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Another Politics of Life is Possible

Institute for Advanced Study of Princeton and Director of Study at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, didier.fassin{at}ehess.fr

Although it is usually assumed that in Michel Foucault’s work biopolitics is a politics which has life for its object, a closer analysis of the courses he gave at the Collège de France on this topic, as well as of the other seminars and papers of this period, shows that he took a quite different direction, restricting it to the regulation of population. The aim of this article is to return to the origins of the concept and to confront the issue of life as such. This implies four shifts with respect to Foucault’s theory: (1) Politics is not only about the rules of the game of governing, but also about its stakes. (2) More than the power over life, contemporary societies are characterized by the legitimacy they attach to life. (3) Rather than a normalizing process, the intervention in lives is a production of inequalities. (4) The politics of life, then, is not only a question of governmentality and technologies, but also of meaning and values. The discussion is grounded on a series of empirical investigations conducted in France and South Africa on how life and lives are treated in our world.

Key Words: biopower • death • Foucault • governmentality • life

Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 26, No. 5, 44-60 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0263276409106349


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