of governmentality andthe techniques of government have really become the only political stake andthe only real space of political struggle and contestation, thegovernmentalization of the state has nonetheless been what has allowed thestate to survive. And it is likely thatif the state is what it is today, it is precisely thanks to thisgovernmentality that is at the same time both external and internal to thestate, since it is the tactics of government that allow the continualdefinition of what should or should not fall within the state's domain, what ispublic and what private, what is and is no within the state's competence, andso on. So, if you like, the survival andlimits of the state should be understood on th bases of the general tactics ofgovernmentality. Foucaultlearned to see history in flux, or rather, to see everything as flux,dynamically historical, where the present is always already multiple andcontradictory to itself. He learnedthis, partially, from Nietzsche, for whom the eternal recurrence of the same isthe eternal recurrence of difference. For anything to maintain itself dominant (in society, politics,economics, religion, history, language and culture), a constant reaffirmationof borders becomes necessary to keep the contours of the political landscape movingin ways that obfuscate from vision and from thinking, historical dynamics andwith them, dynamics of knowledge and of power. He linked discourse to powerrelations in ways that show how forms of knowledge legitimate and reproducepower relations and subject positions aligned with those. In today's neoliberal governmentality, theproduction of the homo economicus was an effect of certain power relations. There is here no subject prior to history:subjectivity has a history, and this history is intimately tied to theconfigurations of power through institutions, language, and culturalpractices. And maybe, in a completely general, rough, andtherefore inexact way, we could reconstruct the major forms, the majoreconomies of power in the following way: first, the state of justice, born in afeudal type of territoriality and broadly corresponding to a society ofcustomary and written law, with a whole interplay of commitments andlitigations; second, the administrative state that corresponds to a society ofregulations and disciplines; and finally, a state of government that is nolonger essentially defined by its territoriality, by the surface occupied, butby a mass: the mass of the population, with its volume, its density, and, forsure, the territory it covers, but which is, in a way, only one of itscomponents. This state of government,which essentially bears on the population and calls upon and employs economicknowledge as an instrument, would correspond to a society controlled byapparatuses of security. ThusFoucault shows how government came to be on top of older forms of power thatare different from it, although government also came as an extension of therole of territoriality and of administrative apparatuses that were then linkedto the population comprised within its borders and over which it came to seeitself as promoter of security and freedom, both seen as operating at the samelevel of rationality. To practicesecurity, the state needed to found its action on the population, who is tobe maximized, that is, be managed in a way that produces maximum health,happiness, normality and productivity to