ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that the analyses of visual art - their importance notwithstanding - form only a part of Michel Foucault's engagement with art and aesthetics. It explores the central intersections between the domains of aesthetics and biopolitics in the 1970s and early 1980s Foucault. The chapter, drawing on late 1970s Foucault, exposes how political-economic liberalism ensues a major transformation in the modality of perception, thinking and knowledge that underpins as well as enables the government of populations, pursuing to maximize their well-being and productivity. It focuses on how Foucault's insights are highly topical also in the context of recent debates dealing with art, aesthetics, perception and government of life. Convergences are spotted with the work of Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Rancière in particular. Foucault focuses on the liberal art of governing and its conditioning form of knowledge, political economics, as they were developed in the 18th-century Britain.
