Foucault distanced himself from Marxism even though he worked in an environment—left French theory of the 1960s and 1970s—where Marxism was the dominant frame of reference. By viewing Foucault in the context of French Marxist theoretical debates of his day, we can connect his criticisms of Marxism to his discussions of the status of intellectuals. Foucault viewed standard Marxist approaches to the role of intellectuals as a problem of power and knowledge applicable to the Communist party. Marxist party intellectuals, in (...) his view, had developed rigid and universal theories and had used them to prescribe action, which prevented work on the sorts of problems that he uncovered—even though these problems were central to the development of capitalism. (shrink)

Michel Foucault was an energetic activist, yet his bleak depiction of totalizing power and his refusal to make normative claims have led many to judge that Discipline and Punish (1975) did not sustain a positive political project. This article offers a new, contextualist account of Foucault’s political purposes by reading Discipline and Punish as a tool for coalition building through historical worldmaking. Addressing the division and marginalization of movements on France’s “alternative left” like feminism and gay liberation, Foucault wove together (...) their differentiated concerns into a shared historical world. His apparently demoralizing identification of the same forms of power everywhere in fact revealed new possibilities for alliance. Focusing on Foucault’s unifying historical narratives reveals a positive project beyond the negative, denaturalizing “critique of power” we usually associate with his political thought. Foucault’s coalitional work of worldmaking may offer a model for genealogical political theory today. (shrink)

This paper reconstructs Foucault's concept of illegalism and explores its significance for his genealogies of modern punishment and racial formation. The concept of illegalism, as distinct from illegality, plays a double role. It allows Foucault to describe a ruling class tactic for managing inequalities and also to characterize an important vein of resistant subjugated knowledges. The political project of the prison is linked to a new crime policy that does not so much aim to repress illegalisms as to manage them (...) differentially. This practice of differential management, which arises in the 18th century, produces a primary split along class lines between two types of illegalism—an insight that has a certain resonance with Edwin's Sutherland's concept of “white collar crime.” Foucault's investigation of a third category of “infralegal illegalism” sheds light not only on the genealogy of the category of delinquency but also on his genealogy of racial categorization. Finally, Foucault argues that a genuinely radical critique of modern society must address the “need” organized political power has for the illegalisms from which it purportedly seeks to protect society. Against this practice of differentially managing illegalisms, Foucault seeks to reactivate a subjugated problematic that might open up questions about the transformative possibilities of illegalism today. (shrink)

In this paper I analyze two distinct contemporary perspectives on the Foucauldian concept of power and resistance, namely the perspectives enlightened by Judith Butler’s La vie psychique du pouvoir and by Stéphane Legrand’s Le marxisme oublié de Foucault. Although these two approaches are interesting ways of discussing the Foucauldian concept of resistance and power, they fail to take into account the role that intellectuals play in practices of social emancipation. Instead I develop the concept of “specific intellectual” in order to (...) explore in more depth the Foucauldian concept of resistance and social innovation. (shrink)

El presente artículo analiza el curso que Michel Foucault dictó en 1973 en el Collège de France titulado La sociedad punitiva. Mediante una reconstrucción conceptual y contextual del curso trataremos de evidenciar su deuda con la perspectiva marxista. Esta deuda da forma a un análisis que atiende a la especificidad de las relaciones de poder, pero –en consonancia con el planteamiento de buena parte de los movimientos radicales y contraculturales de la época– las vincula con el desarrollo de la sociedad (...) capitalista. Crítica de la economía política, genealogía de la moral y análisis del poder constituyen, así, los tres ejes desde los que se propone una historia de la sociedad disciplinaria sensiblemente diferente de la que el propio Foucault ofrecerá solo dos años después en Vigilar y castigar. De este modo, el curso de 1973 evidencia el fundamento marxista de las investigaciones que Foucault desarrolla en la primera mitad de la década de los setenta y cuyo abandono impactará enormemente en su obra alrededor del gobierno y el cuidado de sí. (shrink)

This article aims to reconstruct the intellectual, political and biographical connection between Michel Foucault and the group known as the "new philosophers". By focusing not only on their philosophical project, but also on the way in which they try to situate themselves in the new French intellectual field of the second half of the 1970s - deeply influenced by the decline of the political cycle of 1968 - we attempt to describe the boundaries of two ways of conceiving theoretical work (...) and of understanding the present that are radically different but, nevertheless, in some respects coincident. This analysis of the relationship between Foucault and the new philosophers - mainly developed around the figures of Bernard Henri-Lévy and André Glucksmann - aims, thus, to decipher not only some aspects of their philosophical proposal, but also of a particularly turbulent time crucial to understand the following decades. (shrink)

El presente artículo realiza una comparativa entre las propuestas de Guy Debord y Giorgio Agamben a partir de los términos espectáculo y gloria. A efectos de realizar la comparativa, tomaremos una pregunta inspirada en una célebre crítica de Nancy a Debord: ¿En qué medida podría decirse que efectivamente existe, más allá de las lógicas de la mercancía y la soberanía, una vida “auténtica”? Dividimos, luego de una sumaria introducción, el artículo en tres partes. En la primera, estudiamos la propuesta de (...) Debord en torno al par vida y espectáculo. En la segunda, dilucidamos la perspectiva de Agamben, quien dialoga con Debord, alrededor de los conceptos nuda vida, vida calificada, formas-de-vida y gloria. En la tercera, intentamos ofrecer una respuesta a la pregunta de investigación planteada a partir de la cuestión de una posible vida auténtica en relación con la revolución política. Finalmente, ofrecemos algunas conclusiones. (shrink)

This article examines the controversy that has arisen in the last decade about Michel Foucault’s supposed “fascination” with neoliberalism, especially around the contributions of Daniel Zamora and Michael C. Behrent. Their theses are contrasted with Foucauldian writings and reconsidered from a different approach to the historical, political and intellectual context of the French 1970s, which, in our opinion, shows a lack of complexity in the studies of those authors. Thus, this paper tries to establish that the limitations of Michel Foucault’s (...) approach to neoliberalism do not respond to any sort of neoliberal “sympathies”, but to another kind of problems-mainly analytical-. (shrink)