The Labour of Subjectivity: Foucault on Biopolitics, Economy, Critique [Hardcover]

Michel Foucault defined critique as an exercise in de-subjectivation. To what extent did this claim shape his philosophical practice? What are its theoretical and ethical justifications? Why did Foucault come to view the production of subjectivity as a key site of political and intellectual emancipation in the present?

Andrea Rossi pursues these questions in The Labour of Subjectivity. The book re-examines the genealogy of the politics of subjectivity that Foucault began to outline in his lectures at the Coll?ge de France in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He explores Christian confession, raison d?tat, biopolitics and bioeconomy as the different technologies by which Western politics has attempted to produce, regulate and give form to the subjectivity of its subjects. Ultimately Rossi argues that Foucaults critical project can only be comprehended within the context of this historico-political trajectory, as an attempt to give the extant politics of the self a new horizon.

Andrea Rossis The Labour of Subjectivity: Foucault on Biopolitics, Economy, Critique is a daring read of Foucaults key works from the later years of his lectures at the Coll`ege de France.... Rossis work is both a genealogical interrogation of power integrated into an inquiry into critique. This feat in relation to the works of Foucault is no simple trick and...Rossi accomplishes the task at hand.... Andrea Rossis book is a worthwhile read. British Journal of Industrial Relations

Through an in-depth and skillful presentation of Foucaults work, Andrea Rossi traces the genealogy of governmentality in the problematic relation between the subject and the norm, action and freedom, power and knowledge. His analysis offers a rigorous and original interpretation of the great Foucauldian themes of biopolitics, economy and the formation of modern subjectivity. Roberto Esposito, Prolc—