Notes: Birth of Biopolitics Class Notes Brief context for the lecture: After STP, an Italian newspaper commissions Foucault to write a series of articles. He takes trips to Iran to study the Islamic Revolution. He visits Iran before writing The Birth of Biopolitics . His writing on Iran are controversial because he rarely weighed in on contemporary political struggles. People criticized him for valorizing the movement that overthrew the Shah. He recognized the entirely different economic moment in the Iranian Revolution. He saw in the local resistance a connection to a larger structure, a larger economic problem. A seemingly smooth continuity should be understood by examining its ruptures. He’s struck by neoliberalism. He supported not the Islamic state in Iran, but the movement that said no to a certain kind of government/governance. Counter-practices over resistance He wants after this to find a subjectivity that can discern good from bad governmentalit...