Naissance de la population: nature, raison, pouvoir chez Michel Foucault

This research explores the possibility to work in the wake of Foucault’s work, conceived it as a certain philosophical practice consisting in constantly opening the field of philosophy to its ‘outsides’ and connecting the history of a concept with the historical framework of an experience of thought. The core of this archaeological and genealogical method is the relation between philosophical and historical practices and the use of the historical constructions to complete a philosophical task: to reveal and destabilize our present. Thus, to resume the interrupted task of the “historical ontology of ourselves” means considering Foucauldian genealogies as “machines” to be tested on the historical ground, which also involve a specific practice of history. The genealogy of the scientific and political concept of “population” is here considered in an historical-critical perspective: this history can both clarify the specificity of the Foucauldian reading of “biopolitics” and question its results, assumptions and interpretations. Through the historical genealogy of the object “population” I want, on the one hand, to fight the idea that the concept was “invented” by a dominant scientific and political complex and on the other hand to reveal the multiple power relations, events and struggles that underlie its appearence. The emergence of “population” is thus placed within a history of governmentality which culminated in the middle of the eighteenth century, when a liberal governing art became dominant and the word “population” widely used.