Governmentality, Police, Politics

Foucault with Rancire

Politics is generally seen as the set of procedures whereby the aggregation and consent of
collectivities is achieved, the organization of the powers, the distribution of places and roles, and
the systems for legitimizing the distribution. I propose to give this system of distribution and
legitimization another name. I propose to call it the police. []
I now propose to reserve the term politics for an extremely determined activity antagonistic to
policing: whatever breaks with the tangible configuration whereby parties and parts or lack of them
are defined by a presupposition that, by definition, has no place in that configuration that part of
those who have no part. []
We should not forget either that if politics implements a logic entirely heterogeneous of that of the
police, it is always bound up with the latter. The reason for this is simple: politics has no objects or
issues of its own. Its sole principle, equality, is not peculiar to it and is in no way in itself political.
[]
So while it is important to show, as Foucault has done magnificently, that the police order extends
well beyond its specialized institutions and techniques, it is equally important to say that nothing is
political in itself merely because power relationships are at work in it. For a thing to be political, it
must give rise to a meeting of police logic and egalitarian logic that is never set up in advance. i
So goes the French philosopher Jacque Rancires famous definition of police and politics from his
principal philosophical work Disagreement. From a Foucauldian perspective, Rancires
definitions of police and politics are interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly, the concepts are
relational terms in a way that resembles Foucaults ideas about politics and power as reflected in
Foucaults famous dictum that where there is power, there is resistance. ii; (I will return to this
later). To Rancire, police signifies the mentalities, rationalities, institutions and organizations that
impose order through a series of procedures (coercion, science, upbringing, etc.) and identify
groups and objects of society in order to keep them in their place. Politics, on the other hand, is
what breaks with the existing order, by not conforming to the structuring principles of that order. As
for instance in 1776 when the Americans who werent represented in the English parliament refused

to be seen as an English colony and demanded the right to govern themselves; No taxation without
representation as the motto went. The Americans, thereby, became the part who had no part in
the English political system of the times. They broke with the existing order, in order to redefine a
new order in which they would be acknowledged as a political subject. Thus, politics stands in a
necessary relation to police: politics is what disrupts the existing order, while police is the attempt
to avoid such a disruption by identifying the different parts of society and keeping them all in their
place in order to retain the order as it is. From this perspective, as Rancire has put it, there is
nothing but the order of domination or the disorder of revolt.iii
Secondly, in Rancires definition of police and politics, Michel Foucault is explicitly and without a
doubt the major source of inspiration and at the same time the major target of critique. In his
definition of police and politics, Rancire refers to Omnes et Singulatim, two lectures given by
Foucault at Stanford University in October 1979 on political reason. In the lectures, Foucault sums
up many of the insights he had presented during the 1978 Collge de France lectures, Security,
Territory, Population. In Omnes et Singulatim Foucault discusses in a condensed form, the
points he had presented more than a year before about pastoral power as an individualizing form
of subjectification, about the emergence of reason of state as a new rationality reflecting on state
power as a secular form of power, about the birth of the police and the police as a way of
governing and subjectifying the subjects of society, and finally about modes of self-government, a
theme Foucault had only begun to develop recently and which therefore, unlike the other reflections
here mentioned, did not receive systematic treatment in the 1978 lectures. iv So even though
Rancires text is published in 1995, that is a couple of years before the publishing of Foucaults
lectures from Collge de France commenced, Rancire is nevertheless drawing on and criticizing
the philosophical assumptions underlying Foucaults project in the first of the so-called
governmentality lectures from 1978, Security, Territory, Population.
The problem to be investigated in this article is this: What will it mean for Foucaults project, if we
accept Rancires critique? What will happen, if we transfer Rancires critique of this small piece
of Foucaults work, Omnes et Singulatim, to Foucaults overall project in developing the idea of
governmentality? To what extent and in what sense is Rancires distinction between police and
politics reflected in Foucaults work on governmentality, and more generally in this period, and can
we perhaps gain something by rereading Foucaults work through Rancires critique?

As these questions could probably be investigated and answered in numerous ways, let me try to
close in on the approach I will present in this paper.
Firstly, I will try to answer the question from a Foucauldian and not a Rancirean perspective; i.e. I
am not interested in what the connection between Rancire and Foucault means to Rancires
philosophy and critical, political project, but in what it might mean for Foucaults project. Or to put
it in other words, the challenge is here to answer the question: how, without ignoring Rancires
critique, can one still be a Foucauldian and continue along the lines of Foucaults governmentality
project?
Secondly, I will not stick entirely to Foucaults work with governmentality. Even though it will
form the base of the argument, I will also relate Foucaults theory to some of the other projects he
was engaged in during the 1970s.
Which leads to the third limitation of my approach: even though there are good reasons for
suggesting some general lines in Foucaults entire uvre, as in the way there are some recurring
preoccupations, a certain way of asking questions, and a distinctively Foucauldian way of trying to
answer them, I still find it useful for the purpose of this paper to draw a line between at least three
periods in Foucaults work: the preoccupation with questions on knowledge and truth in the 1960s,
the more politically informed and oriented phase of the 1970s, and lastly the ethical phase of the
1980s, where questions of self-government became central for Foucaults thought. I limit myself to
the political phase in this paper, since I believe the connection between Foucaults disparate
interventions are here more obvious than if one was to compare the political questions posed by
Rancire to, say, Foucaults work on the French poet Raymond Roussel from 1963, or his readings
of Seneca in 1984.
Fourthly, and finally, I do not claim to have, nor am I interested in, restoring some true kernel of
Foucault, or the project Foucault was really doing, or really had in mind. Instead, I am much more
interested in presenting a Foucauldian perspective beyond Foucault, to try and extract some
strategies and ideas from Foucaults work without necessarily buying the whole package, so to
speak. But in order to do so, one will have to take both Foucault and his critics, in this case
Rancire, seriously.
Let us start out by looking at Foucaults notions of politics and police as he uses them in the project
he himself called a history of governmentality. v

Politics in the history of governmentality

The words police and politics both occur, unsurprisingly, a vast number of times during the 1978
lectures Security, Territory, Population. However, and perhaps more surprisingly, as with
Rancires distinction, they are both used as technical terms with a very precise definition, and, as
well as with Rancires distinction, they stand in a non-coincidental relation to each other. But
where the connection between the two terms in Rancires thought is more or less ahistorical,
Foucault locates the pair police-politics to a certain socio-political, historical moment. According to
Foucault, politics emerges around the time of Niccol Machiavellis The Prince (1513),
Guillaume de La Perrires Le miroire politique (1555), and the entire literature on the reason of
state. As Foucault sees it, the invention of modern politics was the invention of a distinctively nonreligious theory of what was the good and righteous thing seen from the States point of view, and
not from the Churchs point of view. It was perceived as scandalous and a form of heresy, and his
scandal, reason of state, was intimately connected to the word politics. As Foucault phrases it,
The politiques are a sect, something that smells of or verges on heresy. The word politique[s]
appears then to designate people who share a particular way of thinking, a way of analyzing,
reasoning, calculating, and conceiving of what a government must do and on what form of
rationality it can rest. In other words, it was not politics (la politique) as a domain, set of
objectivities, or even as a profession or vocation that first appeared in the sixteenth and seventeenth
century in the West, but the politiques, or, if you like, a particular way of positing, thinking,
programming the specificity of government in relation to the exercise of sovereignty. As opposed to
the juridical-theological problem of the foundation of sovereignty, the politiques are those who try
to think the form of government rationality for itself. And [it is] just in the middle of the
seventeenth century that you see the appearance of politics (la politique), of politics understood as a
domain or type of action. vi
In order to understand his overall endeavor, it is important to understand the distinction Foucault
here makes between politics and the juridical-theological questions about sovereignty. Foucault is
not as much interested in how governments and political systems are legitimized and how they are
comprehended in abstract philosophical systems; what concerns Foucault is the techniques and
strategies of governments, and how these are conceived theoretically. vii In this way, politics, as
defined by Foucault in the above, marks a decisive rupture in history. It is the moment, where the
state and worldly government became imbued with the logic of politics, reason of state, and thus

became a self-referential system: what is good for the state is good as such. Hence, when Foucault
speaks about politics as a domain or type of action, it is certainly not in a Rancirean sense as
something that disrupts the dominant order as an extremely determined activity antagonistic to
policing. What Foucault refers to, is politics as the domain of government, and a governmental
type of action.
This distinction resurfaces in Omnes et Singulatim, two lectures given the year after Security,
Territory, Population. Here Foucault gives a number of definitions of what reason of state is, and
how it differs from previous forms of political thought and government. One of the most
enlightening elements of Foucaults analysis is his discussion of Thomas Aquinas. According to
Foucault, Thomas makes the following argument: The kings government of his kingdom must
imitate Gods government of nature; or again, the souls government of the body. The king must
found cities just as God created the world; just as the soul gives form to the body. The king must
also lead men towards their finality, just as God does for natural beings, or as the soul does, when
directing the body. viii
How does the idea about a reason of state, starting with Machiavelli, differ from Thomas idea
about governance? Foucault writes that in Thomas model, the art of governing is that of God
imposing his laws upon his creatures. St. Thomass model for rational government is not a political
one, whereas what the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seek under the denomination reason of
state are principles capable of guiding an actual government. They arent concerned with nature
and its laws in general. Theyre concerned with what the state is; what its exigencies are. ix The
difference between Thomass and Machiavellis ideas about government is strictly speaking
politics. In the way Foucault conceptualizes the development of governmental thought, politics is
per definition a self-referential, strictly secular order of government. Whereas the logic of
government in Thomas model was based on salvation and in reference to Gods government of the
world, politics is what is concerned with government in and for itself. In Machiavelli and other
writers reflecting on the reason of state, there is (mostly) no reference to a divine order, a
transcendental aim, and a higher purpose; in politics, one does not govern in order to salvage man,
one governs for the sole purpose of governing, of keeping power, and of strengthening the state and
thereby strengthening the governor(s).

Police in the history of governmentality

Even though politics, in Foucaults conception understood as a self-justifying, governing
rationality, is not in need of and does not refer to transcendental principles, it is still to be
distinguished from the institutions and everyday practices of government. When Foucault discusses
politics in relation to Thomas Aquinas idea about a rational art of governing, it is because politics
takes the place of such a rational art of governing. Politics, according to Foucault, replaces the
rational art of governing. Politics is the theory about and reflection on good, correct, just, and
optimal government, but instead of discussing such ideas in relation to the salvation of man and the
nature of God and the world, the theory about good government is related to the strength of the
state. If, however, we want to conceptualize the institutions and everyday practices of government,
within Foucaults vocabulary, we would instead have to turn to the word police.
In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault discusses at great length the definitions of and
literature on the police, such as the so-called Polizeiwissenschaft, the different forms of police, the
treatises written by Nicolas Delamare, Claude Fleury, Franois Fenelon, and others. In Omnes et
Singulatim, however, Foucault focuses particularly on two of the most prominent theorizers of the
police: Turquet de Mayerne (1573-1654), and Johann von Justi (1717-71). In words resembling
those with which Rancire would later define the police, Foucault paraphrases Turquet de
Mayernes definition of the object of the police in the following manner, The police includes
everything. But from an extremely particular point of view. Men and things are envisioned as to
their relationships: mens coexistence on a territory; their relationships as to property; what they
produce; what is exchanged on the market. It also considers how they live, the diseases and
accidents which can befall them. What the police sees to is a live, active, productive man. Turquet
employs a remarkable expression, The polices true object is man. x
So, police is preoccupied with man so as to optimize his productivity, and thus strengthening the
state. In this sense police includes everything, as Foucault says. Police is the concern about the
health and reproduction of men, with the infrastructure and circulation of goods, men, and capital,
with the environment, with the security of the state and its subjects, etc. It is in this sense we get the
creation of different forms of police through history: the medical police, the maritime police, the
secret police; they are all concerned with the productivity of man and thus the strength of the state.
This figure runs through a lot of Foucaults material in Security, Territory, Population, from the
analysis of different paradigms of city planning in the first lecture,xi to discussions of urbanization,

grain distribution policies, public hygiene, and police as a, also, repressive apparatus, in the last
lecture.xii Seen from this perspective, it appears that the backbone of Foucaults lectures and work
with governmentality is his interest in ideas on policing and policing institutions. As Rancire
explains in an interview, the difference between his point of interest in comparison to Foucaults,
Foucault, it seems to me, was never interested in this question [that of politics and the quest of
finding a political subject], not at a theoretical level in any case. He was concerned with power.
xiii And later in the same interview, he elaborates the difference he sees between Foucaults notion
of police, and his own: The same word police clearly refers to two different theoretical edifices.
In Omnes et Singulatim, Foucault conceives of the police as an institutional apparatus that
participates in powers control over life and bodies, while, for me, the police designates not an
institution of power but a distribution of the sensible within which it becomes possible to define
strategies and techniques of power. xiv
We can further substantiate Rancires claim if we return to Foucaults reading of Johann von Justi
in Omnes et Singulatim. The distinction between police and politics here occurs explicitly. After
having discussed some of von Justis arguments about the purpose of the police, Foucault says:
von Justi the draws a distinction between this task, which he calls Polizei, as does his
contemporaries, and Politik, Die Politik. Die Politik is basically a negative task. It consists in the
states fighting against its internal and external enemies. Polizei, however, is a positive task: it has
to foster both citizens lives and the states strength. xv So, even though Foucault through von Justi
makes an explicit distinction between police and politics, they both still belong to what Rancire
would define as police. They are two different aspects of securing order and strengthening the state.
Politics designates the explicit concern with security, with defeating and defending the state against
foreign powers through war and diplomacy, and with striking down or preventing rebellion through
army intervention or proper distribution of grain. Police, on the other hand, is the concern about the
well-being of the subjects and their surroundings, since if their health is better they may work
harder and produce more; if the roads are properly planned, constructed, and maintained, goods and
troops may be distributed faster, etc. But both police and politics belong to the domain of
government, and they designate governmental forms of action.

Politics in Lives of infamous men

One should not underestimate, however, the importance Foucault ascribes to the birth of politics.
Politics, for Foucault is, as we have seen, born through the reason of state, the reflection on what
is good for the state, and how the state can and should strengthen itself. Foucault speaks about the
150 or 200 years during which modern states were formed, and the birth and theory of the state,
was formulated especially in two sets of doctrine: the reason of state and the theory of police. xvi
Or, as Foucault formulates the same idea in Security, Territory, Population, the politiques where
those who said: Lets leave aside the problem of the world and nature; lets look for the reason
intrinsic to the art of government; lets define a horizon that will make it possible to fix exactly
what should be the rational principles and forms of calculation specific to an art of government []
The governmentality of the politiques gives us police. xvii There is thus a necessary connection
between police and politics. One could perhaps say that politics is the mind and the police is the
body of government.
But politics also opens up a new problem, which Foucault analyzes in Lives of infamous men,
published in 1977, the year before the Security, Territory, Population lectures. In Lives of
infamous men, Foucault makes a slight detour through the institution of lettres de cachet, which
existed in France from around 1660 to 1760, and which was a system that allowed the subjects to
appeal directly to the king in order for him to intervene in everyday life with its problems of
domestic violence, public indecency, usury, fraud, etc. Thus the subjects would write to the king
and ask him to arrest their husband, neighbor, local priest, or whoever might have offended them
for whatever reason. This institution bypassed the juridical apparatus and allowed the king to
interfere through orders directly in everyday lives, as well as it allowed the subjects to appeal
directly to sovereign power in the person of the king. To Foucault, this institution in many ways
marks the threshold of modern politics for a number of reasons that will be listed below.
Firstly, it expands the police, their field of work, their power, and their interference with everyday
life. The police attained a double function of, on the one side verifying the claims made in the
letters to the king, and on the other executing, or not executing, the punishments called for in those
letters. As Foucault writes, a petition was not freely granted to anyone requesting it; an enquiry
must precede it, for the purpose of substantiating the claims made in the petition. It needed to
establish whether the debauchery or drunken spree, the violence or the libertinage, called for an
internment, and what conditions and for how long a job for the police, who would collect

statements by witnesses, information from spies, and all haze of doubtful rumor that forms around
each individual. xviii
Secondly, police intervention is intervention from neither the church, nor the aristocracy; it is the
state itself that intervenes in everyday lives. Foucault takes up this point again in Security,
Territory, Population. Here he speaks about the way the police demonstrates the intervention of
raison dtat and power in new domains, how the police is not an extension of justice, it is not
the king acting through his apparatus of justice; it is the king acting directly on his subjects, but in a
non-juridical form, which lets Foucault argue that police consists therefore in the sovereign
exercise of royal power over individuals who are subjects. In other words, police is the direct
governmentality of the sovereign qua sovereign. xix It is in this sense that Foucault argues in
Lives of infamous men that with the institution of lettres de cachet, political sovereignty
penetrated into the most elementary dimension of the political body. xx In other words, through the
institution of lettres de cachet, the state and political power became present in everyday lives of
everyday citizens. Political power became something that existed in the minds of everyday people
and which they could see had a direct and profound impact on their lives.
Thirdly, the lettres de cachet allowed everybody to become sovereign for a moment if they played
their cards right. An absolute nobody could, with a bit of cunning or luck, have his brother, his
creditor, or his local minister arrested, if he felt they had done him harm, or maybe just for strategic
reasons. As Foucault puts it, every individual could become for the other a terrible and lawless
monarch: homo homini rex. xxi
Fourthly, in order to become for the other a terrible and lawless monarch, one had to work the
sovereign power in just the right way. So even though everybody could potentially become
monarch for a glimpse of time, it was still necessary, at least for a moment, to appropriate this
power, channel it, capture it, and bend it in the direction one wanted; if one wanted to take
advantage of it, it was necessary to seduce it. It became both an object of covetousness and an
object of seduction; it was desirable, then, precisely insofar as it was dreadful. xxii This is probably
Foucaults most speculative idea about the meaning of the lettres de cachet, as it is also his most
alluring. Because one has to seduce political power in order to obtain it, if just for a moment,
political power also becomes something desirable. It is an object that everybody wants to possess,
but in order to do so, one has to seduce it; that is, one has to say and do the right things, to look the
right way, to charm and trick power into desiring one as well. Thus, the modern desire for power

spreads from the enclosed circles of kings and aristocrats to the everyday lives of ordinary subjects.
Politics become popular, so to speak.
Fifthly, the kings direct intervention in the everyday lives of his subjects also makes him an object
of hatred and anger. If something goes wrong in the lives of everyday citizens, it becomes possible,
and maybe even obvious, to blame the king. Maybe he did not intervene when he should have, and
maybe he did intervene when he should have not. Whether it is just or not, because of the kings
direct involvement through the institution of lettres de cachet, political power becomes
responsible for the good as well as for the bad things that happen in the lives of the states subjects.
The path for critique of political power and for revolution has been opened.
In Foucaults theory, the birth of politics is a complex, multi-faceted event imbued with principles
and ideas pointing in numerous directions. There can be no doubt that according to Foucault, and
this is Rancires critique, the birth of politics happens in the domain of government. Neither can
there be any doubt that Foucaults main interest lies in discovering the rationalities of government,
of the police. However, Foucaults narrative is not as one-sided, as a Rancirean critique might
imply. As we have seen, in his analysis of the birth of politics, Foucault is also concerned with
explaining how politics became popular, how it became possible to think of and actually implement
sovereignty as popular sovereignty, how desires for power and after beheading the king came into
existence, and how a lot of those themes that would be played out during the French Revolution
have their roots in the birth of politics and the lettres de cachet. So even though Foucault thinks of
politics as politics from above (as police, we might say), politics is not only politics from above, it
is always already also politics from below, insurrections, rebellions, revolutions. Foucault reveals
this interest in politics from below in a small comment. After having discussed the meaning of
lettres de cachet, as I have just retold and fleshed out in the above, Foucault makes a short
reference to the French Revolution and the beheading of the king. In other words, what comes at the
end of birth of politics is the French Revolution. Or, as Foucault says with an expression very
reminiscent to Rancires there is nothing but the order of domination or the disorder of
revoltxxiii: There is no power without potential refusal or revolt. xxiv

10

The subject of politics

As we have seen, the difference between Rancire and Foucault is not so much the way they think
about politics and police, as it is their main focus, or point of view. Whereas politics to Foucault is
very akin to what it is to Rancire, a disruption of the dominant order by a group that cannot be
(easily) encompassed through the logic of the existing order, there is no doubt that Foucault is more
preoccupied with the logic of the dominant order than with disrupting it. And with Rancire we of
course find a preoccupation with disruption, with how to break the dominant order. In his article
Versions of the political: Jacques Rancire, Michel Foucault, French philosopher Mathieu PotteBonneville has made exactly this point by showing that the divergence between Foucaults and
Rancires political are, so to speak, versions of the same. In Potte-Bonneville words: the logicodiscursive operation through which the subject attempts to lift himself outside of his usual position,
to displace himself against himselfxxv is not thought in the same way by Rancire and Foucault
respectively. But the general theory and ambition remains the same. Perhaps this is how we should
understand Rancires critique of Foucault, as already quoted above: Foucault, it seems to me, was
never interested in this question [that of politics and the quest of finding a political subject], not at
a theoretical level in any case. He was concerned with power. xxvi That is, even though Foucault
had to a large extent the same general theory and the same ambition as Rancire does, he never
systematically investigates the subject of politics. In Rancires words, Foucault is not interested in
the question of finding a political subject, such as The Third Estate in the early phase of The
French Revolution or the proletariat in Marxism, at least not at a theoretical level, because he
never fully focuses on politics. In Foucaults work, human beings are rarely conceptualized as
political subjects. Instead Foucault tends to see bodies and populations as objects of power. xxvii
Not subjects, but objects.
It is in many ways puzzling that in spite of the fact that Foucault is in most of his work concerned
with the period from around 1600 to 1850, a period that bears witness to the English Civil War
(1642-51) (which in many senses can be described as the worlds first (failed) popular revolution),
the American Revolution (1776-83), and the French Revolution (1789-99), Foucault never really
raised the issue of revolt, revolution, and the question of political subjects and their claims. The
popular and widespread political movements are played out in the background of Foucaults work,
but they are never allowed to take center stage; that is, they never become fully thematized or an
object for Foucaults historical analysis. In his essay The Subject and Power, written in 1982 as

11

an afterword to the anthology Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics,

Foucault proposes a way of investigating power relations that takes the forms of resistance against
different forms of power as a starting point. xxviii However, in this phase of his work Foucault
seems to be more interested in resistance as a mode of being rather than in finding a political
subject. As Potte-Bonneville has also pointed out, volume 2 and 3 of The History of sexuality
(1984) provides a theoretical framework for analyzing forms of subjectification not politically,
certainly, but ethically. xxix That is, the resisting subject is not theorized as a political position,
but as an ethical position. As Potte-Bonneville notes, in this late phase of Foucaults work,
Foucaults reflections on resistance, and other forms of self-government, may be transferred to the
sphere of politics, as Rancire himself tries to do. But they are not really an answer to Rancires
critique of the missing political subject in Foucault, and I also find highly problematic to try to
extract a sold political philosophy from Foucaults so-called ethical writings of the 1980s.
Instead, we might have to turn elsewhere if we want to find a systematic engagement with politics
on Foucaults behalf. As Mads Peter Karlsen and Kaspar Villadsen have shown convincingly in a
recently published article, Foucault was from the early 1970s closely linked to Maoist currents in
France, such as the Group for Information about the Prisons (GIP), which had close relations to
the Gauche Proltarienne, which can be translated as Proletarian Left or Awkward
Proletariat. xxx However, more interestingly, Foucaults link to the Maoist current was not only
activist but also theoretical. Especially in his preface to the illegal research conducted by GIP in the
prisons, where GIP distributed questionnaires to the inmates in order for them to describe the
conditions in the prisons, and published their findings in 1971 as Investigation in 20 prisons (the
group published four such investigations). Foucault wrote the preface to the book about the
purpose of the investigations, in words clearly reminiscent of some of Maos phrases from Oppose
book worship (Unless you have investigated a problem, you will be deprived of the right to speak
on it. How can we overcome book worship? The only way is to investigate the actual situation.
You cant solve a problem? Well, get down and investigate the present facts and its past history!
xxxi). But Foucault also makes some interesting comments about politics. On the purpose of the
investigations, Foucault writes that it is not to improve, to soften, to make an oppressive power
more bearable. The investigations are designed to attack that, which operates under a different name
that of justice, of technique, of knowledge, of objectivity. They are therefore all political acts. xxxii
In this way, both the exercise of governmental power (whatever its form be it juridical, medical,
physical violence), and the resistance against it, are viewed as two sides of a political struggle. One

12

is tempted to speak about class struggle, although perhaps class struggle in a broad sense of the
term, a class struggle between those who rule, and those who are ruled. Mads Peter Karlsen and
Kaspar Villadsen even argue (and I think convincingly) that Foucaults genealogical method has its
roots in the Maoist idea of investigation, which is information and political intervention at the
same time. And as such, the purpose of the investigation is to investigate an actual problem in such
a way that it can be solved (politically). In this way, the text functions as a direct political
intervention intended to produce both information and political struggle. As Foucault writes in the
preface, It is about giving the detainees in various prisons the means to speak [prendre la
parole]xxxiii, at the same time about the conditions of detention, imprisonment, and ways out [sortie].
It is, at the same time, also about breaking through into the prisons in order to reveal what happens
there: abuse, suicides, hunger strikes, unrest, revolts. xxxiv
Thus, the political subject that is not properly theorized in Foucaults writing according to Rancire
can perhaps be found in the very existence of the texts themselves.That is, in the same way as
Foucault spoke about specific intellectuals, as opposed to universal intellectuals, who were not
all-knowing oracles but would be engaged in particular, local struggles, we can understand
Foucaults texts as direct, local political interventions. Specific texts, so to speak. This is
obviously true for the preface to the investigations in the prisons, but the same idea can also be
found in other remarks by Foucault, as for instance when he in the opening chapter of Discipline
and Punish writes: That punishment in general and in the prison in particular belong to a political
technology of the body is a lesson I have learnt not so much from history as from the present, and
as such the book is an attempt to write a history of the present. xxxv
One can probably read all of Foucaults texts and lectures, at least that from 1970s, as attempts at
direct political interventions. This can be said about both for the written books such as Discipline
and Punish and The History of Sexuality, as well as the edited historical primary text such as
I, Pierre Revire, having slaughtered my father, my mother, and my sister (1973), Herculine
Barbin (1980), and Lives of infamous men (1977) that was initially written as a preface to a
never published collection of lettres de cachet and other short texts that would reveal the language
and ideas used to subjectivize individuals and thus bear witness to the institutions and actions
people were subjected to.xxxvi In the forewords to the three publications of primary texts of which
two were published, we find very similar formulations about the power apparatuses (legal, medical,
family), how they subjectivize the individual, and how they try to make the individual speak the

13

words of the dominant discourse. But they also present the cases without any nostalgia; except for
perhaps the hermaphrodite Herculine Barbin, we are not dealing with heroes but with infamous
people who happened to cross the dominant ideology in various ways and because of that could
witness a corpus of writing grow around them. And finally, we find in the publications on Pierre
Revire and Herculine Barbin, texts written by the subjects themselves; that is, we are presented
with their own words also. Hence, the texts presents intersections between subjects and different
apparatuses of power, and the primary aim of the texts through particular investigations is to show
how power apparatuses functioned (and functions), and how they subject human beings. In these
texts, Foucaults tells the story about the police, not by telling it but by showing it.
In this way, Foucault hoped his texts would function as political interventions. In an interview from
1984, Polemics, Politics and Problematizations, Foucault gives a few remarks on the relation
between politics and his research, in which he says that he has never tried to analyze anything
whatsoever from the point of view of politics, but always to ask politics what it had to say about the
problems with which I was confronted. xxxvii This quote fits perfectly with the proposed theory that
Foucault analyzes problems from the point of view of police, whereas Rancire analyzes (the same)
problems from the point of view of politics. However, this does not mean there is no political
subject in Foucaults writing. In the same interview, Foucault explains that the political subject, the
we, cannot be presupposed but must arise with the problem, with the investigation: Richard
Rorty points out that in [my] analyses I do not appeal to any we - to any of those wes whose
consensus, whose values, whose tradition constitute the framework for a thought and define the
condition in which it can be validated. But the problem is, precisely, to decide if it is actually
suitable to place oneself within a we in order to assert the principles one recognizes and the values
one accepts; or if it is not, rather, necessary to make the future formation of a we possible by
elaborating the question. Because it seems to me that we must not be previous to the question; it
can only be the result and the necessary temporary result of the question as it is posed in the
new terms in which one formulates it. For example, Im not sure that at the time when I wrote the
history of madness, there was a preexisting and receptive we to which I would only have had to
refer in order to write my book, and of which this book would have been the spontaneous
expression. Laing, Cooper, Basaglia, and I had no community, nor any relationship; but the problem
posed itself to those who had read us, as it also posed itself to some of us, of seeing if it were
possible to establish a we on the basis of the work that had been done, a we that would also be
likely to form a community of action. xxxviii In other words, the investigations themselves were

14

ideally meant to take part in producing their own political subject, a we, who would solve the
problem, Maoistically speaking, through political struggle. But it also serves the purpose of maybe
providing, as Potte-Bonneville has put it, the possibility of a subjectification that is not
identification but consists, on the contrary, in contesting the ordinary regime of identification. xxxix
In this way, through the specific text, the specific investigation, Foucaults ambition is to make
way, possibly, for a political subject who would be a part who has no part in the existing order, a
politics disrupting the police.

15

Jacques Rancire: Disagreement. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1999 [1995] (p. 28-32).
Michel Foucault: The History of Sexuality (volume 1). London: Allen Lane 1979 [1976] (p. 125)
iii
Rancire: Disagreement (p. 12) (translation modified after Jacques Rancire: La Msentente. Paris: Galile 1995 (p.
31)).
iv
See Michel Foucault: Omnes et singulatim [1979], from
http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/documents/foucault81.pdf.
v
Michel Foucault: Security, territory, population. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2009 (p. 108).
vi
Foucault: Security, territory, population (p. 245-246).
vii
For a more on this see Martin Saar: Relocating the Modern State, in: Ulrich Brckling/Susanne Krasmann/Thomas
Lemke (ed.), Governmentality: Current Issues and Future Challenges. London: Routledge 2011, and my own article
with Mathias Hein Jessen: Konger hersker, men regerer ikke, in Slagmark no. 66: Michel Foucault 2013.
viii
Foucault: Omnes et singulatim (p. 244).
ix
Foucault: Omnes et singulatim (p. 244) (my emphasis).
x
Foucault: Omnes et singulatim (p. 248).
xi
Foucault: Security, territory, population (pp. 12-23).
xii
Foucault: Security, territory, population (pp. 333-357).
xiii
Jacques Rancire: Biopolitics or politics? [2000] in Jacques Rancire: Dissensus On politics and Aesthetics.
London: Continuum 2010 (p. 93).
xiv
Rancire: Biopolitics or politics? (p. 95).
xv
Foucault: Omnes et singulatim (p. 252).
xvi
Foucault: Omnes et singulatim (p. 242).
xvii
Foucault: Security, territory, population (p. 348).
xviii
Michel Foucault: Lives of infamous men [1977] in Michel Foucault: Power. New York: New Press 2000 (p. 167)
(my emphasis).
xix
Foucault: Security, territory, population (p. 339).
xx
Foucault: Lives of infamous men (p. 168).
xxi
Foucault: Lives of infamous men (p. 168).
xxii
Foucault: Lives of infamous men (p. 168).
xxiii
Ibid. (p. 12) (translation modified after Jacques Rancire: La Msentente. Paris: Galile 1995 (p. 31)).
xxiv
Foucault: Omnes et singulatim (p. 252).
xxv
Mathieu Potte-Bonneville: Versions du politique Jacques Rancire, Michel Foucault in La philosophie dplace.
Paris: Horlieu 2006 (p. 171) (my translation)
xxvi
Rancire: Biopolitics or politics? (p. 93).
xxvii
Rancire: Biopolitics or politics? (p. 93).
xxviii
Michel Foucault: The Subject and Power in Critical Inquiry 8:4 1982 (p. 780)
xxix
Potte-Bonneville: Versions du politique (p. 181) (my translation)
xxx
Mads Peter Karlsen & Kaspar Villadsen: Foucault maoismen, genealogien in Slagmark no. 66: Michel Foucault
2013.
xxxi
Mao: Oppose Book Worship [1930] from http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume6/mswv6_11.htm#fn1.
xxxii
Michel Foucault: Prface Enqute dans vingt prisons from Enqute dans vingt prisons. Paris: Champ Libre 1971.
Retrieved from http://1libertaire.free.fr/MFoucault165.html (my translation; my emphasis).
xxxiii
Literally to take the word.
xxxiv
Foucault: Prface Enqute dans vingt prisons.
xxxv
Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish. London: Penguin Books 1991 [1975] (p. 30, 31).
xxxvi
In 1982 some of these texts were published by Foucault with Arlette Farge as co-editor under the title Le dsordre
des familles.
xxxvii
Michel Foucault: Polemics, Politics and Problematizations in Michel Foucault: Ethics. London: Penguin Books
2000 (p. 115).
xxxviii
Foucault: Polemics, Politics and Problematizations (p. 114-115).
xxxix
Potte-Bonneville: Versions du politique (p. 175) (my translation)
ii

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