A little while ago Stuart Elden re-blogged a post from the Foucault News blog that contained a video recording of Catherine Malabou’s European Graduate School talk entitled ‘The Deconstruction of Biopolitics‘, which is well worth watching (embedded below). That post links to an earlier post that includes another video recording of Malabou, offering a ‘critique of Foucault‘ (also embedded below).
I recommend watching both videos for a critical engagement with Foucault’s later work. I also find it interesting to think about this line of argument in relation to Stiegler’s engagement with Foucault’s work, particularly in Taking Care.
Catherine Malabou, philosopher and author, talking about Foucault’s deconstruction of biopolitics. In this lecture Catherine Malabou discusses Hobbe’s Leviathan model of sovereignty, biopolitics as disciplinary power, the relationship between biology and politics, Agamben’s critique of Foucault and the function of symbolism in psychoanalysis in relationship to Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Aristotle, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan focusing on non-sovereign power, biopower, the individual body, will, the notion of organism, the structure of kingship, power relations, intentionality, resistance, self-subjugation, transgression and sexuality.
In this lecture Catherine Malabou discusses the unity of the symbolic and biological, a new theory of power outside the model of language, the genealogy of relations of force, the somatic in place of the symbolic, functionality as the materiality of bodies and a new notion of life in relationship to Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Friedrich Nietzsche and Immanuel Levinas focusing on sexuality, the vocabulary of war, sensation, corporeality, the living body, bare life, Homo sacer, animality, poetry, sovereignty and the absolute value of life.