Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge (review)

In this short but bold volume, Harvard-trained historian Eric Paras traces the development of Michel Foucault's thought from the 1950s to the 1980s in an effort to delineate and comprehend "the process by which he abandoned his hard structuralist position and later embraced the ideas that he had labored to undermine: liberty, individualism, 'human rights,' and even the thinking subject" (4). Paras develops his analysis by first discussing Foucault's early work on madness, wherein, he contends, Foucault recognizes something like a subject of experience and a subjective center of creativity; but in the early 1960s, increasingly dissatisfied with phenomenology, Foucault turned toward structuralism with its commitment to system rather than subject as explanation and cause. "In contrast to the philosopher's prior works, which had nibbled around the edges of the question of subjectivity, The Order of Things . . . directly challenged the 'modern' conception of subjectivity: the freestanding, thinking, speaking subject that encounters the world and creates meaning therein" (28). Foucault's project during this period is to rid philosophy of subjectivity altogether, Paras submits, and his work on power/knowledge in the early 1970s through the publication of Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, is a continuation of this effort, although with poststructuralist modifications; Foucault wanted to understand history without positing a subjective source of meaning, and his notions of dispositif and power/knowledge networks were simply tools developed to that end.

Thus Paras sets the stage for his careful investigation of the reasons for Foucault's return to individuality, subjectivity, creativity, and freedom in the 1980s, a change in focus so dramatic and seemingly so inexplicable that Paras terms it a "paradigm shift" (102). By 1977, "even before the ink on American copies of Discipline and Punish was fully dry" (102), Foucault had dismantled the analytic apparatus of power/knowledge and embraced a kind of neoliberalism. "Gently as the shift may have occurred," Paras writes, "this is a view that placed Foucault in opposition to his own positions of ten years earlier" (88). But most commentators in both the U.S. and France have failed to appreciate the magnitude of this change of philosophical direction, Paras contends, because readers in the U.S., intent on using Foucault's ideas in popular political movements, have focused on the works on power, while French readers have typically refused to take Foucault's last works seriously at all (150).

Paras insists, contra the French, that the last works are very much worthy of serious interest, because Foucault's philosophical commitments truly do change. He really does implicitly repudiate his attack on subjectivity and the kind of social and political analysis undertaken in, for example, Discipline and Punish. He really does reverse his position on human rights and freedom. And there are good, understandable reasons for these changes—including his in-depth reading in neoliberalism, his experience of the Iranian Revolution, and the wisdom he gained through his political activism. By the late 1970s Foucault saw the need for laws and rights and individualism and for an analysis of political struggle that allowed for subjective experience and creativity. And his philosophical projects had by that time afforded him the conceptual tools to strike out in what for him was yet another new philosophical direction.

The account that Paras gives of Foucault's intellectual trajectory is interesting and provocative. Some of the historical context it provides will no doubt be helpful to readers tackling Foucault in all his many intellectual phases. However, this book's value to any reader ultimately depends on the extent to which one accepts the contention that Foucault's work of the early and mid-1970s on power and knowledge actually did preclude the possibility of human freedom and subjective experience to the extent that Paras claims. There is no doubt that Foucault offered a radical critique of subjectivity as it was put forward in phenomenology and existentialism in the first half of the...