Foucault's Last Decade by Stuart Elden

Author:Stuart Elden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2016-04-27T04:00:00+00:00

The key to this, as with so much of his work, is to avoid thinking that concepts of our present can be used as analytical tools to make sense of previous eras. It is not simply that different times, and different geographies, operated with different understandings within existing concepts, but that they operated with entirely different concepts. This is why Foucault suggests that the relation and distinction between the state and civil society should not be seen as ‘an historical universal enabling us to examine every concrete system’. Rather, it is ‘a form of schematization peculiar to a particular technology of government’ (BB 325/319). Looking back on the course in June 1979, when he wrote its summary for the Annuaire de Collège de France, Foucault stressed that he had spent the entire course on what was originally intended only to be an introduction, and that the discussion of the political rationality of liberalism was to make sense of the emergence of biopolitics and regulation of population. Regulation, while a key topic in earlier work, is now the core concern of Foucault's interest in government. Ultimately, this is how the course does deliver at least something of the promise of its title. Population is the key object of the modes of government and the limitations of liberalism, and this is ‘the basis upon which something like biopolitics could be formed’ (BB 23–4/21).

The Birth of Biopolitics would remain Foucault's most contemporary course, and his last course to treat the modern era at all. He suggests the potential of continuing this analysis, especially in terms of the governmentality of the party in totalitarian states, in the following year's course (BB 197/191), though this was not fulfilled, as he turned back to Christian thought and practice. That and subsequent courses would, of course, make his analysis more explicitly linked back to the long-running project on sexuality, but even in this course there are important indications that the project remains a current focus. As he says in the second lecture:

studying the genealogy of the object ‘sexuality’ through a number of institutions meant trying to locate [repérer] in things like confessional practices, direction of conscience, the medical relationship, and so on, the moment when the exchange and cross-over took place between a jurisdiction of sexual relations, defining the permitted and the prohibited, and the veridiction of desire, in which the basic armature of the object ‘sexuality’ currently appears.

(BB 36/35)

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