Foucault Studies

INTERVIEW Governing Liberal Societies – the Foucault Effect in the English‐ speaking World1 Jacques Donzelot, University of Paris X‐Nanterre Colin Gordon, Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Trust JD: In the two volumes of his lectures of 1978 and 1979, we see Michel Foucault making a major intellectual change of direction, moving away from an analysis of power as the formation and production of individuals towards an analysis of governmentality, a concept invented to denote the ‘conduct of conducts’ of men and women, working through their autonomy rather than through coercion even of a subtle kind. Out of this concept and the extended analysis of political economy which provides the material for its elaboration, Foucault never produced a published work. He broke off this series of investigations to occupy himself up to his death in 1984 with the writing of two books, which were evidently closer to his heart, of a history of the subject passing by way of the Care of the self and the Use of Pleasure (Foucault 1989a 1989b). This however did not prevent this concept of governmentality from meeting with great success in the English‐speaking world, in many ways stimulating there an intellectual dynamic more intense than in the case of his published works, which rapidly became classics and were treated as such and with the deference that status entailed, but not with the excitement which met the lectures on governmentality. In 1991, your volume The Foucault Effect (Burchell, Gordon, Miller 1991) set off this dynamic by centring the “effect” in question precisely on this notion of governmentality. But in France Foucault’s lectures on the subject were not published until 2004 and without at first arousing great interest. So what accounts for this singular success of Foucault’s reflection on governmentality in the Anglo‐Saxon world? CG: We had a few advantages in Britain. In the first place, Foucault in his lifetime was more easygoing about foreign translations of his interviews and lectures than he was about their publication or reprinting in France. There may also have been more