From Biopolitics to Biopoetics and Back Again : On a Counterintuitive Continuity in Foucault’s Thought

Abstract

The chapter addresses the relation between Michel Foucault’s studies of biopolitics and his work on the ancient techniques of the self in the 1980s. It argues that Foucault’s distinction between biopoetics and biopolitics in his 1980–1 lectures serves as the articulation of these research projects into a meaningful whole. The argument proceeds in two steps. The chapter first reconstitutes Foucault’s analysis of the Stoic discourse on marriage in his Subjectivity and Truth lectures as a paradigm for the articulation of biopolitics and biopoetics that opens governmental rationalities to various forms of reception, readjustment, or resistance by the subject. It then proceeds to Foucault’s study of the Cynics in his lecture course The Courage of Truth, in which biopoetics is in turn submitted to a politicization that consists in the constitution of a form of life through the confrontation with the existing order. Finally, the conclusion addresses the implications of this reading for contemporary discussions of affirmative biopolitics.