Abstract

The paper focuses on the innovative potential of the notion of governmentality that demonstrates Foucault's working hypothesis on the reciprocal constitution of power techniques and forms of knowledge: it is not possible to study the technologies of power without an analysis of the political rationality underpinning them. So it is not pure, neutral knowledge; instead, it constitutes the intellectual processing of the reality which political technologies can then tackle. This is understood to include agencies, procedures, institutions, legal forms, etc., that are intended to enable us to govern the objects and subjects of a political rationality. The concept is used in a comprehensive sense geared strongly to the older meaning of the term and adumbrating the close link between power relations and processes of subjectication.