Eric Schliesser on "Lice and Biopolitics"

Schliesser thought he could escape the Borg, but a senior philosopher elsewhere has tracked him down for us here. In this very interesting reflection, he writes about the head-lice inspection all Dutch kids undergo at school, and connnects it to Foucaultian analyses of biopolitics (or, with less fancy terms, that government rationality that licences, among other things, involvement in public health). But, as Schliesser recognizes,  it's hard to be simply "against" public health -- what, you  *want* your kids and other kids to have lice?

Also, any objections, like his about evidence of the effectiveness of school level inspection, share much the same rationality -- what's the most effective means of obtaining a health-managed population? Now we could do some sort of neoliberal twist here: some sort of market in private insurance against the costs of head lice treatment with a tax penalty for non-compliance might fit -- a AHLIA (Affordable Head Lice Inspection Act), if you will -- but would this neoliberalization not still fit within a biopolitical horizon?* Or, if you prefer more direct means, do we continue at the level of schools or centralize ("up") to the level of the city or state, or further de-centralize ("down") to the level of the household with say, random house visits?**

* I was reminded the other week on FB of just how brief and passing are the points in Security, Territory, Population in which the terms "governmentality," "liberalism," and "biopower" are brought into close proximity. 

 

** This last bit reminds me of the discussion Schliesser and I had about Plato's Laws, back in the days of the unruptured Borg, though there the worry was the health of the soul through checking on games and music. The difference, of course, is that Plato was much less worried -- to put it mildly -- about the inculcation of obedience through submission to such checkups than Schliesser.