Michel Foucault, Accelerationist

New research into Foucault's life and work has coalesced around the thesis that Foucault embraced key neoliberal ideas and policies. Assessing this neoliberal-Foucault thesis, we argue that there is considerable evidence for the claim that Foucault " flirted with an outlook anchored on the political Right … a school of thought embraced by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Alan Greenspan " (M.Behrent). This ought to disqualify Foucault as an intellectual resource in resistance against neoliberal rule. We argue that it does not. We do this in two steps, both of which are based on a close reading of his Collège de France lecture courses on governmentality. We use Foucault against himself to identify junctures at which Foucault took methodological and conceptual turns inconsistent with his own conceptual dispositif. Next we use Foucault against himself to extract a critical perspective on neoliberalism from his lectures, one consistent with his overall work. In conclusion, we argue that Marxian castings of Foucault as an anti-Marx overlook that one can distil from him a radical critique of capitalist modernity while respecting the integrity of his work. As our rereading of his lectures on neoliberalism illustrates, Foucault's insights constitute a useful intellectual resource for making neoliberalism thinkable as a dangerously alienating project that ought to be discontinued. Instead of positing a polarity between Marx and Foucault, a more constructive way forward is a dialectical approach: acknowledging their irreconcilability while " making Foucault function in Marx, and Marx in Foucault, in the service of an enlarged critical thought, but without guarantees " (E.Balibar).

The Sage Handbook of Neoliberalism, 2018

This is the typescript of: Mitchell Dean, ‘Foucault and the neoliberalism controversy’, in D. Cahill, M. Cooper, M. Konings, and D. Primrose (eds), The Sage Handbook of Neoliberalism. London: Sage, pp. 40-54. It includes reviews of a) the current controversy of Foucault's relation to neoliberalism (2012-2016), b) Foucault's views of neoliberalism and the arts of government, and c) his view of neoliberal subjectivity, and refections on Foucault and d) his intellectual habitus, e) his political and historical context, and f) his relation to neoliberalism as an ideal, a concrete political program and a social policy framework. It argues that there are three specific elements of what might be considered neoliberalism to which Foucault had an affirmative relationship: 1. the form of regulation without 'subjectification' imagined by the Chicago School; 2. the political faction of the French Socialists, the Second Left; and 3. the critique of the welfare state as inducing dependency.

2020

In the late 1970s, Michel Foucault dedicated a number of controversial lectures on the subject of neoliberalism. Had Foucault been seduced by neoliberalism? Did France’s premier leftist intellectual, near the end of his career, turn to the right? In this book, Geoffroy de Lagasnerie argues that far from abandoning the left, Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism was a means of probing the limits and lacunae of traditional political philosophy, social contract theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. For Lagasnerie, Foucault’s analysis was an attempt to discover neoliberalism’s singularity, understand its appeal, and unearth its emancipatory potential in order to construct a new art of rebelliousness. By reading Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism as a means of developing new practices of emancipation, Lagasnerie offers an original and compelling account of Michel Foucault’s most controversial work.

introduces a forum of three expert-scholars of Foucault, placing the debate in historical context

2018

man, in the name of normal man, in the name of good health—they are the precipitate of a series of powers. If we would like to critique these powers, we must not carry it out in the name of an idea of man that was constructed by these powers. When the vulgar Marxist speaks of total man, of man reconciled with himself, what is at stake here? It’s normal man, balanced man. How was this image of man formed? By using a psychiatric, medical knowledge and power, by starting from a power that normalizes. To make a political critique in the name of humanism means reintroducing into one’s arsenal the very thing against which we must struggle.” (DE1, 1685)

The Cultural Studies Program's colloquium (CSC) series features talks by distinguished scholars from across the disciplines. Graduate student Dave Zeglen interviewed Daniel Zamora, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois at Chicago. See below for the transcript.

International Review of Social Research, 2011

The contemporary investigations on power, politics, government and knowledge are profoundly influenced by Foucault's work. Governmentality, as a specific way of seeing the connections between the formation of subjectivities and population politics, has been used extensively in anthropology as neoliberal governmentalities have been spreading after the 1990s all over the world. A return to Foucault can help to clarify some overtly ideological uses of 'neoliberalism' in nowadays social sciences.

Contemporary Political Theory, 2017

Daniel Zamora and Michael C. Behrent's edited volume Foucault and Neoliberalism is concerned with the intellectual ambiguity of the later Foucault in relation to what was then nascent neo-liberalism. At its core is the uneasiness that a critic of neo-liberalism should feel when encountering Foucault's presentation of neo-liberalism. The primary focus is therefore the intellectual backdrop of the Collège de France lectures, published in English as Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics, as well as various other interjections of this period and the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality. The question is an important one because it tackles head-on Foucault's presentation of neo-liberalism, of which he is ambivalent at best. The essays in this collection are particularly pertinent for academic circles in which, as Zamora notes in his introduction, '[Foucault] has acquired almost saint-like status' that is also part of the 'critical Left' (p. 2). This is not simply an attempt to paint Foucault as a neo-liberal or to postulate the question of whether he was for or against neo-liberalism, but rather to understand the intellectual context of Foucault's commentary on neo-liberalism. This is something that the editors contend is often lacking, particularly in American scholarship (p. 26). In this sense, the essays in this volume constitute a rich contribution to recent intellectual history and political theory that will be an important reference for both Foucault scholars and those interested in the historical development of neo-liberal thought. The volume is book-ended with an introduction and conclusion, written by the editors, that frame the essays within. This gives the volume a narrative that so many edited volumes lack. Also included is a short essay by Foucault that originally appeared in Le Nouvelle Observateur in 1977, in which he glowingly reviews Glucksmann's (1980) The Master Thinkers. His endorsement of Glucksmann's attack on the politics of the Left, as a system of domination, in turn seems to open Foucault up to thinking about contemporary politics in a different way. This is the lens through which we are asked to view Foucault's engagement with neo-liberalism. This is an important point because it puts Foucault's ambivalence towards neoliberalism into a context in which it is a proxy for a critique of Leftist politics. It was therefore a strategic intervention into the politics of the late 1970s through which

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 2024

This article critically examines Foucault's engagement with neoliberalism. While Foucault declares that his analysis of this tradition is primarily descriptive, I argue that he continually questions whether neoliberalism is less disciplinary and biopolitically normalizing than traditional forms of liberalism. Although Foucault does not endorse neoliberalism as a prescriptive solution to these problems of normalization, his interest in such problems is consistent with his tendency to privilege freedom over other values like justice and equality. This helps to clarify the normative stakes of Foucault's analysis while rejecting any suggestion that he was invested in neoliberalism as a comprehensive political program. Indeed, I repudiate the claim that he was “seduced” by neoliberalism. Furthermore, I reject the idea that he was trying to “invent” a distinctively socialist governmentality through the prism of neoliberalism. Finally, I consider the broader significance of this discussion for normative political philosophy.