Contextualizing family planning

the long version

The book uses various governmental texts to push its main point: that a sine-qua-non condition of liberal governing is 'othering', by which it means an understanding of "difference" as natural, essential, and irreducible. This argument is applied to an analysis of the formation of knowledge and identity in liberalism; the book aims to demonstrate that 'othering' founds all modern knowledge and power relations and therefore that racism, colonialism, eugenics, patriarchy, misogyny, homophobia, as well as all the past and present violences of modernity including slavery and genocide, are not aberrations, but built-in, structural and inevitable characteristics of liberal governing. Some of the chapters insist on the processes through which this 'othering' determines the formation of scientific knowledge, especially in the field of family planning. Despite being strongly inspired by Foucault, the book has a stab at the Anglo school of 'governmentality' studies that is accuses of a lazy and accomplice understanding of liberalism. It also volunteers a skeptical analysis of the euphoria surrounding the election of Barack Obama and of the future political effects of his mandate.