Liberal Governing and the Contemporary Political Imagination

Abstract

The purpose of this analysis has been to provide an example of how governmental forms of power that are “implanted in bodies, slipped in beneath modes of conduct, made into a principle of classification and intelligibility, established as a raison d’être and a natural order of disorder” (Foucault 1990, 44), create the identity of a subject or cate- gory of subjects. And throughout, this analysis has attempted to show that it is a crude reduction to analyze liberalism as a purely procedural form of thinking about governing that is informed exclusively by a reflexive skepticism over the state’s ability to know and do. Quite on the contrary, what liberal apparatuses can see, think, and do, and therefore the types of questions that liberal governing asks and the types of subjects it forms whenever “reflexively” reshaping itself, are structured by the genealogy of this form of governing. More specifically, liberal apparatuses function by recodifying in law and norm the violences that found Enlightenment universalism, among others: positivism, patriarchy, Eurocentrism, colonialism, racism, heterosexism, homophobia, eugenics, slavery, and genocide (see Foucault 1998, 378) and make the reality of their objects of government concrete and malleable through processes of othering in relation to a plethora of nodal points like race, sex, sexuality or gender. In brief: the order of reality of liberalism is, and always has been historically, a patriarchal, misogynistic, racist, eugenic, and pauperist one.