Governmentality and Biopolitics: Hegemony and neoliberalism in Latin América.

Hegemonía y neoliberalismo en América Latina

Abstract

Abstract:

This work aims to assess the contributions of Michel Foucault from the concepts of Governmentality and bio-politics for a conceptualization of Hegemony. Its context is, in the first instance, that of a critique of Ernesto Laclau's discursive idealism, which does not recognize discourse as the result of a system of disciplinary relations, operated on bodies and the environment. On the other hand, such criticism is also essential to answer the inability of Latin American Critical Thought to articulate the changes brought about by neoliberalism in the subjective processes of production, affects, institutionality and communication. In this sense, Foucauldian notions allow us to found the contingent and discursive character of Hegemony, accounting for the system of disciplinary practices that its political economy entails. The treatment of the State and Civil Society by the French thinker will be an obstacle to a critique of neoliberal reason, as presented by Dardot and Laval. The study demonstrates, in the Latin American context, how neoliberalism is the result of a process of hegemonic dispute of imposition of colonial interests of domination based on a new subjective framework.