Reinventint the people: political subject and emancipation

Abstract

Foucault described at the end of 1970, with brilliant lucidity, the mode of governing proper to neoliberalism, at that time, incipient. In these pages we recognize ourselves today in the way we are dominated by a power that crosses all aspects of our individual and social existence with impunity, making it extremely difficult to think about the ways and practices of emancipation in our day. The neoliberal governmentality thinks about the government from the political economy, it places at the level of natural laws the social relations between the men. In this framework, the population emerges as a collective subject. The population is not a set of subjects of law but a set of processes that must be handled in their biological aspects. The figure of the population differs from the political subject embodied in the people, more typical of the logic of modern sovereignty where the emancipatory ideology of the West is also molded. The people, says Foucault, are composed of those who refuse to be a population. It is interesting to explore the emancipatory potential of the subject-people as a political figure opposed to the economic-mercantile figure of the population. It is proposed to thematize that notion without neglecting to point out the criticisms that have been addressed to it, but highlighting its relevance to think a political subject capable of confronting the governmental logic of the prevailing neoliberalism.