The Government of Life: Foucault, Biopolitics, and Neoliberalism
ISBN: 9780823261284
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Fordham University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Social and Political Philosophy; Bioethics and Medical Ethics;

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.


Vanessa Lemm is Professor in Philosophy at the School of Humanities and Languages of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Nietzsche's Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics and the Animality of the Human Being (Fordham).

Miguel Vatter is Professor of Politics at the University of New South Wales. He is the author of Between Form and Event: Machiavelli's Theory of Political Freedom (Kluwer) with a paperback edition forthcoming with Fordham 2014.

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