Abstract
Although the concept of governmentality was elaborated in Foucault's last years, its philosophical premises are to be found in many of his earlier publications. From 1961 (Madness and Civilization) to 1984 (The History of Sexuality) , he explored various forms of powers and constraints, in order to determine "in what way a specific mode of subjection was able to give birth to man as an object of knowledge for a discourse with a 'scientific' status"1. The case of the execution of Damiens (1757) perfectly illustrates this shift in objectives: what was important in the regicide was structured around questions like 'what happened and who did it?'. Slowly, the attention of the judge turned to questions that referred to the nature itself of the defendant, what he went through in his life, his attitude, etc.
The emergence of these questions had a paramount influence on criminal psychology, and on "the formation of a criminality that will become the object of penal intervention rather than the crime itself"2. Medical, scientific, penal, pedagogical, military, educational or psychiatric domains were progressively understood as areas of knowledge; and the institutions they gave birth to, prison in the case below, aimed at normalizing self-subjecting bodies, both inside and outside their walls.
Foucault's neologism gains clarity, and its commonly accepted definition appears more accessible: "The ensemble formed by the institution procedures, analysis and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, has as its target the population, as its principal form of knowledge the political economy, and as its essential technical means the apparatuses of security"
