Autonomy through the Welfare State: Some Notes on Michel Foucault’s Un système fini face à une demande infinie

Abstract

This essay reads the relationship between autonomous subjectivation and social security in Foucault's thought in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The first part traces Foucault’s critique of the twentieth-century welfare state, focusing on how mechanisms of social security sharply constrain possibilities for autonomous subjectivation. The second part offers, by contrast, a reading of the interview Un système fini face à une demande infinie, aimed at theorizing forms of social security conducive to a wider expansion of forms of autonomous subjectivation.