PERCHE' IL GOVERNO. IL LABORATORIO ETICO-POLITICO DI FOUCAULT

In this book the author analyzes the philosophical work of Michel Foucault considering, primarily, those courses and texts – long unpublished or not very well-known – which provide evidence of the extensive research he carried out after publishing Surveiller et punir (1975). Overcoming the common notion that in this period Foucault moved “from politics to ethics”, the book shows how much importance he gave, in this period, to his intense study of “politics as war continued by other means” and, above all, to the genealogy of various forms of the “government of men”. In particular, the courses held by Foucault at Collège de France starting in 1976 make it possible to focus very precisely on the theme of biopolitics which, instead, has often been interpreted in ways that were too freeform and variable. Additionally, in these courses it is possible to find a very sharp and surprising historical reconstruction of liberal and neoliberal “governmentality,” a reconstruction which especially today seems to be very useful. Finally, these courses make it possible to contextualize appropriately the Foucaultian research on the ethics of “the care of the self,” explaining the extreme importance this theme has in the definition of the relationship between the “government of self” and the “government of others”, i.e. between ethics and politics