Review by A. Janae Sholtz of Marcelo Hoffman, Foucault and Power: The Influence of Political Engagement on Theories of Power, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2014.09.25
Extract
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Hoffman makes several signature claims. As his central thesis, he proposes the relationship between Foucault’s political and militant activities and his analysis of power as a dialectic interplay, which provides a more refined and discriminate view of the various permutations of power throughout the development of Foucault’s philosophy. The book consists of a detailed examination of the different models of power identified by Foucault (war and governmental) and an analysis of the interrelations between the different modalities of power (disciplinary, biopolitical and governmental) as they relate to specific instances of activism and desire for militant intervention. Hoffman clearly challenges readings of Foucault that demarcate his thinking according to the break with one theory of power in lieu of another. Hoffman conducts a nuanced and precise study of how subsequent iterations of power bear the residuals of predecessor accounts or are informed by them in significant ways. Thus he proposes a continuum where conceptions of power bleed into one another rather than operate as discontinuous breaks.
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