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State University of New York Press - Mark G. E. Kelly

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114 pages

English

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This book comprises a series of staged confrontations between the thought of Michel Foucault and a cast of other figures in European and Anglophone political philosophy, including Marx, Lenin, Althusser, Deleuze, Rorty, Honneth, and Geuss. Focusing on the status of normativity in their thought, Mark G. E. Kelly explains how Foucault's position in relation to political theory is different, and, over the course of the book, describes a distinctive Foucauldian stance in political thought that is maximally anti-normative, anti-theoretical, and anti-political. For Foucault aims to undermine attempts to discern the appropriate form of political action, instead putting forward a rigorously critical program for a political theory that lacks any moralizing or totalizing dimension, and serves only to side with resistance against power, and never with power itself. Looking at attempts to think radically about politics from Marx to the present day, Kelly traces a novel history of political thought as a trend of attempts to overcome the constraints of normativity, theoreticism, and subordination to public policy. He concludes by assessing and rejecting recent attempts to reclaim Foucault for a form of normative politics by associating him with neoliberalism.
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Foucault and Political Philosophy

1. Marx: Anti-normative Critique

2. Lenin: The Invention of Party Governmentality

3. Althusser: A Failed Project to Denormativize Marxism

4. Deleuze: Denormativization as Norm

5. Rorty: Relativizing Normativity

6. Honneth: The Poverty of Critical Theory

7. Geuss: The Paradox of Realism

8. Foucault: The Lure of Neoliberalism

Conclusion: What Now?
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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Philosophy

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Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	04 décembre 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438467627
Langue	English

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For Foucault
SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy

Dennis J. Schmidt, editor
For Foucault
Against Normative Political Theory
Mark G. E. Kelly
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2018 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Eileen Nizer
Marketing, Anne M. Valentine
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kelly, Mark G. E., author.
Title: For Foucault : against normative political theory / Mark G. E. Kelly.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2018] | Series: SUNY series in contemporary continental philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016059960 (print) | LCCN 2017054330 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438467627 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438467610 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Political science—Philosophy. | Political ethics.
Classification: LCC JA71 (ebook) | LCC JA71 .K46 2017 (print) | DDC 320.01—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016059960
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Foucault and Political Philosophy
1. Marx: Anti-normative Critique
2. Lenin: The Invention of Party Governmentality
3. Althusser: A Failed Project to Denormativize Marxism
4. Deleuze: Denormativization as Norm
5. Rorty: Relativizing Normativity
6. Honneth: The Poverty of Critical Theory
7. Geuss: The Paradox of Realism
8. Foucault: The Lure of Neoliberalism
Conclusion: What Now?
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
If there’s a single person who needs to be acknowledged here—other than the spectral figure of Michel Foucault himself, the dedication of the book to him appearing in the title—it’s Paul Patton. It perhaps does not come through strongly enough in what follows that his defense of Foucault against normativizing misreadings is seminal to the entire line of thought this book represents. I also owe multiple other debts to him.
I must acknowledge Dimitris Vardoulakis, to whom I also owe much, but in this particular case for encouraging me to take this book forward and making introductions to editors. Dennis Schmidt, my colleague and the editor of this series, also acted as an important conduit in bringing this book to SUNY Press, as of course ultimately did my editor there, Andrew Kenyon.
I acknowledge funding from the Australian Research Council in the form of a Future Fellowship, during which I prepared this book for publication. This book has been long in the writing, however, predating in large part this fellowship. The piece on Rorty dates in its core to 2002. My work on Lenin dates in its beginnings to 2007. The piece on Marx and ethics I began in 2009. My work on Geuss and that on Patton dates mostly to 2011, that on Althusser to 2012, that on Honneth to 2013, and that on Deleuze to 2014.
Particular chapters require their specific acknowledgments. The genesis of the chapter on Rorty dates from a class at Sydney University given by Paul Redding in 2002, and the direction of it certainly begins with Paul’s teaching.
Yet another person to whom I am overwhelmingly indebted in life is Jessica Whyte, in the particular case of this book for her help and encouragement in relation to the Althusser chapter.
The Deleuze chapter was initially written with the encouragement of Jeremy Gilbert and Andrew Goffey, to each of whom I also owe other debts dating back several years. I owe thanks for the careful reading of and comments on the chapter by graduate students at the University of Oregon, to Nicolae Morar for penetrating questions and suggestions for further investigation, and to Colin Koopman for orchestrating these encounters.
The chapter on Honneth stems from my involvement since 2012 with the Sydney Recognition Workgroup, which is to say primarily with Jean-Philippe Deranty and Heikki Ikäheimo. I have much for which I should thank them. I was encouraged in bringing the chapter to fruition by Danielle Petherbridge, and should thank anonymous referees for Critical Horizons for their feedback.
I also acknowledge the provocatively unsympathetic and uncomprehending audiences I had when talking about opposing normativity at the Australasian Association of Philosophy conference at UNSW in 2010, the Philosophy Department of Cardiff University the same year, and the Sydney Recognition Workgroup’s 2013 seminars at UNSW.
An earlier version of Chapter 3 previously appeared as a chapter entitled “Foucault against Marxism: Althusser beyond Althusser” in Jernej Habjan and Jessica Whyte (eds.), (Mis)readings of Marx in Continental Philosophy , 2014, Palgrave Macmillan. An earlier version of Chapter 5 previously appeared as an article entitled “Discipline Is Control: Foucault contra Deleuze” in New Formations 84/85, 2015. An alternative version of Chapter 6 appeared as an article entitled “Foucault contra Honneth: Resistance or Recognition?” in Critical Horizons , 2017.
Introduction
Foucault and Political Philosophy
With his critique of ideology applied to the bourgeois constitutional state and with his sociological dissolution of the theoretical basis for natural rights, Marx so enduringly discredited … both the idea of legality and the intention of natural law, that the link between natural law and revolution has been broken ever since. The parties of an internationalized civil war have divided this heritage between themselves with fateful clarity: the one side has taken up the heritage of revolution, the other the ideology of natural law.
—Habermas 1978, 117 1
This book is for, and not about, Michel Foucault. I will refer to him often in what follows, and occasionally (particularly in the final chapter, and in this introduction) will slip into Foucault scholarship, but I have already written several books on Foucault, so this one will deal primarily with other figures. Similarly but conversely, this book is against, and not about, normative political theory. This object too will heave into view, but for the most part the book deals with terrain in between Foucault and normative political theory, with a series of political thinkers who contest in various ways the normative stakes of political thought, but retain a normative political-theoretic dimension that Foucault lacks and rejects. I explore and critique their work from a Foucauldian direction, with a particular focus where applicable on their commentary on Foucault.
While I think most readers will readily have some understanding of the term “political theory,” the meaning of the term “normative” is trickier. This latter term is bandied about in academic circles with abandon, but it is not often encountered outside of academe, and even within it the meaning of the word can be elusive, as I discovered several years ago when I started presenting papers at conferences and seminars proposing that political philosophy be conducted in a “non-normative” way, in material seminal to multiple of the chapters here. These claims were unpopular with my learned audiences—not merely among those who were practitioners of conventional normative political philosophy, but with almost everyone. Even those who reject conventional normative political philosophy turned out to be attached to some notion of normativity. Some seemed to take everything that is not a physical fact to be “normative,” by which measure human life is indeed intrinsically normative. I want to reply now, however, that such a notion of “normativity” is hopelessly inflationary, making the normative coextensive with subjectivity and making the term apply to things that have nothing in particular to do with “norms.” By contrast, in my opposition to “normativity” here I mean to invoke a much stricter definition of the “normative,” the one operative in mainstream philosophical ethics, which takes it as merely a by-word for prescription, which is to say for “oughts” (Korsgaard 2009). Such a definition may seem no less redundant than the one that identifies it with subjectivity: it’s a word of art applied to a well-understood notion, for which we had time-honored names before people started bandying the word “normative” about in the twentieth century. However, I will argue that normativity in this sense does exist in more forms than those imagined by its own partisans, specifically in forms of political imagination that constrain political action through ideas about the way things should be.
Contemporary political philosophy remains in the shadow of an “ethical turn” that happened in political thought in the 1970s, almost simultaneously affecting the main languages of Western philosophical discussion. Raymond Geuss (2016, ix–x) has recently characterized this as a “normativist counterrevolution” that “has been an unmitigated catastrophe.” In English, John Rawls revitalized the very marginal field of political philosophy by re-envisioning Kantianism in his 1971 Theory of Justice , breathing