ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book engages in detail with Michel Foucault's thought on freedom, it is not an exercise in exegesis. It is not meant to say definitively what Foucault's conception of freedom is, but rather offers an example of what a Foucauldian conception of freedom might be. It focuses on one such commitment, an ontological affirmation of freedom, and, on its basis, ventures to develop a vision of political freedom that would be adequate to our present. The book explains the accounts of biopower and biopolitics by Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri are exemplary in this respect, being thoroughly heterogeneous to Foucault's original articulation of these concepts, for better or worse. It relocates the Foucauldian ontology of freedom to the political terrain in the reaffirmation of the presently discredited figure of the sovereign subject.
