Introduction

This volume seeks to make a contribution to these questions by focusing on the relation that Foucault established between the ideas of biopower and biopolitics and the studies of governmentality in his last Courses and occasional writings of this period. Most of the essays in this volume adopt and contribute to Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics as a guiding thread to understand why liberalism and neoliberalism is a “government of life.” The idea that biopolitics is somehow the core issue of governmentality is in many ways a contribution of recent Italian theory, from Antonio Negri and Giorgio Agamben to Roberto Esposito. Many of the contributions to this volume in one way or another critically engage this Italian reception of Foucault. At the same time, the originality of this collection consists in the variety of perspectives and traditions of reception brought to bear on the problem of the connection between biopolitics and governmentality in Foucault’s work, showing this connection to be anything but obvious, both with regard to its textual basis as well as in its philosophical and political projections.