In a recent blog post, Joshua Clover rightly notices the swift emergence of a new panoply of "genres of the quarantine." 1 It should not come as a surprise that one of them centers on Michel Foucault's notion of biopolitics, asking whether or not it is still appropriate to describe the situation that we are currently experiencing. Neither should it come as a surprise that, in virtually all of the contributions that make use of the concept of biopolitics to address the current coronavirus pandemic, the same bunch of rather vague ideas are mentioned over and over again, while other-no doubt more interesting-Foucauldian insights tend to be ignored. In what follows, I discuss two of these insights, and I conclude with some methodological remarks on the issue of what it may mean to "respond" to the current "crisis."
In this paper, I offer an overview of the ways in which Foucault defines and uses the concept of 'regime of truth' in his works between 1975 and 1980, focusing especially on his lectures at the Collège de France On the Government of the Living. There, I argue, a substantial shift takes place, which corresponds to the emergence of the dimension of subjectivity at the heart of the concept of regime of truth itself. This shift bears witness to Foucault's elaboration of a new critical project, namely that of a genealogy of our contemporary regime of truth 'indexed to subjectivity'.
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