Abstract

In a 1979 memo about governmentality, Michel Foucault establishes that the analysis of governmentality as a “singular universality” implies that everything is political.¹ Foucault explains his conclusion by “de-constructing” the phrase “everything is political.” This leads to the set of questions that he introduces when he talks about the terms biopolitics and biopower, whose meaning provides a new perspective regarding the history and development that shaped modern forms of government. I will characterize these problems in detail before I return back to the aforementioned passage.

These problems pertain to the question of the status of the political raised by the…