The Necessity of Freedom: A Critique of Michel Foucault
Some of them drag down everything from heaven and the invisible to earth, actually grasping rocks
and trees with their hands; for they lay their hands on all such things and maintain stoutly that that
alone exists which can be touched and handled; for they define existence and body, or matter, as
identical, and if anyone says that anything else, which has no body, exists, they despise him utterly,
and will not listen to any other theory than their own.
Plato, The Sophist
I.
Introduction
The major works of Michel Foucault are widely recognized and taught as “classics” of the
genre of critical theory, continuing to exercise a deep influence across the humanities and social
sciences. The vigorous debates once waged about Foucault’s impact and legacy have largely
abated; the canonical status of his texts reflects a naturalization of his critical paradigm. Foucault
is no longer the “dangerous” thinker he once was—not in the sense that we have moved on, but in
the sense that we now take Foucault’s thought for granted. In recent years, the discussion of
Foucault has shifted away from his theory to his politics and in particular to his late avowal of
economic liberalism.1 The resurgent interest in Foucault’s politics is a clear sign of the times, a
symptom of the current crisis of the neoliberal world order. While this topic is of great urgency
and has the potential to help clarify our political predicament, it also threatens to obscure the true
stakes of Foucault’s persistent influence. Instead of allowing the recent past to continue to
determine the future of social critique, we should take the renewal of the debate surrounding
Foucault as an opportunity to break open the tomb and resurrect the dead—to render the theorist
“dangerous” once more by raising the issue of the adequacy of his thought to its own critical task.
Whether or not Foucault was actually a neoliberal is thus secondary to the question of
whether Foucault’s basic picture of power, institutionality, and normativity can, even in principle,
live up to its avowed aim of providing a critical theory of modernity. While a critique of Foucault
along similar lines was attempted by Jürgen Habermas and Nancy Fraser in the 1980s, they
arguably failed to provide an adequate metaconceptual foundation for critical theory and to
develop a form of critique truly immanent to our late modern form of life.2 In what follows, I treat
Foucault’s project as an opportunity to reflect on the logic of human freedom and its social form,
in order to begin to outline a philosophical program capable of grounding the Marxian idea of a
critique of capitalist modernity by its own lights.
Starting with the account in Discipline and Punish of the panopticon as the model of
institutionality as such, Foucault’s keen insight into the subtle exercise of power through
institutional constraints under modern conditions is what lends his account its seemingly
irresistible, almost self-evident quality. On Foucault’s account, the direct forms of domination that
characterized premodern social life have given way in capitalist modernity to indirect methods of
social control, which he identifies with the emergence of discipline. Through our participation in
modern institutions, we become subject to normative constraints that are not enforced with overt
threats of violence but rather reinforced through correction and the ever-present possibility that we
are being observed. What Foucault has grasped more powerfully than almost any other thinker is
the dark side of modern institutional life—that we are subject to an all-pervasive, invisible
authority in every aspect of our lives and that our own practical activity unavoidably perpetuates
impersonal forms of power and domination. In this way, Foucault’s writings have given articulate
expression to a historical form of collective despair.
At the same time, Foucault’s project is a critical response to Stalinism and the “Hegelian”
philosophy of history used to justify it. Foucault’s rejection of teleology in history and his demand
that we “free ourselves from Hegel” should be understood as a protest against a political regime
that offered philosophical rationalizations for its own dysfunction and that was responsible for the
horrors of the Gulag.3 Not only does Foucault’s work bear elegant witness to forms of social
domination; it also seeks to overcome the deadlock of dialectics by emphasizing the essential
contingency of history. While Foucault may no longer serve as an overt inspiration for political
actors, his basic conception of political agency in terms of a capacity to resist anonymous, allpervasive “techniques of power” continues to inform activism on the Left, from Occupy Wall
Street to Black Lives Matter. But can the Foucauldian understanding of history and society actually
ground a truly efficacious emancipatory politics? On my account, Foucault’s distorted
understanding of Hegelian thought and pessimistic diagnosis of modern power reflect deep-seated
problems with his attempt to offer a critical theory.4 This essay will examine four deficiencies in
Foucault’s theory, arguing that it fails to fulfill its own ambition of articulating a critique of
contemporary society and of advancing a truly critical methodology.
2
First, Foucault’s account of the panopticon as a viable theoretical model for modern
institutional practices is one-sided in its emphasis on our passive determination by normative
constraints. Foucault rightly argues that we are formed by and dependent on institutions, but his
conformist account of social practices as merely “regulated” by law-like norms raises questions
about whether he can truly understand such practices as practices (as a class of events that bear an
intentional form and are subject to the normative distinction between correct and incorrect, success
and failure). The uniquely first-personal question of what ought to be done cannot be answered by
appeal to any sort of regularity (“how we do things”) and is thus practically unavoidable for any
possible agent. The reasons we take ourselves to have for acting, I will show, are not incidental to
but constitutive of the very notion of a social practice. Consequently, in rejecting the idea of agency
(the spontaneous aspect of normative determination), Foucault underdetermines the concept of
institutional practices that underlies his critical theory of modernity.
Second, Foucault opposes the method of ideology critique—the critique of our overt beliefs
about what we ought to do collectively—because he believes that the method presupposes the
“sovereignty” of consciousness and subjectivity and that it thereby neglects our actual embodied
practices.5 Foucault is right to emphasize what we actually do and not just what we think we do,
but in opposing ideology altogether (rather than just the vulgar form of ideology he identifies), he
throws the baby out with the bathwater and severely restricts both the explanatory and the critical
force of his own theory. Given that Foucault ignores our assumptions about the justifiability of our
practices in favor of an essentially causal explanation of human activity in terms of “an investment
of power in the body,”6 there is a real question as to whether he is able to account for the
determinate content of historical forms of life (what we do and believe) and to ground a critique
of modern institutions (a diagnosis of collective failure).
Third, Foucault attempts to account for his critical standpoint by virtue of his genealogical
method of writing a “history of the present”—of describing the causal historical process of how
we got to be where we are as opposed to justifying our present standpoint as progress over the past.
Yet having deprived himself of the resources necessary for explaining why where we are is not
where we should be, Foucault is also unable to give a coherent account of why writing histories
matters and of why his own critical history ought to be taken to be true.7
Fourth, Foucault’s express commitment to economic liberalism in his late lectures reflects
his own recognition of the necessity of freedom, i.e., of a new social form that would enable us to
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genuinely lead our lives. Far from indicating a political change of heart, Foucault’s endorsement
of neoliberal ideas can be traced back to his dystopian account of modern institutional life as
panoptic. Because Foucault understands normativity itself as a prison (instead of grasping modern
institutions as a deficient form of normativity), he must assume an incoherent picture of
emancipation as the overcoming of all normative constraints. (Whether or not there are elements
in Foucault in tension with his avowal of neoliberalism is thus beside the point, since it can be
shown that such a political commitment arises organically on the basis of the deep structure of his
thought.) At the same time, to follow the lead of Foucault’s contemporary critics and simply reject
his affirmation of neoliberalism out of hand is to miss an opportunity to understand its motivational
force. By confronting neoliberal ideology with its own promise of freedom, we can locate
resources for immanent critique within both Foucault and capitalist modernity itself.
In the recent work of political theorist Amy Allen, Foucault’s project is defended on the
grounds of its purported compatibility with the Enlightenment ideal of autonomy, the postcolonial
critique of the idea of progress, and Frankfurt School-style social critique.8 Others have sought to
show that Foucault’s anti-historicist approach to genealogy can be productively reconciled with
Marx’s critical theory of capitalism.9 But if the critique of Foucault offered here proves right, then
his genealogical method is inadequate to the demands of critical theory and should be overcome.
Following my analysis of the four deficiencies in Foucault, I briefly outline a new program for a
truly satisfying (as opposed to question-begging) critical theory, grounded in a renovated
conception of normativity and ideology. Normativity, on my account, is constitutive of practical
agency and sociality, and ideology is essential to understanding not only what we take ourselves
to be doing, but also what we are actually doing, as well as any discrepancy between our practices
and self-understanding.
Taking as my starting point one of Foucault’s key influences, Immanuel Kant, I show that
Foucault’s deep misapprehension of transcendental idealism results in an incoherent conception
of human discourse and practice. Turning to Kant’s greatest inheritor and Foucault’s bête noir,
G.W.F. Hegel, I establish the conceptual conditions necessary for providing a consistent
articulation of the idea of the historicity of reason. While critics of Foucault like Habermas and
Fraser have argued that Foucault requires the notion of autonomy that he denies, such accounts
are premised on a conception of human agency and rationality that remains overly formalistic (a
“de-Cartesianized humanism,” in Fraser’s words).10 This prevents both Habermas and Fraser
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from providing an adequate alternative to Foucault’s notion of critical theory and from
articulating a critique of capitalist modernity on its own terms. On the model of social critique
that I take Foucault’s own theory to ultimately require, freedom is understood in two related
senses.
First, freedom is understood in a “thin” sense as the capacity of spiritual beings to act in
light of laws they themselves have legislated collectively, through their practices over time. I call
this constitutive freedom. To be a free being is not to exist apart from institutions or beyond
social constraints, but to be bound by norms to which one has bound oneself. Consequently,
emancipation from forms of domination must entail a radical revision of our normative
commitments, not the abandonment of normativity. I call freedom in the second, “thick” sense
historical freedom, which consists not in emancipation from norms, but in a reconciliation with
our normative status and the achievement of historically specific norms, institutions, and
practices that actually enable us to lead our lives. Far from being a condition of unthinking
conformism, such reconciliation is the condition for a genuinely critical social theory and a
transformative political praxis.
II.
Foucault’s Theory of Modern Social Life
Standing at the center of Foucault’s constellation of concerns—madness, medicine,
sexuality, punishment—is the idea of a "discursive formation," which comprises a set of disparate
discourses whose rule-governed interplay produces objects of knowledge (e.g. the historical notion
of “mental illness”) and constrains forms of practice (e.g. the social relation between psychiatrist
and patient). The larger unit in Foucault’s analytic method is the “episteme,” an epistemological
field that grounds the unity of discursive formations and serves as the historical condition for their
possibility. In The Order of Things, three successive epistemes are delineated: the Renaissance,
the Classical Age, and Modernity. The epistemic principles that underlie a discursive formation
and regulate the interplay of discourses determine how subjects understand themselves and one
another, as well as the reality in which they live, labor, and speak. Discourse is power, on
Foucault’s account, inasmuch as every discursive formation is a discursive regime: any
organization of knowledge also entails the organization of knowers, supplying forms for the
constitution, regulation and hierarchization of social actors. A given discourse establishes rules for
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the control of some subjects by others, and ultimately—in the modern context—for the monitoring
of all subjects by themselves, in accordance with the norms that govern their roles.
Foucault develops his mature theory of power in the context of Discipline and Punish,
rejecting the identification of power with repression that had, by his own admission, characterized
his earlier studies and emphasizing instead that power not only “weighs on us as a force that says
no, but traverses and produces things, induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse.”11
On this model, power is not a one-sided display of sovereignty by some subjects in the face of
others, but is rather a relation of domination that constitutes subjects as subjects, endowing them
with capacities for acting and knowing by habituating them to social roles.
The discovery of this “constitutive” notion of power was made possible by Foucault’s
research into the specifically modern form of punishment, which he discusses under the rubric of
“discipline.” As will become clear, this is a controversial point: while Foucault takes himself to be
pursuing an analysis of a historically specific form of power, the idea of discipline often just seems
to explicitly theorize the constitutive, normative character of Foucault’s own historically general
concept of social rules.12 Punning on its dual meanings, Foucault employs the term discipline to
capture both the sense of a branch of knowledge and the sense of a regulated form of behavior,
reinforced by sanction and reward. In “Docile bodies,” the opening chapter of the section on
“Discipline” in Discipline and Punish, Foucault remarks that
the historical moment of the disciplines was the moment when an art of the human body
was born, which was directed not only at the growth of its skills, nor at the intensification
of its subjection, but at the formation of a relation that in the mechanism itself makes it
more obedient as it becomes more useful, and conversely. […] Thus discipline produces
subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile’ bodies.13
The disciplines presuppose malleable bodies as their raw material—bodies that can be shaped and
manipulated through a process of institutional formation. In increasing individuals’ mastery over
their own bodies through the teaching of skills, military, medical, and educational disciplines
institute standards with which our bodies are trained to accord. The more successfully embodied
we are, the more obedient we are—and the more useful our bodily acts are to the disciplines.
6
In modern disciplinary society, the bodies of individuals are not, therefore, directly coerced
by an external force or sovereign power, but indirectly dominated through their assimilation to an
institution comprised of hierarchical relations. For example, citing Marx’s discussion of the phases
of capitalist production, Foucault describes how the body of the worker is remade with the
introduction of cooperation, which constitutes each individual laborer as a part of a “machine,” in
order to exploit the amplified power of laborers working in common and to render the labor process
as a whole more efficient and economical. This “functional reduction of the body,” as Foucault
puts it,14 individuates the laborer by inculcating certain habits and skills, which in turn reproduce
the subordination of the individual to the cooperative and to capitalist accumulation more broadly.
Rather than treating the body “wholesale,” as the site of a unified subject, the disciplines rework
it “retail,” by seizing upon and molding its movements, gestures, attitudes, and desires.15
Throughout the section on “Discipline,” Foucault employs a naturalistic idiom to describe this
process: the “simple physics of movement” is replaced by the “micro-physics” of the specific
disciplines,16 which have their foundation in the social metaphysics—to be explained below—of
disciplinary power.
Foucault further specifies his notion of discipline through an elaboration of the concept of
normalization. Discipline consists in a process of training that “‘makes’ individuals; it is the
specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its
power.”17 Through techniques of observation and surveillance, individuals are conditioned to act
in accord with institutional standards. In the factory and in the classroom, for example, continuous
surveillance by managers and teachers ensures that workers meet their quotas and that students
know their lessons, respectively. “It is the fact of being constantly seen, of being able always to be
seen, that maintains the disciplined individual in his subjection.”18 And as Foucault makes clear,
the supervisors themselves are subject to supervision, inasmuch as “all eyes are on them”: they are
compelled to conform to the demands of their roles by the general dynamic of the institution. No
one individual exercises power over the whole, but rather power becomes “multiple, automatic
and anonymous.”19 Exemplary punishment—the public execution, for example—is superseded in
modernity by a far more efficient and focused network of “gazes,” which controls all individual
actors by subjecting them to the watchfulness of one another.
“Thanks to the techniques of surveillance,” Foucault writes, “the ‘physics’ of power, the
hold over the body, operate according to the laws of optics and mechanics […] and without
7
recourse, in principle at least, to excess, force or violence. It is a power that seems all the less
‘corporal’ in that it is more subtly ‘physical.’”20 The “laws of optics and mechanics” ensure the
well-functioning of normative orders. Norms themselves, on Foucault’s account, are the specific
institutional rules that govern our bodies and capacitate them for action. But the “normalizing”
function of discipline not only dictates how individuals are to act; it is also originally productive
of any possible social role, forming individuals as individuals in the first place—as workers,
soldiers, laborers, and students. Unlike laws, which prohibit or rule out certain forms of conduct,
norms function as positive standards that are reinforced by both sanction and reward.21 Norms
describe what it is normal for, say, students to do, grounding the distinction between “good” and
“bad,” “correct” and “incorrect,” types of behavior. Accordingly, all non-conforming behavior is
subject to punishment and further conditioning, so that the body in question might fulfill its own
potential and thereby maximize its contribution to the reproduction of existing relations of power.
And crucially, for Foucault, our subjection to norms is not a matter of individual choice or “selflegislation,” but is rather a necessary condition of personhood under the modern regime of
discipline. Modern power is so insidious, in Foucault’s eyes, because it expresses itself not through
prohibitions or the threat of violence but through the very practices and institutions with which
individuals are trained to positively identify.
Foucault’s critical aim begins to emerge in his account of the panopticon, the famous
concluding section of the chapter on discipline. Bentham’s hypothetical prison is a circular
building structured around a central watchtower occupied by a lone guard. The outer ring is
comprised of the prison cells, each of which has two windows, one that faces the world beyond
the prison and allows light to enter and one that faces the tower, enabling the guard to see inside
at any time. “Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious
and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.”22 Because the inmates
can never know if they are being observed, they must assume that they always are and thus do
what they are supposed to do; they thereby “internalize” the norms of the institution. “It is a
perpetual victory,” Foucault writes, one that “avoids any physical confrontation and which is
always decided in advance.”23
The panopticon for Foucault is less a literal design plan than an allegorical representation
of the ideal functioning of disciplinary society; despite being conceived by Bentham as a utopian
solution to a variety of social ills, “[the panopticon] represented the formula of a very real
8
technology, that of individuals.”24 As such, the idea of the panopticon is taken to concern the prison
only insofar as society as a whole has come to resemble one. The corrective function of
incarceration is to produce juridical subjects predisposed to compliance with state laws. But rather
than constituting an exception to the idea of the “contract” each citizen autonomously makes with
the state, the modern penalty of a corrective detention is the “omnipresent armature” of individual
formation.25 It is for this reason that, towards the end of Discipline and Punish, Foucault notes that
the institution of the prison has become increasingly anachronistic, rendered superfluous by the
“corrective” character of all institutions in disciplinary society. The potency of the image of the
panopticon lies in its ability to recast the celebrated idea of the self-determining nature of modern
society in terms of a prison whose inmates are, effectively, their own wardens.
For Foucault, individuals were “made to accept the [state’s] power to punish” not by an
exercise of the will but by what he calls the “carceral continuum,” the extension of the disciplinary
technique “from the smallest coercions to the longest penal detention.”26 The formal, egalitarian
system of laws is not purely formal after all, but depend for their functioning on the “counter-law”
of the disciplines, which “have the precise role of introducing insuperable asymmetries and
excluding reciprocities.” That is, the formal laws of the state are given the lie by their actual
content, the asymmetrical relation between select populations subject to regular imprisonment and
“correction” and the politically dominant class that operates the state (the bourgeoisie). As
Foucault writes:
The contract may have been regarded as the ideal foundation of law and political power;
panopticism constituted the technique, universally widespread, of coercion. It continued
to work in depth on the juridical structures of society, in order to make the effective
mechanisms of power function in opposition to the formal framework that it had
acquired.27
This suggests that even the purportedly sovereign subject of modern democracies is a product of
the coercive process of normalization. In effect, on Foucault’s model, the conformity to law is
itself always a matter of habituation to discipline-specific norms. Each of one’s particular
disciplinary involvements readies one for governance by the formal laws of the state. It is in this
sense that society as a whole, in all its aspects, has become prison-like, or “panoptic.”
9
In a late lecture on the “productive” character of power, in the course of offering a series
of methodological precautions concerning the domains of right and law, Foucault urges the critical
theorist not to “ask why certain people want to dominate, what they seek, what is their overall
strategy. Let us ask, instead, how things work at the level of on-going subjugation, at the level of
those continuous and uninterrupted processes which subject our bodies, govern our gestures,
dictate our behaviors etc.”28 In this vein, he proceeds to advocate, in the form of a fourth
methodological precaution, the idea of an “ascending” and inductive as opposed to a “descending”
and deductive analysis of power. Rather than attempting to deduce, say, the internment of the mad
from the dominance of the bourgeois class, we should take as our starting point the “infinitesimal
mechanisms” of power, each of which has its own contingent history and trajectory, and seek to
show how such relatively autonomous mechanisms have been “invested and annexed” by more
general social forces. Therefore, at that more general level, the dominant political force in
modernity is interested not in the morality of workers, the rehabilitation of delinquents, or the
exclusion of the mentally ill, but in the economically profitable and politically useful techniques
of power it finds ready-made in the disparate disciplines that make up panoptic society.29
What Foucault wishes to challenge, finally, is not just the horrible conditions in prisons or
the abuses suffered by hospitalized mental patients. But nor is his critical target those in power,
the bourgeois class, or even the broader institutional context power relations produce, like
capitalism as a form of life. Rather, the object of Foucauldian critique is “the very materiality [of
the prison] as an instrument and vector of power, […] this whole technology of power over the
body.”30 What must be opposed is not any particular “group, or elite, or class,” but the technique
of individuation itself, the production of normatively constrained persons by the permanent
surveillance and corrective detention characteristic of modern institutions.31
III.
The Idea of Normativity
I have shown that Foucault’s mature social theory understands power not as a restriction
on knowledge or as a practical prohibition but as a relation that constitutes an order of truth and a
field of practical possibilities. Consensus and violence are thus effects of power, rather than the
principles of its exercise. While the panopticon and carceral continuum are elements in his
historically specific theory of modern punishment, Foucault’s historically general theory of power
10
seems to presuppose the notion of normalization developed in the same context. That is, all
historical forms of power are forms of subjectification, systems of rules that dictate what is done
and what is believed by individuals at a time. And as Foucault has made clear in his work on
genealogy, history as a whole is a process of increasing subjection,32 culminating in the emergence
of disciplinary society. But while Foucault’s conception of power is constitutive, allowing both
those in power and the powerless to emerge in their respective roles in the first place, can it
adequately account for the distinctive way in which social roles are constitutive of subjects and
actually ground the battery of agential concepts—knowledge, discourse, practice, discipline, and
normativity itself—required by his critical analysis of history and society?
Political theorist Amy Allen has argued in a series of books and articles that Foucault’s
understanding of historical rules is premised on a historicization of Kant’s notion of transcendental
conditions of knowledge. While Foucault rejects the anthropological implications of Kant’s
conception of subjectivity, he does not “eliminate the concept of subjectivity altogether. […]
Indeed, one might interpret [Foucault] as making the rather innocuous claim that one does not need
to conceive of the subject in terms of strong Kantian notions of transcendental subjectivity in order
to be able to conceive of the subject as a thinking being.”33 Such thinking, for Foucault, is to be
understood in terms of the unified discursive structures unearthed in archaeological investigations
like The Order of Things, which traces the historically contingent constraints on knowledge that
constitute an episteme.
On Allen’s account, Foucault transforms the Kantian project from within, by articulating
“historically specific conditions of possibility of thought, subjectivity, experience, and agency.”
Foucault’s term of art for these constraints is the “historical a priori,” which is supposed to grasp
the fact that “conditions of possibility for thought are both necessary for us—in the sense that we
can’t think without or outside them—and also historically contingent—in the sense that they have
been otherwise and could be again.”34 For Allen, Foucault substitutes for Kant’s “critique of pure
reason” a demonstration of the impurity of practical rationality, which is no longer regarded as
constrained by a transhistorical moral law, but is regarded instead as rooted in historically specific
relations of power. The impurity of practical reason thus lies in its constitution by different
historical systems of rules and in its susceptibility to change. And as Foucault himself recognizes,
in an extraordinary passage worth quoting at length, an adequate theorization of subjectivity and
of the possibility of change must account for the agency of social actors, their capacity for freedom:
11
Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free. By this we
mean individual or collective subjects who are faced with a field of possibilities in which
several ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments, may be realized.
[…] Freedom may well appear as the condition for the exercise of power (at the same
time its precondition, since freedom must exist for power to be exerted, and also its
permanent support, since without the possibility of recalcitrance, power would be
equivalent to a physical determination).35
Freedom is understood here as a negative capability, as a freedom from constraint; Foucault rightly
notes that if power could not be resisted, then it would be indistinguishable from a physical law.
In keeping with her reading of Foucault as a sort of revisionist Kantian, Allen contends that such
freedom consists not “in freely binding oneself to a necessity in the form of the moral law [but] in
freely calling into question that which is presented to us as necessary, thus opening up the space
for a possible transgression of those limits that turn out to be both contingent and linked to
objectionable forms of constraint.”36
Allen’s reading has the merit of clarity and grasps what many readers of Foucault have
failed to, his indebtedness to Kant and his retention of the idea of subjectivity. But while I find
Allen’s reading of Foucault illuminating and persuasive, the position he is shown to espouse is
itself deeply problematic. Allen contends that it is “innocuous” to claim that a transcendental
account of subjectivity is not required to conceive of the subject as a thinking being, but given
Foucault’s own employment of general concepts like “rules,” “practices,” and “actors,” such a
move is far from harmless. If one rejects the Kantian or idealist route of giving an account of the
transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience, then one is forced to simply take for
granted an empirical or psychological notion of thought. That is, one begs the question of what it
means to think. Foucault thus fails to see that his notion of the “historical a priori” cannot take the
place of a philosophical account of subjectivity but itself requires such an account. To claim that
subjectivity is always historically situated is to make a claim about the logical constitution of
subjectivity itself. What is subjectivity such that it must always be historically constituted?
I will return to the question of historical self-constitution in section VI below. In the present
context, I want to focus on the even more fundamental issue of what both Allen and Foucault miss
12
in Kant and how this undermines Foucault’s attempt to offer a theory of discursive content.37
Foucault employs a quasi-Kantian notion of “rules” (what Allen refers to as the “historical a
priori”) in order to explain the idea of a “discursive field,” in which a sign or statement is held to
exclude or entail a range of other possible signs or statements. Foucault frequently notes that his
analyses concern “what governs statements, and the way in which they govern each other so as to
constitute a set of propositions which are scientifically acceptable,” and what counts as acceptable,
on his account, is ultimately an expression of what power requires. 38 For instance, the modern
concept of “mental illness” is produced by the ensemble of possible statements about it and the
practices its treatment rules in and out; the idea that madness is a “disease” that requires medical
treatment constitutes mental illness as a new object of knowledge and the psychiatrist-patient
relation as a new form of power. But Foucault also argues that the “description of discourse is
opposed to the analysis of thought.” The latter is held to be guilty of presupposing “the intention
of the speaking subject, his conscious activity.”39 Foucault is insistent that his method, by contrast,
is empirical, descriptive, and value-free, and that the objects of his analysis are causes, facts, and—
to use one of his favorite terms—“positivities.”40 Foucault dismisses the myth of the “mental” in
order to focus on the objective regularities immediately evident in the use of discourses
themselves.
Kant’s revolutionary insight, however, lay in his claim that the basic unit of thought is not
the concept or the representation, but the judgment, which is the rational activity of unifying and
applying concepts. According to Kant, concepts are neither abstractions from particulars nor selfstanding, isolatable descriptions like proper names; rather, their content is a function of the role
they play in judgments, of the way in which they are used. They are thus “predicates of possible
judgments” and act as rules for judging, determining what can and cannot be predicated of what,
the sorts of discriminations that must be made, and the kinds of reasons that must be appealed to,
in taking anything to be the case.41 In judging that “every metal is a body,” for instance, the concept
of “body” dictates what would count as appropriate usage, such as its application to “every metal”
(and not, say, to the concept of an immaterial entity, like freedom or love). Judgment is thus
fundamentally self-conscious or “apperceptive,” as the “representation of a representation of [an
object]”42: I know not just what I am representing but why the world ought to be represented thusand-so and how my concepts ought to be applied. Such rules are not, however, a separate object
of knowledge, as if an external standard against which one could measure one’s actions and beliefs;
13
rather, such rules are “bedrock,” constituting not another content of consciousness, but the very
form of one’s conscious activity (of acting and believing).43
Thinking, for Kant, is thus spontaneous and “self-determining,” inasmuch as the only laws
that have authority over thought are laws whose authority thought itself acknowledges. Such
conceptual rules, then, are not causal laws that describe what one will or is likely to think, given
perceptual cues, evolutionary imperatives, biological makeup or class background; rather, they are
norms to which one holds oneself and that prescribe what one ought to think. While I cannot will
myself to believe just anything (that it is not raining, for example, when I perceive that it is), my
beliefs are not just necessitated by external impingements on the senses. I am responsible for
deciding what should count as evidence for or against a belief, such that I can always decide
wrongly (the ground was damp because of a spillage, not rain). The norm-guided nature of
judgment grounds the idea of the objective purport of experience—the idea that we are trying to
get things right and understand them as they are—and thereby entails the a priori contestability of
any belief. Because judgment is a matter of a commitment or subscription to a norm rather than
causal necessitation, one is constitutively attuned to the possibility of being mistaken; at least
minimally responsive to the demand for justification; and in principle capable of self-correction—
of coming to recognize what one ought or ought not to have believed.
At issue, then, is what makes intentional content possible in the first place: if such norms
are not understood as self-legislated, Kant argues, we will be unable to account for the
intelligibility of discursive activity. Without reasons, warrants, and justifications, which
themselves entail the responsibility of the believer for what she believes, our beliefs would lack
any articulable content. For beliefs and indeed for actions to be regarded as determinately
contentful (as embedded in relations of exclusion and implication), they must be understood as
expressions of norm-governed commitments that we can fail to sustain. The space of reasons
coincides, in a word, with the realm of freedom.44 At the highest level of generality, Kant’s theory
of “pure” categories grasps the rules that thought must follow in making any empirical judgment
and that are thus required for thought to be the thought of an object (to be thought, period). What
Kant thereby establishes is our constitutive freedom, the formal capacity for self-legislation—for
binding ourselves to norms—that constitutes us as the kind of beings that we are. The “innocuous
claim” that we can understand what it means to be a “thinking being” without such a theory rests
on the pernicious assumption that the intelligibility of human practice and discourse, as well as the
14
notion of thought itself, is simply self-evident. As will become clear, any account of the social and
historical contingency of human rationality requires that we understand reason as such as the
ongoing process of trying to decide what ought to be done and what ought to be believed.
It should also be noted that critics of Foucault like Habermas make the opposite mistake,
in that they take the basic form of reason to furnish transhistorical criteria for assessing the
rationality of human practices. Such critics are thus equally ill-equipped to grasp that the radically
autonomous nature of reason is what grounds and necessitates the distinctly historical process of
its self-formation. As I show below, what counts as true freedom and autonomy is itself subject to
historical development, and not deducible from the formal structure of practical or
“communicative” rationality.45
Foucault’s refusal to consider “conscious activity” as constitutive of discourse, therefore,
undercuts his attempt to account for the intelligibility of the content of signs and statements—and
of social practices more broadly—by way of rules. Foucault’s own reference to the relations of
exclusion and implication that define a discursive field requires the thought of a subjective process
of determining what ought to be excluded and what ought to be taken to follow from what. Absent
such normative judgments, there would be no way to ground the idea that we even purport to know
things as they are (that we take it that things are in some determinate way) and thus that our beliefs
have intelligible content,46 as Foucault’s account of discourse must assume. The claim that
discourse is not to be understood in terms of the conscious activity of the subject is not a
metaphysically neutral statement of fact (pace Allen), but a normative proposal as to how we ought
to understand the kind of beings that we are. In other words, Foucault’s theory rests on a
metaphysics of power, contingency, and structure that is simply taken for granted. By the same
token, the claim that thought is reducible to the historically specific discursive structures in which
it is embedded fails to grasp what thought is such that those diverse structures could be understood
as structures of thought.47
Now, it is worth recalling that Foucault develops his understanding of normalized practice
in explicit and indeed vehement opposition to the “self-legislation” model of freedom developed
by Rousseau and Kant and critically inherited by the latter’s greatest heir (and a frequent target of
Foucauldian ire), Hegel. “The question is often posed,” Foucault writes,
15
as to how, before and after the [French] Revolution, a new foundation was given to the
right to punish. And no doubt the answer is to be found in the theory of the contract.
But it is perhaps more important to ask the reverse question: how were people made to
accept the power to punish, or quite simply, when punished, tolerate being so. The
theory of the contract can only answer this question by the fiction of a juridical subject
giving to others the power to exercise over him the right that he himself possesses over
them.48
In the previous section, I showed that Foucault’s own answer to this question is what he calls the
“carceral continuum,” which is regarded in Discipline and Punish as the “technical and real,
immediately material counterpart of that chimerical granting of the right to punish.”49 Foucault is
rightly objecting to the idea of a “sovereign” subject that can choose its own constraints and
emphasizing instead the practical and institutional constitution of subjectivity. But as the Kantian
picture rehearsed above indicates, there is a way to understand agency that neither falls prey to the
voluntarism Foucault criticizes nor recoils from such a position into the determinism Foucault
ultimately espouses.
While Foucault can describe what is likely to happen in disciplinary society on the basis
of an essentially causal continuum and the regularities it produces, his rejection of the “juridical
subject” as a fiction undercuts his ability to account for practices as practices, whose
contentfulness, again, he simply takes for granted. Human doings cannot be adequately specified
apart from the reasons and justifications partly constitutive of what such doings are and thus apart
from the notions of agency, responsibility, and self-determination that such reason-giving entails.
To specify that aspect of a physical event that would count as “teaching a class,” for example, is
to determine not just which physiological mechanisms enable one to speak and gesture, but which
reasons one has for putting such mechanisms into play and for moving one’s body in the way one
does. In undertaking a commitment, one holds oneself to the normative proprieties that govern the
practice in question and that establish a distinction between success and failure. It is because norms
prescribe what one must do to be who one is committed to being—and not what will happen as a
matter of course—that agents are a priori responsible for their actions and can fail to live up to
their own avowed commitments.
16
If, as noted above, an agent’s knowledge of her own acts is non-observational and
somehow “identical” with the acts themselves, then it follows that to act is to do so in light of a
provisional grasp of what ought to be done—such that one is always susceptible to failing and to
being mistaken about the meaning of one’s own deeds.50 We are, consequently, in a profound sense
dependent on the recognition of others. Hegel’s crucial contribution to the Kantian account of
practical self-legislation—to which I will return below—lies in his argument that whether one
succeeds or fails in living up to one’s own normative standards is not just up to the agent in
question, but is ultimately a matter of how our deeds are assessed by other institutional actors,
whose authority to judge derives from our shared commitment to the same practical criteria of
success and failure.51
Foucault’s notion of normalization, by contrast, cannot actually ground the distinction
between correct and incorrect practices that it invokes.52 Without an account of the distinctly
rational force of institutional norms, one loses not only the distinction between correct and
incorrect performances of a practice but also the determinacy of the notion of practice itself. To
render intelligible the idea of a practice in contradistinction to a natural event, we require the
thought of the first-personal, felt necessity of doing what one ought to do and the attendant thought
of the possibility of failure. While Foucault acknowledges the risk of collapsing the distinction
between social rules and natural laws, he nevertheless assimilates the former to the latter, most
explicitly in his account of panopticism, which is held to consist in a regulation of the body itself
by power. It is no coincidence that, in Discipline and Punish, Foucault has recourse to a scientific
metaphor to articulate his theory of institutionality. According to this theory, institutionality
consists in "a micro-physics of power," i.e., the system of forces operated by individual institutions
in order to press "bodies" into service or “constitute” them as mechanisms for the production and
reproduction of those selfsame institutions.53 Institutions, for Foucault, are conditioning structures
that produce regularities of behavior with the consistency of a natural law. Whereas for Kant we
act on our conception of laws, on laws that we take as laws,54 for Foucault we are merely regulated
by laws, not unlike a planetary system, which cannot break the laws that regulate its activity
because it cannot take them as laws that can be broken.
The reduction of norms to mere regularities will have as its ultimate consequence the loss
of the very object of social critique—the idea of a practice for which we are responsible and that
ought to be given up, resisted, sustained, or transformed. As Allen herself notes, “It would seem
17
that in order for individuals to be capable of deliberately transforming practices of subjectivation
in more emancipatory or, if you prefer, less normalizing directions, they have to be autonomous
in some sense.”55 But conceived in terms of an emancipation from norms, the idea of autonomy
cannot account for the commitment to transforming our practices in a “less normalizing” direction,
let alone secure the possibility of critique. The commitment to such a norm-less state itself must
presuppose normalization of actors—through experience, argument, and education—in the
direction of an opposition to norms. Foucault’s claim that “freedom requires the possibility of
recalcitrance” itself requires the notion of a self-legislated norm, in light of which recalcitrance to
a practice could show up as worthy of affirmation.
While Nancy Fraser have similarly emphasized Foucault’s inconsistency on this score, she
fails to undertake the reexamination of the formal structure of freedom that Foucault’s challenge
to the idealist tradition should inspire.56 As I have noted, Foucault rejects the idea of “freely
binding oneself to a necessity in the form of the moral law” in favor of the idea of “freely calling
into question that which is presented to us as necessary.” Hegel often describes, in a seemingly
paradoxical locution, freedom as “the truth of necessity.”57 This might seem to assimilate us to a
fate teleologically ordained or decided in advance and to thereby deny the element of contingency
for which Foucault is trying to make room.58 While I will offer a fuller treatment of Foucault’s
conception of contingency in the discussion of history below, the point here is that to freely call
such “objectionable forms of constraint” into question is eo ipso to regard their overcoming as
practically necessary—not on account of what an ahistorical moral law demands, but on account
of the historically specific norms to which we have bound ourselves. Such norms establish what
we must do to be who we take ourselves to be, but the “must” of practical necessity is a selfimposed constraint to which we can fail to adhere. Far from eliminating the element of contingency
in human action, the notion of a distinctly “practical” or “rational” necessity Hegel inherits from
Kant grounds the possibility of doing otherwise—of either calling into question or failing to satisfy
what one’s own self-conception requires.
IV.
The Necessity of Immanent Critique
In Foucault’s discourse, the panopticon is meant to function as a critical device; it is meant
to theorize the way in which the technique of normalization transforms society as a whole into a
18
prison. Employing an especially vivid and powerful image, Foucault argues that the human soul
itself, as the historical product of normalization, is the “prison of the body.”59 The individuated
identity effected by one’s assimilation to a range of social institutions is the technology of bodily
self-regulation, whereby “the automatic functioning of power” is ensured. Foucault infers from the
panoptic character of modern society the political task of liberating us “both from the state and
from the type of individualization which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of
subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for
centuries.”60 In demanding that we resist disciplinary society, Foucault must assume that we are
responsible for what we do as well as for what we fail to. If we were to allow the disciplinary
technique of power to persist, for example, that would count for Foucault as a deed undone, a
collective omission. But the criterion of Foucault’s critique—a conception of freedom defined in
terms of a freedom from normative constraints—is merely assumed rather than anywhere argued
for. Moreover, it is inherently defective. By the lights of Foucault’s own understanding of
emancipation as the emancipation from norms, any positive criterion, standard or norm would
count as a form of domination, including the vision of economic liberalism he will ultimately
defend. How can Foucault justify his own appeals to “new forms of subjectivity,” if he has denied
the self-legislative freedom constitutive of any possible subjectivity, however radically new?
Foucault’s self-undermining rejection of the normative domain has severe implications for
his attempt to provide a theory of society. The indeterminacy of Foucault’s critical criterion—its
question-begging status—is a product of his commitment to a “more empirical” and “ascending”
method of social analysis.61 Against the form of “ideology critique” he ascribes to Marxism,
Foucault holds that theory must proceed from “local, regional, material institutions” to “how […]
they are invested, colonized, utilized, involuted, transformed, displaced, extended etc., by ever
more general mechanisms and by forms of global domination.”62 This is so, on his account,
because such global forces and dominant classes strategically appropriate techniques of power that
have their own independent genealogies and histories of development:
We could say that to the extent to which this view of the bourgeoisie and of its interests
appears to lack content […] it reflects the fact that it was not the bourgeoisie itself which
thought that madness had to be excluded or infantile sexuality repressed. What in fact
19
happened was that […] all of a sudden, [such techniques] came to be colonized and
maintained by global mechanisms and the entire State system.63 (my italics)
The “more empirical” character of the ascending method of analysis lies precisely in its willingness
to take for granted the determinate content of the practices from which it “ascends.” At the same
time, because Foucault assumes that the ultimate end of any group is the attainment and
maintenance of power, “local, regional, material institutions” will always appear to be of merely
instrumental or strategic value. As Foucault himself acknowledges, this renders the relation of the
bourgeois standpoint to modern practices entirely accidental, thereby voiding the standpoint of its
content and distinctiveness.64 Foucault concedes that the “reasons need to be studied” as to why
such practices suddenly revealed themselves as politically useful to the bourgeoisie,65 but as my
analysis has shown, the reasons in question cannot be just a secondary or tertiary object for further
empirical research: they are conditions for the intelligibility of practices as practices.
If power is presupposed as the matter-of-fact substantive end to which all practices and
relations are subordinated (rather than as the form of the authoritativeness of any possible end, an
option I will explore below), then we cannot be the subject of our ends but merely subject to them.
Strictly speaking, in that case, “we” would not be at all, because we would not be intelligible as
the agents of change Foucault’s own critical project must take us to be, if his critique of modernity
is to be more than an idle airing of discontents. One could counter that this is less a criticism of
Foucault than a description of his own position: “The analysis of descent [Herkunft, the
Nietzschean term for a contingent development] permits the disassociation of the Me, its
recognition and displacement as an empty synthesis, in liberating a profusion of lost events.”66 But
the question is what could take the place of such a “Me” and to whom Foucault’s own account is
meant to appeal. There must be enough synthesis and coherence for Foucault himself to take his
account as incompatible with competing accounts and to take the recovery of such “lost events”
as integral to our project of becoming who it is we ought to be.
Consequently, the ascending method Foucault endorses suffers from a fateful onesidedness. Bourgeois ideology—the justifications given for modern practices and institutions at
the most general level—is not incidental to but partly constitutive of such practices and relations.
One need not “deduce” the internment of the mentally ill from the class dominance of the
bourgeoisie; rather, the “descending” complement to Foucault’s method of ascension shows how
20
such internment is a further determination and specification of what bourgeois society requires of
itself. On the one hand, bourgeois society believes in recognizing the dignity and autonomy of all
individuals (the principle that governs the “ascent” from particulars). On the other hand, it
effectively excludes the disabled from bourgeois society through its employment of labor as a
criterion of moral and individual worth (a particular application of the principle of “descent”).67
Foucault’s claim that the “essence” of society is “fabricated in a piecemeal fashion from
alien forms” fails to grasp that, by definition, an essence cannot be such an aggregate, given its
formal function of enabling the parts to be parts, to play an essential role in the whole.68 How our
practices hang together, what this conception of labor has to do with that idea of statehood, is
ultimately a matter of the reasons we share, of the socially general rules that govern who we are
committed to being.69 While such diverse practices emerge contingently, in fits and starts over
time and never “all at once,” there is always a question of which practices we ought to sustain and
which we ought to give up or reject, which practices conflict with which and which practices are
required or entailed by others. Whatever contingent circumstances we find ourselves in cannot on
their own dictate who we are or what we will do. Rather, such circumstances must be taken up by
us on the basis of who we take ourselves to be (our historically specific, self-legislated “essence”).
Our practices and relations are thus not simply “indifferent” to one another; we are responsible for
resolving the incompatibilities and contradictions that arise among them. Ideology is not, as
Foucault assumes, a static standpoint from which the full range of historical possibilities can be
deduced, but the social rules embodied in the ongoing collective activity of deciding what ought
to be done. Ideology is the principle in light of which novel historical circumstances show up as
requiring a practical response of this or that sort and is itself something that can in principle always
be transformed.
Foucault rightly wishes to take aim at deep structural and institutional conditions rather
than just particular institutions or groups. But as Andrew Sartori has argued in an important essay
on Foucauldian genealogy, Foucault’s critical account of disciplinary society fails to posit “his
own critical capacity as part of that account and through the same categories as that account.”70
Foucault does not, in other words, derive his criterion of critique from disciplinary society itself,
by measuring it against its own norms, but opposes it instead from an anti-disciplinarian standpoint
that is largely simply postulated, on the basis of Foucault’s identification of freedom with the
capacity to resist. Sartori proposes as an alternative Moishe Postone’s account of Marx’s critical
21
method, which is held to articulate political-economic categories that are both constitutive of the
modern capitalist form of life and generative of a self-contradictory dynamic that points beyond
it. Through his elaboration of that contradiction, Marx is held to ground his critique immanently,
in the objective process of capitalist production itself.71
At the same time, Sartori largely accepts—and attempts to demonstrate Marx’s
compatibility with—Foucault’s genealogical dismissal of ideology (of the ideal of freedom) as the
mere rationalization of historically contingent relations of power.72 From my standpoint, this
compromises Sartori’s otherwise promising proposal, insofar as the rejection of ideology
undercuts one’s ability to properly specify the historical structure of society, which should be
understood as inseparable from the normative self-understanding of historical actors. And indeed,
the dismissal of ideology conflicts with the approach Marx actually advocates, as formulated in a
letter from 1843: “We shall confront the world not as doctrinaires with a new principle: ‘Here is
the truth, bow down before it!’ We develop new principles to the world out of its own principles.
[…] We only show the world what it is fighting for.”73 To give an account of the failure of
modernity and its susceptibility to critique requires that we give an account of our form of life in
its determinacy, that is, in terms of the normative standards to which we hold ourselves and in
light of which we can succeed or fail.
Such internal standards can ground two distinct critical methods. The first and less radical
method I call immanent criticism, because it adopts the standpoint of the principles internal to an
institution in order to determine whether its practical reality accords with what its own principles
require. For example, if the administrators of a self-avowed democratic state are corrupt and
authoritarian, immanent criticism would point out the discrepancy between the corrupt
administrators and the commitment to democracy and propose measures for institutional reform.
As Postone notes, Habermas’ famous critique of the encroachment of the “lifeworld” by the
capitalist “system” presupposes the ultimate adequacy of the latter, so long as it keeps within its
bounds. Accordingly, Habermas’s ideal of freedom—which is grounded in the notion of a
communicatively rational lifeworld and a properly regulated capitalist system—remains restricted
to a criterion for immanent criticism.74 By contrast, my approach keeps faith with Foucault’s
transformative aspirations, but by following Marx, who pursues the second critical method, a form
of immanent critique. This method shows that our standards must also be measured against
themselves, interrogated as to whether they can even in principle be realized: can the commitment
22
to freedom and equality that animates bourgeois institutions actually be fulfilled, or does the
bourgeois conception of freedom prevent its own realization? Only this latter form of critique can
ground the kind of radical social transformation Foucault himself envisions.
V.
The Metaphysics of Social Form
To be clear, I want to acknowledge that the importance of Foucault’s project lies in its
ambition to provide a materialist account of social life. A materialist account grants primacy to
what we really do over what we believe we do in explaining our actions. Foucault’s emphasis on
the “technical and real, immediately material counterpart of that chimerical granting of the right
to punish” intends to bring into view the originally formative nature of institutional practices and
thus the “primacy of the practical” in our constitution as historical subjects. Foucault compellingly
shows that we are what we do and that what we do is constrained by institutional norms. In
addition, Foucault has tried to capture, with his image of the panopticon and the prison more
broadly, how modern institutions are self-perpetuating structures of domination that reinforce the
status quo through disciplinary techniques. The justifications we offer for our practices, Foucault
argues, are given the lie by those practices themselves, as in his own example of the idea of liberty,
which is held not to have genuine force for practical actors, but to function instead as an empty
justification (a mere rationalization) for class domination.75
Yet there is a real question as to whether Foucault’s materialist form of analysis—his
genealogical method—is adequate to its own aim. The task of genealogy, for Foucault, is to show
that our forms of practice and forms of knowledge are historical results and that, as such, they can
be overcome. Foucault is emphatic that this is not a normative enterprise, that he is not writing a
history from the standpoint of the present (from the standpoint of contemporary values and norms)
but rather a history of the present (of the contingent causal process that led to our contemporary
circumstances).76 Taking aim at the historicist tradition, Foucault seeks to banish final causes from
the sphere of historical research, in order to establish that “history has no ‘meaning,’ though this
is not to say that it is absurd or incoherent. On the contrary, it is intelligible and should be
susceptible of analysis down to the smallest detail—but this in accordance with the intelligibility
of struggles, of strategies and tactics.”77 History is meaningless for Foucault because there is no
end or purpose towards which it is progressing (nothing that it is all “for”), but it remains
23
intelligible insofar as events and the predominance of certain ideas can be explained on a micro
level, by reference to their contingent, causal, and empirical grounds. In contradistinction to
archeology, which Foucault tasked with the demonstration of the contingency of past discursive
formations, genealogy is supposed to carry a sense of immediacy and urgency, exposing the
historical bounds of our institutional present and the implicit status of all institutions and
discourses as forms of struggle.78
Foucault encapsulates his understanding of the task of genealogy in the idea of “expos[ing]
a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body.” 79 What
Foucault means by the “destruction of the body” is the regimentation and habituation of the body
over the course of history, to such a great extent that eventually the body no longer requires
external coercion, because it has been trained to identify with its own domination. Consequently,
the destruction of the body can also be understood in terms of the Foucauldian metaphor cited
earlier, the imprisonment of the body by the soul. The more the historical systems of rules are
internalized and the more self-regulating power becomes, the more “ensouled” the body of the
subject is and the more it suffers from the imposition of an external, institutional form. Foucault’s
aim, therefore, is to overcome a form of history defined by the process of ensouling the body and
thereby to emancipate the body from the soul. This raises profound questions about Foucault’s
metaphysics of social and historical form, which Foucault himself largely fails to pose, let alone
answer. Can, for instance, the body be understood as the body apart from the idea of the soul? And
is history rightly understood as the destruction of the body through its subordination to the soul
(through its increasingly efficient instrumentalization by power)?
In my reconstruction above of Kant’s account of constitutive freedom (of the formal
freedom that constitutes us as the rational beings that we are), I showed that the notion of selflegislated rules is essential to grasping the possibility of discursive content. But Kant’s account is
not sufficient on its own to ground a conception of radical social critique. Hegel’s critique of the
Kantian project revolves around Kant’s failure to think the inseparability of material and spiritual
life and the historicity of rationality itself. Foucault’s misapprehension of Kant on rules has fateful
implications for his understanding of Hegel, who is widely recognized as the main target of
Foucault’s critique of historicism. The final part of Hegel’s Science of Logic, entitled “The Idea,”
offers a critical synthesis of the Kantian account of freedom and the Aristotelian conception of the
soul (partially recovered by Kant himself, in the third Critique), in order to elaborate the logic of
24
critical theory. In this remarkable and yet little-understood sequence, Hegel shows that the concept
of the soul is a condition for the intelligibility of any possible critical theory, whether of society or
of history. Deepening Kant’s notion of freedom, Hegel argues that to be free is to be embodied
and living; essentially dependent on the recognition of others; and subject to a process of historical
becoming.
Hegel famously defines the Idea as the “unity of the concept and objectivity, […] of the
ideal and the real, of the soul and the body,” but he emphasizes that this notion of “unity” is
misleading, since the Idea is not a “calmly enduring identity” but actually a “process.”80 In other
words, Hegel’s notion of the Idea is not a disembodied Platonic form, but a theory of subjectivity
as the fragile activity of form (Formtätigkeit), in virtue of which the subject makes itself into the
kind of entity that it is and renders the world intelligible as the world. Following Aristotle, Hegel
understands the soul (psuchê) as the “form of a natural body that has life potentially.”81 On
Aristotle’s account, form is the purposive arrangement of the parts of a thing in view of its function
or “constitutive activity” (ergon),82 while matter is the material well-suited to being formed but
also capable of falling apart. For example, the form of an eye (its metaphorical “soul”) is its
capacity for sight, which is actualized (energeia) in the activity of seeing; in a state of sleep, an
eye is only potentially (dynamei) an eye (its parts are so arranged that they can be actualized at
any moment, upon awaking), while an eye that has lost the capacity for sight is an eye only
“homonymously” or “in name only.”83
The soul is thus the form of a living being, whose function consists in its own
reproduction—either through the maintenance of its own parts or through the production of a new
instance of its own form (the reproduction of the species). As the form of the living individual, the
soul is the animating principle of the body, establishing what parts it ought to have and how they
ought to be arranged and what ought to be done for the sake of its maintenance. The parts are thus
both the means to such maintenance of the body and the end to be attained.84 The soul cannot exist
apart from the body, as a distinct entity, nor can the body remain the body without the soul. As
Hegel puts it, the separability of the soul and the body “constitutes the mortality of the living.”85
Death is the literal crumbling of form, of the soul of the body and, with it, the body itself, which
ceases to be a body when it loses its potential for living and is overtaken by the mechanical
processes of the natural world. To be a living being, therefore, is to perform the constitutive activity
of striving to be one, of actualizing one’s embodied potential for living a life.
25
Crucially, this account of life rests on a distinction between the logical concept of selfmaintenance and the biological notion of self-preservation, to which the modern theorists of a
“disenchanted” world—from Hobbes to Weber, from Arendt to Foucault—tend to reduce the
notion of life. Life is not a matter of a causally regulated drive to preserve a bodily substrate but
rather a matter of a spontaneous pursuit of self-satisfaction: a living being takes aspects of its
environment to be worth pursuing or avoiding (to be potentially satisfying or dissatisfying) in light
of its purpose of maintaining itself. In the case of spiritual animals like human beings, the “formally
essential feature” of the soul, according to Hegel, is “freedom.”86 We do not just maintain ourselves
in light of given standards, but constitute ourselves in light of self-legislated norms. We are not
simply responsible to species-specific imperatives we acquire at birth but responsible for norms
that we inherit from past generations and that we must choose to affirm or disaffirm, to sustain or
transform. Accordingly, what counts as a life worth living—what counts as material satisfaction
and spiritual fulfillment—is itself subject to change.
Foucault’s understanding of subject formation in terms of discipline and habituation and
the “subtly physical” laws of “optics and mechanics” is meant to demonstrate our essential
sociality—our constitution by social relations—and to contest a picture of human life in which the
consciousness of a self-possessed subject is granted primacy over embodied activity shaped by
and embedded in an institutional context.87 Yet the intentional dimension constitutive of human
action as such consists not in a reason held explicitly in mind or in a discrete psychological event
that precedes the enactment of a practice, but rather in the soul of a distinctly human body and in
the form of an embodied action, its principle of intelligibility.88 Explanation of such events requires
appeal to justification, if they are to be understood as the actions that they are.89
Normative habituation, therefore, is not a process of behavioral conditioning such that one
can be “caused” to act by the presence of certain stimuli, like the gaze of another. Rather, it is the
process whereby our motivational propensities are given a rational form, enabling us to count the
desires and inclinations elicited by the objects of experience as reasons to pursue or avoid them
and to reflectively deliberate on which desires ought to be acted upon. For example, to fear the
punishment that some institutional authority will inflict if its laws are broken is to have been taught
to take that punishment as worth fearing. My behavior may indeed be the product of disciplinary
constraints, habituation, and regimentation over time, but such institutional habituation is a way of
actualizing the distinctly human potential for rationality, which distinguishes us from the other
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animals by rendering us susceptible to a process of Bildung, of assimilation to a form of
responsiveness to the world guided by historically specific social norms. In Aristotle’s profound
chiastic formulation, crucial for the Hegelian conception of spirit (the soul of free animals):
“Deliberate choice is either desire-involving intellect or thought-involving desire, and this sort of
starting point is a human being.”90 Accordingly, even the most habitual and automated-seeming
doings are “ensouled” and “thought-involving,” insofar as desire is as such expressive of a
commitment to some conception of what ought to be desired, of what counts as desirable.
If Foucault conceives the soul as the prison of the body, he is thus implicitly advocating an
ontological prison break, in which the capacity for life would be exorcised. The body itself would
cease to be a body, because it would no longer have the function of trying to keep itself together.
Foucault not only fails to account for what renders the body intelligible as the living organization
of matter; he also fails to grasp the distinctly human body as the potential for social selfconstitution. To cease to have a soul and to just be a body is to no longer have a practical identity
(an institution-bound, normatively constituted sense of self). But to be just a body without a soul,
to be a human being without a practical identity, is not only to be less than human, but less than
animal: it is to be dead.
VI.
Why Genealogy is Insufficient for Writing History
What I have called our constitutive freedom is our unique capacity to act in light of
considerations that we take to have rational force and that we thereby expect others to recognize
as binding or justified. Unlike the other animals, we do not just test our judgments against the
world, but test them against one another, desiring that our claims and deeds be acknowledged as
such by other institutional actors. This is not an optional “psychological” state, as if one could
desire otherwise; inherent in doing anything is the desire to be recognized as doing what one
intends to do. To be an artist is to take it that one ought to be taken as an artist, by the critics,
viewers, and other artists whose recognition one a priori demands, just by trying to be a participant
in the institution of art. If one’s work is deemed a failure—a judgment that is itself normative and
contestable, as the history of misunderstood genius attests—one’s institutional status as an artist
will be imperiled, regardless of the strength of one’s own convictions.
27
Yet at a deeper level, there is a question as to whether our institutional norms themselves
embody or contradict such mutual recognition. For example, in Hegel’s famous master/slave
dialectic, the norms that govern mastery require that the master deny recognitive authority to the
slave, on whose recognition the institutional status of the master depends. The normative authority
or power of the master is thus intrinsically unstable and liable to being regarded by the slave as
mere violence.91 The norm of mastery is thereby revealed to be a failed norm, insofar as its content
(the practices it legislates) undermines its own claim to authority. Given our constitutive
dependence on recognition, we cannot be indifferent to the realization of the social conditions
under which our identities, deeds, and beliefs could actually be recognized as what they purport to
be. It is precisely because human reason is radically free, bound only by norms to which it binds
itself, that what counts as genuine mutual recognition cannot be decided in advance, or deduced
from pure practical rationality, but must be developmentally determined on the basis of historical
experience. Historical freedom, therefore, is the historically specific way in which our formal
freedom is actualized and refers to the degree to which our institutions and norms are themselves
actual—are “effective” (wirklich) and sustainable as institutions and norms.
The Hegelian notion of the “We,” therefore, is not the empirical aggregate of living
human beings or an idealized collective subject acting behind the scenes. The idea of the “We” is
logically prior to the concept of any particular community, insofar as it seeks to delineate the
kind of being that can take itself to be part of a community, hold itself to communal norms (or
fail to), and relinquish its commitment to specific communities. Any proposal as to how the
world should be is a proposal as to how we should comport ourselves towards one another.
Attempts to exclude, enslave, coerce, and devalue are only intelligible as such attempts in light
of this idea of the “We”: slavery, for example, is not simply a line drawn in the sand between
“us” and “them” but rather a self-contradictory way of trying to be the “We.” Slaves are not
excluded tout court, but it is rather demanded of them that they take themselves to be excluded
and that they act in accord with the normative requirements of their role. To overcome slavery,
consequently, is not just to include subjects previously excluded from the “We,” but rather to
qualitatively transform both our historical freedom and the “We” itself: it is to recognize our
collective responsibility to one another for who we are.
If, on the contrary, we accept Foucault’s thesis that the soul is the prison of the body (that
the “We” is the prison of the body politic, as it were), then we will be unable to give a conceptually
28
determinate account of past forms of life, their relation to one another, and ultimately their relation
to us, our present commitments, and any critical theory we might attempt to provide of modern
institutional practices. Foucault’s appeal to contingency as an explanatory principle cannot itself
explain why he picks out the “contingent” events he does as relevant for an account of why one
practice loses its grip (“torture”) and another comes to seem justified (“punishment”). How, for
instance, in a purely causal or “empirical” account of historical change, do we discriminate
between essential and inessential causes? For instance, should the contingent birth of the inventor
of the guillotine in 1738 be included as a cause of the Terror in an account of the French
Revolution? Or since the guillotine was made of steel, should the invention of steel be included as
a cause in such an account? On the one hand, a strictly causal account of history would give rise
to an infinite regress and fail to ever reach a satisfying conclusion, since there is a potentially
endless series of causes that would have to be considered.92 On the other hand, such a causal
account could provide no criteria for specifying the contingent causes and events that political
actors take to count as reasons for acting, underdetermining the very notion of a historical practice
(as that which is subject to a special form of the question “why?”).93
Foucault’s own account of the transition from “torture” to “punishment” in Discipline and
Punish claims to be causal-explanatory rather than justificatory, but that transition itself is only
intelligible as a historical transition in light of the new justifications provided for preferring
punishment to torture as a mode of enforcement. That is, while Foucault is right that the transition
from torture to punishment was contingent, in that it did not have to happen when and how it did
(it could have happened otherwise), it still exhibits a logic of development that makes it possible
to specify why one practice was abandoned in favor of another. Foucault would perhaps attempt
to defang this line of criticism by recalling us to the vagaries of power and the changing
instrumental requirements for its efficacious exercise. But the desire for greater economy and
efficiency in the exercise of power is itself expressive of a normative commitment to power itself:
new means are required for the fulfillment of an end we take ourselves to have. The sympathetic
response of the members in a crowd to the victim of public torture and the resulting civil unrest—
to take up Foucault’s own example—indicates that a form of power now shows up as a form of
unredeemable violence and can no longer be justified.94 But the transition from torture to
punishment is not just quantitative in nature, as if the same form of power is simply being more
29
efficiently pursued; rather, what counts as the successful exercise of power is itself at issue and
subject to change.
Nevertheless, Foucault is emphatic that the possibility of progress is irrelevant to a proper
science of history: “I don’t say that humanity doesn’t progress. I say that it is a bad method to pose
the problem as: ‘How is it that we have progressed?’. The problem is: how do things happen? And
what happens now is not necessarily better or more advanced, or better understood, than what
happened in the past.”95 Yet Foucault is unable to successfully explain “how things happen”
because he has failed to come to grips with the distinctly social and historical mode of “happening”
specific to human life. While Foucault is right that what happens is in no case necessarily better
than what came before, just by virtue of coming later, what is at issue is whether we take it that
some past practice ought not be repeated and whether we believe that some historical development
ought to be counted as progressive. In coming to regard madness not as an afflatus or a curse, but
rather as an illness or as an effect of various environmental factors, we recognize that we ought
not ascribe human intentionality to the natural world and that a distinction ought to be made
between the norm-governed space of reasons and the causally determined “region” of the space of
nature.96 The members of ancient societies in which such a distinction was not drawn took the
natural world itself to be a source of normative authority, and the resulting arbitrariness and
irrationalism of both individual and communal decisions was experienced as a kind of collective
suffering, making it increasingly difficult for social actors to justify to one another—and thereby
to sustain—their way of life.97
Any number of contingent events can lead to the breakdown or emergence of a historical
form of life, but an efficient-causal narrative of the sort pursued by Foucault is precisely not
sufficient to explain “how things happen” in such cases. How those contingent events are regarded
and responded to, the reasons and justifications we offer for sustaining or rejecting the new
practical circumstances such events produce—these factors are essential to explaining the distinct
kind of spiritual happening at issue. The practices of a community are not just the endpoint of a
causal chain, but embodied manifestations of a normative self-regard that reflects the attitudes of
the community’s members towards its own history. Moreover, the claims we make about what in
the past ought to be counted as a failure or as a partial success are themselves contestable normative
judgments, rather than infallible proclamations made from an Archimedean vantage, beyond
history and debate.98 The point is not that historical progress is guaranteed, or that our judgments
30
about such progress are made in light of an unimpeachable standard, but rather that we make such
judgments a priori, in doing anything at all (in believing that there is anything that ought to be
done). History cannot intelligibly be a history of mere difference, not at least without ceasing to
be our history. It thus must be understood as a history of better and worse—and of transformations
of what counts as better and worse.
Because Foucault purports to offer a critical genealogy that will “expose” historical forms
of domination, he implicitly commits himself to providing an account of why such domination
should be exposed and rejected. Yet in rejecting the idea of human freedom as a pernicious illusion,
Foucault forfeits the ability to ground his own standpoint and to explain to his readers why the
forms of social domination he describes ought to be rejected. Nevertheless, its appearance of
neutrality notwithstanding, Foucault’s conception of history does express a normative
commitment of its own. Foucault’s historical determinism (“the iron-hand of necessity shaking the
dice-box of chance”) is not just a description of what happens to us in history,99 but a practical
proposal as to how we ought to comport ourselves towards historical possibilities and constraints.
By seeking to justify determinism as the truth about the dynamic of history, Foucault enjoins us to
take as true “the process of history’s destruction of the body” and to legislate for ourselves such
historical helplessness as the principle of our practical self-understanding. Foucault thus
presupposes the notion of self-legislation—of freedom—that he disavows. He seeks to establish
the impossibility of freedom as a norm for practice, to be sustained by historical agents who,
ironically, can feel the force of Foucault’s reasons and act freely in their light.
VII.
The End of Neoliberalism
Where does this leave Foucault politically? An important clue is the late Foucauldian
notion of “biopolitics,” which is identified in The Birth of Biopolitics (1978-1979) with “economic
liberalism”—a controversial topic in recent scholarship on Foucault.100 In “Society Must Be
Defended,” a lecture from 1976, Foucault defines biopower as the “technology of power over ‘the’
population as such, over men insofar as they are living beings.”101 If panopticism designates the
self-regulation of individuals on the level of the institution, then biopower refers to the selfregulation of the population as a whole. Replacing the power of the sovereign to “take life and let
live,” biopower is thought to explicitly emerge in the eighteenth century and to have as its objects
31
not the lives of individuals, but public health and hygiene, mechanisms for reproduction, and the
birth and death rates of the population as a whole. Through manipulation of these measures,
biopower intervenes at the most socially general level and regulates—“in statistical terms”—the
biological process of the total population.102 Life itself becomes the measure of power.
In The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault begins to develop a conception of freedom grounded
in biopower, which he redefines in terms of economic liberalism, or what he also refers to as
“neoliberalism.” Tracing this idea from the Physiocrats up through the Chicago school, Foucault
argues that, in contrast to its political counterpart, economic liberalism makes no appeal to a
humanistic anthropology. It presupposes not the “will” of the free subject as the origin of the state
and its laws, but self-interested individuals whose needs are best satisfied by optimal market
conditions, with minimal intervention by an administrative state. The economic tradition of
liberalism argues that the task of the state is to minimize its own role in the lives of individuals by
ensuring the equilibrium and healthy functioning of the free market. By emphasizing market
efficiency rather than the rights of individuals (aside, of course, from property rights), economic
liberalism embodies a perfected biopolitics, maximizing individual freedom while also creating
the ideal conditions for society’s self-regulation. Questions of “good and evil, normal and
abnormal,” lose their relevance, since market performance becomes the most consequential
measure of the rationality of behavior.103 Who one is, consequently, is determined solely by the
labor one does.
In other words, Foucault comes to understand economic liberalism as a way to overcome
the “panoptic” condition of normalization and the chimerical notion of the ensouled “juridical
subject” that it produces. As Foucault himself puts it, in an astonishing passage worth quoting in
full:
[Neo-liberalism in the United States] is not at all the ideal or project of an exhaustively
disciplinary society in which the legal network hemming in individuals is taken over and
extended internally by, let’s say, normative mechanisms. Nor is it a society in which a
mechanism of general normalization and the exclusion of those who cannot be
normalized is needed. On the horizon of this analysis we see instead the image, idea, or
theme-program of a society in which there is an optimization of systems of difference,
in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes, in which minority individuals and
32
practices are tolerated, in which action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather
than on the players, and finally in which there is an environmental type of intervention
instead of the internal subjugation of individuals.104
This amounts to an endorsement of neoliberalism as a form of life emancipated from normativity.
Far from reflecting a conservative turn in Foucault’s thinking, this endorsement is entirely
consistent with his earlier work and larger project, as I have reconstructed it. According to
Foucault’s argument here, the freedom “produced” by neoliberal policies consists in “freedom of
the market, freedom to buy and sell, the free exercise of property rights, freedom of discussion,
possible freedom of expression, and so on.”105 As the perfect expression of biopolitics, the
“governmental practice” of neoliberalism manages and organizes “the condition in which one can
be free,” allowing society to regulate itself through the spontaneous interplay of “bodies” on the
market, rather than through the institution of rights and welfare programs.106 This is a
“macrophysics” of power, through which the supposed illusion of collective self-legislation is
finally dispelled and the self-regulation of the market ensured by a purely functional state
apparatus.
The problems I identified in Foucault’s account of normalization recur here. First,
neoliberalism could never be a purely administrative or “prudential” solution—an impartial,
technocratic calculus—because it itself is a normative commitment that must be justified and
sustained. A neoliberal form of life cannot simply be a means pursued to satisfy some preinstitutional or “given” egoistic ends, because such ends are already the product of a social and
institutional process of formation. Foucault’s commitment to individual freedom is itself a
reflection of his modernism—of the shaping of Foucault himself by the greatest of modern ideals.
Foucault’s belief that neoliberalism is free of norms is thus contradicted by the fact that the free
market, the free exercise of property rights, etc., are bourgeois ideals to which we must hold
ourselves. To organize a society conducive to individual egoism, the private accumulation of
wealth, and so on, is to be committed to institutionalized relations of dependence that make the
pursuit and satisfaction of such particular ends possible. Accordingly, the state cannot be a mere
instrument for regulating the market but is rather the political form whereby we collectively bind
ourselves to the free market. Participation in the modern state shapes us as subjects who value the
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right to property and who sustain that right through recognition of and adherence to the relevant,
universally binding laws.107
Foucault’s own restricted understanding of freedom as economic freedom is thus
incoherent. In the absence of the notion of our constitutive freedom, neoliberalism would be
unintelligible as a historical form of life. On Foucault’s model, the players on the free market are
indistinguishable from automatons, or entities governed by natural or biopolitical forces. Even if
it appears that market forces are regulating our activity, such regulation does not replace but is
itself the result of collective self-legislation. The minimization of government for the sake of the
self-regulation of the market is itself a commitment we make and sustain, not a “freedom” from
collective commitment. Because Foucault endorses and seeks to justify a political project that is
thought to dispense with justification and normative authority, his commitment to neoliberalism
as the realization of freedom is, by its own lights, essentially contradictory. As the illusory promise
of freedom from norms, neoliberalism fulfills Foucault’s vision of the body without a soul; it is
the dream of the corpse of the body politic.
A truly adequate critical approach, by contrast, must be able to account for the practices
we pursue for the sake of our self-maintenance as living beings (e.g. wage labor) as well as the
justifications we offer for maintaining ourselves in that way. We require an account of the form of
our lives, of our life process, and the reasons we give to one another for undertaking the particular
practices that we do. The way in which we maintain our lives is not incidental to the ideology of
individual freedom at issue, which also does not just function as a contingent “rationalization” for
practices that are “really” just self-interested, subordinate to a desire for power, and so on. Rather,
the normative commitment to freedom—to individual autonomy and democratic self-rule—is
essential to the determination of the content of our material practices under capitalism, of what we
take to be required for realizing that commitment.
Foucault’s belief in a negative income tax, one’s right to one’s labor, and mechanisms for
safeguarding individual choice thus reflects a determinate conception of who we ought to be.
While Foucault holds that a minimally regulated market is a non-normative alternative to the
disciplinary state, his account ultimately presupposes the normative distinction between true and
merely apparent emancipation, between power and mere violence. Accordingly, Foucault’s own
justifications for a neoliberal order (e.g. the promise of maximal individual autonomy) must be
measured against the practices they are intended to justify. Do wage labor and a free market
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economy (1) fulfill their promise of enabling us to live our lives and (2) fulfill their promise of
enabling us to lead the lives we live? Because Foucault fails to pose the question of the adequacy
of a capitalist economy to its own aims, he is also unable to see that the neoliberal order cannot
actually be what it purports to be, the production of a free individuality.
Much of the recent critical work on Foucault—itself a symptom of the crisis of
neoliberalism—opposes his politics from the standpoint of a redistributive paradigm, instead of
pursuing an immanent critique of his position that seeks to understand its motivational force.108
Such critics miss the kernel of truth in Foucault’s affirmation of individual choice. They succumb
to an antinomy between statism and individualism, equality and liberty, social democracy and
economic liberalism, at the expense of a systematic critique of the “whole” of the capitalist form
of life. Any form of capitalism—whether social democratic or neoliberal—is ultimately at odds
with the commitment to emancipation. The truth content of Foucault’s position lies in its
recognition that a free form of life must be experienced by us as free and be regarded as a source
of self-satisfaction. Trickle-down economics, the dismantling of the welfare state—part of what
we have to learn from Foucault is that such ideas are not simply advanced in bad faith, 109 but are
genuinely taken to be means for achieving an ideal of freedom. What Foucault’s genealogical
method—his rejection of normativity and of ideology—prevents him from grasping is that the
capitalist conception of freedom is at variance with itself and must be transformed if it is to be
realized.
VIII.
Conclusion: Mutual Empowerment
For the Foucauldian account of social forces as competing powers to be adequate to itself,
it must reconceive power in terms of the formal capacity for self-legislation (constitutive freedom)
and the historical potential for mutual empowerment (historical freedom). Otherwise, in the
absence of such a notion of power, we will be unable to account for the distinctiveness—the
determinate content—of specifically social and historical institutions, practices and processes.
Were subjects simply regulated by external norms or caused to act by the bare desire for power,
there would be no intelligible distinction between beings that are the subjects of themselves and
beings in nature subject to natural forces. The realm of the historical that Foucault takes to be his
purview would lose its determinacy as a realm, as a distinct set of phenomena with distinct
35
explanatory requirements. Critical theories grounded in any type of mechanical explanation—
whether naturalist, behavioral, or strategic—will (1) underdetermine human action and (2)
undermine their own purported status as critical theories. Not only will they be logically
incoherent, in other words; they will also be practically self-contradicting, insofar as they will
demand of us that we disavow our freedom.
Yet as I have acknowledged, Foucault is not wrong to seek to explain who we are in terms
of power relations, and there is a good model of—a powerful historical precedent for—an actually
satisfactory explanation of distinctly human or spiritual power. The epigraph to this essay recalls
a crucial moment in the history of philosophy, when the debate between materialism and idealism
was, perhaps for the first time, explicitly staged. In Plato’s The Sophist, the Eleatic stranger
dramatizes this debate by reimagining it as a war—famously dubbed the Gigantomachia—
between a race of giants (the materialists) and the gods (the idealists, or “friends of the forms”).
Whereas the giants identify being with the tangible and the contingent, with what becomes or is
ceaselessly changing, the gods identify being with unchanging forms, which exist apart from
sensible, perceptible reality. Yet surprisingly, Plato does not have the stranger side with the friends
of the forms, whose position resembles Plato’s own earlier doctrine of the Ideas. Rather, the
stranger proceeds to develop the notion of a consistent materialism, redeeming the partial insight
of the giants. According to the stranger, the giants are not wrong to emphasize contingency and
change as essential to the structure of being; indeed, this is what the friends of the forms miss.
What the giants fail to grasp is that to be subject to change is not to be purely passive, but to have
a capacity for being changed. This embodied capacity or potential is to be understood as the power
of form, which enables things to determinately be what they are, to affect and be affected by other
beings.
Just as the Eleatic critique of the giants rehearsed by Plato seeks to redeem the materialist
perspective by grasping its implicit dependence on the principle of form and spontaneity that it
denies, so must the critique of Foucault strive to keep faith with his own materialists ambitions
and profound insights into the structural role played by power in human life. In a supreme
dialectical twist, it is Hegel who plays the Eleatic stranger to Foucault’s giant:
The universal is therefore free power; it is while reaching out to its other and embracing it,
but without doing violence to it; on the contrary, it is at rest in its other as in its own. Just
36
as it has been called free power, it could also be called free love and boundless soulfulness
[Seeligkeit], for it relates to that which is distinct from it as to itself; in it, it has returned to
itself.110
This Hegelian conception of freedom as a formally distinctive way of being a living being is not
only a coherent alternative to Foucault’s program, but actually succeeds in realizing Foucault’s
own aims. In a profound passage at the end of a late interview on “Truth and Power,” Foucault
notes that “the essential political problem […] is not a matter of emancipating truth from every
system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already power) but of detaching the power
of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic, and cultural, within which it operates at
the present time.”111 It is crucial that Foucault acknowledges here the inseparability of power and
truth, since he elsewhere demands—incoherently—that we sacrifice the “subject of knowledge”
and abandon the pursuit of truth.112 What this remark suggests is that there could be a fully “actual”
power of truth—an operative conception of what ought to be done and believed no longer
disfigured by social, economic, and cultural forms of hegemony.
Reinterpreted in this light, Foucault’s narrative of the progressive destruction of the body
and perfection of power becomes a narrative about what would count as free power. That is, each
new historical system of power is premised on a distinction between power and violence, between
the effective or actual exercise of power and the external or impositionist exercise of power in the
form of violence. The aim, for Foucault, is not to overcome power as such, but to establish a nonviolent form of power and to thereby enable power to truly be power, by its own lights. Yet such
an account would commit Foucault to a principle of progress—to a criterion for distinguishing
relative success from failure in past forms of life—and would require that Foucault, like Plato’s
giants, give up his mechanistic understanding of human practices and norms and his insistence on
the bare contingency of history. While the distinction between power and violence is normative
and thus contestable, it is a distinction we must always make, if the idea of emancipation is to be
more than an empty dream. We need to know how we came to have the commitments that we do,
and what they tell us about who we can no longer be. Only through such a historical and recognitive
process can we learn who we ought to be and what we ought to do, as well as what we have
committed ourselves to never doing or being again. If power is the effective exercise of authority,
then true normative authority could consist in nothing other than institutional relations of mutual
37
empowerment. To reanimate the body destroyed by history is not to exorcise its soul, as Foucault
once proclaimed, but to recognize its “boundless soulfulness”—our freedom.
From the recent notion of “institutional normalism” in literary studies to the concept of
“necropolitics” in political theory, Foucault’s influence on humanistic inquiry remains pervasive and his
critique of historicism and anti-Hegelianism are abiding hallmarks of the postmodern tradition of critical
theory. In recent years, aspects of this influence have been questioned, in the context of a debate
surrounding Foucault’s critique of the welfare state and his sympathy for neoliberalism. See, for instance,
Daniel Zamora, “Foucault’s Responsibility,” Jacobin, December 15, 2014,
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/michel-foucault-responsibility-socialist/, as well as Mitchell Dean,
“Foucault Must Not Be Defended,” History and Theory, 54, no. 3 (2015): 389-403. For a related critique
of Foucault’s “philosophical antihumanism” as the basis of his critique of notions of labor and
subjectivity associated with the tradition of political economy, see Michael C. Behrent, “Can the Critique
of Capitalism be Antihumanist?” History and Theory, 54, no. 3 (2015): 372-388. While these and similar
interventions have contributed to our understanding of Foucault’s political limitations, they have for the
most part neglected his core philosophical presuppositions concerning questions of agency,
institutionality, and normativity. Accordingly, this piece seeks to remedy this oversight and to undertake a
more fundamental critique of Foucault, by demonstrating the deep contradictions of his thinking and by
outlining a more adequate approach to critical theory.
2
The critical literature on Habermas is vast. For a critique of Habermas’s formalistic conception
of rationality, see Robert Pippin, “Hegel, Habermas, and Modernity,” in Idealism as Modernism:
Hegelian Variations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 157-184. For a critique of
Habermas’ approach to capitalism, see Moishe Postone, Time, labor, and social domination: A
reinterpretation of Marx’s critical theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 226-262.
3
Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philisophicum,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed.
James Faubion and trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: The New Press, 1998), p. 359. For Foucault’s
remarks on the “Marxist” tradition’s defense of the Gulag, see Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected
Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon and trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York:
Vintage Books, 1980), pp. 135-157.
4
I rely throughout this essay on the reading of Hegel I outline in Jensen Suther, “Hegel’s Logic
of Freedom: Towards a ‘Logical Constitutivism,’” in The Review of Metaphysics (forthcoming). My
approach is itself indebted to the recent “revisionist” interpretation of German Idealism, as exemplified by
the work of Robert Brandom, Christine Korsgaard, John McDowell, and Robert Pippin, among others.
5
Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 118.
6
Ibid., p. 56.
7
Ibid., pp. 49-50.
8
See chapters two and three in Amy Allen, The Politics of Ourselves: Power, Autonomy, and
Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); and the
penultimate chapter in The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
9
Andrew Sartori, “Genealogy, Critical Theory, History” (unpublished).
10
For Habermas’ classic critique of Foucault, see chapters IX and X in Jürgen Habermas, The
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1990).
1
38
For Fraser’s own Habermas-inspired critique (and her assessment of Habermas’ criticisms), see Nancy
Fraser, “Michel Foucault: A Young Conservative?” in Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse and Gender
in Contemporary Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 35-54
11
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 119.
12
See his remark in “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry, 8, no. 4 (1982), p. 789.
13
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 137-138.
14
Ibid., p. 164.
15
Ibid., p. 137.
16
Ibid., pp. 149, 156.
17
Ibid., p. 170.
18
Ibid., p. 187.
19
Ibid., p. 176.
20
Ibid., p. 177.
21
Ibid, pp. 222-223.
22
Ibid., p. 201.
23
Ibid., p. 203.
24
Ibid., p. 225.
25
Ibid., p. 301.
26
Ibid., p. 303.
27
Ibid., p. 222.
28
Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 97.
29
Ibid., pp. 99-102.
30
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 30.
31
Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” p. 781.
32
Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” p. 376.
33
Amy Allen, The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary
Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p. 37.
34
Andreea Smaranda Aldea and Amy Allen, “History, critique, and freedom: the historical a
priori in Husserl and Foucault,” in Continental Philosophy Review vol. 41 (2016), pp. 6-7.
35
Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” p. 790.
36
Allen, The Politics of Our Selves, p. 65.
37
The discussion that follows is indebted to Robert Pippin’s valuable critical account of “neostructuralism” in an essay on Manfred Frank; see Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian
Aftermath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 181-185. See also Robert Brandom,
“Reason, Genealogy, and the Hermeneutics of Magnanimity,” (unpublished manuscript, 2012).
38
Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 112.
39
Foucault, “On the Archaeology of the Sciences,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed.
James Faubion and trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: The New Press, 1998), p. 307.
40
Foucault, Power/Knowledge, pp. 49-50.
41
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), A106: “All cognition requires a concept, however imperfect or
obscure it may be; but as far as its form is concerned the latter is always something general, and
something that serves as a rule.”
42
Ibid., A68/B93.
43
The classic formulation of the “bedrock” status of rules can be found in Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing, 2009), §217.
44
John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 5.
45
For a summary of Habermas’ notion of communicative reason, see Habermas, The
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 314.
39
For an important discussion of Kant’s radical transformation of our understanding of the issue
of the content and determinacy of representations, see Robert Brandom, Making It Explicit: Reasoning,
Representing, and Discursive Commitment (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 72-74.
47
For an account of the irreducibility of theory in anti-theoretical and positivistic projects like
Foucault’s, see the critique of Weber in Theodor Adorno, Philosophical Elements of a Theory of Society,
trans. Wieland Hoban (Medford: Polity Press, 2019), pp. 10-11.
48
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 303.
49
Ibid.
50
For an invaluable discussion of this point, see Robert Pippin, Hegel on Self-Consciousness:
Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), pp. 1719.
51
See, for example, G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen Wood, trans.
H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), §113.
52
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 222-223.
53
Ibid., p. 25-26.
54
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. and ed. Mary Gregor and
Jens Timmermann (Cambridge, 2012), p. 26.
55
Allen, The Politics of Our Selves, p. 64.
56
In “Michel Foucault: A Young Conservative?”, Nancy Fraser offers an insightful analysis of
Foucault’s implicit commitment to providing some normative conception of an alternative to panopticism.
Her contribution to the normativity question notwithstanding, the success of Fraser’s critique of Foucault
is ultimately quite limited, because of its framing of the problem in terms of humanism and antihumanism and its reliance on Habermas’ formalistic conception of autonomy and communicative
rationality (see note 94 below). While Fraser does acknowledge that Foucault may end up having a point
against Habermas on the issue of the emancipatory character of the modern ideal of autonomy, that will
depend—she claims—on whether “feminists succeed in reinterpreting our history so as to link that ideal
to the subordination of women” (p. 53). But this neglects (a) the Hegelian alternative—that autonomy is
not just the Habermasian idea of a capacity for critical reflection or a rational procedure for
communication but a form of genuine Mitsein, of historically specific, socially shared norms that enable
us to actually be ourselves and to mutually recognize one another. And it neglects (b) Marx’s own
immanent critique of the bourgeois conception of autonomy, which grounds the domination of specific
groups and the dynamic of marginalization in the very form of modern life, capitalism. Marx does not
reject but rather reformulates the ideal of freedom—an approach that, I would argue, ultimately depends
on the “logic” of social critique developed by Hegel.
57
Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010), 12.12/505.
58
See the remark about freedom as the availability of “a field of possibilities in which several
ways of behaving, several reactions and diverse comportments, may be realized” in Foucault, “The
Subject and Power,” p. 790.
59
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 30.
60
Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” p. 785.
61
Ibid., p. 780; Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 99.
62
Ibid., pp. 97, 99.
63
Ibid., p. 101.
64
This notion of the “contentlessness” or emptiness of an ideology or standpoint is pervasive in
Foucault. In a different context, he remarks that “rules are empty in themselves, violent and unfinalized;
they are made to serve this or that, and can be bent to any purpose”; see Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy,
History,” p. 378. Foucault’s conception of rules as empty and unfinalized is incoherent, since it fails to
grasp that such rules can only show up as practically useful in light of a higher-order rule—affirmed for
its own sake—that establishes a distinction between success and failure and enables one to pick out the
means to an end (including other rules).
46
40
65
Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 101.
Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” p. 374.
67
While Foucault likely has inductive and deductive methods in mind, this problem was given its
most profound philosophical articulation in, first, Kant’s account in the Critique of the Power of
Judgment of the distinction between reflecting and determining judgment; and second, in Hegel’s critique
of Kant’s distinction in the Science of Logic. Notably, Hegel shares Foucault’s critical attitude towards
merely “determining” or subsumptive models of judgment, but unlike Foucault, Hegel does not get stuck
on the opposite horn of the antinomy, articulating instead the unity of ascending and descending, or
reflecting and determining, forms of judgment. The key to such unity is the crucial category of “purpose,”
which is “the concrete universal containing within itself the moment of particularity and of externality”;
see Hegel, The Science of Logic, 12.159/656. The category of purpose will play a significant role in
section V.
68
Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” p. 371.
69
For an account of our constitutive concern with how our values “hang together,” see the
discussion of “Neurathian reflection” in John McDowell, The Engaged Intellect: Philosophical Essays
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), p. 34.
70
Sartori, “Genealogy, Critical Theory, History,” p. 26.
71
Postone, Time, labor, and social domination, p. 143.
72
Sartori, “Genealogy, Critical Theory, History,” p. 15. See Foucault’s often quoted remark about
the origin of value, liberty, and logic in Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” p. 377.
73
Karl Marx, “For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed.
Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), pp. 14-15.
74
Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, p. 250-251.
75
Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” p. 371.
76
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, p. 31.
77
Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 114.
78
Andreea Smaranda Aldea and Amy Allen, “History, critique, and freedom: the historical a
priori in Husserl and Foucault,” Continental Philosophy Review 49 (2016), p. 7.
79
Ibid. p. 376.
80
Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, §215/286-287.
81
Aristotle, De Anima, trans. C.D.C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2017),
412a19-20.
82
Ergon is usually translated as “characteristic activity,” but as McDowell notes, this term is
misleadingly statistical; see John McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1998), p. 12. I have thus opted for “constitutive” instead of “characteristic,” in order to capture the
sense that the activity in question defines a thing as the thing it is.
83
Aristotle, De Anima, 412b18-27.
84
Hegel, Science of Logic, 12.184/681.
85
Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, §216/287-288.
86
Hegel, Philosophy of Spirit, §382/15.
87
See Foucault’s critique of Marxism’s alleged neglect of the body in Foucault,
Power/Knowledge, pp. 58-59.
88
As Aristotle argues in the Nicomachean Ethics, voluntary action need not involve overt
calculation and deliberation, but can rather manifest the rational character of an agent, her embodied
capacity for reading the salient features of a situation in light of her understanding of what ought to be
done; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Roger Crisp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014),
1117a21-23. See also Wittgenstein’s reductio of the idea that one need have reasons over and above those
embodied in a practice, in Philosophical Investigations, §212: “When someone of whom I am afraid
orders me to continue a series, I act quickly, with perfect assurance, and the lack of reasons does not
trouble me.”
66
41
Commenting on Aristotle’s notion of the practical syllogism, G.E.M. Anscombe writes that
reasons do not refer to “actual mental processes […] [but] to an order which is there whenever actions are
done with intentions”; G.E.M. Anscombe, Intention (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 80.
90
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1139b4-6 (translation modified); I have also consulted
Nicomachean Ethics, trans. C.D.C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014).
91
While Hegel does not systematically elaborate the distinction between power and violence, the
idea of violence as a deficient form of power and of a realized form of power that would be free of
violence is essential to the structure of the Logic and to the Hegelian project more broadly; see Hegel,
Science of Logic, 11.405-406/501.
92
This is the logical upshot of the poststructuralist notion of “overdetermination”—developed in
detail by Althusser—which dresses pre-modern materialism up as radical social critique. For the locus
classicus on overdetermination, see Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Verso
Books, 2005), pp. 99-101. In the terms I have developed here, what the Althusserian notion of
overdetermination conceals is the crucial question of normative standpoint, which informs not only the
practice of critique, but also the issue of political organization. What good is a “ruptural unity” of
disparate struggles, for example, if the aims of those struggles are incompatible, or keyed to different
“levels” of the social process (e.g. trade unionism versus bolshevism)?
93
Anscombe, Intention, p. 32.
94
See, for example, Foucault, Discipline and Punish, pp. 62-63.
95
Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 50.
96
I say “region” because strictly speaking, this classic distinction, at least as it is typically drawn,
reinforces a dualistic conception of the nature/spirit relation by failing to grasp that the space of nature is
not exhausted by the notion of lawfulness and the efficient-causal form of explanation appropriate to it.
Within the space of nature, a further distinction must be made between lawfulness and purposiveness,
which itself is not simply opposed to law but is rather its higher, minimally self-relating form. Otherwise,
we make no room in our account for the idea of a non-rational living being. Accordingly, the space of
reasons can itself be understood as a segment within the space of nature, as the highest and indeed selfconscious form of law. The dualism reflected in the hard distinction I am rejecting is endemic to
contemporary scholarship on German Idealism. See, for example, Robert Pippin, Interanimations:
Receiving Modern German Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 66.
97
Note that such “social suffering” in no way guarantees the breakdown or overcoming of a
historical form of life. This is not a claim about the efficient cause of collective transformation, or a
predictive claim about what is likely to happen, but a normative judgment about what ought to happen, or
a retrospective justification of what did happen, given the failure of a society to live up to its own
principles. It is perfectly plausible, therefore, that tragic situations of this sort could persist indefinitely.
For Hegel’s own recognition of the ineliminable contingency in history, see Hegel, Lectures on the
Philosophy of World History: Introduction, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1975), p. 66: “But if we say that universal reason is fulfilled, this has of course nothing to do with
individual empirical instances; the latter may fare either well or badly, as the case may be, for the concept
has authorized the forces of contingency and particularity to exercise their vast influence in the empirical
sphere.” Hegel’s point in claiming that “the concept has authorized the force of contingency” is to
indicate that contingency is an irreducible aspect of an intelligible reality and thus of the structure of
rationality itself. To be clear, such an “authorization” is not something that reason capriciously “provides”
and thus could “rescind”; it is rather an internal constraint reason must give to itself, if it is to be coherent,
truly rational. See also Hegel’s account of “the necessity of contingency” under the rubric of “absolute
necessity” at the end of the Logic of Essence; Hegel, The Science of Logic, 11.389-393/485-488. For an
important recent defense of Hegel’s conception of “reason in history” in terms of its compatibility with
historical contingency, see Terry Pinkard, Does History Make Sense? Hegel on the Historical Shapes of
Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017).
98
Habermas’ famous critique of Foucault also focuses on the issue of the self-undermining nature
of the Foucauldian project; indeed, for Habermas, Foucault’s claim that all truth claims are ultimately
89
42
strategic in nature and grounded in the desire for power undercuts the critical aim of Foucault’s own
theory: “But once all predicates concerning validity are devalued, once it is power and not validity claims
that is expressed in value appraisals—by what criterion shall critique still be able to propose
discriminations? It must at least be able to discriminate between a power that deserves to be esteemed and
one that deserves to be devalued”; Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 125. Yet this
critique ultimately falls short because of Habermas’ assumption that the procedural norms of
communicative rationality can function as the standpoint of his critique. That is, Habermas contends that
the modern lifeworld is explicitly governed by the communicative standard of the “better argument or
reason” implicit in all human exchanges; such a standard enables us to distinguish between forms of
power that deserve our affirmation and those that do not (that violate what “justice” demands). But the
standard of the “better reason” is far too abstract and formal to actually determine what counts as the
better reason, since what does count as the better reason is always historically contingent and may itself
be insufficiently rational. On the one hand, the norm of the “better reason” is itself a historical
achievement dependent on a range of other institutional achievements; it is a norm whose authority we
have come to acknowledge, rather than a transcendental condition (that is, such a norm rules out
asymmetrical models of authority, like the divine right of kings). On the other hand, even given such a
standard, what social actors take to be the more rational argument can itself turn out to be deficient or
self-contradictory. This demonstrates the defeasible nature of historical judgments, or so I would want to
claim. (For instance, both Antigone and Creon, by the end of the play, come to see the force of the
opposed argument, but it is too late, and in a certain sense, it always was: neither reason could ever
effectively circulate as a reason in the public sphere.) Accordingly, because of the indeterminacy and
“neutrality” of his criterion of rationality, Habermas himself is in no position to criticize Foucault or to
specify a viable “concept of counterpower” (p. 281).
99
Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” p. 381.
100
In an important anthology on Foucault’s relation to neoliberalism, Michael Behrent makes the
claim that Foucault replaces “biopower” with economic liberalism, in which “the modern practice of
power finds its most coherent expression” (Michael Behrent, “Liberalism without Humanism: Michel
Foucault and the Free-Market Creed, 1976-1979” in Foucault and Neoliberalism, p. 121).
101
Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76, trans.
David Macey, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana (New York, 2003), p. 247.
102
Ibid., pp. 243-248.
103
Behrent, “Liberalism without Humanism,” p. 113.
104
Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, trans.
Graham Burchell and ed. Michel Senellart (New York, 2008), pp. 259-60.
105
Ibid., p. 63.
106
Ibid., pp. 63-64.
107
Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (Cambridge,
2008), pp. 253-54.
108
A partial yet insightful exception is Jan Rehmann, “The Unfulfilled Promises of the Late
Foucault and Foucauldian ‘Governmentality Studies,’” in Foucault and Neoliberalism, 134-158. While
Rehmann also espouses a redistributive/social-democratic political vision and appeals to a questionable
“Spinozist” conception of agency, his article rightly emphasizes that “a critical ideology theory needs to
grasp the contradictions between neoliberal discourses of self-activation and the submission to alienated
relations of domination” (p. 153).
109
It is here that my account of Foucault diverges from that of Daniel Zamora, who fails to grasp
the truth content of Foucault’s commitment to neoliberalism. That is, Foucault did not just make a
mistake, or get “neoliberalism so wrong,” as the title of a recent interview with Zamora proclaims. Rather,
Foucault’s vision of individual freedom is a “torn halve of integral freedom,” to quote Adorno; a truly
emancipated society would not just abandon the individualism Foucault sought to shore up, but rather
enable it to come into its own. See Daniel Zamora, “How Michel Foucault Got Neoliberalism so Wrong,”
43
trans. Seth Ackerman, Jacobin, September 6, 2019, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/09/michelfoucault-neoliberalism-friedrich-hayek-milton-friedman-gary-becker-minoritarian-governments.
110
Hegel, Science of Logic, 12.35/532.
111
Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 133.
112
Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” pp. 387-389.
44