What does rethinking the concept of the political from a posthumanist point of view entail? More specifically, I want to ask here, what resources are made available to us for this task in Michel Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France published in translation under the title, The Birth of Biopolitics? My approach to these questions may be usefully contrasted with Wendy Brown's account of the waning of the political sphere in her recent book, Undoing the Demos, where she laments the weakening of the political as such under the pressure of neoliberalism. More specifically, she identifies the incursion of the neoliberal logic of the market into what was heretofore the autonomous, or at least largely autonomous, realm of the political, where popular sovereignty should be allowed to express itself and be articulated by a set of values not subject to neoliberalism's logic of the market. Taking off from a critical reading of The Birth of Biopolitics, she argues that ‘neoliberal reason, ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, culture, and a vast range of quotidian activity, is converting the distinctly political character, meaning and operation of democracy's constituent elements into economic ones’ (Brown 2015: 17). For neoliberal reason, as she characterises it,

As she notes, critics of neoliberalism typically focus on four main negative effects of this shift: intensified inequality between polarised haves and have nots, with a stagnant (or worse) middle class caught in between; the commercialisation of activities that ought not be subject to the logic or dis-course of commercialisation (education, wilderness, green space and carbon emissions, but also organ trafficking); increasingly inappropriate intimacy between finance capital, corporations and the state; and, finally, an increasingly unstable economic landscape brought on by the volatility of the financial markets themselves (epitomised by the 2008–9 ‘bubble’ and meltdown),