Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jeffrey T. Nealon is Professor of English at Penn State University. He is the author of Double Reading: Postmodernism after Deconstruction (1993), Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity (1998), and The Theory Toolbox (2003).

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FOUCAULT BEYOND FOUCAULT

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments.............................................................................................viiIntroduction: Foucault Today................................................................................1Chapter 1 Foucault Beyond Foucault..........................................................................7Chapter 2 Once More, with Intensity: Foucault's History of Power Revisited..................................24Chapter 3 Genealogies of capitalism: Foucault, with Deleuze and Jameson.....................................54Chapter 4 Foucault's Infamous ethics; or, Biopower, Globalization, and ethical Scarcity.....................74Chapter 5 Resisting, Foucault...............................................................................94Notes.......................................................................................................113Works Cited.................................................................................................127Index of Names..............................................................................................135

Chapter One

The task of philosophy is to describe the nature of today, and of "ourselves today." With the proviso that we do not allow ourselves the facile, rather theatrical declaration that this moment in which we exist is one of total perdition, in the abyss of darkness, or a triumphant daybreak, and so on. It is a time like any other, or rather, a time that is never quite like any other. -Foucault, "Structuralism and Poststructuralism"

This book has two related aims. The first is constituted by my sense that, while Foucault has been dead for more than two decades and the world has changed quite substantially over those years, his work continues to offer us a set of valuable tools for intervening within today's discourses of power. In short, Foucault's work (especially his mid-career work on power and his late work on biopower and governmentality) still has much to teach us about the singular imbrications of practice, subjectivity, resistance, and power that saturate our present-"a time like any other, or rather, a time that is never quite like any other." If one takes seriously the Foucaultian provocation that theories are toolboxes, conceptual schemas that function primarily within their transversal linkages to other archives, then there would seem no more "Foucaultian" project than one that attempts to take "Foucault beyond Foucault," into domains that he never could have analyzed.

In mobilizing that project, however, it became clear to me that such a trajectory also committed me to a second, related task: to perform a different or counterreading of the relation between the "middle" ("genealogical") Foucault and his "late" work on ethics and subjectivity. this second project-retracing Foucault's conceptual path from 1969's Archaeology of Knowledge to his death in 1984-became necessary precisely because of the exigency of the first. In short, it became clear to me that if one wants to read Foucault as something other than an apologist for the present, for the increasing "privatization" of economics, subjectivity, resistance, and power since his death in 1984, then one has to counter (or at least nuance) what has become the dominant sense of "the late Foucault": the sense that after the mid-1970s, he largely abandoned his work on the social interpellations of power and became instead a thinker of individual, artistic self-creation as a mode of resistance.

A concise version of this consensus concerning the late Foucault can be found, for example, in Understanding Foucault, which gives us the following gloss on Foucault's "later writings, where he shifts his focus from the effects of power to the ways in which human beings become 'subjects'":

An important concept that comes out of his work is that the self can be "authored" by us, the subjects, and that we can produce these selves and our lives as works of art. Foucault's early work on subjectivity effectively debunked the idea that identity is inherent or natural, but it failed to explain how and why individuals can in fact act autonomously, or resist the power of disciplinary forces and institutional discourses. In his later work he argues that individuals can in fact "cultivate" themselves through what he calls "arts of existence" that not only allow us to become self-determining agents, but also provide the grounds for us to challenge and resist power structures.

Although I'll try to provide a critique of this line of reasoning throughout the text, here at the beginning I'd simply like to mark the hegemony of this reading of the late Foucault. According to the consensus constituted by the secondary literature, Foucault's early and middle work culminates in a kind of totalizing theoretical cage (of which "discipline" is the highest manifestation) that in turn constituted a kind of crisis or dead-end for Foucault's thinking by the mid-1970s. As Fredric Jameson puts it, Foucault seems to have constructed a nearly iron "'winner loses' logic": "the more powerful the vision of some increasingly total system or logic-the Foucault of the prisons book is the obvious example-the more powerless the reader comes to feel." Hoping to reinvigorate a discourse and practice of resistance, Foucault turns in his late work-after Discipline and Punish (1975) and the first volume of The History of Sexuality (early 1976)-toward a more positive rendering of the formerly "docile" subject, highlighting the individual's potentials for subversive agency. In short, Foucault's late work performs a 180-degree turn away from the (too-totalizing and demoralizing) "power" discourse of the early and mid-1970s and culminates in a renewed appreciation of the enlightenment subject, the ethical arts of the self, and resistance to normalized totalization through individual action.

On this line of reasoning, the 1984 essay "What Is enlightenment?" becomes the central theoretical text where one can see Foucault overtly thematizing this softening of his earlier stances toward truth, subjectivity, reason, and the enlightenment itself. As Lois Mcnay puts it, Foucault's late work turns to an "'ethics of the self'":

Through the formation of a "critical ontology of the self" it is possible to formulate an alternative ethical standpoint from which individuals can begin to resist the normalizing force of the "government of individualization." The idea of an ethics of the self redefines Foucault's relation with a tradition of enlightenment thought, which he rereads through the figures of Kant and Baudelaire. From this reinterpretation, Foucault is able to deploy the concepts of autonomy, reflexivity, and critique and thereby overcome some of what have been regarded as the nihilistic implications of his earlier work on discipline. The idea of ethics of the self partially overcomes some of the difficulties ... arising from Foucault's insistence on individuals as docile bodies rather than as agents with the capacity for autonomous action.

Foucault's work does of course consistently shift its targets and interests as it discovers new objects and problems, and as part of his peripatetic research agenda, he clearly does become increasingly interested in the subjective...