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Document Details : Title: Against the Republican Foucault Subtitle: How to Establish an Affirmative Biopolitics of Care Author(s): CHRISTIAENS, Tim Journal: Tijdschrift voor Filosofie Volume: 83 Issue: 4 Date: 2021 Pages: 683-709 DOI: 10.2143/TVF.83.4.3290133 Abstract : In The Republic of the Living, Miguel Vatter argues that, at the end of the 1970s, Michel Foucault did not convert to but criticized neoliberalism from a republican point of view. Neoliberal governmentality allegedly represses the capacity of human collectives to democratically govern themselves. The potential for republican self-government would then constitute the basis for an affirmative variant of biopolitics. I argue that this creative reformulation of Foucault’s oeuvre does not work as an interpretation of Foucault nor as a valid critique of neoliberalism. Using the influence of Georges Canguilhem on Foucault, I propose to locate the potential for affirmative biopolitics not in the collective capacity for self-government, but in the fragility of living beings in their interaction with their milieu. Because life is constitutively dependent on infrastructural conditions to flourish, we need a biopolitics that establishes institutions which support the sustenance of life. |
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