On governmentality

Thomas Lemke published a paper on the journal PARRHESIA on the genesis and implications of Foucault’s notion of ‘governmentality’.

From the introduction:

One concept that has attracted an enormous amount of interest since Foucault’s death in 1984 is the notion of governmentality. The word is a neologism derived from the French word gouvernemental, meaning concerning government”.3 This paper will focus on the role and dimensions of the notion in Foucault’s work. I will argue that Foucault corrected and elaborated his “analytics“ or “genealogy“ of power in he second half of the 1970s. At the centre of this theoretical reorientation was the notion of government that became a “guideline” for his research in the following years. It played a decisive role in his analytics of power, since it situated the question of power in a broader context. First, governmentality mediates between power and subjectivity and makes it possible to investigate how processes of domination are linked to “technologies of the self ”, how forms of political government are articulated with practices of self-government. Secondly, the problematic of government accounts for the close relations between power and knowledge and helps to elucidate what Foucault in his earlier work called the “nexus of power-knowledge”.
Foucault introduced the notion of government as a “necessary critique of the common conceptions of ‘power’”.6 Its theoretical contours will become clearer when we compare it to the concept of power it tries to
escape and overcome: the “’juridico-discursive’” representation of power.

Thomas Lemke, Foucault’s Hypothesis: From the critique of the juridico-discursive concept of power to an analytics of government,

PARRHESIA, NUMBER 9 • 2010 • 31-43

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