Neoliberal Subjectivation: Between Foucault and Marx

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

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.

Etica e Politica, 2021

This essay seeks to elucidate if and to what extent Foucault's analyses of governmentality and neoliberalism as a form of governmentality in his 1978-1979 Collège de France lecture series can justifiably be used to come to a critical understanding of present-day neoliberalism(s). This has been a hotly debated issue among Foucault scholars based on what they consider to be ambiguities related to the normative status as well as the methodology of these lectures. In an attempt to contribute to this debate and to settle some of these concerns, I start by explicating how neolib-eralism has variously been interpreted and specify what I understand "neoliberalism" to mean. Foucault's notion of "governmentality" and his analyses of the mid-20 th C versions of German and American neoliberal governmentalities presented in these lectures are contextualized in terms of his general thinking in the late 70s and early 80s specifically his insistence on the critical attitude as virtue and his methodological specifications of philosophical-historical research. I contend that although Foucault's neoliberal governmentality lectures might be value-neutral, meth-odologically they remain a strategics of power/knowledge configurations imbued with the "critical attitude" that asserts the right not to be governed like that. It is therefore both justifiable and instructive to critically engage contemporary neoliberalisms through the lens of governmentality.

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).

2015

This review essay investigates two recent contributions - Geoffroy de Lagasnerie's "La dernière leçon de Michel Foucault" and Daniel Zamora's edited volume "Critiquer Foucault : Les années 1980 et la tentation néoliberale" - to the 'seduction thesis' - the claim that Michel Foucault, since the end of the 1970s became seduced by neoliberal thinkers. While the essay dismisses the 'seduction thesis', it calls for a need to revise some of the implicit theses on neoliberalism of Foucault and, in particular, governmentality studies.

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.

Critical Discourse Studies, 2012

Contemporary theorizations of neoliberalism are framed by a false dichotomy between, on the one hand, studies influenced by Foucault in emphasizing neoliberalism as a form of governmentality, and on the other hand, inquiries influenced by Marx in foregrounding neoliberalism as a hegemonic ideology. This article seeks to shine some light on this division in an effort to open up new debates and recast existing ones in such a way that might lead to more flexible understandings of neoliberalism as a discourse. A discourse approach moves theorizations forward by recognizing neoliberalism is neither a ‘top down’ nor ‘bottom up’ phenomena, but rather a circuitous process of socio-spatial transformation.