Politiques de Foucault

by Jean Terrel

292 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Larry · Rating 1 out of 5]

Boring ass. You're never sure whether the author's point was to look at political theory through Foucault's lenses or to paraphrase what Foucault had to say about it. Either way it's not doing it in any interesting sort of way. The terminology is messy, liberalism is thought of as a technique of government that refines government and restrains its scope while still somehow enlarging it and transforming it at the same time, and then there is this focus on ordoliberalism the author (or perhaps Foucault himself) doesn't seem to clearly differentiate from neoliberalism, which is itself not clearly distinguished from the Austrian school. So it's all very confusing and blurry, the lack of definitional clarity with regards to "liberalism" allowing much room for nonsense. A little bit before we have a chapter on sovereignty that doesn't add much to one's understanding of the concept, the overall idea being that sovereignty is never one but meshed in a network of other sovereignties. The few pages devoted to Hobbes' awkward position in the raison d'Etat debate is interesting, as it both nuances Hobbes' alleged absolutism and shows how unique his views on government necessary actions were, as they seem to stem from its need for survival, compared to that of a sick body resisting a sickness as the government resists seditious factions. But I'm making a whole fuss about it when it really isn't very important in the whole book. Then the author moves on to analyze Foucault's theories about self-government as an answer to Marxist revolutionary options and frankly I put the book down because of its overall narrow-mindedness, lack of conceptual rigour and Franco-French references.