Mark G. E. Kelly

Against prophecy and utopia : Foucault and the future

In this essay, I take as a starting point Foucault’s rejection of two different ways of thinking about the future, prophecy and utopianism, and use this rejection as a basis for the elaboration of a more detailed rejection of them, invoking complexity-based epistemic limitations in relation to thinking about the future of political society. I follow Foucault in advocating immanent political struggle, which does not seek to build a determinate vision of the future but rather focuses on negating aspects of the current conjuncture. I extend this argument into an ethical register, arguing that the same arguments apply mutatis mutandis to our personal lives. I conclude by engaging with Jacques Lacan’s account of subjectivity, and the interpretation of its political import furnished by Yannis Stavrakakis, drawing from these additional supports for my position, in particular the rejection of utopianism as an attempt to avoid limitation by the real.

Foucault Contra Honneth: Resistance or Recognition?

ABSTRACT This article deals with the relationship between the thought of Michel Foucault and that of Axel Honneth, arguing in favour of the former against the latter. I begin by considering Honneth’s early engagement in The Critique of Power with Foucault’s thought. I rebut Honneth’s criticisms of Foucault here as a misreading, one which prevents Honneth from coming to grips with Foucault’s position and hence the challenge that it poses to Honneth’s project. I then move on to offer a Foucauldian critique of Honneth’s own position, arguing for a Foucauldian alternative to Critical Theory.

Problematizing the problematic : Foucault and Althusser

Abstract In this article, I re-examine the relationship between the thoughts of contemporaneous and associated late twentieth-century French philosophers Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, through the prism of the notion of the problem. I discuss the philology of the use of the noun “problematic” in French philosophy in relation to Foucault and Althusser’s use of it, concluding that while Althusser makes this a term of art in his thought, Foucault does not make any particular use of this concept. I nonetheless consider the possibility of the existence of a similar notion under a different name, episteme, in Foucault’s thought, but conclude that this is a distinct notion from Althusser’s “problematic.” I then consider Foucault’s later, idiosyncratic notion of problematization and its possible relation to Althusser’s conceptual framework. I conclude that, despite divergent vocabularies, Althusser and Foucault do have a common problematic and approach to problematization, though Foucault also problematizes aspects of Althusser’s problematic, effectively taking problematization a step further.

Foucault against Marxism: Althusser beyond Althusser

This is an essay about two late-twentieth-century French philosophers, Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, and Marxism. My thesis, simply stated, is that Foucault and Althusser pursued the same basic theoretical trajectory in relation to Marxism and that this trajectory is both rooted in and leads decisively away from Marx and Marxism. I argue that Althusser was stymied in this trajectory by his adherence to the French Communist Party, leaving Foucault to fulfil it.

T. Rayner, Foucault's Heidegger: Philosophy and Transformative Experience

In Michel Foucault’s last interview before his death, he acknowledged a debt to the work of Martin Heidegger that has surprised many, specifi cally claiming that for him Heidegger had always been “the essential philosopher”, someone whose thought Foucault had used as a tool without explicitly engaging with it.1 Th is leaves us in a quandary: Foucault is apparently philosophically indebted to Heidegger, but this infl uence is unmarked in his work. Clearly this demands further investigation, particularly as Foucault’s philosophical bases are themselves notoriously opaque (many have argued that they are simply nonexistent or fl imsily nihilistic). Th is investigation is what Rayner has undertaken, its publication fi lling a signifi cant gap in Foucault scholarship. Rayner is of course not the fi rst scholar to bring Foucault and Heidegger together. Th ere is a previous Foucault–Heidegger monograph in Stuart Elden’s Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History,2 but this is not as clearly about the Foucault–Heidegger connection per se as the present work, but rather more focused on a third thing, the eponymous project of a spatial history, which Foucault and Heidegger both instantiate. Rayner argues that previous treatments of the two thinkers together have erred in taking a comparative approach: they are thus forced either, like Hubert Dreyfus, to misinterpret Foucault to make him Heideggerian, or to abstract the two thinkers’ work to an overly formalistic level to make them agree, since their points of agreement are so slight (p. 5).