Foucault News

It’s now been the better part of a year since I finished this book. Our pandemic world makes it extraordinarily difficult for me to accomplish the mundane academic task of producing summary statements of what I’ve read. I offer this belated set of notes on the third part of Laval, Paltrinieri and Taylan’s text because these essays are rich and important. I hope these partial reflections (long though they are for a ‘blog post’) might inspire some of you to tackle the French original.

1. Tony Negri, “Subjectivity rediscovered: A Marxist Experience of Foucault.” Negri’s essay focuses on modes of subjectivation, modes of class struggle, and biopower, and the struggle to produce the commons. Negri lists four points that frame Marx’s project:  radical historicization of the critique of political economy; recognition of class struggle as motor of capitalist development; subjectivation of the workforce of living work in struggle; and the adequation…