December 5, 2010
Most of the articles in Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy are not in English. In the latest issue---No 2 2010 there is an article in English by Jodi Dean entitled Drive as the Structure of Biopolitics that explores the relationship between biopolitics and sovereign power.
She says that the most significant work on the link between biopolitics and the relation between sovereign power and capitalist economics comes from Foucault’s 1978-1979 lectures published as The Birth of Biopolitics in which he argues that liberalism is a ‘form of critical reflection on governmental practice’. Dean says:
It is a reflection, Foucault points out, motivated by a suspicion: is government necessary at all? Do free people and free markets need supervision and regulation or are they better off when left to themselves? Over the course of the lectures, Foucault demonstrates how liberalism’s claims to laissez faire, to let the market be, incite a wide range of interventions throughout the newly emergent domain of civil society. Liberalism ends up doing the opposite of what it intends, in effect proving that its suspicions were justified all along: government does bring with it the risks of its own over-reaching.
Dean in this article develops a psychoanalytically attuned reading of Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics. The concept of drive can go some way toward clarifying how it is that biopolitics is a politics of reversal, repetition, and return wherein activity and passivity converge
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