Daria Farafonova. “Gouvernementalité”, the mystery of government: from the analysis of the forms of rationality by Foucault to the theological genealogy of Agamben. Vol. 5. No. 1-2. 2020

Publication Details

“Gouvernementalité”, the mystery of government: from the analysis of the forms of rationality by Foucault to the theological genealogy of Agamben
Title in the language of publication: «Gouvernementalité», тайна управления: от анализа форм рациональности Фуко к теологической генеалогии Агамбена
Author:
Daria Farafonova
PhD in Philology, PhD in Italian Language, Literature and Culture, Lecturer.
University of Urbino “Carlo Bo”.
Address: via Aurelio Saffi 2, 61029 Urbino PU, Italia.
Issue:
P. 5–29.
Language: Russian
Document type: Research Article
DOI https://doi.org/10.31119/essephts.2020.5.1-2.1
 

Abstract

This article explores the origins and the semantic transformation of the concept of governmentality, the central notion of the genealogy of power which Michel Foucault elaborates in his three lecture courses held in Collège de France in 1978–1980 (“Security, Territory, Population”, “The Birth of Biopolitics”, “On the Government of the Living”), and also examines the way this form of power evolves in Giorgio Agamben’s studies.

Initially defined as a complex of practices which founds a particular regime of power, the concept of gouvernementalité moves towards a more abstract meaning in the dynamics of Foucault’s thought, so that in the end its content nearly coincides with the semantic field of «government», and it starts to appear as a «grill of analysis of the relations of power» in principle. Foucault placed the birth of this specific form of power in the Classical age; but later he comes up to a more general definition of the governmentality as a complex of techniques and procedures, dispositifs, meant to manage people’s behavior, indicating its archetypical model in the institute of the Christian pastorate.

It is exactly this extensive meaning of the term that becomes decisive for Agamben’s research, which he himself characterizes as a theological genealogy of economy, recognizing in theology “a great laboratory of the political thought in the West” (B. Karsenti). Agamben traces back the origins of “economization” of the human being, minutely described by Hannah Arendt, to the first centuries of Christianity, when in the course of elaboration of the trinitary theology the Christological conception of oikonomia was formed, meaning the divine government of the celestial “house” and of the world. It is exactly this event, as he points, that determined the affirmation of the primacy of “economy” in the comprehension of the divine being and praxis. Agamben shows that, when put together with the idea of providence, this theological-economic paradigm unexpectedly reveals itself at the origin of the fundamental categories of modern politics — from the theory of division of powers to the strategic doctrine of collateral effects, from the invisible hand of Smith’s liberalism to the triumph of ideas of order and security. Economy and government, thus, reveal their structural co-belonging underlying the specific form of power, which determined the keynote in the development of Western culture and history.

Keywords

Economy, power, forms of rationality, theology, governmentality, dispositive, genealogy, liberalism, management.

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© Daria Farafonova, 2020

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