Ruptures and continuities in the Brownian recovery of Foucault’s research on neoliberalism

Abstract

The Michel Foucault’s courses given at the Collège de France, between 1977 and 1979, wield a lucid critic of the neoliberalism, but especially innovative for its time. However, his ideas have not been exempted of controversy, which are also added to the series of innovations that the last forty years of neoliberalism have brought, leaving some parts of Foucault’s investigation out of date. That is why Wendy Brown, assuming its legacy even against the author, offers an interesting revision of the scope and limits of the governmental studies, drawing a series of continuities and ruptures between her own ideas and Foucault’s courses. So is that, elaborating an original theory about the Homo Politicus from an exam of the Foucauldian Homo Economicus, this thinker reveals the disastrous effects that neoliberalism unleashes over democracy and its emancipatory imaginary; a problem by the way, highly dismissed by Foucault. The present article rebuilds, in general terms, the different readings and critics that surrounds the work of the philosopher, later explaining the Brownian appreciation in this regard, and her studies on democratic crises in the neoliberal era.