Abstract
Why study governmentality? ∼ The problem of the state and population. ∼ Reminder of the general project: triple displacement of the analysis in relation to (a) the institution, (b) thefunction, and (c) the object. ∼ The stake of this year’s lectures. ∼ Elements for a history of “government.” Its semanticfieldfrom the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. ∼ The idea of the government of inen. Its sources: (A) The organkation of a pastoral power in the preChristian and Christian East. (B) Spiritual direction (direction de conscience). ∼ First outline of the pastorate. Its specific features: (a) it is exercised over a multiplicity on the move; (b) it is a fundamentally beneficent power with salvation of theflock as its objective; (c) it is a power which individualkes. Omnes et singulatim. The paradox of the shepherd (berger). The institutionalkation of the pastorate by the Christian Church.
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Footnotes
R. Castel, L’Ordre psychiatrique. L’âge d’or de l’aliénisme (Paris: Minuit, “Le sens commun,” 1976; English translation by W.D. Halls, The Regulation of Madness, the origins of incarceration in France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988).
See, ibid. ch. 3, pp. 138–152 (“L’aliéniste, l’hygiéniste et la philanthrope”); trans., ibid. pp. 112–124 (“The Mental Health Specialist, the Hygienist and the Philanthropist”). See on pp. 142–143 (trans. pp. 116–117), the quotations from the prospectus presenting the Annales d’hygiène publique et de médecine légale, founded in 1829 by Marc and Esquirol (“public hygiene, hich is the art of preserving the health of people gathered together in society and which is destined to be very greatly developed and to provide numerous applications for the improvement of our institutions”).
Ibid. ch. 1, pp. 39–50 (“Le criminel, l’enfant, le mendiant, le prolétaire et le fou”); trans., ibid. pp. 28–38 (“Criminal, Child, Beggar, Poor Wage-earner and Mad person”).
In the 1973–1974 lectures, Le Pouvoir psychiatrique; Psychiatric Power, going back over various points in Histoire de la folie; Madness and Civilization, that according to him could be challenged, Foucault questions for the first time the criticism of psychiatric power in terms of the institution and sets against it a criticism founded on the analysis of relations of power, or the micro-physics of power. See the lecture of 7 November 1973, p. 16; p. 15: “I no longer think that the institution is a very satisfactory notion. It seems to me that it harbors a number of dangers, because as soon as we talk about institutions we are basically talking about both individuals and the group, we take the individual, the group, and the rules which govern them as given, and as a result we can throw in all the psychological or sociological discourses. […] What is important […] is not institutional regularities, but much more the practical dispositions of power, the characteristic networks, currents, relays, points of support, and differences of a form of power, which are, I think, constitutive of, precisely, both the individual and the group.” See the lecture of 14 November 1973, p. 34; p. 33: “Let’s be really anti-institutionalist.” See too, Surveiller et Punir, p. 217; Discipline and Punish, p. 215: “ ‘Discipline’ may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus (appareil).”
Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), Panopticon, or the Inspection House..., in Works, ed., J. Bowring (Edinburgh: Tait, 1838–1843) vol. IV, pp. 37–66; French translation, Panoptique, Mémoire sur un nouveau principe pour construire des maisons d’inspection, et nommément des maisons de force, trans. E. Dumont (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1791), republished in Œuvres de Jérémy Bentham, ed., E. Dumont (Brussels: Louis Hauman and Co., 1829) vol. 1, pp. 245–262. The French translation is reproduced in J. Bentham, Le Panoptique, preceded by M. Foucault, “L’œil du pouvoir”; “The eye of power” and followed by a translation by M. Sissung of the first part of the original version of Panopticon, as published by Bentham in England in 1791. The most recent English edition is, Jeremy Bentham, The Panopticon Writings, ed. M. Bozovic (New York and London: Verso, 1995). See Surveiller et Punir, pp. 201–206; Discipline and Punish, pp. 200–209.
See, “L’éthique du souci de soi comme pratique de la liberté” (January 1984) Dits et Écrits, 4, p. 726; English translation by P. Aranov and D. McGrawth, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom” in Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 1: Ethics: subjectivity and truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1997) p. 297: “I have been seen as saying that madness does not exist, whereas the problem is absolutely the converse: it was a question of knowing how madness, under the various definitions that have been given, was at a particular time integrated into an institutional field that constituted it as a mental illness occupying a specific place alongside other illnesses.” According to Paul Veyne, this was how Raymond Aron, for example, understood Histoire de la folie; Madness and Civilization.
See Paul Veyne, “Foucault révolutionne l’histoire” (1978) in Paul Veyne, Comment on écrit l’histoire (Paris: Le Seuil, “Points Histoire,” 1979) p. 229. Veyne’s essay on Foucault is not included in the English translation of the first, 1971 edition of his book, Writing History: Essay on Epistemology, trans. Mina Moore-Rinvolucri (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984). The essay is translated by Catherine Porter, “Foucault Revolutionizes History” in Arnold I. Davidson, ed., Foucault and his Interlocutors (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997) p. 170: “When I showed the present text to Foucault, he responded roughly as follows: ‘I personally have never written that madness does not exist, but it can be written; because, for phenomenology, madness exists, but is not a thing, whereas one has to say on the contrary that madness does not exist, but that it is not therefore nothing.’”
The manuscript (unnumbered page inserted between pages 14 and 15) refers to the Dictionnaire de l’ancienne langue française et de tous ses dialectes du IXe au XVe of Frédéric Godefroy (Paris: F. Vieweg, 1885) vol. IV.
“Un petit chemin si estroit, qu’un home a cheval seroit assez empesché d passer outre, ne deux hommes ne s’y pourroyent gouverner” Froissart, Chroniques, 1559, Book I, p. 72, cited by F. Godefroy, Dictionnaire, p. 326.
Foucault frequently took an interest in this drama in the years between 1970 and 1980. See the lectures of 1970–1971, “La Volonté de savoir,” 12 lecture (summarized in a lecture at Cornell in October 1972); “La vérité et les formes juridiques,” (1974) Dits et Écrits, 2, pp. 553–568; English translation by Robert Hurley, “Truth and Juridical Forms,” Essential Works of Foucault, 3, pp. 1–89; the first lectures of the 1979–1980 series, “Du gouvernement des vivants” (16 and 23 January, and 1 February: the Louvain seminar of May 1981, “Mal faire, dire vrai. Fonction de l’aveu” (unpublished).
In fact the image only appears once in Oedipus the King.See the French translation by R. Pignarre (Paris: Garnier, 1964) p. 122: “My king, I have said to you before, and I say it again, / I would prove mad and foolish / if I were to abandon you, you / who, when my country was beset by storm, / was the good wind that guided it. Ah! Once again, / if you can, lead us to safe harbor today.” [Cf. the English translation by David Grene, which refers to “you who steered the country,” but not explicitly to harbor or port; “Oedipus the King” in David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, eds, Sophocles I (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991) pp. 40–41; G.B.] It is, however, a recurrent theme in Sophocles: Ajax, 1082, Antigone, 162, 190. See P. Louis, Les Métaphores de Platon, p. 156, n. 18.
“Hymne à Amon-Rê” (Le Caire, c.1430 B.C.E) in A. Barucq and F. Daumas, Hymnes et Prières de l’Éypte ancienne, no. 69 (Paris: Le Cerf, 1980) p. 198.
There is a considerable literature on this subject. See, W. Jost, Poimen. Das Bild vom Hirten in der biblischen Überlieferung und seine christologische Bedeutung (Giessen: Otto Kindt, 1939); G.E. Post, “Sheep,” in Dictionary of the Bible (Edinburgh: 1902) vol. 4, pp. 486–487; V. Hamp, (i) “Das Hirtmotiv im Alten Testament,” in Festschrift Kard. Faulhaber (Munich: J. Pfeiffer, 1949) pp. 7–20, and (ii) “Hirt,” in Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche (Freiburg im Breisgau: 1960) col. 384–386. On the New Testament: Th. H. Kempf, Christus der Hirt. Ursprung und Deutung einer altchristlichen Symbolgestalt (Rome: Officium Libri Catholici, 1942); J. Jeremias, “ΠOΨΗΥ,” in Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament, Bd. 6, 1959, pp. 484–501. Among more recent studies we note the article by P. Grelot, “Berger,” in Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique (Paris: Bauchesne) 1984) vol. 12, col. 361–372, and the good synthesis accompanied by a very rich bibliography, by D. Peil, Untersuchungen zur Staats- und Herrschaftsmetaphorik in literarischen Zeugnissen von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: W. Fink, 1983) pp. 29–164 (“Hirt und Herde”).
See, J. Engemann, “Hirt” in Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum (Stuttgart: 1991) vol. 15, col. 589: “Andererseits bleibt ihnen (= den Rabbinen) dennoch bewußt, daß Mose, ger-ade weil er ein guter Hirt war, von Gott erwählt wurde, das Volk Israël zu führen (Midr. Ex. 2, 2); L. Ginzberg, The legends of the Jews, 7, trans. from the German manuscript by Henrietta Szold (Philadelphia: Jewish Publ. Soc. of America, 1938) Reg. s.v. shepherd.” See also Philo of Alexandria, Di vita M osis, I. 60 (according to D. Peil, Untersuchungen, p. 43, n. 59); Justin Martyr, Apologies, 62, 3 (according to W. Jost, Poimen, p. 14, n. 1).
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Senellart, M., Ewald, F., Fontana, A. (2009). 8 February 1978. In: Senellart, M., Ewald, F., Fontana, A. (eds) Security, Territory, Population. Michel Foucault. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230245075_5
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