From Foucault’s Lectures at the Collège de France to Studies of Governmentality: An Introduction

In Foucault’s writings, the term “governmentality” (gouvernementalité) fi rst surfaces in the Collège de France lectures of 1978 and 1979. The term is derived from the French adjective gouvernemental, and already had some currency before Foucault made it into a central concept in his work. In the 1950s, Roland Barthes used what he referred to as this “barbarous but unavoidable neologism” (1989: 130) to denote a mechanism inverting cause and effect and presenting the government as the author of social relations: as “the Government presented by the national press as the Essence of effi - cacy” (ibid.: 130). Foucault took up this “ugly word” (2007: 115), freeing it from its semiological context. For Foucault, governmentality thus does not stand for a mythic practice of signs depoliticizing and masking those relations, but rather for a range of forms of action and fi elds of practice aimed in a complex way at steering individuals and collectives (2007: 122; 2000c: 295).