It was of all people the reactionary Chicago economist Gary Becker who posed the key question about Michel Foucault as a man of the Left: “But well, what does Left mean?” Foucault’s political activism certainly sounds Left: work in favor of prisoners and immigrants, for instance. But still: As Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora explain, Foucault wanted a Left that would not be socialist. Becker was right to be puzzled: Although it might not have been entirely obvious in Foucault’s time, in retrospect it seems unlikely that there could be a non-socialist Left—that the idea would have any substance. Or is that not exactly the point? Maybe a better way to put it would be to turn the proposition around, to argue “that a subversive view of neo-liberalism was possible, that in its ‘enterprise-oriented’ framework the Left could open space for…anti-‘social statist’ politics.” What makes that sound a little bit more interesting, at least on the face of it, is what it could do for language—namely to make what I’ve only known as a cuss word, neo-liberalism, and use it to designate something substantive that might have constructive as well as harmful uses. (Aren’t poison and medicine more or less the same thing, distinguished more by dosage and application than anything else?) Even still, I’m not convinced, and to see Foucault aligned with the right-wing of the French Socialist Party of the Mitterand era—as he is depicted by Dean and Zamora—certainly takes a shine off his supposed radicalism. And yet there’s real interest in an account that connects Foucault to his political context, above all because it clarifies how different his time was from our own, and how different our political needs are. At least since Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello published The New Spirit of Capitalism in 1999 (English translation, 2005), it’s been easy to see how the anti-authoritarian, anti-hierarchical spirit of the 1960s played into the hands of an economic model touting flexibility, autonomy, and networks—which in reality translated into precarity and heightened exploitation. But we have to remember that the revulsion against bureaucracy—including that of political parties of the left—and the heavy hand of the social state was something real, deeply felt, and widespread, and not only among incipient neo-capitalists. In France, the “figures of authoritarianism” included both “the national centralism of Gaullism and the supposedly democratic one of the PCF.” This was a period when it seemed to make sense for Foucault to remark that the essential problem might be, “not that of too little wealth, but that of too much power,” necessitating “the assertion of the art of ‘not being governed so much.’” Since then, the problem of power has hardly been solved, but the problem of wealth—of extreme inequality of wealth—has only intensified. Labor unions and political parties look different than they did during the trente glorieuses. Does that make Foucault’s thought less usable than it used to seem? In any case, it has to be used differently. As for his life-changing 1975 trip at Zabriskie Point, which him to abandon an already-finished manuscript of volume one of his History of Sexuality and start again from scratch, its citation in the title of Dean and Zamora’s book turns out to be a red herring. But reading Foucault—early or late, pre- or post-acid—still seems like a good way to break your head open.
❂
Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora, The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution, is published by Verso, London and New York, 2021.
❂
BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.