The birth of the security device and of the State phobia studied in the perspective of the political history of governmentalities and regimes of knowledge

Abstract

In this paper I propose to analyze the way in which Foucault in the course of 1980 reinterpreted the threshold of modernity in the rationality of government that he had studied in 1978’s and 1979’s courses. The aim of investigating is the displacement that gave rise to the biopolitical device developed under the art of government in the rationality of the governed, which is organized in the fit between an economic naturalism and a security device that produces and consumes liberties. In a second moment, I propose to study from the open perspective in 1980 the process that led from State Reason to State Phobia with the aim of suggesting some consequences that derive from the counterpoint between both poles and that seem relevant to political history of the arts of governing and regimes of knowledge.