Foucault and the Politics of Rights

by Ben Golder

This book focuses on Michel Foucault's late work on rights in order to address broader questions about the politics of rights in the contemporary era. As several commentators have observed, something quite remarkable happens in this late work. In his early career, Foucault had been a great critic of the liberal discourse of rights. Suddenly, from about 1976 onward, he makes increasing appeals to rights in his philosophical writings, political statements, interviews, and journalism. He not only defends their importance; he argues for rights new and as-yet-unrecognized. Does Foucault simply revise his former positions and endorse a liberal politics of rights? Ben Golder proposes an answer to this puzzle, which is that Foucault approaches rights in a spirit of creative and critical appropriation. He uses rights strategically for a range of political purposes that cannot be reduced to a simple endorsement of political liberalism. Golder develops this interpretation of Foucault's work while analyzing its shortcomings and relating it to the approaches taken by a series of current thinkers also engaged in considering the place of rights in contemporary politics, including Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Jacques Rancière.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

260 pages, Paperback

First published October 5, 2015

Reviews

[Tom Burdge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall a good book. My first dip into literature on Foucault so I can't tell you how faithful Golder is being, although I got the impression some might claim this is Golder's Foucault rather than the historical figure's views on rights. However, how much hermeneutic quibbles really matters is up to the reader - Golder has taken the most charitable reading of Foucault's discussions of rights to give a really sensible way to think about rights discourse. Rights are always ambivalent, there is no such thing as a pre-political subject (rights bearer), we should adopt a critical counter-conduct in regards to rights. This last point is the most important. In particular, it answered some concerns I had about Marx's writings on rights, and the accepted interpretation of him as claiming their universal flaccidity and denouncability, it never really sat right with me and the late Foucault's treatment seems far more palatable.