Happy Friday all – what a long, tiring week! I don’t have the energy to do justice to the lecture by Judith Revel that kicked off the second evening of 34 Exercises of Freedom (September 15, 2016) and the topic of DEMOCRATIC TRANSITIONS… INTO NEOLIBERALISM. Revel, a French philosopher and expert on the thought of Michel Foucault, discusses (in French) a range of questions, such as what it means to be free when the market exceedingly places the demand on individuals to be free, creative, autonomous, and striving? Or: what is the difference between what Foucault, since the end of the 1970s, coined as “homo economicus” and the ensemble of practices of freedom upon which we can perhaps attempt to project something like an act of resistance? But I will leave it to you to follow the thread of her argument for yourselves. If you too cannot muster the energy to do so, here is a summary of another (the same?) talk she delivered at a conference on Foucault and Neoliberalism in March that same year at the American University of Paris made by Luca Provenzano (here is the link to his account of the whole conference). Either way, sit back, relax and join us in reveling in Revel’s Foucault.
- Judith Revel interrogates
- Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism
- in terms of the current refugee crisis in Europe
- asking whether the Foucauldian ‘toolbox’
- remains pertinent for accounting for the management of ‘migrants’ and ‘refugees.’
- Does the governmentality on display
- in the treatment of the refugee crisis
- represent another new form or stratum of governmentality
- or can it be interpreted within another Foucauldian paradigm?
- Reminding the audience
- that Foucault’s understanding of discontinuity
- requires attention to the contemporary emergence of new phenomena,
- Revel notes that the management of migrants today
- appears to have left behind the paradigm that Foucault identified
- in the analysis of human capital
- as well as the ‘make live and let die’ [faire vivre et laisser mourir]
- model of biopolitics from 1975-1976.
- She argues that the management of refugees
- demonstrates shifts in the temporality of governmental rationality:
- the instantiation of a double temporality
- structured by the concept of ‘crisis,’
- on the one hand,
- and that of the temporality of the electoral cycle,
- on the other.
- Current governmental policy
- is actually irrational
- within the paradigm
- of economic rationality.
- Meanwhile
- in a shift from conventional biopolitical rationality
- we have moved
- into a paradigm of
- ‘not making live
- and letting die’
- [ne pas faire vivre, et laisser mourir].
