Description:
Foucault's late work on biopolitics and governmentality has established him as the fundamental thinker of contemporary continental political thought and as a privileged source for our current understanding of neoliberalism and its technologies of power. In this volume, an international and interdisciplinary group of Foucault scholars examines his ideas of biopower and biopolitics and their relation to his project of a history of governmentality and to a theory of the subject found in his last courses at the College de France.
Many of the chapters engage critically with the Italian theoretical reception of Foucault. At the same time, the originality of this collection consists in the variety of perspectives and traditions of reception brought to bear upon the problematic connections between biopolitics and governmentality established by Foucault's last works.Brief description: Vanessa Lemm is Professor of Philosophy at the School of Humanities and Languages at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Nietzsche's Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics, and the Animality of the Human Being (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), Nietzsche y el pensamiento politico contemporáneo (Santiago: Fondo de cultura económica, 2013) and several articles on Nietz sche, biopolitics, and contemporary political theory. She has also edited volumes on Hegel and Foucault..
Review Quotes: The Government of Life reminds us of how prescient Foucault was. We have so few guides in our present age of unbridled neoliberalism and biopolitics; Foucault was one of the few who saw what was coming. The authors in this volume richly plumb Foucault's work in order to make sense of our predicament, to recuperate from the maw of biopolitics a more affirmative way of life. These authors speak to one another and to Foucault through a focus on common texts. In doing so they engage in critical questions about sovereignty, bodies and human life that make for essential reading for anyone interested in the underlying fabric of our time and our politics.-----James Martel, San Francisco State University