Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge, and: Esquisse pour une auto-analyse (review)

Anyone wishing to present a synthetic overview of Michel Foucault's work in English has to deal with a recent tidal wave of texts. The 3000-odd pages of interviews, lectures, and essays published in 1994 as Dits et écrits, subsequently translated selectively and collected by various editors, are now joined by annotated transcriptions of the audio tapes from Foucault's lecture series at the Collège de France. The transcriptions of the lectures offered from 1970 to 1984 add another 5000 or so pages to the Foucault library, while commentary and criticism continue apace, institutionalized in new specialist journals such as Foucault Studies.

The depth, breadth, and variety of the scholarship revealed in Foucault's engaging college lectures is astonishing. As presented in the "Birth of Bio-Politics" (from 1978–9), for instance, his analysis of political economy —from the physiocrats: Ferguson, Smith, Ricardo, and Marx —through marginalism: Sombart and Weber —to the obscure founders of German Ordo-liberalism and its American descendants in the Chicago school —is something of a tour de force. Despite its title, that lecture series and the one which followed, "The Government of the Living," were not restricted to bio-political matters in the sense of the government of population. Still, Foucault's mastery of empirical materials, including forgotten conference proceedings from the 1930s and 1940s, and the demonstration that 20th century neoliberalism engaged a radically different problematic than did its classical counterpart, makes this a worthy career accomplishment for any academic. Yet there was Foucault in 1981–2 in "The Hermenuetics of the Subject" working in quite a different register, lecturing on Plutarch, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, among many others, and probing the shifting practices of telling the truth about oneself. Throughout this work, Foucault invokes things he has done in the past, shifts direction, employs concepts at one moment that he denounces violently at another, occasionally offers a mea culpa, claims his interests are continuous only to assert that the sole continuity to be found in his work is a constant questioning. The scholar who agitated in 1969 for a philosophy of language which dispensed with a knowing subject and with an authorial voice was, in 1984, analyzing the ways in which individual subjects are capable of conscious self-fashioning.

This last shift is the central concern of Eric Paras' short, lucid, and courageous critical assessment of part of Foucault's work. He asks, "How and why does Foucault go from being a philosopher of the disappearance of the subject to one wholly preoccupied with the subject?" (p. 3). Paras claims to have written the first study to make extensive use of the Collège de France lectures, which he listened to on audiotape. He draws on and offers his own translations of a very large number of original French-language sources, both by Foucault and by the shifting groups of his interlocutors. In doing so, he draws our attention to texts and authors that had a profound influence on Foucault's conceptual development and points to some of Foucault's own texts which signal shifts in his work that have been little appreciated. Paras tracks the shifting fate of a number of trademark Foucauldian concepts across much of the latter's corpus of work: "experience," "archaeology," "exteriority," and "subjectivity," for instance. Paras is frequently insightful. In places, his work resembles that of Foucault's own teacher Georges Canguilhem, whose history of science emphasized the emergence of concepts, recognizable by the difference they make in a body of thought.

The Michel Foucault who appears in Paras' text is aptly described "as a thinker [who] was exceedingly permeable. . . . It was the nature of his philosophical practice to enter a community, imbibe its concepts, deploy them in a powerful and original way —and then move on when the tides changed" (p. 153). How sociologists might come to analyze such a figure is a matter to which I...