The Will to Knowledge as an instance of the Foucauldian research work on biopolitics and politics

Abstract

This article pretends to realize a hermeneutics of The Will to Knowledge (1976) allowing to comprehend this work in its double condition: the first result of a research work concerning a genealogy or history of sexuality in the modern West and the framework in which Foucault develops his analysis on biopolitics and governmentality and in which he presents his notions of politics. To that end, the article analyzes, in the first place, the specificity of The Will to Knowledge as the first step of a genealogy of sexuality in the modern West. In the second place, it examines The Will to Knowledge as the official inauguration of the studies on biopolitics and as the turning point of two fundamental notions proposed, in the author’s opinion, by Foucault about politics: one of a diagnostic character (linked to the notions of biopolitics and governementality) and another of a proposal character (related to the subjetivation modes and the practices of the self). Finally, the article underlines the relationship of the subjectivity with the games of truth marked by the problem of power-government as the touchstone of the preoccupations and general goals of the Foucauldian research works.