Foucault and Neoliberalism

Daniel Zamora, Michael C. Behrent, Daniel Zamora, Michael C. Behrent

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781509501779, 9781509501762
• eBook ISBN: 9781509501809
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Michel Foucault's death in 1984 coincided with the fading away of the hopes for social transformation that characterized the postwar period. In the decades following his death, neoliberalism has triumphed and attacks on social rights have become increasingly bold. If Foucault was not a direct witness of these years, his work on neoliberalism is nonetheless prescient: the question of liberalism occupies an important place in his last works. Since his death, Foucault's conceptual apparatus has acquired a central, even dominant position for a substantial segment of the world's intellectual left.

However, as the contributions to this volume demonstrate, Foucault's attitude towards neoliberalism was at least equivocal. Far from leading an intellectual struggle against free market orthodoxy, Foucault seems in many ways to endorse it. How is one to understand his radical critique of the welfare state, understood as an instrument of biopower? Or his support for the pandering anti-Marxism of the so-called new philosophers? Is it possible that Foucault was seduced by neoliberalism?

This question is not merely of biographical interest: it forces us to confront more generally the mutations of the left since May 1968, the disillusionment of the years that followed and the profound transformations in the French intellectual field over the past thirty years. To understand the 1980s and the neoliberal triumph is to explore the most ambiguous corners of the intellectual left through one of its most important figures.

1
Foucault and New Philosophy: Why Foucault Endorsed André Glucksmann's The Master Thinkers^*

Michael Scott Christofferson

In 1977, “new philosophy” took French intellectual and political life by storm. In their runaway best-selling books, “new philosophers,” the most notable of whom were André Glucksmann and Bernard Henri Lévy, offered a radical critique of Marxism and revolutionary politics by linking them both to the Gulag. Further, they argued that transformative politics in general and, at the limit, reason and science were dangerously affiliated with totalitarianism. The only safe politics, they suggested, was the defense of human rights. This was a crucial moment in French intellectual and political life that marked the end of the revolutionary upsurge begun by 1968 and the transition to more moderate liberal and republican political options. Making sense of it is crucial for understanding both recent French history and, more specifically, the trajectories of the intellectuals engaged in it. This is notably the case for Michel Foucault, a central figure in the ideological–political debates of the 1970s.

Foucault intervened in the debate over new philosophy with a laudatory review of Glucksmann's The Master Thinkers in the May 9–15, 1977 issue of the mass-circulation weekly Le Nouvel Observateur. Foucault's intervention was important for himself, for Glucksmann, and for “new philosophy” in general. For Foucault, it was not a minor matter. His support for Glucksmann resulted in irreparable breaks with old friends, such as Claude Mauriac and, most notably, Gilles Deleuze, who had broadly shared Foucault's Nietzchean inspiration and post-1968 philosophical and political trajectory, but was sharply critical of new philosophy and remained, unlike Foucault, more generally supportive of post-1968 radicalism.¹ For Glucksmann and new philosophy, Foucault's endorsement was even more important because, as I have argued elsewhere,² new philosophy, although a mass-media phenomenon, would have been much less successful if it had not received support from leading intellectuals.

Foucault's praise for The Master Thinkers has presented something of a mystery to scholars of Foucault because Glucksmann arguably simplified and twisted Foucault's ideas beyond recognition. Evaluations of it have consequently differed greatly. Didier Eribon, Foucault's first biographer, downplays its importance by holding that Foucault's support for The Master Thinkers was “dictated more by political than by philosophical considerations.”³ By contrast, Michael C. Behrent argues in his contribution to this volume that “the extent to which this shift [the anti-totalitarian one in new philosophy] impacted his own thinking has been underestimated” (p. 26). Here I will address the problem of Foucault's support for Glucksmann as a point of departure for understanding Foucault's politics and conception of power in the early to mid-1970s. While complicating Eribon's picture of Foucault taking a primarily political position, I also seek to demonstrate that Foucault's endorsement of Glucksmann was hardly accidental, but rather a reflection of Foucault's philosophical practice, its relationship with politics and the mass media, and shortcomings in his conception of power that limited its effectiveness for thinking about the twentieth century. It may be from Behrent's downstream perspective that the moment of new philosophy was a turning point for Foucault, but looking upstream toward 1977 Foucault's endorsement of Glucksmann was less of a break with Foucault's past than it may seem.

André Glucksmann's The Master Thinkers was the culmination of Glucksmann's disaffection with post-1968 revolutionary politics and his effort to turn a broader public away from it and other efforts at radical political transformation such as that represented by the Union of the Left, which seemed likely to win the March 1978 legislative elections when Glucksmann's book was published in 1977. Glucksmann, who had been a member of the Maoist Gauche prolétarienne in the early 1970s, had already tried to justify and explain his disillusionment with the revolutionary Left in his 1975 book La cuisinière et le mangeur d'hommes: essai sur l'État, le marxisme, et les camps de concentration [The Cook and the Cannibal: Essay on the State, Marxism, and the Concentration Camps]. Taking as his point of departure Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago and the French response to it, Glucksmann argues that the Gulag is a culminating point of Western historical development, the great moments of which are “Platonism (and its slaves), classical Reason (and its inmates), Marxism (and its camps).”⁴ The Gulag and its Marxist theoretical foundation are but the latest effort by elites to build up state structures and ideologies to dominate the masses, which Glucksmann calls “the pleb.” This link between the Gulag and the West explains, Glucksmann argues, why French intellectuals have not been more indignant in the face of the Gulag. Considering theory and the state to be instruments of domination, Glucksmann calls for a politics of resistance by the pleb in both East and West. These populist and anarchist conclusions find sustenance in Foucault's work. Foucault's Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961) is used by Glucksmann to establish the link between Western historical development and the Gulag, as it was in his view “the general hospital,” “crowning achievement of the new Reason,” that “prefigures the concentration camp.”⁵ For Glucksmann, the twentieth century “innovates little” in relation to this earlier precedent, “even the idea of deporting is not its own; the general hospital already served as the warehouse for the unfortunate that one rounded up [raflait] to send them ‘to the Islands’.”⁶ Foucault was central not only to Glucksmann's historical analysis, but also to his political response to it. Politics, Glucksmann stated in 1975, should take a Foucauldian turn, focusing its aim on micropowers, the disciplines that are at “the root of the state power.”⁷

Glucksmann's The Master Thinkers of 1977 follows the same line of argumentation as his earlier The Cook and the Cannibal. Joining Marx in infamy are Hegel, Fichte, and Nietzsche, also presented by Glucksmann as philosophers of a coercive and normalizing state. Glucksmann argues that these “master thinkers” systematized and justified the modern state's project of domination, itself put on the “order of the day” by the French Revolution. They promoted an interiorization of the law that smothers the pleb's protest at its inception. While not directly responsible for the Gulag and Auschwitz, they “systematized and rendered strategically malleable ideas and tactics largely diffused before them in societies in the process of becoming rationally disciplinary.” They are guilty for having “under the cover of knowledge…put together the mental apparatus indispensable to the launching of the great final solutions of the twentieth century.”⁸

Glucksmann's book is constructed around a number of homologous oppositions: the state versus the pleb, anti-Semitism versus Judaism, revolution and power versus resistance, and reason and science versus ignorance. The state seeks to dominate the pleb, submit it to its will and force it to internalize its subordination. This project leads directly to anti-Semitism, the camps, and genocide:

All that wanders, that is the question. Under the cloak of the Jew one condemns an entire little world that threatens to elude the state in crossing frontiers, and that, in transgressing them, upsets disciplinary society. The Europe of states seeks to exclude the marginal. The master thinkers step down for the master purgers who mix Jews and homosexuals in the Nazi camps and all that deviates in the Russian camps. Liberal Europe wanted to assimilate and normalize more calmly; cultural genocide substitutes for physical genocide.

Although the project of domination is that of the state, intellectuals, science, and reason are all essentially complicit in it. Science and the texts of the master thinkers are simply strategies of domination, and “to think is to dominate.” Conversely, behind Nazism and Stalinism lie texts and science. Neither of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• List of endorsers
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1: Foucault and New Philosophy: Why Foucault Endorsed André Glucksmann's The Master Thinkers
• 2: Liberalism without Humanism: Michel Foucault and the Free-Market Creed, 1976–1979
• 3: Foucault, the Excluded, and the Neoliberal Erosion of the State
• 4: Foucault, Ewald, Neoliberalism, and the Left
• 5: Bourdieu, Foucault, and the Penal State in the Neoliberal Era
• 6: The Unfulfilled Promises of the Late Foucault and Foucauldian “Governmentality Studies”
• 7: Michel Foucault and the Spiritualization of Philosophy
• 8: The Great Rage of Facts
• Conclusion: The Strange Failure (and Peculiar Success) of Foucault's Project
• Index
• End User License Agreement