Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 September 2009
Nothing is a risk in itself; there is no risk in reality. But on the other hand, anything can be a risk; it all depends on how one analyses the danger, considers the event.
(Ewald, 1991: 199)Introduction
There is no such thing as risk in reality. Risk is a way – or rather, a set of different ways – of ordering reality, of rendering it into a calculable form. It is a way of representing events so they might be made governable in particular ways, with particular techniques, and for particular goals. It is a component of diverse forms of calculative rationality for governing the conduct of individuals, collectivities and populations. It is thus not possible to speak of incalculable risks, or of risks that escape our modes of calculation, and even less to speak of a social order in which risk is largely calculable and contrast it with one in which risk has become largely incalculable.
A second proposition follows: the significance of risk does not lie with risk itself but with what risk gets attached to. Risk, to put it in Kantian terms, is a category of our understanding rather than intuition or sensibility (cf. Ewald, 1991: 199). If the task of critique – after the work of Michel Foucault – is to investigate the historical conditions of true knowledge, then the critique of risk will investigate the different modes of calculation of risk and the moral and political technologies within which such calculations are to be found.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.