Foucault: yay or nay?

[ChangeAndChance]

Did one of these with Nietsche earlier, but I'm reading Foucault's Birth of Biopolitics for a Poli Sci course this term and I'm curious as to what RevLeft has to say on him. He seems to be more popular amongst those on the post-left than with traditional Marxists.

[Major K.]

Foucault was something of a celebrity philosopher a few decades ago. He has an intriguing method (influenced heavily by the project laid out by Heidegger in his later years) of deconstruction, which he applies to some value to sexuality and other aspects of modernity. I personally think he uses a lot of words to say something very simple, but I still can't help but like the guy and his played-down French pomposity.

[Thirsty Crow]

Did one of these with Nietsche earlier, but I'm reading Foucault's Birth of Biopolitics for a Poli Sci course this term and I'm curious as to what RevLeft has to say on him. He seems to be more popular amongst those on the post-left than with traditional Marxists.
Not sure what edition it is but...History of Sexuality ain't that bad. The big problem is the issue of the discursive formation of the subject and power, something which can't be approached without considering the production of day to day necessities of life. In other words, he never got round to actually explaining the basis of power. I also don't think Foucault has any significant standing debt to Heidegger (that would be Derrida). Or I'm blessed in my ignorance.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

Foucault gets a bad rap from Marxists because he flirted with Marxism but abandoned it, then was insufficiently critical of the Iranian revolution. That doesn't diminish the huge relevance of his work, however.


Not sure what edition it is but...History of Sexuality ain't that bad. The big problem is the issue of the discursive formation of the subject and power, something which can't be approached without considering the production of day to day necessities of life. In other words, he never got round to actually explaining the basis of power. I also don't think Foucault has any significant standing debt to Heidegger (that would be Derrida). Or I'm blessed in my ignorance.

I think the strength of Foucault isn't in class analysis, but in taking critique to realms which had been ignored (or at least insufficiently critiqued) by Marxists. While it's easy to say "Well, Foucault didn't consider the systemic domination of Capitalism in power relations", the fact remains that most anti-capitalists during the Cold War were ignoring abuses of psychiatry, laws based on sexual morality, and so on in the countries governed by so-called "really existing Socialism". The fact is that on many social issues, Marxists today are probably closer to Foucault than they would recognize, and certainly closer to him than many Marxist contemporaries of Foucault.

There's definitely some influence from Heidegger in there, although perhaps it is less clear than the more obvious influence that Heidegger had on Derrida..

[blake 3:17]

The British SWP were just as big celebrators of Iranian revolution! I think Foucault's early work is pretty interesting, and his book on prisons, is really his most important political work.

In the 50s, 60s and early 70s he identified as a Communist, Trotskyist, Maoist and anarchist. Later he was a liberal, which I'm fine with, but he was a serious sell out.

From an excellent article in Jacobin part of a series on Foucault:
Foucault, then, doesn’t advocate neoliberalism, but he adopts all of its critiques of the welfare state. He attacks the supposed “dependency” it produces, the very notion of “rights,” and its negative effect on the poor. His objective is thus not to move towards a totally neoliberal society, but to incorporate within the socialist corpus some of the decisive elements of the neoliberal critique of the state. It’s precisely in this sense that Colin Gordon sees him as a sort of precursor to Blairism.

This thesis is also illustrated by Foucault’s closeness to Pierre Rosanvallon, the French progenitor of the “social-libéralisme” now dominant within the French Socialist Party.

Moreover, it is in this light that we should understand Foucault’s support for the anticommunist New Philosophers of the 1970s. As has been shown by Michael Scott Christofferson — to whom I am indebted — this support was aimed equally against the Union of the Left and the whole ideology it represented. (The Union of the Left was the socialist-communist electoral alliance initiated in the 1970s by French socialist leader François Mitterrand, marking a sharp left turn for the socialists.)

To my mind, Foucault was thus not asking the “right questions.” On the contrary, he popularized a good part of the neoliberal common sense that constituted the theoretical basis of the war waged against the welfare state. This common sense, far from being a secondary issue, represents in my view one of the principal obstacles to the institution of far-reaching social policies.

How could we seriously think that discrediting state action in the social domain and abandoning the very idea of social “rights” constitutes progress toward thinking “beyond the welfare state”? All it has done is allow the welfare state’s destruction, not a glimpse of something “beyond.”

The example of the quotation from Beatriz Preciado is particularly clear. In this succinct statement, she posits that the retreat of the welfare state is ultimately not a serious political problem. We should probably even celebrate it, since it will now liberate individuals from social control. The least one can say is that only an academic, someone relatively protected from social precarity, could say such a thing.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/michel-foucault-responsibility-socialist/

[wehbolno]

Some of his 'Discipline and Punish' book is truly amazing. It's deep with analysis of class antagonism, whether explicit or implicit, definitely worth a read.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

Some of his 'Discipline and Punish' book is truly amazing. It's deep with analysis of class antagonism, whether explicit or implicit, definitely worth a read.


The most significant aspect of discipline and punish for Leftists isn't so much directly related to class analysis so much as the motivations behind and structure of disciplining itself, in all its forms. Why do we incarcerate people (whatever their class, be they a bourgeois fraudster or a working class thief) instead of any other kind of punishment, and how does it fit into a broader system of oppression? I think this is what Foucault answers, and something he rightly sees the "old Left" as not doing enough of.

Its important not to get caught up in the "Foucault vs the Left" dialogue that a lot of Marxists and postmodernists alike like to whip out to berate other intellectuals who disagree with their priorities, but there are important differences too in the positions of Foucault and Marxism.

[Бай Ганьо]

For our Chicago comrades:


Daniel Zamora - "Foucault and Neoliberalism" with Walter Benn Michaels - 3CT

Monday, February 22at 6 PM in CST

The Seminary Co-op Bookstores

5751 S Woodlawn Ave, Chicago, Illinois 60637

"'Foucault and Neoliberalism' has already begun to launch a crucial historical and political debate. Its critique and historical contextualization of Foucault's late work open up new perspectives on the rise of neoliberalism in France and the general evolution of the intellectual left since the 1980s. From the retreat of class analysis to the triumph both of identity politics and of a conception of social justice limited to equality of opportunity, Foucault and Neoliberalism helps us first to understand and then to imagine an alternative to the political dead end of the contemporary left."

--Walter Benn Michaels, University of Illinois at Chicago

Daniel Zamora discusses "Foucault and Neoliberalism"

Co-sponsored by Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT)

At the Co-op

About the book: Michel Foucault's death in 1984 coincided with the fading away of the hopes for social transformation that characterized the postwar period. In the decades following his death, neoliberalism has triumphed and attacks on social rights have become increasingly bold. If Foucault was not a direct witness of these years, his work on neoliberalism is nonetheless prescient: the question of liberalism occupies an important place in his last works. Since his death, Foucault's conceptual apparatus has acquired a central, even dominant position for a substantial segment of the world's intellectual left.

However, as the contributions to this volume demonstrate, Foucault's attitude towards neoliberalism was at least equivocal. Far from leading an intellectual struggle against free market orthodoxy, Foucault seems in many ways to endorse it. How is one to understand his radical critique of the welfare state, understood as an instrument of biopower? Or his support for the pandering anti-Marxism of the so-called new philosophers? Is it possible that Foucault was seduced by neoliberalism?

This question is not merely of biographical interest: it forces us to confront more generally the mutations of the left since May 1968, the disillusionment of the years that followed and the profound transformations in the French intellectual field over the past thirty years. To understand the 1980s and the neoliberal triumph is to explore the most ambiguous corners of the intellectual left through one of its most important figures.

About the author: Daniel Zamora is a postdoctoral fellow in sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and has recently published "Foucault and Neoliberalism" at Polity Press.

About the interlocutor: Walter Benn Michaels teaches at UIC. In addition to The Beauty of a Social Problem, his recent books are The Shape of the Signifier and The Trouble with Diversity, which will be reissued in a 10th anniversary edition this spring.

https://www.facebook.com/events/1650359438522329/