This is the first major study of Michel Foucault as a political thinker. Written in clear prose, Foucault and the Political explores the ramifications for political theory of the whole range of Foucault's writing, including materials only recently made available. Jon Simons argues that Foucault's work is animated by a tension between his presentation of modern life as "unbearably heavy" and his temptation to escape its limitations by aiming for "unbearable lightness." Through expositions of Foucault's ideas on power/knowledge, subjectification, governmentality, (...) political rationality and the aesthetics of existence, Simons demonstrates how Foucault resists both extremes. Foucault's thought entails an ethic of permanent resistance, best embodied in radical democracy. Simons relates Foucault's work both to contemporary political thinkers, such as Michael Walzer, Charles Taylor and Jurgen Habermas, as well as to scholars challenging conventional political categories, especially feminist and gay theorists such as Judith Butler. (shrink)

This chapter first outlines some of Foucault' s conceptualizations of forms of power, focusing on discipline and biopower. The first section explores the extent to which Foucault understood modern power relations to be constraining limits, inhospitable to freedom. The second section focuses on some of Foucault's general conceptualizations rather than specific historical analyses of power and resistance. The third section follows Foucault's conceptualization of power relations as more expansive and complex than domination. In the final section Foucault's affirmative conceptualization of (...) power relations in the forms of liberty and freedom, not only resistance, comes to light. The section argues that Foucault's theorization and practice of resistance and liberty illustrate that, under contemporary conditions, resistance is the most viable way to practice freedom. Most of Foucault's work on ethical concern for the self focuses on the Classical Greek and Hellenistic eras, as Greek ethics turns power relations on the self. (shrink)

Michel Foucault's involvement with politics, both as an individual and a writer, has been much commented upon but until now has not been systematically reviewed. This is the first major introductory study of Michel Foucault as a political thinker. Jonathon Simons explores the importance of the political in all areas of Foucault's work and life, including important material only recently made available and the implications of various revelations about his private life. Simons relates Foucault's work both to contemporary political thinkers (...) such as Michael Walzer, Charles Taylor and Jurgen Habermas, and to those challenging conventional political categories, especially people who write on feminist and gay theory, such as Judith Butler. Students of Foucault and of political and social theory, as well as those working in lesbian and gay theory, and feminist studies, will find this book essential. (shrink)

Recent interest in communism as an idea prompts reconsideration of Walter Benjamin’s conception of a “communist” aesthetic politics. In spite of Benjamin’s categorical condemnation of aestheticized politics, his “artwork essay” is better read as both explicit condemnation of a particular type of aestheticized politics and implicit commendation of another type. Under the modern conditions of the technological reproducibility of art, and mass politics, the character of and relationship between the cultural value spheres of politics and aesthetics also changes. Benjamin analyzes (...) dialectically the actuality of the fascist response to modern mass arts and politics in which technology and society are misaligned, and the potentiality of a communist response that would bring about a collective interplay of humanity and technology. (shrink)

This paper argues that democracy is universalisable as a theory and practice that fails to be identical with itself. Firstly, the paradox that democracy's universality can be put into practice only in particular terms and contexts is discussed. Then four models of democratic universality are presented and assessed: (i) empirical or actual universality; (ii) hybrid universality; (iii) cosmopolitan universality; (iv) impossible universality.The final argument is that democracy can be universalised because of the impossibility of making the demos identical with political (...) authority, which is akin to the impossibility of being identical to ourselves. (shrink)

Michel Foucault's involvement with politics, both as an individual and a writer, has been much commented upon but until now has not been systematically reviewed. This is the first major introductory study of Michel Foucault as a political thinker. Jonathon Simons explores the importance of the political in all areas of Foucault's work and life, including important material only recently made available and the implications of various revelations about his private life. Simons relates Foucault's work both to contemporary political thinkers (...) such as Michael Walzer, Charles Taylor and Jurgen Habermas, and to those challenging conventional political categories, especially people who write on feminist and gay theory, such as Judith Butler. Students of Foucault and of political and social theory, as well as those working in lesbian and gay theory, and feminist studies, will find this book essential. (shrink)

Aimed at students without philosophical training and who study literary, cultural, social or political theorists engaging with this European intellectual tradition, this textbook is an accessible guide to key figures in "The Tradition of Critique"--Critical post-Enlightenment European thinking.

Media technologies are an integral and vital element of democratic governance. The political public of representative democratic régimes are mediated publics, in that they exist and are constituted as publics through the mediation of technologies of mass media. The public sphere of democratic politics is part of, and central to, the mediated sphere of popular culture. There is a structural and necessary relation between the popularization of culture and the democratization of politics. A governmentalist approach understands political media technologies not (...) as aberrations in the light of democratic theory but as the practices of “actually existing” representative democracy. Genuine popular democracy does not exist, fully formed, in the publics constituted by the media technologies but is most likely to flourish in popular culture and through media technologies. (shrink)

Several critics of Foucault, notably Alan Megill and Jürgen Habermas, accuse Foucault of being an ‘aestheticist’. As such, Foucault fails to realise that the very appeal to aesthetics is made possible by modernity's rationalization, which offers better resources for emancipation than dangerous aestheticizations. This paper argues that such criticisms mistakenly deploy only certain modernist notions of aesthetics against Foucault. There are some fair grounds for holding that Foucault does appeal to such conceptions of aesthetics in his theorization of transgression, not (...) least because of his interest in modernist, avant‐garde writers and artists such as Roussel and Magritte. Yet, overall, Foucault's interest in avant‐garde aesthetics is not modernist in the sense understood by his critics. Foucault tends to focus on modernist illustration of the absence of foundations for representation and language, adopting a paraesthetic angle of critique. The limiting conditions that make representation possible can be seen in this light as both contingent yet necessary. Foucault's model of critique is developed in his early analyses of avant‐garde art and then expanded to cover subjectivity and the aesthetics of existence in his later philosophical critical ethos of modernity. Foucault uses avant‐garde art as a critical mode of reflection, to analyse and rethink the limits of the present. (shrink)