Foucault’s Hypothesis

Abstract

"“Forget Foucault!“—this was the provocative title of a book by Jean Baudrillard published in 1977.1 The famous French sociologist claimed that Foucault’s work and especially his analytics of power was obsolete, unable to account for power relations in contemporary societies. Baudrillard could hardly imagine that 30 years later the reception and appraisal of Foucault’s work would be even more intense than during his lifetime. Today, it is quite impossible to give an exhaustive overview of the monographs, edited books, articles and PhD theses that have used Foucault and his famous “tool kit”. The impact of his work has not been limited to philosophy and history. Foucault has inspired a variety of disciplines and fields of knowledge ranging from political science, sociology, media studies, gender studies, and criminology to postcolonial studies.2 One concept that has attracted an enormous amount of interest since Foucault’s death in 1984 is the notion of governmentality. The word is a neologism derived from the French word gouvernemental, meaning “concerning government”.3 This paper will focus on the role and dimensions of the notion in Foucault’s work. I will argue that Foucault corrected and elaborated his “analytics“ or “genealogy“ of power in the second half of the 1970s. At the centre of this theoretical reorientation was the notion of government that became a “guideline”4 for his research in the following years. It played a decisive role in his analytics of power, since it situated the question of power in a broader context. First, governmentality mediates between power and subjectivity and makes it possible to investigate how processes of domination are linked to “technologies of the self ”,5 how forms of political government are articulated with practices of self-government. Secondly, the problematic of government accounts for the close relations between power and knowledge and helps to elucidate what Foucault in his earlier work called the “nexus of power-knowledge”."(