The first part of this edited collection reflected on Foucault as a reader of Marx. In the book’s second part, five essays respond to the various Marxisms of the 19th-20th centuries and how Foucault situated his own research in relation to them. The first essay maps Foucault’s writings alongside developments in Marxian theory. The second to fourth essays juxtapose Foucault to the specific claims of Sartre, Althusser and Burckhardt, respectively, and the last (my personal favorite) examines the double chiasm of history and subjectivity in Foucault’s writings and pushes back—successfully in my view—on the ludicrous claim that Foucault ‘became’ a liberal individualist in his last years.
It has to be said that writing of any kind is difficult and strange right now, as protests raging against the police murder of George Floyd are crowding streets and highways and pressing up against the edges of the White House lawn, and as…
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