MATEUS CASTILHA

By exploring clues of the political context in which Foucault makes his conceptual turn towards the analytics of the “government” in the late 1970s, this study aims to show that the rapprochement to the so-called “deuxième gauche”, far from entailing an adherence to the neoliberalism, helps to explain the provocative aspect of his interventions at the time. Leaving the post-1968 “gauchisme” behind, Foucault starts to contribute theoretically to a new emergent left. Based upon this hypothesis, an interpretation of The birth of biopolitics as a diagnosis of the times is proposed, allowing then to account for the controversies on the contemporary social theory brought by the late publication of the lectures.