Le moment du vivant (dir. Arnaud François, Frédéric Worms), Presses Universitaires de France, 2016
In this essay, we first consider Foucault’s biopolitics a hypothesis rather than a theory, meanin... more In this essay, we first consider Foucault’s biopolitics a hypothesis rather than a theory, meaning it is in the first place a heuristic tool, inviting us to inquire into historical changes and into today’s features of governmentality as well as of biomedicine or other techno-scientific apparatuses involving life in a way or another, whether human or not. But we believe its relevance goes far beyond a demand for empirically grounded descriptions: it is intrinsically an act of politicisation within the biopowers, and an act of theoretical re-problematisation of politics as well, that both need an ethnographic approach attuned to the actual forms taken by power relationships. Taking Latour’s and Foucault’s respective approaches and shifting from the power-knowledge apparatuses theory (The Will to Know) to a new theory of action and of discourse (Politics of nature, Reassembling the social), we sketch the outlines of what politics can mean at the time when government is not only exerted...
Le moment du vivant (dir. Arnaud François, Frédéric Worms), Presses Universitaires de France, 2016
In this essay, we first consider Foucault’s biopolitics a hypothesis rather than a theory, meanin... more In this essay, we first consider Foucault’s biopolitics a hypothesis rather than a theory, meaning it is in the first place a heuristic tool, inviting us to inquire into historical changes and into today’s features of governmentality as well as of biomedicine or other techno-scientific apparatuses involving life in a way or another, whether human or not. But we believe its relevance goes far beyond a demand for empirically grounded descriptions: it is intrinsically an act of politicisation within the biopowers, and an act of theoretical re-problematisation of politics as well, that both need an ethnographic approach attuned to the actual forms taken by power relationships. Taking Latour’s and Foucault’s respective approaches and shifting from the power-knowledge apparatuses theory (The Will to Know) to a new theory of action and of discourse (Politics of nature, Reassembling the social), we sketch the outlines of what politics can mean at the time when government is not only exerted...
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