Neoliberal governmentality

Foucault and the critique of Byung-Chul Han's psychopolitics

Abstract

This article aims to conduct a critical analysis of Byung-Chul Han’s thesis, which argues that the concept of biopolitics has been surpassed in light of the “psychopolitics turn”, characterized as a set of political techniques for exploiting the psyche within the neoliberal regime. In contrast to this diagnosis, this paper defends the existence of a continuity between the Foucauldian hypothesis of state control over the biological and the neoliberal art of government. Drawing on the courses Security, Territory, Population (1978) and The Birth of Biopolitics (1979), it demonstrates that neoliberal rationality operates according to a technology of “government through the medium” (milieu), in which the psyche appears as a surface of reception and response to market stimuli, enabling the conduction of the economic subject's behavior. It concludes, from a Foucauldian perspective, that the psyche becomes one of the central elements for establishing the continuity between biopolitics and neoliberal management.