Governmentality and the genealogy of politicsI

The article offers a series of reflections on the presentation of a phase of work by Michel Foucault and some of his co-researchers in the volume The Foucault Effect: studies in governmentality (1991), co-edited by the author. These reflections fall into three parts. First, there is a review of some important aspects of Foucault’s ‘governmentality’ lectures that, due to different reasons, were left aside when the book was published. Second, there is the account of important themes that, although presented in the book, have not received so much consideration from the readers. And last, in the axis that occupies the greater part of the article, the author examines Foucault’s later discussions of what Gordon calls “the multiple births of politics”, in order to show the continuing pertinence of Michel Foucault’s enterprise during the 1970s, made possible by this notion of governmentality, at once so strange and so operative. That this is an enterprise of continuing contemporary relevance is indicated not only by the spread of governmentality studies since the appearance of Michel Foucault’s lectures at Collège de France, but specially by the dilemmas and “dead-ends” that our political culture has brought us to. In this sense, the article concludes with a sort of research agenda for continuing Foucault’s unfinished investigation, one that invites us to deepen our understanding of the relationships between philosophical critique, governmental rationality and political culture, understood as a set of forms of conduct and sociability, modes of life, and styles of subject-formation and truth-telling.