Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications Since 1984 (review)

In this concise yet highly charged volume, Nealon challenges the now influential perception of Foucault as a thinker who in mid-career found himself at a theoretical dead-end, having construed power in too totalizing a fashion, so that in the last analysis each variety of agency and resistance always becomes recuperable as already a function or condition of power itself. Thus, so the story goes, the research program of his middle period was jettisoned by and large by Foucault in favor of an aesthetics of subjectivity which, in emphasising the artistic self-creation of the individual through a reexamination of classical origins, offered possibilities of resistance that required something of a theoretical retreat, in that they entailed a less hostile critical engagement with Enlightenment and humanist traditions of ethics, agency, and selfhood. For Nealon, this very same narrative about Foucault’s “career,” with its neo-Hegelian understanding of change as development, correction, or progress, remains inimical to the tenor and tenets of Foucaultian thought. Moreover, Nealon worries that, since “privatized” individual self-creativity has become a wholly normative feature and discursive effect of neoliberal consumer capitalism, such a Foucault offers little critical force in the present, whereas the reevaluation of his thinking of power—far from remaining rooted in a now nearly obsolete history of the state—may help equip us to rethink global (panoptico-bio) politics and resistance today. Nealon therefore argues for a notion of intensification as a better way to track the movement through Foucault’s research career from one project to the next (he claims that it is power that always sets the Foucaultian itinerary), and indeed to elaborate the very logic and practice of power as it mutates from the historical form of sovereignty through social and disciplinary epochs to the biopolitical forms of power we now endure. Nealon places the accent on a conception of intensity which keeps its distance somewhat from a subject-centered discourse of affect, bodily sensation, or aesthetic experience. Intensity instead names power’s desire to penetrate the entire field with maximal efficiency (or, to put it another way, least expenditure/cost), generating in the process tipping points at which saturation at threshold level leads to a mutation in the field of operation of power itself. Nealon argues that a detailed reading of Foucault’s texts frequently demonstrates his rich understanding of the complex interplay between emergent, dominant, and residual forms and techniques of power, giving rise to transitional moments as this logic and practice of intensification plays itself out. Such reading offers a productive challenge to those simpleminded interpretations of Foucault which argue that, in presenting us with totalized systems of power in successive epochs, he provides no way to think the transition from one to the next.

For Nealon, the late work on subjectivity represents not so much Foucault’s acceptance of the inescapable centrality of the human subject construed as autonomous, rational, and auto-foundational; instead, his return to the thought of Kant stresses the Enlightenment legacy which discovers the subject only in relation to the concept, or rather amid a host of conceptual relations or, indeed, a network of functions and practices which grant the subject’s possible form. Nealon suggests, then, that such a reading of the late Foucault allows for an intensification of the question of power that becomes all the more relevant as power itself intensifies beyond disciplinary and institutional limits (while of course still harnessing and adapting the techniques of power that, say, governmentality and institutions offer), pervading remorselessy and seemingly inexhaustibly the highly virtualized spaces of the twenty-first-century “self” or, rather, “life.”

Nealon draws our attention to the undoubtedly shrewd question Foucault frequently asks of theoretical and methodological decisions—“What does it cost?” (both for oneself and others)—and suggests that such a question is well attuned to the analysis of neoliberal capitalism as desiring maximum economy in its transaction with the entire field, and indeed to a strategic (rather than heroically oppositional...