a history of governmentality and to a theory of the subject found in his last Courses at the College de France. The essays in this volume explain and expand on Foucault's analysis of biopolitics in order to understand why liberal and neoliberal regimes are forms of "government of life". Recent Italian theory, from Negri and Agamben to Esposito, has made biopolitics into the core issue of neoliberal governmentality. Many of the chapters in this volume engage critically this Italian reception of Foucault. At the same time, the originality of this collection consists in the variety of perspectives and traditions of reception brought to bear upon the problematic connections between biopolitics and governmentality established by Foucault's last works, showing these connections to be anything but obvious, both with regard to their textual basis as well as in their philosophical and political projections.