Noopolitics and political action in Maurizio Lazzarato: contributions for a political collective psychology in control societies

Abstract

In this review of the concept of noopolitics, I offer a follow-up of the way Maurizio Lazzarato proposes deriving it from the notion of biopolitics in Michel Foucault. In this exercise I expose the bridges that Lazzarato is establishing between the approaches coming from a political philosophy, particularly the work of Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, and the sociology of Gabriel Tarde, to ad-dress a collective phenomenon that would characterize for him the current societies of control: the net. The net would be the field in which a particular agonistic would be deployed for the ex-ercise of power and for contemporary political action. With noopolitics Lazzarato contributes to an understanding of this form of exercise of power and the potential of collective political action. In this sense, their contribution becomes relevant for areas of psychology that have these prob-lems as an object, such as collective psychology and political psychology.