Biopolitics and the Ideology of ‘Mental Health’

Authors

  • Davide Tarizzo

Abstract

Modern political power has two branches: the sovereign and the biopolitical. With the former, the state makes laws, with the latter, it governs. Of the two branches of modern power, the sovereign and the biopolitical, this essay attempts to thematise only the latter, trying in particular to emphasise the de-subjectifying effects of biopolitical rationality and focusing on the three levels of biopolitical rationality: its economistic matrix, its epidemiological apparatus, and its ideological order. By briefly analysing these three levels, or registers, of biopower’s effectiveness we might understand certain characteristics of the ‘mental health’ construct and of the role that it has in our societies.

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Author Biography

Davide Tarizzo

Davide Tarizzo is a Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Salerno and a Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Naples “L'Orientale”. He is also Scientific Adviser to the Ph.D. Program in Political Philosophy at the Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane, Naples. He has edited Italian translations of many books by contemporary thinkers, such as Georges Canguilhem, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, Alain Badiou, Stanley Cavell, Hannah Arendt, and Ernesto Laclau. He is a regular contributor to Italian and foreign journals of philosophy and the humanities. Since 2011 he has been Section Editor of Politica Comun. A Journal of Thought. His main publications include the following: Il pensiero libero. La filosofia francese dopo lo strutturalismo (Raffaello Cortina, Milano, 2003), Giochi di potere. Sulla paranoia politica (Laterza, Roma-Bari 2007), Introduzione a Lacan (Laterza, Roma-Bari, 2011, third edition).

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Published

2012-09-05

How to Cite

Tarizzo, D. (2012). Biopolitics and the Ideology of ‘Mental Health’. Filozofski Vestnik, 32(2). Retrieved from https://ojs.zrc-sazu.si/filozofski-vestnik/article/view/3236

Issue

Vol. 32 No. 2 (2011): Les Politiques du Temp / Politics of the Times

Section

Politiser la santé / Politicizing Health

License

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