THINKING POLITICS Series Editors: Matthew Sharpe and Geoff Boucher Politics in the twenty-first century is immensely complex and multi-faceted, and alternative theorisations of debates that radically renew older ideas have grown from a trickle to a flood in the past twenty years. The most interesting and relevant contemporary thinkers have responded to new political challenges – such as liberal multiculturalism, new directions in feminist thinking, theories of global empire and biopolitical power, and challenges to secularism – by widening the scope of their intellectual engagements and responding to the new politics. The thinkers selected for inclusion in the series have all responded to the urgency and complexity of thinking about politics today in fresh ways. Books in the series will provide clear and accessible introductions to the major ideas in contemporary thinking about politics, through a focus in each volume on a key political thinker. Rather than a roll-call of the ‘usual suspects’, it will focus on new thinkers who offer provocative new directions and some neglected older thinkers whose relevance is becoming clear as a result of the changing situation. www.euppublishing.com/series/thpo FOUCAULT AND POLITICS A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION 2 Mark G. E. Kelly © Mark G. E. Kelly, 2014 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ www.euppublishing.com Typeset in Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 7685 9 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 7686 6 (paperback) ISBN 978 0 7486 7687 3 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 7689 7 (epub) The right of Mark G. E. Kelly to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Contents Abbreviations of Foucault’s Works vi Acknowledgements viii Introduction 1 1 In the Wake of Marx 12 2 Madness and Psychology 23 3 Words and Things 45 4 Genealogy and Discipline 66 5 Power and Resistance 85 6 Sex and Life 114 7 Government and Governmentality 137 8 Ethics and Spirituality 157 Conclusion 189 References 190 Index 195 Abbreviations of Foucault’s Works AB Abnormal. Translated by Graham Burchell. (London: Verso, 2003). AK Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. (London: Tavistock, 1972). BB Birth of Biopolitics. Translated by Graham Burchell. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). BC Birth of the Clinic. Translated by A. M. Sheridan. (London: Routledge, 1989). DE(vol.) Dits et écrits. 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1994). DL Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel. Translated by Charles Ruas. (New York: Doubleday, 1986). DP Discipline and Punish. Translated by Alan Sheridan. (London: Allen Lane, 1977). EW(vol.) Essential Works. 3 vols. (New York: The New Press, 1997, 1998, 2000). FIR Appendices to Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson (2005). Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islam. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). GSO The Government of Self and Others. Translated by Graham Burchell. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). HM History of Madness. Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. (London: Routledge, 2006). HS Hermeneutics of the Subject. Translated by Graham Burchell. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). HS(vol.) History of Sexuality. 3 vols. Translated by Robert Hurley. (London: Penguin, 1978, 1985, 1985). OD ‘Orders of Discourse’, Social Science Information, 10:2 (1971), 7–30. OT The Order of Things (London: Routledge, 2002). vi abbreviations PK Power/Knowledge. Edited by Colin Gordon. (Brighton: Harvester, 1980). PP Psychiatric Power. Translated by Graham Burchell. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). PPC Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Edited by Lawrence D. Kitzman. (New York: Routledge, 1988). RM Remarks on Marx. Translated by R. James Goldstein and James Cascaito. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991). SD Society Must Be Defended. Translated by David Macey. (New York: Picador, 2003). STP Security, Territory, Population. Translated by Graham Burchell. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). vii Acknowledgements During the time this book was written, I have accumulated many debts to a plethora of intellectual confrères, companions and col- leagues, particularly at the University of Western Sydney and Monash University. I will, however, constrain myself here to thanking those who have aided in some direct way with the production of this book. Thanks are due to Adam Jasper Smith and the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building of the University of Technology, Sydney, for arranging an honorary fellowship for me there, which provided me with library services vital to the production of this book during an early phase of research. Thanks also to my former students Lenin Gatus and Tracy Sealey for their proofreading. On the publishing side, I’d like to acknowledge Carol Macdonald for initially suggesting the idea of writing a more introductory book on Foucault’s political thought, and for bringing me on to Edinburgh University Press’s list; I would like to thank Geoff Boucher and Matt Sharpe for welcoming my contribution to their series, and the staff at Edinburgh’s politics division for their patience. This book incorporates some brief phrases, shorter than a sen- tence in length, from my Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article, ‘Michel Foucault’s Political Thought’. viii Introduction Foucault Now This is a book about Michel Foucault and politics. Its remit encom- passes Foucault’s own politics, his political thought and the political impact of that thought. Foucault’s name has become ubiquitous in the humanities and social sciences in recent decades, more commonly mentioned than that of any other thinker in history (Times Higher Education 2007), but its meaning remains ambiguous for all that. Politically, it has been turned to a variety of contradictory purposes, from updat- ing Marxism to defending liberalism. The possibilities for diver- sity in the use of Foucault’s name are in no small part due to the diversity of positions he himself took during his twenty-five-year career. While Foucault has been invoked by a range of causes, people want to invoke him not because he was clearly a member of their ideological tendency but because he was an original thinker who defied categorisation. In the words of his sometime friend Gilles Deleuze (1988, 30), with Foucault’s work it was ‘as if finally, some- thing new were emerging in the wake of Marx’. That is, to unpack the hyperbolic implications of this characterisation, Foucault’s work is the most important contribution to political thought since that of Karl Marx a century before. I’m sure most experts on political thought would think this an exaggeration. I, however, do not. While I can hardly claim to know a century of political ideas in its entirety, it seems to me that Foucault is the most significant political thinker of the twentieth century. I do not expect you to agree with me, but perhaps you will take the fact that it is possible for me sincerely to make such a statement as indicative that Foucault’s thought at least holds some import. His radical reconception of power in particular seems to me to be a watershed moment in the history of political thought, albeit one that has still yet to be fully thought through. In the profusion of usages of his concepts, Foucault’s users almost 1 foucault and politics all backslide towards more conventional, and in a few cases more nihilistic, positions than he himself took. Despite the political importance of Foucault’s thought, and perhaps to some extent because of its radicalness, the study of politics is an area in which Foucault was until recently relatively neglected by com- parison with other social sciences and the literary humanities. His reception in political studies is mainly oriented towards the decade of his output, the 1970s, during which his work was at its most overtly political, and during which a single, crucial shift occurred. Two con- cepts of Foucault’s from this time, ‘biopolitics’ and ‘governmentality’, have been particularly influential in this area. The appropriation of these concepts has gone in widely diverging directions, which was to an extent Foucault’s own intention, inasmuch as he presented his thought during its more political phase after 1970 as being a concep- tual ‘toolbox’ from which one might take what one needs (DE2 523). Without diminishing the shifts in Foucault’s position over time, I will argue that he was consistently radical and, in a certain sense, pro- gressive. There are several problems for this account, however, which must be considered fully. One is that, during a major part in his career, political concerns were superficially almost absent from his work. This could be said to be another reason for his relatively late take-up in politics compared to other academic disciplines. Foucault published eleven books during his lifetime. The immediate picture that emerges from these is not one of a primarily political thinker. Only three of these books are overtly political – and one of those, ‘The Order of Discourse’, is largely apolitical and so short that when it was translated into English it appeared as a journal article rather than a book. These three political books form a series, written between 1970 and 1976, under the rubric of ‘genealogy’. If one looks only at Foucault’s books, this phase might seem a relatively minor one. During the second half of his career, between 1970 and 1984, he published only five books, compared to six between 1954 and 1969. However, if one looks at the material by Foucault that is now, posthumously available in print, the quantity from the later period dwarfs that from the first.