Foucault and Neoliberalism by Daniel Zamora & Michael C. Behrent

Author:Daniel Zamora & Michael C. Behrent
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2016-01-10T16:00:00+00:00

If Becker is somewhat puzzled by what Foucault's critique of his work is meant to be by this stage, he now seems rightly bewildered at the use of the very term “Left.” Ewald does not help matters when he sidesteps the question about political orientation to the role of government by the clear obfuscation entailed in invoking “governmentality.” The discussion has moved into the frame of a polite conversation between friends, at least as far as Ewald and Becker are concerned – or even perhaps of the same “thought collective,” to cite Philip Mirowski's exceedingly useful term.37 Ewald concludes that Becker made possible a “positivist” and immanent “critique of governmentality that is internal to the system,” but raises what he regards as a Kantian normative question.38 This concerns both the use of deterrence as a tactic of punishment that uses human beings as means to another end, and the impossibility in Becker's terms of gaining the information necessary to make the calculus that such deterrence will be effective.

We should note that this interpretation of Foucault by Ewald was not new, even if its early incarnations were somewhat more muted. In an essay dated from the mid-1990s, for instance, Ewald concerned himself with the nature of “philosophical acts” and explained what he had learnt from Foucault about the present: “Foucault posited that our current situation [actualité] is very fundamentally post-revolutionary: if there was an event in the 1970s, it was the disappearance of the revolution.”39 In a nod to Francis Fukuyama's thesis, and an explicit reference to Alexandre Kojève, Ewald suggests that it “is clear that the end of revolution, and the end of History represent the same event: it is an event in our consciousness of time.”40 What is left only belongs to “the order of administration, of management.” But this does not mean that the state assumes a central importance. Quite the contrary, for the end of revolution brings about the end of the philosophical relevance of the state, which is “no longer a philosophical concern…The stakes are with respect to power, and this is a totally different location, a totally different zone, a totally different type of reality.”41 Ewald brings a philosophical refinement to what he views as Foucault's radical anti-statism.

In Ewald's view, this situation does not portend a world without events. Rather, anything can emerge from it. It makes possible new “philosophical acts,” or “events which have the value of acts concerning being.”42 What would a philosophical act look like, then, in the realm of a politics without revolution and with a philosophically non-relevant state, which has been reduced to the order of management and administration? It would seem to Ewald that Foucault found an exemplar in Becker's theory and in neoliberalism.

Within a few years of these statements, and guided by his understanding of Foucault's actuality for the present, Ewald would be able to join in relations of power on the side of the neo-liberalizing fraction of business in France and seek a fundamental restructuring to the corporatist welfare state.

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