Foucault's Critique of Political Reason: Individualization and Totalization

This paper tries to sketch the continuity between the topics of government and subjectification and that of discipline and bodies in Foucault's work by assessing the pervasiveness and the importance of the two poles of what Foucault himself, in a Kantian fashion, called a critique of political reason: individualization and totalization. In the first place, I will sketch the mode of functioning of "government" with reference to the pastorate invented by the Christian Church, showing that the theme of government and of its historical origins appears for the first time when Foucault talks about the disciplinary powers of normalization of 19th-century psychiatry. In the second place, I will approach directly the logic of strategy that makes intelligible the relationships between government and discipline. Finally, these two concepts will be included in what Foucault called the double modern political rationality, and the persistence of this topic, in different forms, in many of his historico-philosophical analyses, and above all as the two sides of what he famously called bio-power. The main claim is that the relationship between the concepts of governmentality (the effect of which is totalization) and discipline (the effect of which is individualization) is neither one of conceptual incompatibility nor one of chronological succession in the development of Foucault's thought, but rather a relation of interdependence that needs to be pointed out and further articulated in order to understand and pursue a critique of modern political reason.