In this essay I discuss what I call the four ages of security. My reconstruction of the four great ages of security owes much to the work of Foucault, and I will address the idea of biopolitics through the lens of the fourth age of security. The four ages of security refer neither to social or political practices, nor to representations or mentalities. They stand for four great historical problematizations of security that Foucault marked out, but did not fully develop. For that matter, the concepts of “security” and “biopolitics” were never objects of any sustained conceptual elaboration on Foucault’s...

The year 1979 precipitated an extraordinary set of events in world politics, the effects of which are still alive today. In early 1979, a tenuous coalition of Iranian Marxists, leftists, and Shi’ite clerics brought down the secular oligarchy of the American-backed Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, instituting in its place the equally authoritarian and theocratic rule of Khomeini. In this, the first modern revolution to install an Islamic state, many detected the birth of a uniquely contemporary form of anti-imperialism, one that looked for inspiration in religious law and divine violence rather than the Marxist repertoire of class struggle or liberal...

In an interview published in 1983, Foucault presents his ideas about the problems and perspectives of the social security system. This text, which became known to an English-speaking audience under the title “The Risks of Security,” is characterized by a certain ambivalence. At first sight, Foucault seems to subscribe to the neoliberal critique of the welfare state by identifying some “perverse effects” of the social security system, namely, the “growing rigidity of certain mechanisms and the creation of situations of dependency” (RS, 366). At the same time, he takes a critical stance towards the liberal opposition of state and civil...

In 1976, in the first volume ofThe History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault introduces what would become a polemical concept in his work as well as for his interpreters: the “bio-politics of the population” (with a hyphen which is dropped in the following years). This notion has since polarized the readings of Foucault’s theory of power and maybe has played a much more important role then he ever intended. The most prominent and popular reading of biopolitics nowadays may very well be its “ethical” interpretation in terms of bio-ethics. Biopolitics would thus be the “political” administration of the changes and...

As Foucault was working on his analysis of the transformation of power from the Renaissance to the contemporary world, he wrote a number of essays, for the most part in the form of conferences, on the relationship between economics, medicine, and biology.¹ In these texts, Foucault describes various changes pertaining to the role of medicine. At the turn of the eighteenth century under the pressures of a significant modification in Europe’s economic geography, the health and physical well-being of the population became targets for political power. From this moment on, power will be concerned with the population understood as a...

In these past few years, the term “biopolitics” has enjoyed great success: in philosophy as well as in history, and more generally in the social and human sciences, a great number of scholars have helped themselves to the Foucaultian tool kit and used the term as an integral part of their analyses. In this essay I attempt to “deconstruct” three discursive employments of “biopolitics.” Giorgio Agamben maintains that deconstruction represents a thwarted form of messianism. If one were to reverse this formula so as to understand messianism as an incomplete form of deconstruction, then the deconstruction that I would like...

A few years ago Foucault’s readers had still to grope in the dark to reconstruct the theoretical itinerary of his last production. In fact, after the publication of the first volume ofThe History of Sexualityin 1976, for eight long years Foucault did not add any further volume to the series he announced withThe Will to Knowledge. WhenThe Use of PleasureandThe Care of the Self, respectively the second and third volumes of the series, appeared in 1984, only a few weeks before his death, it became evident that the initial project had undergone such important...

Foucault and Rawls represent very different approaches to political philosophy. Whereas the former pursues a resolutely descriptive approach to the techniques, strategies, and forms of rationality of power, the latter is explicitly normative in setting out and arguing for principles of justice that should inform the government of society conceived as a fair system of cooperation. I propose to show that the distance between them is less extreme than might be supposed and that differences between them are instructive. They converge on the analysis of particular conceptions of the proper business of government and the institutions and policies it should...

InThe Birth of BiopoliticsFoucault refers to Hayek’s thought as the clearest illustration of what he calls the “neoliberal project: to introduce the principles of rule of law into the economic order” (BB,159). As Foucault argues, in the Hayekian and German Ordoliberal versions of neoliberalism, what makes possible the coordination of expectations and valuations achieved by the free market is the fact that the “natural order” of the market has become radically impregnated and molded by a “certain legal order” whereby it is impossible to separate abstractly the economic from the legal dimensions of the relations of production. Foucault...

In the lecture dedicated to the Socratic concept ofparrhesia, given on February 22, 1984, in the Course titledThe Courage of Truth, Michel Foucault warmly recommended Jan Patočka’s bookPlato and Europe: “Of all modern books on the history of philosophy—he states—this is the only one that confers a crucial role toepimeleia heauton” (CT, 127). In fact, Patočka discerned in the idea of “care of the self” as “care of the soul,” the root of European rationalism. Of course, Foucault states, Patočka’s book was fundamental, but it nevertheless adhered to a notion of the soul still...

This chapter investigates Foucault’s analysis of the philosophical life of the Cynics inThe Courage of Truthfrom the perspective of the Nietzschean question: how can truth be incorporated or embodied (einverleibt)? In order to consider philosophy as a form of life (bios theoretikos) and not merely as a doctrine or a science, the question of how truth can be lived or materialized in the physical body is obviously crucial. As a form of the true life (la vraie vie), philosophy competes with political life (bios politikos), which is based on opinion. The competition oragonbetween the philosophical life...