In part, this is because they were designed to respond to the pressures of a very different context. We claim that in the political climate of our present, Foucault’s ideas have been largely emptied of their political force. We claim, nevertheless, that despite Foucault’s best efforts, the young revolutionary might well judge Foucault or at least his present-day followers to be deserving of the same watery treatment. Foucault’s critique is similar in that it, too, takes issue with the problem of intellectual detachment ( Foucault, 1977a). As is well known, Foucault, like the young man in question, had his own critique of the intellectual. It is an investigation into the political effects of Michel Foucault’s work. This article adopts a similar strategy, which it applies to the work and legacy of a different thinker. The interruption is instructive on two counts: first, it dramatizes a difference in comportment between the would-be revolutionary who acts, and the intellectual who stands by to observe, transforming moments of action to points of reflection second, the heckler takes issue with the potential effects of Lacan’s ideas rather than with their internal consistency. This moment, he declares, has been chosen to denounce intellectuals who preach its impossibility, providing a rationale for their own political acquiescence. Outwardly calm, Lacan encourages the man to explain what he hoped to achieve by interrupting the lecture. ( Tiqqun, 2010: 59)Ĭigar in hand Jacques Lacan looks on as a young man pours water over his desk. We reproach this world not for going to war too ferociously, nor for trying to prevent it by all means we only reproach it for reducing war to its most empty and worthless forms. ‘ Why fight?’ becomes replaced by the more immediate question, ‘ How fight?’ Without denying the obvious benefits of cautious scholarly work, we argue that a reconfiguration of Foucault’s analytics of power might help Foucaldian research to transcend the self-imposed ethic of political quietism that currently dominates the field. In response we suggest that if we reconfigure power-as-government to power-as-war, this adjusts the central concern. The site of this reduction is a complex debate over the role of normativity in Foucaldian research, where it has been claimed that Foucault’s genealogical approach is unable to answer the question ‘ Why fight?’ The terms of this debate (on the neo-Foucaldian side) are limited by a dominant though selective interpretation of Foucault’s analytics of power, where power is understood primarily in terms of government, rather than struggle. In this article we argue that in one particularly influential line of development of Foucault’s work his exemplary caution has been exaggerated in a way that weakens the political aspirations of post-Foucaldian scholarship. Though Foucault was intrigued by the possibilities of radical social transformation, he resolutely resisted the idea that such transformation could escape the effects of power and expressed caution when it came to the question of revolution.
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