Foucault’s Marx: Subjectivity, History, and the Present

The question of the place and role of subject in Foucault has given rise to a multitude of new questions and potential uses (and abuses) of his work. In the Englishspeaking world, Eric Paras' controversial Foucault 2.0 (2006) is a good example of the positions taken and the resistance that followed. What cannot be taken lightly is that as more of Foucault's work becomes available in English, the more we encounter statements that come to many as a shock. The careful reader, however, will note (and many have) that these ‚shocking‛ statements on the subject have been available in English for some time. With all the novelty and excitement of this ‚new‛ quandary in Foucault studies, it seems appropriate to return to some of those texts that, at the very least, precede the more recent revelations. Two of these texts are the early translations of Foucault's 1978 interview with the Italian Marxist, Duccio Trombadori.

Pavón-Cuéllar, D. (2022). Foucault’s Marxism. Continental Thought and Theory: A Journal of Intellectual Freedom 3(4), 327-345. , 2022

If we accept the existence of multiple Marxisms, it can be said that despite those questioned and rejected by Foucault, there is one that he celebrated, adopted, and promoted, and that is presupposed and implicated in his thinking. There is, in two words, a Foucauldian Marxism. This Marxism requires a critique to distinguish and distance it from what differs from its interpretation of Marxism.

Foucault Studies, No. 14, Sept. 2012, p. 98-114 http://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/3894/4239 «Considérations sur le marxisme, la phénoménologie et le pouvoir» Cités, No. 52, Déc. 2012, p. 103-126 http://www.puf.com/Revues:Cit%C3%A9s_2012_-_N%C2%B0_52 http://www.cairn.info/revue-cites-2012--p-101.htm This is an interview with Michel Foucault by Colin Gordon and Paul Patton conducted at Foucault's Paris apartment in April 1978 and published in the original French and in English translation in 2012. There is an introductory note by Alain Beaulieu who arranged the authorised publication, and a note on the background to the interview by Colin Gordon.

1. The question I will ask today is simple: how have I tried, how has it been possible, in my work, to read Marx with and after Foucault? I would like to present a brief analysis of this experience. To do it, I had to position and arrange axes of Marx's reading around a dispositive of subjectivation retraced on Foucault; a dispositive from which I will try to demonstrate how it is possible to apply it to our present, how it imposes an adequate ontology. Inversely, if reading Marx means nourishing a radical will of transformation of historical being, Foucauldian subjectivation must be confronted with this determination. a) Today it seems to me that on the basis of Foucault's intuition and conclusions, the highly historicized tone and the style of Marx's critique of political economy need to be neatly installed within a materialist approach. Thus, evidently, reading Marx's historical writings together with all the others (especially those on the critique of political economy) is not enough; one needs to go deeper and develop, genealogically, his analysis of concepts by opening them up to the present. Foucault's approach has allowed us not only to grasp, but also to insist on the fact that the subjectivation of class struggle is an agency in the historical process. The analysis of this subjectivation will always need to be renewed and confronted with the transformative determinations that affect concepts in the historical process. In the framework of Foucault's stimulations and aside from any dialectics and teleology, historical subjectivation is assumed as a dispositive that is neither causal nor creative, and yet determining. Like Machiavelli: a historical materialism for us.

Policy Futures in Education, 2004

This article explores the relationship of Foucault to Marxism. Although he was often critical of Marxism, Foucault's own approach bears striking parallels to Marxism, as a form of method, as an account of history, and as an analysis of social structure. Like Marxism, Foucault represents social practices as transitory and all knowledge and intellectual formations as linked to social relations and power. In this he asserts the historical relativity of all systems and structures -of society, of thought, of theory and of concepts, while at the same time not denying a materialism of physical necessities. Yet while Foucault's approach reveals these important similarities to Marxism, the differences, claims the author, are fundamental. These concern his rejection of Hegel's conceptions of history and society as a unified developing totality, his rejection of essences and teleology, and his rejection of any utopian impulse revolving around the laws of economic development or the role of the proletariat in history. Foucault's own conception of change, in fact, is represented in ways that are altogether different to Marx's approach, and ultimately supports localistic forms of resistance and specific forms of democratic incrementalism, rather than revolutionary or totalistic strategies as the basis of transforming society.

Open Review of Educational Research, 2017

It is challenging to define who Michel Foucault was, whether he was a theorist, a philosopher, a historian, or a critic. In many of his books, and essays, Foucault denied being a philosopher or a theorist, nor did he want to be called a writer or a prophet. He described himself as an experimenter by saying that his work simply consists of 'philosophical fragments put to work in a historical field of problems'. Like Ball [2013. Foucault, power, and education. New York: Routledge, p. 2], we believe that Foucault tried hard not to be 'a something', opening up opportunities to develop and practise theory. Emeritus Professor Mark Olssen has written widely on Foucault's theoretical underpinnings and legacy. This conversation aims to revisit Olssen's work, as well as Foucault's own writings in order to engage with Foucault's philosophical background and the methods he developed. By exploring Foucault's theoretical and methodological approaches, the conversation situates his work within broader traditions of social theory, particularly within the works of Marx and Hegel. Our conversation starts by discussing Foucault's relationship with Marx and Hegel and moves towards his approach to history and his wider contribution to poststructuralist school of thought.

Critical Inquiry, 2023

s edited volume Foucault and Neoliberalism (2016) became the topic of a heated debate in the philosophical blogosphere for a while. The editors contend that Michel Foucault was "seduced" by neoliberalism; he facilitated its rise and betrayed the Marxist left. 1 The book's claims are arguable, textually ill-founded, and sensationalist, but the book is nevertheless symptomatic of the fractured and conflictual response in the academic left to the rise of neoliberalism. 2 The Marxist and the Foucauldian governmentality critiques have become the two main approaches in the critical analyses of neoliberalism, 3 and both of them have Critical Inquiry, volume 49, number 4, Summer 2023.

The article discusses the presence of "Marxian threads" in Michel Foucault's work beyond his criticism of Marxism. It focuses on a specific Marxian problematic, which means the production of labor power as a commodity, and aims at showing how reflections upon that problematic spur Foucault' s work in the early 1970s, providing us with a peculiar angle on the shifts that shape his trajectory after the publication of Discipline and Punish. At the center of the analysis pursued in the text are the lectures held by Foucault at the Collège de France in 1971/72 (Penal Theories and Institutions) and in 1972/73 (The Punitive Society). Many other texts and interviews are also discussed in order to shed light on Foucault's peculiar relationship with Marx and on the way in which a constant, although often underground dialogue with Marx helped him to delineate and develop his own problematic.

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).

This paper will assess to what extent the Foucauldian critique of the subject provides a problem for Marxist philosophy. One aspect of Marx’s critique of capitalism in his early work concerns the idea that the capitalist mode of production produces alienated labour, a consequent of which is that the worker is alienated from their ‘species-essence’, which, when paralleled with the Foucauldian conception of subjectivity, characterized purely as a socially contingent construct as a product of power, seems to call into question to what extent we can meaningfully talk about human nature and real selves. Section 1 of this paper will provide an outline of the Marxist conception of alienation and its roots in Feuerbach before turning to the Foucauldian critique in Section 2. The final section of this paper will evaluate Marx against Foucault, and offer a preliminary conception of how we can still meaningfully talk about alienation in a mode sensitive to Foucauldian scepticism towards subjectivity, from the position that we have to reject the Frankfurt School reading of Marx, which – in its discussion of ‘real interests’ – implies Marx is unduly normative.