Stop Understanding “Power” Through the “State”: Gouvernementalité, Governmentality Studies, and the Fate of Michel Foucault’s Analytics of Power in Russian Translations

Abstract

Gouvernementalité is a neologism that was coined by Michel Foucault in 1978, and soon followed by “governmentality” in English. It has become one of the key concepts in the social sciences. Those terms both refer to the novel perspective that Foucault arrived at to understand and analyze the phenomenon of power or, more specifically, various types of power relations typical of different cultures and political communities. Over the past several decades, that perspective has provided the methodological basis for an emerging interdisciplinary field called Governmentality Studies in the English-language social sciences. One purpose of this approach is to reassess the genealogy and specific features of modern societies and modern states without conceptualizing “power” through the “state” as traditional political philosophy has done. However, contemporary social science in Russia has largely been deprived of the opportunity to use Foucault’s conceptual instruments and research methods because of problems with translation among other barriers. The article 1) summarizes the Foucauldian critique and analysis of power embedded in the concept of gouvernementalité and compares that approach with traditional paradigms in political philosophy, 2) highlights how that concept has been used over the years in Foucault’s works dealing with power relations and the topic of the ethical subject, 3) demonstrates that current Russian translations of Foucault’s primary texts incorporating the term gouvernementalité are not merely imprecise, but exemplify what the French call contresens - interpretations that directly contradict the essence of the original. As a corpus, the available translations do not convey Foucault’s thought, but rather bar Russian-speaking readers from his conceptual and exploratory perspective