Thinking Differently

Michel Foucault’s notion of governmentality provides an important theoretical framework in my analysis of Deuteronomy. Because this notion was developed in his lectures at the Collège de France in the late 1970s and early 1980s, they are not as familiar to many scholars as his published books on madness, penality, and sexuality. This chapter offers an explanation of power, knowledge, subject and subjectivity, governmentality, and its related concepts of government and conduct. Governmentality analyzes how technologies of power influence technologies of the self, those techniques and mechanisms individuals engage in as they become a certain type of governed subject. Governmentality also recognizes that particular governing rationalities, the reasoning of particular governing systems, are what make possible the technologies of power and technologies of the self. They coordinate these technologies toward distinct ends and purposes. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how interaction with Foucault’s work aids the interpretation of Deuteronomy and its “Israel.”