In this paper I offer an interpretation of Foucault's 1978 and 1979 lectures at the College de France: Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics. Through doing so, I suspend the mainstay of social scientific research that falls within the field of governmentality studies and turn instead to the historico-critical basis for Foucault's researches. Embracing notions of governmental ‘counter-conducts' and the ‘critical attitude’, I show how a positive desubjugating form of critique, which temporarily suspends the power of governmental norms, is wholly immanent to the formation and development of modern political governmentality. Furthermore, the ethos of this critique is key to understanding Foucault's genealogical method and his conception of the political. To advance these claims, throughout this paper I draw on the example of rights. I move away from the normative approach to rights in an era of (liberal) political governmentality towards a more performative understanding—what Foucault t...

How (Not) to be Governed: Foucault, Critique, and the Political

Local Space, Global Life engages with the expansive, ground-level and intertwined operations of international law and the development project by discussing the current international focus on local jurisdictions. Since the mid-1980s, and through the discourse of decentralization, municipalities and cities in emerging nations have become the preferred spaces in which to promote global ideals of human, economic and environmental development. Through an ethnographic study of Bogota's recent development experience and the city's changing relation to its illegal neighbourhoods, Luis Eslava interrogates this rationale and exposes the contradictions involved in the international turn to the local. Attentive to historical and current transformations, norms and praxis, and both ideology and materiality, he provides an innovative reading of the nature of international law and the development project, and reveals their impact on local spaces and lives at the urban periphery of today's world order.

Local Space, Global Life: The Everyday Operation of International Law and Development

This paper takes up the notion of citizenship and ethnicity as forms of belonging in the context of globalisation. The discussion draws on a case study focusing on a Fulfuldephone servile group from Northern Benin called the Gando. Since pre-colonial times, their servile status ascribed by birth has been an argument for placing them at the margins of their society and excluding them from political participation. While still claiming their belonging to the nation-state of Benin and the Fulbe's culture, the Gando have progressively built a new social identity that is showing to be a new ethnic group. In the context of the decentralisation reform implemented in 2002–2003, the Gando have taken the opportunity to access local power; they conquered municipal power in the 2003 and 2008 local elections. In doing so they opened the gates to a full citizenship that in the context of today's Benin means a clientelistic citizenship. Contrary to recent literature focused on the simultaneous emergence of belonging dyna...

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Past and present African citizenships of slave descent: Lessons from Benin

The past to come

This article describes how a political assemblage currently at work in higher education is re-articulating academic subjectivities. This assemblage draws together entrepreneurial and humanist concepts of creativity into an intellectual resource that can change national economies. Academics are urged to use their creativity to counteract the narrowing funding base of the university. The article first introduces a history of the concept of creativity and explains how governmental agendas for creative industry and creativity in education emerged. Second, it describes a practice-based research project that grapples with the difficulties of knowledge transfer between the ‘creative’ and ‘social science’ academic disciplines. This raises questions about creative knowledge and reveals some ethical tensions in the performance of academic research. The research project is then positioned as a ‘counter-conduct’, used to short-circuit the procedures implemented for the conduct of creative research in the crea...

Counter-conduct in creative university research: deliberations on freedom

The Greeks invented the words ‘‘city,’’ ‘‘democracy,’’ ‘‘people,’’ ‘‘oligarchy,’’ ‘‘liberty,’’ and ‘‘citizen.’’ So, if it were not for slavery, which would be the major difference between their democracy and true democracy, it is tempting to assume that they invented the eternal truth of politics, or of our politics. For then there would be an eternal politics about which we could philosophise, instead of just writing its history. Across the centuries we would find again an identical essence of the political; political regimes, despite their differences, would exhibit a functional analogy that could be represented in a number of ways: establishing justice, getting men to live together peacefully, defending the group, exercising class domination by the owners of the forces of production . . . But let’s suppose that this is all just appearance and that the words mislead us. Let’s suppose that what is defined as politics in different epochs is based upon presuppositions that escape the consciousness of the historical actors, and that they also elude a posterity that is too eager to recognise itself in its ancestors, even if this trivialises their features. Identical words and vague analogies would then conceal huge and invisible differences, like trees concealing the wood. We will try here to clarify some fragments of this hidden part of the iceberg. We will call the biggest of these fragments, which is not the only one, the ancient citizen’s ‘‘militantism’’; it roughly corresponds to what Claude Nicolet, in a fine book (1980), called the citizen’s profession. Because an ancient citizen does not have human rights or citizen’s rights, he has no freedoms or even freedom; he has duties. We won’t find the democratic semi-ideal of Western

Did the Greeks know democracy

By ‘‘individual’’ we will understand here a subject, a being attached to his own identity through self-consciousness or self-knowledge. Let us suppose that this subject, in this philosophical sense of the word, is also a subject in the political sense of the same word; let us suppose that he is the ‘‘subject’’ of a king. In this case he will not obey unconsciously, as animals probably do: he will think about his obedience and his master, and also about himself as the docile or rebellious subject of his king. In the sense agreed here, then, an individual is not an animal in a herd; he is, rather, someone who attaches a price to the image he has of himself. Concern for this image may push him to disobey, to rebel, but it may also, and even more frequently, push him to be even more obedient. Thus understood, the notion of the individual is in no way opposed to the notions of society or the State. We can say then that this individual is fundamentally affected by the power of the State when his self-image, the relationship he has with himself when he obeys the State or society, is affected. We would like to distinguish this effect on the individual’s self-image, which has always been one of the major stakes in historical conflicts, from other no less important stakes, such as economic stakes or those of the distribution of power. When an individual’s own idea of himself is thus affected, we can say that his relationship with the

Paul Veyne

Papers

Did the Greeks know democracy

When the individual is fundamentally affected by the power of the State

The inventory of differences