Michel Foucault: The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979 (2008–) [EN, PT, CZ]

Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France in 1979, The Birth of Biopolitics, pursue and develop further the themes of his lectures from the previous year, Security, Territory, Population. Having shown how Eighteenth century political economy marks the birth of a new governmental rationality – seeking maximum effectiveness by governing less and in accordance with the naturalness of the phenomena to be governed – Michel Foucault undertakes the detailed analysis of the forms of this liberal governmentality. This involves describing the political rationality within which the specific problems of life and population were posed: “Studying liberalism as the general framework of biopolitics”.

What are the specific features of the liberal art of government as they were outlined in the Eighteenth century? What crisis of governmentality characterises the present world and what revisions of liberal government has it given rise to? This is the diagnostic task addressed by Foucault’s study of the two major twentieth century schools of neo-liberalism: German ordo-liberalism and the neo-liberalism of the Chicago School. In the years he taught at the Collège de France, this was Michel Foucault’s sole foray into the field of contemporary history. This course thus raises questions of political philosophy and social policy that are at the heart of current debates about the role and status of neo-liberalism in twentieth century politics. A remarkable feature of these lectures is their discussion of contemporary economic theory and practice, culminating in an analysis of the model of homo oeconomicus.

Foucault’s analysis also highlights the paradoxical role played by “society” in relation to government. “Society” is both that in the name of which government strives to limit itself, but it is also the target for permanent governmental intervention to produce, multiply, and guarantee the freedoms required by economic liberalism. Far from being opposed to the State, civil society is thus shown to be the correlate of a liberal technology of government.

Edited by Michel Senellart
General Editors: François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana
Translated by Graham Burchell
Publisher Palgrave Macmillan, 2008
ISBN 140398655X, 9781403986559
346 pages

publisher (EN)
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The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979 (English, trans. Graham Burchell, 2008, updated on 2013-9-26)
Nascimento da Biopolítica: Curso dado no Collège de France (1978-1979) (Portuguese, trans. Eduardo Brandão and Claudia Berliner, 2008, added on 2013-9-26)
Zrození biopolitiky: Kurz na Collège de France (1978-1979) (Czech, trans. Petr Horák, 2009, no OCR, added on 2013-9-26)

Volume 16: Engineering Society & Volume 17: Content Management (2008)

Volume 16: Engineering Society (2008, 2)

Just as there was a time before the book, there will also be a time after it. In this issue ‘The Last Book’ project is taken up, but as to the consequences of publishing exclusively online – the loss of filters such as the publisher, editor and publication costs – we can only guess. Yet it is clear that our centuries old house of knowledge is undergoing a fundamental renovation, beginning with the solid base of the library.

Volume 17: Content Management (2008, 3)

At the close of this era of expansion and surplus Volume speculates on one of the period’s emblematic inventions: Content Management, or the collecting, organizing and sharing of digital information. Our retrospective appraisal of recent developments in the managing of information offers inside into the ability of Content Management to serve the current realities of digital abundance and material shortage, and to protect both vast and extremely limited quantities.

Publisher Archis Publishers, Amsterdam

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PDF (Vol. 16, added on 2013-7-28)
PDF (Vol. 17, added on 2013-7-28)

Nicole Shukin: Animal Capital. Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times (2009)

Illuminates the profound contingency of market life on animal figures and flesh

The juxtaposition of biopolitical critique and animal studies—two subjects seldom theorized together—signals the double-edged intervention of Animal Capital. Nicole Shukin pursues a resolutely materialist engagement with the “question of the animal,” challenging the philosophical idealism that has dogged the question by tracing how the politics of capital and of animal life impinge on one another in market cultures of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Shukin argues that an analysis of capital’s incarnations in animal figures and flesh is pivotal to extending the examination of biopower beyond its effects on humans. “Rendering” refers simultaneously to cultural technologies and economies of mimesis and to the carnal business of boiling down and recycling animal remains. Rendering’s accommodation of these discrepant logics, she contends, suggests a rubric for the critical task of tracking the biopolitical conditions and contradictions of animal capital across the spaces of culture and economy.

From the animal capital of abattoirs and automobiles, films and mobile phones, to pandemic fear of species-leaping diseases such as avian influenza and mad cow, Shukin makes startling linkages between visceral and virtual currencies in animal life, illuminating entanglements of species, race, and labor in the conditions of capitalism. In reckoning with the violent histories and intensifying contradictions of animal rendering, Animal Capital raises provocative and pressing questions about the cultural politics of nature.

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2009
ISBN 0816653429, 9780816653423
288 pages

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PDF (updated on 2012-8-1)