“If “freedom” can be said to exist in Foucault, it is tied to his conception of life as alterity and biopolitics as inseparable from the productive, “natural” dimension of human existence as the element in which power has to function. So famously, he said power becomes the “power to make live and let die,” but there is a limit here. There is something radically other about life that exceeds the grasp of power. This is because technologies of government/security control the milieu of a population but are unable to completely penetrate its biological processes. Therefore these technologies only function in a regulatory way. The political tendency towards systemization (i.e., “resistance”) is based on the presupposition of the impotence of power. The residual power of life is disclosed not as merely power over life but as power of life. There is an Inherent unpredictability here that serves as the limit that governmental power cannot overcome, but it is also, ironically, the source for power (basically the idea of exponential increase). Life remains resistance to biopolitical calculations then, but it is not because of a willing agent-subject. It is tied rather, to life as force of chance and to the capability for error. Foucault’s challenge to biopolitics was to conceived of a politics of disorganization that affirms life without finality, ends, or goals. Here’s where Deleuze’s conception of life as “ontology of force” becomes a helpful corollary. Anyway, you can see the radically different conception of life/the subject/politics here that only a very deliberate misreading could mistake for “liberalism” or “anarchy.”
—

Rhizombie on Bio Fooko 

To be fair, communities of thinkers create journals and they have to fill the pages of these journals with something. I guess.

For the record, I want a government job where I am allowed unprecedented access to “penetrate” biological processes. 

Mar. 9 2012
#foucault #power #biopolitics #anarchism #liberalism #libertarianism #marxism
68 notes

Notes

  1. thenoobyorker reblogged this from rhizombie
  2. philosophy-of-praxis reblogged this from interruptions and added:
    bait was taken? Libertarian realism...thing. All great...up...
  3. machistado reblogged this from whakatikatika
  4. freemarketliberal reblogged this from whakatikatika and added:
    Ch. 1 Anarchism From Foucault to Ranciere (PDF) Philosophy of Foucault The History of Sexuality Power/Knowledge With...
  5. angryeyed reblogged this from whakatikatika and added:
    OKAY OKAY I’LL PLAY BALL FINE. I’m not a libertarian. I don’t know if there are elements of Foucault that can be...
  6. philosophy-of-praxis said: I read this, took ‘libertarian’ to be inclusive of left-libertarianism, thought “not that he’s not necessarily, but those things don’t mean that he is …” then realised there was a joke going on :( also beer