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Перестать мыслить «власть» через «государство»: gouvernementalité, Governmentality Studies, и что стало с аналитикой власти Мишеля Фуко в русских переводах
To stop understanding “Power” through the “State”: Gouvernementalité, Governmentality Studies, and the fate of Michel Foucault’s analytics of power in Russian translations
Gouvernementalité is a neologism introduced by Michel Foucault in 1978. Today, with its English version “governmentality”, it has become one of the key concepts of social sciences.
This term is used to represent a new recherche perspective developed by Foucault, to understand and analyze the phenomenon of "power" or, more specifically, various types of power relations typical for different cultures and political communities. In the past several decades, this perspective has provided methodological basis for an emerging interdisciplinary research field referred to, in English-language social sciences, as Governmentality Studies. Among several aspects of this approach is a novel outlook on the genealogy and specific features of modern societies and modern state, which no longer conceptualizes "power" through the "state", in contrast to traditional paradigms of political philosophy. At the same time, contemporary social science in Russia has been largely deprived of an opportunity to use the conceptual instruments and research methods offered by Foucault; and, among the key barriers to this is the problem of translation.
This paper aim to: 1. Summarize Foucault’s critical analytical approach to power, referred to by the concept of governmentality; 2. Compare Foucauldian analytics of power to traditional paradigms in political philosophy; 3. Highlight how the concept of governmentality is used over the years in Foucault’s works dealing with power relations and the topic of ethical subject; 4. Describe the peculiarity of the early period of Governmentality Studies in English-speaking social sciences; 5. Demonstrate that current Russian translations of Foucault’s primary texts incorporating the term gouvernementalité are not merely imprecise, but display what the French call “contresens” -- interpretations that directly contradict the essence of the original. As a corpus, the available translations do not convey meaning, but rather close off the Foucauldian conceptual and exploratory landscape for the Russian-speaking world.