The publication of Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France in the late
1970s has provided new insight into crucial developments in his late work, including
the return to an analysis of the state and the introduction of biopolitics as a
central theme. According to one dominant interpretation, these shifts did not entail
a fundamental methodological break; the approach Foucault developed in his work on
knowledge/power was simply applied to new objects. The present article argues that
this reading — which is colored by the overwhelming privilege afforded to
Discipline and Punish in secondary literature — obscures an
important modification in Foucault’s method and diagnostic style that occurred
between the introduction of biopolitics in 1976 (in Society Must Be
Defended) and the lectures of 1978 ( Security, Territory,
Population) and 1979 (Birth of Biopolitics). Foucault’s
initial analysis of biopolitics was couched in surprisingly epochal and totalizing
claims about the characteristic forms of power in modernity. The later lectures, by
contrast, suggest what I propose to call a ‘topological’ analysis that examines the
‘patterns of correlation’ in which heterogeneous elements — techniques, material
forms, institutional structures and technologies of power — are configured, as well
as the redeployments through which these patterns are transformed. I also indicate
how attention to the topological dimension of Foucault’s analysis might change our
understanding of key themes in his late work: biopolitics, the analysis of thinking,
and the concept of governmentality.
