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The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution
Foucault’s personal and political experimentation, its ambiguous legacy, and the rise of neoliberal politics
Part intellectual history, part critical theory, The Last Man Takes LSD challenges the way we think about both Michel Foucault and modern progressive politics. One fateful day in May 1975, Foucault dropped acid in the southern California desert. In letters reproduced here, he described it as among the most important events of his life, one which would lead him to completely rework his History of Sexuality. That trip helped redirect Foucault’s thought and contributed to a tectonic shift in the intellectual life of the era. He came to reinterpret the social movements of May ’68 and reposition himself politically in France, embracing anti-totalitarian currents and becoming a critic of the welfare state.
Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora examine the full historical context of the turn in Foucault’s thought, which included studies of the Iranian revolution and French socialist politics, through which he would come to appreciate the possibilities of autonomy offered by a new force on the French political scene that was neither of the left nor the right: neoliberalism.
Part intellectual history, part critical theory, The Last Man Takes LSD challenges the way we think about both Michel Foucault and modern progressive politics. One fateful day in May 1975, Foucault dropped acid in the southern California desert. In letters reproduced here, he described it as among the most important events of his life, one which would lead him to completely rework his History of Sexuality. That trip helped redirect Foucault’s thought and contributed to a tectonic shift in the intellectual life of the era. He came to reinterpret the social movements of May ’68 and reposition himself politically in France, embracing anti-totalitarian currents and becoming a critic of the welfare state.
Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora examine the full historical context of the turn in Foucault’s thought, which included studies of the Iranian revolution and French socialist politics, through which he would come to appreciate the possibilities of autonomy offered by a new force on the French political scene that was neither of the left nor the right: neoliberalism.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published May 25, 2021
42 people are currently reading
1049 people want to read
About the author
Mitchell Dean
22 books4 followersMitchell Dean is Professor of Public Governance and Head of the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at the Copenhagen Business School. He is author of the best-selling Governmentality, a title that has been cited in the first edition of Foucault’s lectures and the Oxford English Dictionary.
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May 11, 2021
Love this book. Basically it puts to bed any notion that Foucault can be considered a man of the Left. His entire late trajectory is a rejection of institutionalized leftism, which of course is the central broad takeaway of the post-leftists about 1968. There is no coherent class subject of history, and any state that claims to represent the social whole is at best obfuscating its true interests and most likely a vehicle of oppression; likewise, any political movement advocating a project of radical social transformation was either incoherent or totalitarian or both. By the late 1970s, Foucault the former PCF member would be dismissing Marxism as nothing more than “a modality of power in an elementary sense.” The socialist project was intrinsically a threat to liberty, because revolution was an intrinsically totalitarian project.
This sort of rhetoric and political commitment would of course end up resonating with emerging neoliberal views, with which his recently published lectures from those years show Foucault as having been disturbingly sympathetic. The difference is that whereas Foucault came (ahem) to believe that the road to liberation lay in getting fisted, the likes of Friedman and Hayek instead proposed that it lay in allowing bosses to do something similar to workers. What Zamora and Dean definitively show is that these two projects, both rooted in anti-Marxism and a hostility to technocratic governance, were in no way at odds with one another. In sum, this is basically an intellectual history of the post-1968 antistatist project. It makes clear how the whole post structuralist turn, motivated by anti-Marxism, ended up basically clearly the ground for the neoliberal turn toward marketization of everything.
Whether his dropping acid at Zabriskie Point in 1975 was the decisive factor for Foucault’s turn toward neoliberalism seems a more dubious proposition, even if the account is riveting in a gossipy sort of way. “In the years immediately after his ‘acid test’ in Death Valley,” they argue, Foucault “turned toward his redefinition of the subject as a privileged place foe politics.” Although the sequencing here seems odd since the poststructuralists and Foucault himself had been proclaiming “the death of the subject” since the early 1960s, it’s true that the subjective experience of LSD, with its disaggregation of the subjective self, may have pushed him back toward these insights, and encouraged him to marry these up with post-1968 “Second Left” rejection of totalizing projects of collective emancipation.
This sort of rhetoric and political commitment would of course end up resonating with emerging neoliberal views, with which his recently published lectures from those years show Foucault as having been disturbingly sympathetic. The difference is that whereas Foucault came (ahem) to believe that the road to liberation lay in getting fisted, the likes of Friedman and Hayek instead proposed that it lay in allowing bosses to do something similar to workers. What Zamora and Dean definitively show is that these two projects, both rooted in anti-Marxism and a hostility to technocratic governance, were in no way at odds with one another. In sum, this is basically an intellectual history of the post-1968 antistatist project. It makes clear how the whole post structuralist turn, motivated by anti-Marxism, ended up basically clearly the ground for the neoliberal turn toward marketization of everything.
Whether his dropping acid at Zabriskie Point in 1975 was the decisive factor for Foucault’s turn toward neoliberalism seems a more dubious proposition, even if the account is riveting in a gossipy sort of way. “In the years immediately after his ‘acid test’ in Death Valley,” they argue, Foucault “turned toward his redefinition of the subject as a privileged place foe politics.” Although the sequencing here seems odd since the poststructuralists and Foucault himself had been proclaiming “the death of the subject” since the early 1960s, it’s true that the subjective experience of LSD, with its disaggregation of the subjective self, may have pushed him back toward these insights, and encouraged him to marry these up with post-1968 “Second Left” rejection of totalizing projects of collective emancipation.
June 16, 2021
In The Last Man Takes LSD Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora build on their argument - first raised in Jacobin regarding Michel Foucault's relationship to neoliberalism.
According to Dean and Zamora, Foucault's lectures on the arrival of neoliberalism (The Birth of Biopolitics)are much more than a mere description of economic currents. On their view, Foucault was instead giving a prescriptive description of an anti-statist governmentality: Foucault was using neoliberalism as an example of a world in which individual were more free from the social impositions of the state and its institutions. And as a result, Foucault's own advocacy of neoliberalism led to many of the social problems we have today that find themselves rooted in an ignorance of class and inability to build solidarity.
Dean and Zamora are only half right about Foucault, though. Yes, Foucault was certainly not a Marxist, and he was absolutely critical of Marxism. But this is not because Foucault was some kind of center-left or neoliberal thinker. Foucault saw the dangers inherent in loyalty to an ideology. Which is the main reason why Foucault was not a neoliberal. Dean and Zamora's thesis is flaw throughout the book and its frustrating that they are unable to keep from lobbing ad hominems at Foucault. In this case, the authors' own loyalty to their Marxist ideologies are holding them back from studying topics that truly merit study.
According to Dean and Zamora, Foucault's lectures on the arrival of neoliberalism (The Birth of Biopolitics)are much more than a mere description of economic currents. On their view, Foucault was instead giving a prescriptive description of an anti-statist governmentality: Foucault was using neoliberalism as an example of a world in which individual were more free from the social impositions of the state and its institutions. And as a result, Foucault's own advocacy of neoliberalism led to many of the social problems we have today that find themselves rooted in an ignorance of class and inability to build solidarity.
Dean and Zamora are only half right about Foucault, though. Yes, Foucault was certainly not a Marxist, and he was absolutely critical of Marxism. But this is not because Foucault was some kind of center-left or neoliberal thinker. Foucault saw the dangers inherent in loyalty to an ideology. Which is the main reason why Foucault was not a neoliberal. Dean and Zamora's thesis is flaw throughout the book and its frustrating that they are unable to keep from lobbing ad hominems at Foucault. In this case, the authors' own loyalty to their Marxist ideologies are holding them back from studying topics that truly merit study.
July 10, 2021
The book wrestles with Foucault’s relationship with the changes in social and political life which have come to described as neoliberalism. It traces his departure from more orthodox, Marxian-inspired critiques of capitalism under the impact of the May ’68 events in France. Alongside the nouveaux philosophes Foucault moved to replace the revolution/state couple with a questioning of power. His engagement with the Second Left grouping in the wing of the Socialist Party led by Michel Rocard and the CFDT trade union federation hinged on a common interest in a leftist politics that aimed for the decomposition of the state and the distribution of its power to civil society associations.
Dean and Zamora see Foucault reading Hayek in the mid-1970s from a leftist perspective “that had its lineage in the cultural elements of ’68…” “…and the themes of a politics of everyday life poised by the women’s and gay movements.” Following the leading Second Left theorist, Pierre Rosanvallon, he came to see liberalism “as a critique of government that deploys the market as a site of truth production…” which he cited as ‘veridction’. He argued that socialism had failed to generate its own form of governmentality, by which he meant a relationship between government and the governed in which that latter retained its own autonomy. This meant that the only forms of governmentality that were available were either those of liberalism or the police state.
From this standpoint Foucault’s move towards neoliberalism was not simply of acquiescence to an inescapable reality, but an attempt to sculp into a principled leftist libertarian political position. This necessitated a critical look at the welfare state and the range of corporativist economic strategies favoured by the mainstream left and to cast them as mechanism which aimed to shape the subjectivity of citizens to facilitate their functioning in the sort of society envisioned in the Common Programme of Francoise Mitterrand’s Socialist Party and the PCF, which had widespread support in the 70s. Foucault was instead looking for a politics that hinged on the self-conscious activity of individuals who were shaping their own subjectivities from the material that would be made available by neoliberal structural reforms. The book discusses the influence of Gary Becker’s theory of human capital on Foucault’s thought, which required the rethinking of criminal activity as something other than social delinquency, and instead seeing it as a rational choice from the range of options that existed for the individual.
A significant moment was reached with Foucault’s embrace of the government of Valery Giscard d’Estaing (’74 – ’81) which broke with the Gaullism which had been the dominant position on the French centre-right to pursue a neoliberal course. Giscard made attempts in his early years to pursue policies aimed at the modernise French society by breaking it away from what were represented as social prejudices. His reforms included new government departments aimed at improving the conditions of prisoners, immigrants, and women. Foucault saw this as presenting opportunities for a new form of left militancy which was orientated towards the social margins – people conducting everyday struggles around their exclusion, incarceration, immigration status and mental well-being. In place of revolution he talked of ‘micro-resistances’ and “local experiences against the vertical exercise of power.”
In a lengthy chapter on ‘the sovereign subject’, the book discusses Foucault’s re-evaluation of the place of the author as the absolute interpreter of the meaning of her text. This position is seen as having roots in Christian exegesis, which pinned the self to a particular identity. The ‘hermeneutics of the self’, a critical theme in Foucault’s thought, set in place a view of subjectivity which saw it as an essential core of being revealed in such practices as the confessional but also in authorship. With an essentialised self as the bedrock of human existence then the works which individuals created had to be interpreted as unconditional truth. For Foucault this was tyranny. Actions and texts had to be liberated from this interpretation and viewed instead as acquiring meaning from “a web of quotes , coming from a thousand sourced of culture.” The author was therefore not the originator of the text , but an effect of the ‘intertextuality’ of discourse. The fluidity of the relationship of the reader to the text , with meaning arising from the discourse, provided a model for social change itself. ‘Experimentation’ became the key concept, with change accruing from the multiplicity of microresistances and assertions of new identities which were becoming possible under the neoliberal dispensation.
Under neoliberalism a modern present was contrasted with a past where industrial capitalism was on the rise. The authors quote Foucault: the “nineteenth century was concerned mainly with the relations between large economic structures and the state apparatus…”. This has now become “the problems of small powers and diffuse systems of domination.” Whilst poverty had not been ‘totally’ solved “it no longer arises with the same urgency.” This was also the same with exploitation. From now on, “all current struggles revolve around the same question: who are we?”
Foucault was committed to the view that human beings are essentially formless and capable of ‘aesthetic and ethical forms of self-creation, of action upon itself, of pitting, folding assembling its impulses, materialities, forces and energies onto and against themselves with new and unpredictable outcomes.’ This opened the possibility of more personal autonomy being gained from the ordeals and experimentations and economic tests of neoliberalism.
Whilst this world of boundless possibilities was being opened up Foucault paid less attention to the elements of neoliberalism which closed down experimentation. More so, he even formulated versions of experimentalism that seem bizarre when considered as a route to more personal autonomy. Dean and Zamora consider his infatuation with the Iranian Islamic revolution, which he asserted represented the undivided and collective will of the Iranian people, sustained by an anti-modern, political spirituality. Iranian was characterises as a “‘timeless’, unified, historico-cultural discourse system”. He claimed, for the Iranians, “religion was like the promise of finding something that would radically change their subjectivity.”
This naivety was also a component in Foucault’s over-looking of the repressive forms neoliberalism took in countries where its writ ran strongest. Chile is the obvious example, where a bold experiment in democratic socialism was crushed by generals and their police state associates acting under the direction of Chicago School economists. But moving well beyond these obvious criticisms, Dean and Zamora consider the emergence of authoritarianism in the neoliberal social spaces that were being opened by the decentralisation of mass communication. They point to the ‘deeper paradox’ in which “openness to diverse experiments in everyday life transform the public space from a space for the formulation of solidarities and collective voice into Foucault’s desired ‘great proliferation of discourse’, a ‘great incessant’, ‘violent, discontinuous, pugnacious’ and ‘disorderly’’” For Dean and Zamora, “these multiple atomized voices would finally express nothing more than the diverse individual preferences of the sovereign political consumer, transforming the public sphere into another version of the market.”
Could all this be summarised by saying that a Foucault might have reached different conclusions if he had not been so determined to excise Marx’s towering analysis of the fundamental character of capital from his version of the new left? Without this anchor Foucault’s search for a libertarian politics that measured progress by the possibilities that life offered the individual devolved into a tune-in and drop-out view of the world which certainly gave us the dizzy visions of a hedonistic California, but also occluded any view of the great mass of people, marginalised as ever by a system which valued their labour power above their subjectivities.
Dean and Zamora see Foucault reading Hayek in the mid-1970s from a leftist perspective “that had its lineage in the cultural elements of ’68…” “…and the themes of a politics of everyday life poised by the women’s and gay movements.” Following the leading Second Left theorist, Pierre Rosanvallon, he came to see liberalism “as a critique of government that deploys the market as a site of truth production…” which he cited as ‘veridction’. He argued that socialism had failed to generate its own form of governmentality, by which he meant a relationship between government and the governed in which that latter retained its own autonomy. This meant that the only forms of governmentality that were available were either those of liberalism or the police state.
From this standpoint Foucault’s move towards neoliberalism was not simply of acquiescence to an inescapable reality, but an attempt to sculp into a principled leftist libertarian political position. This necessitated a critical look at the welfare state and the range of corporativist economic strategies favoured by the mainstream left and to cast them as mechanism which aimed to shape the subjectivity of citizens to facilitate their functioning in the sort of society envisioned in the Common Programme of Francoise Mitterrand’s Socialist Party and the PCF, which had widespread support in the 70s. Foucault was instead looking for a politics that hinged on the self-conscious activity of individuals who were shaping their own subjectivities from the material that would be made available by neoliberal structural reforms. The book discusses the influence of Gary Becker’s theory of human capital on Foucault’s thought, which required the rethinking of criminal activity as something other than social delinquency, and instead seeing it as a rational choice from the range of options that existed for the individual.
A significant moment was reached with Foucault’s embrace of the government of Valery Giscard d’Estaing (’74 – ’81) which broke with the Gaullism which had been the dominant position on the French centre-right to pursue a neoliberal course. Giscard made attempts in his early years to pursue policies aimed at the modernise French society by breaking it away from what were represented as social prejudices. His reforms included new government departments aimed at improving the conditions of prisoners, immigrants, and women. Foucault saw this as presenting opportunities for a new form of left militancy which was orientated towards the social margins – people conducting everyday struggles around their exclusion, incarceration, immigration status and mental well-being. In place of revolution he talked of ‘micro-resistances’ and “local experiences against the vertical exercise of power.”
In a lengthy chapter on ‘the sovereign subject’, the book discusses Foucault’s re-evaluation of the place of the author as the absolute interpreter of the meaning of her text. This position is seen as having roots in Christian exegesis, which pinned the self to a particular identity. The ‘hermeneutics of the self’, a critical theme in Foucault’s thought, set in place a view of subjectivity which saw it as an essential core of being revealed in such practices as the confessional but also in authorship. With an essentialised self as the bedrock of human existence then the works which individuals created had to be interpreted as unconditional truth. For Foucault this was tyranny. Actions and texts had to be liberated from this interpretation and viewed instead as acquiring meaning from “a web of quotes , coming from a thousand sourced of culture.” The author was therefore not the originator of the text , but an effect of the ‘intertextuality’ of discourse. The fluidity of the relationship of the reader to the text , with meaning arising from the discourse, provided a model for social change itself. ‘Experimentation’ became the key concept, with change accruing from the multiplicity of microresistances and assertions of new identities which were becoming possible under the neoliberal dispensation.
Under neoliberalism a modern present was contrasted with a past where industrial capitalism was on the rise. The authors quote Foucault: the “nineteenth century was concerned mainly with the relations between large economic structures and the state apparatus…”. This has now become “the problems of small powers and diffuse systems of domination.” Whilst poverty had not been ‘totally’ solved “it no longer arises with the same urgency.” This was also the same with exploitation. From now on, “all current struggles revolve around the same question: who are we?”
Foucault was committed to the view that human beings are essentially formless and capable of ‘aesthetic and ethical forms of self-creation, of action upon itself, of pitting, folding assembling its impulses, materialities, forces and energies onto and against themselves with new and unpredictable outcomes.’ This opened the possibility of more personal autonomy being gained from the ordeals and experimentations and economic tests of neoliberalism.
Whilst this world of boundless possibilities was being opened up Foucault paid less attention to the elements of neoliberalism which closed down experimentation. More so, he even formulated versions of experimentalism that seem bizarre when considered as a route to more personal autonomy. Dean and Zamora consider his infatuation with the Iranian Islamic revolution, which he asserted represented the undivided and collective will of the Iranian people, sustained by an anti-modern, political spirituality. Iranian was characterises as a “‘timeless’, unified, historico-cultural discourse system”. He claimed, for the Iranians, “religion was like the promise of finding something that would radically change their subjectivity.”
This naivety was also a component in Foucault’s over-looking of the repressive forms neoliberalism took in countries where its writ ran strongest. Chile is the obvious example, where a bold experiment in democratic socialism was crushed by generals and their police state associates acting under the direction of Chicago School economists. But moving well beyond these obvious criticisms, Dean and Zamora consider the emergence of authoritarianism in the neoliberal social spaces that were being opened by the decentralisation of mass communication. They point to the ‘deeper paradox’ in which “openness to diverse experiments in everyday life transform the public space from a space for the formulation of solidarities and collective voice into Foucault’s desired ‘great proliferation of discourse’, a ‘great incessant’, ‘violent, discontinuous, pugnacious’ and ‘disorderly’’” For Dean and Zamora, “these multiple atomized voices would finally express nothing more than the diverse individual preferences of the sovereign political consumer, transforming the public sphere into another version of the market.”
Could all this be summarised by saying that a Foucault might have reached different conclusions if he had not been so determined to excise Marx’s towering analysis of the fundamental character of capital from his version of the new left? Without this anchor Foucault’s search for a libertarian politics that measured progress by the possibilities that life offered the individual devolved into a tune-in and drop-out view of the world which certainly gave us the dizzy visions of a hedonistic California, but also occluded any view of the great mass of people, marginalised as ever by a system which valued their labour power above their subjectivities.
May 29, 2023
This is my book of the year. Whenever I am saddened or worried about the state of universities - the state of knowledge - the state of thinking - I will remember this book. This book has enacted the best of intellectual projects. The writers take a very small event - Foucault taking LSD in Death Valley - and then theorizes his engagement with neoliberalism and subjectivity through this gauze. It is a literal event. It is also a metaphor for thinking with - and through - subjectivity in the construction of knowledge.
So many of us - and I put my hand up here - have dismissed Foucault because of his last decade of writing and speaking. He got so much wrong, that it is difficult to acknowledge the transformative nature of his work on prisons in particular. But this book does the deep and intricate intellectual work and asks why. Why was Foucault drawn to neoliberalism, while also validating identity politics?
This book provides an answer to this question. In intricate detail - and with a focus on not only his writing but lectures delivered around the world - Dean and Zamora offer a transcendent history of our present, and the consequences of validating subjectivity over other regimes of knowledge.
This book is inspirational and aspirational. This is the best of what humanities research can be.
Outstanding. Transformative. Read it before you die.
So many of us - and I put my hand up here - have dismissed Foucault because of his last decade of writing and speaking. He got so much wrong, that it is difficult to acknowledge the transformative nature of his work on prisons in particular. But this book does the deep and intricate intellectual work and asks why. Why was Foucault drawn to neoliberalism, while also validating identity politics?
This book provides an answer to this question. In intricate detail - and with a focus on not only his writing but lectures delivered around the world - Dean and Zamora offer a transcendent history of our present, and the consequences of validating subjectivity over other regimes of knowledge.
This book is inspirational and aspirational. This is the best of what humanities research can be.
Outstanding. Transformative. Read it before you die.
June 6, 2021
I'm unconvinced. Dean and Zamora are recycling their work and arguments about Foucault and neoliberalism here, which is fine, but try to tie it all up with Foucault's biography and LSD. However, they are hamstrung by their fixation on the ins and outs of theory and spend so little time actually discussing or using history to orient their discussion that it feels paper-thin - as a historical argument - and the LSD use is relegated to the trendy bookends of the volume, making it feel tacked on at best.
I wish Dean and Zamora would have simply aimed to polish the book that they wrote, which is a theoretical argument about Foucault and left neoliberalism, instead of trying for a weird argument about drug use that feels abbreviated at best.
I wish Dean and Zamora would have simply aimed to polish the book that they wrote, which is a theoretical argument about Foucault and left neoliberalism, instead of trying for a weird argument about drug use that feels abbreviated at best.
August 12, 2024
Ganske interessant bok. Forfatterne bruker Foucalts opphold i California, der han eksperimenterte med "limit experiences" slik som S/M og psykedelika, som fokalpunkt (sorry) for en diskusjon rundt et skifte i hans tenkning. Foucalt ble mer interessert i hvordan neoliberalisme, en gryende tankeretning på den tiden vel å merke, la grunnlag for en a-moralsk og a-juridisk holdning der subjektet kan forme seg selv og dermed frigjøres fra velferdsstatens subjektivisering og bryte med dets strukturer av "mikro-makt". En brytning med klassisk venstretenkning om statlig makt, der den politiske arenaen heller er subjektet og dets relasjon til seg selv. 1968 markerte for Foucalt enden av Revolusjon. Spørsmålet skiftet seg fra spørsmålet om å gripe politisk makt til å finne opp nye former for kultur og livsstiler. Selvet som førstelinja for motstand mot politisk makt. Molekylære revolusjoner som, på et mikronivå i dagliglivet kan transformere samfunnet innenifra.
I dagens situasjon derimot ser vi effektene av neoliberalisme produsere ulikhet og nød, samtidig som at diskursen ser ut til å være sentrert rundt den identitetspolitiske fanen "men jeg er også en minoritet!". Foucalts intellektuelle skifte omtales som høyst relevant og symptomatisk, men til syvende og sist begrenset i møte med dagens utfordringer
I dagens situasjon derimot ser vi effektene av neoliberalisme produsere ulikhet og nød, samtidig som at diskursen ser ut til å være sentrert rundt den identitetspolitiske fanen "men jeg er også en minoritet!". Foucalts intellektuelle skifte omtales som høyst relevant og symptomatisk, men til syvende og sist begrenset i møte med dagens utfordringer
December 17, 2021
It's really, really worth noting that this book did engross me from beginning to end, and I read it quite rapidly. The flow and organization of the prose contributed to this significantly.
What this book really nails is a historical survey of Foucault's engagement with his contemporaries and a detailed evaluation of his break with Marxism. I do feel it provides a strong sense of the processes in Foucault's thinking.
It was the authors' evaluation of Foucault's legacy that, for me, became confused. It's quite heavily implied that the suffering engendered by Reagan and Thatcher's austerity measures is somehow a product of Foucault's engagement with the initial framing of neoliberal political theory, even as the authors have stressed time and again that Foucault was not "a neoliberal," but rather a dabbler in a variety of contradictory thinking-types. (As you can see elsewhere on this review page, clearly this implied blame has not been missed by, well, the very faction of homophobic and ableist Marxists that Foucault broke with in the first place, who have eaten this aspect of the book up.) The final chapter consists in a dystopic reading of the contemporary political climate centered upon the capitalistic strip-mining of the individual, and the authors' relation of these contemporary phenomena to Foucault's prescriptions feels (ironically, given the contextualization that has undergirded this project up to now) as if Foucault's words have been taken out of context - "gotcha!" moments that fall short of achieving a meaningful evaluation of Foucault's work through a present lens. Such an evaluation seems temptingly close; Foucault's interest in the deregulation of personal life as a means of enabling a "relation of self to self" seems to me to have the potential to cut through the multifarious dogmas that late-capitalist institutions impose on pain of absolute poverty, which, coupled with his support for the universal basic income, might be used to construct a compelling alternative to our present-day status quo. The materials are there, but the authors have attempted to foreclose on such a possibility, instead relegating their subject to the role of a cautionary tale, I think prematurely.
I legitimately think this book would have worked outstandingly if the authors had simply left off before the last two chapters. Oh, well.
What this book really nails is a historical survey of Foucault's engagement with his contemporaries and a detailed evaluation of his break with Marxism. I do feel it provides a strong sense of the processes in Foucault's thinking.
It was the authors' evaluation of Foucault's legacy that, for me, became confused. It's quite heavily implied that the suffering engendered by Reagan and Thatcher's austerity measures is somehow a product of Foucault's engagement with the initial framing of neoliberal political theory, even as the authors have stressed time and again that Foucault was not "a neoliberal," but rather a dabbler in a variety of contradictory thinking-types. (As you can see elsewhere on this review page, clearly this implied blame has not been missed by, well, the very faction of homophobic and ableist Marxists that Foucault broke with in the first place, who have eaten this aspect of the book up.) The final chapter consists in a dystopic reading of the contemporary political climate centered upon the capitalistic strip-mining of the individual, and the authors' relation of these contemporary phenomena to Foucault's prescriptions feels (ironically, given the contextualization that has undergirded this project up to now) as if Foucault's words have been taken out of context - "gotcha!" moments that fall short of achieving a meaningful evaluation of Foucault's work through a present lens. Such an evaluation seems temptingly close; Foucault's interest in the deregulation of personal life as a means of enabling a "relation of self to self" seems to me to have the potential to cut through the multifarious dogmas that late-capitalist institutions impose on pain of absolute poverty, which, coupled with his support for the universal basic income, might be used to construct a compelling alternative to our present-day status quo. The materials are there, but the authors have attempted to foreclose on such a possibility, instead relegating their subject to the role of a cautionary tale, I think prematurely.
I legitimately think this book would have worked outstandingly if the authors had simply left off before the last two chapters. Oh, well.
shelved
April 26, 2022thought I'd like this, but it's incredibly dry and unpleasant to read, so might pick back up later. you'd think writing about how much the bald french NAMBLA dude sucks would be ez spaghetti but naw
July 29, 2021
En vulgär liten bok som nog hade varit intressantare om den handlat mer om LSD, faktiskt... Ganska mycket tröttsamt svingande mot den här mytiska vääääänsterns (och Foucault själv såklart) idpol. Ganska ointressant att ständigt läsa sån här kritik som inte samtidigt analyserar hur den kapitalistiska produktionen har förändrats de senaste decennierna och hur det påverkat klass(sammansättning), ideologi o realpolitik, identitet osv.
August 6, 2021
I went to Graduate School in English about 20 years ago. Somehow, I didn't have to read much Foucault. I think I read Discipline and Punish but only on my own time. We may have read some sort of excerpts in a larger theory class. But that doesn't mean I'm not kind of familiar with the concepts of the man because the postmodern, post-structuralist thinking, that he helped engineer was everywhere at the Academy at that time. Even if you were more structural, Marxist or something that wasn't as grounded in French theory you still had to deal with that environment.
That basically means that I don't have the full context to completely judge this book because it is somewhat of a biography and somewhat of an intellectual biography but also a criticism of his work. So, reading this I learned a lot about Foucault and his thought and the things he was involved in. But I can't say where the authors got it right where they got it wrong how much he was involved in the creation and strengthening and dissemination of what we now call neoliberalism. What I can say is that the subtitle means more to the structure of the book than the title. There is sadly very little about LSD and it's more about the fizzling out of revolutionary potentials. I'm glad I read this book and I think I learned a lot from it.
That basically means that I don't have the full context to completely judge this book because it is somewhat of a biography and somewhat of an intellectual biography but also a criticism of his work. So, reading this I learned a lot about Foucault and his thought and the things he was involved in. But I can't say where the authors got it right where they got it wrong how much he was involved in the creation and strengthening and dissemination of what we now call neoliberalism. What I can say is that the subtitle means more to the structure of the book than the title. There is sadly very little about LSD and it's more about the fizzling out of revolutionary potentials. I'm glad I read this book and I think I learned a lot from it.
December 15, 2021
A comprehensive obliteration of the entirety of Foucaults work, showing that his useful idiocy towards fanatical Iranian fundamentalism, his apologia for child and sexual rape, and his egregious, shocking, quite amazing whitewashing to the emerging neoliberal horror show grinding it's way across the world, were not just mere errors in an otherwise sound mind, but were part and parcel of his entire philosophical and intellectual system.
Foucault lies in ruins after this book, his legacy is one of ash. Philosopher's get things wrong. They are, alas, only human. But for a philosopher to get things wrong so completey, so utterly, so comprehensively wrong, to allay themselves so vocally with the most retrograde, reactionary, anti Marxist and anti leftist voices in France, to be so blind towards the vicious tendencies of neoliberalisms apparent (even then) ponchont for authoritarianism (in the most extreme cases like in Chile, in the more pernicious and subtle means by the death of a thousand cuts welfare "reform" procedures, forcing disabled people to perform gymnastic gyrations to appeal to a cruel and merciless system just to prove their basic right to live as a human), to be so utterly contemptible of the liberatory and emancipatory properties of Marxism (of which he seemed to both have little interest or knowledge of), to neglect questions of moral agency, of rights and of being an active particpant in the material issues of today, marks Foucault out not just as stupid (which he is) but quite possibly the most intellectually negligent philosopher of the modern age. This would be acceptable, if the smug, preening, amoral, and at times (with his complete disregard to crimes commited against gays and women in Iran, to sex crimes against children and to rape against women) borderline sociopathic Foucault was merely a harmless crank. But to be still the source even to this day of cult like adoration, if his poison wasn't still poured into journals, articles, books and our way of even discussing issues of power and agency, marks it out as especially alarming. Colonising vast swathes of the humanities departments, Foucalian thought, like some ginormous mushroom creature slowly spreading across the rotten corpse of the neoliberal, marketised academy, has become less a body of work to be engaged with and debated, and more akin to a religious creed, with all the theological trappings of impenetrable obscurantianism and in built tendencies for uncritical route regurgitation of established dogmas. Marxism has been all by exterminated in the academy, yet Foucault flourishes everywhere (the Times Higher Education ranked the writers most cited in humanities in 2007, predictably, Foucault was first. Marx? A lowly 36), a sad state at how utterly intellectually degenerate the state of academia was.
Foucault's thought was garbage from the start. Early and insightful reviewers of his work, like Stuart Hall and Alex Callinicos, were already aware of the damaging aspect of his writing. His biopower framework was an explicit alternative to the Marxist framework of understanding power. Divorced from almost any system of political economy, uninterested in class, it instead decided to turn power into a kind of God, an all consuming, all enveloping force that existed everywhere, all the time, forever reinscribing its logic into the fabric of modern society, enmeshed in every social function, now so hegemonic that even ideas claiming to combat it (like humanism) were itself another function of power and its operation. The state, and with it, the analysis of the class relations within it, the sources of its power, the means and ways it operated, the locations of its power, as well as its contradictions and weaknesses, fanished into a puff of deconstructionism, simply being turned into a matrix constellation of seemingly endless multiplying sources of barely detectable control. Reality was turned into a kind of glorified hall of mirrors, one so airtight that it left one a mere helpless wanderer, desperately trying to discern which mirror was the accurate reflection, and constantly outdoors every time. In Foucaults world we each inscribed power in our own daily habits and thoughts, power was not just something imposed on us but also something we engage in ourselves. For for Foucault, everyone was both jailer and prisoner, slave and master, guilty and innocent, a uniquely suffocating and constraining vision of agency. This perspective of power was paranoid, laced with conspiracism, politically disabling, and, most importantly, perfectly compatible with capitalism. Foucault founded his analysis on the idea that the concept of revolution, and everything that went with (states, classes, wars, struggles for and against, capitalism, power blocs, and most importantly, the invocation of truth through the process of interpretation) were now over. On its place would come the aforementioned multiplicity of biopwer. Wrapped up with biopower was Foucaults overriding obsession, of the use of knowledge as a mechanism of power, the quantification, regulation, statistical analysing functions that are hallmarks of modernity. Far from, as most sane people would, see this as not only inevitable but in fact desirable (replacing the arbitarty cruelty of the monarch and the monopoly of truth from the church, and replacing it with, albeit it highly imperfect and at first unequal, democratic apparatus that were birthed out of it, such as the University, science, the welfare state, the health service - see Charles Tilly for this) to Foucault this was just another mutation of power and its attempt to control people.
Where on earth can one even remotely go with such an analysis? If power is everywhere, who can we possibly oppose it? If even truth is a form of oppression, who we combat its machinations? Foucaults awnser was that we drive ourselves into the fucking ditch, that's where. As there were no 'power centers' to destroy or combat, and as according to Foucault, attempts historically to overcome oppressive power structures (through the revolutionary party, the mass union, the revolution itself, the agents of history most capable of doing so) were itself just another attempt to operate 'governmentality' (Foucaults wanky piece of academese to describe pretty much any form of even minimum centralised control) and therefore implicitly totalitarian, all that was left was insular microrebellions of the self. Through a long and tortrous procedure, Foucault claimed (on dubious and questionable history, although he, by his own admittance, admitted he was more writing "historical fiction" than anything, playing around with ideas and discourses in a totally slap-dash and unprincipled way, incapable and unwilling to normatively identify with anything, unconcerned with actually generating any overeaching theory of knowledge) that the ancients had a better, more genuine form of recreating the Self, through the process of thr ordeal. By a show of strength, instead of a ferocious introspective communion of the internal self, as Christianity developed, truth was decided not by its actual truth value but by whether it simply won. This included trials by combat, and even up torture. This bizzare fetishing of brutal might makes right turned truth into a matter of power plays, a conquest of wills, one in which outside institutional filtering (Foucaults main target) was an irrelevance. He saw in this a kind of renewed way of combating biopower and governmantality, by taking matters of truth outside of the scientific institution or the welfare state,and into people's own active agency. Patently, this insane framework led comfortably into neoliberalism's fetish for the atomised individual, that change starts within oneself, that society does not exist and that there are only individuals and their families and so on and so forth (*sniff, sniff, shirt tug*). Neoliberalism's cruel, miserable view of humanity, where human beings are subdued to the disciplinary whip of market forces, forced to remould themselves to be better and active participants in the market society, more "sellable" (the 'learn how to code' bullshit), as a displacement of the universal rights inherent in the notion of a social democratic welfare stare, was precisely what Foucault found so appealing in light of his overall project. He felt that in the emerging neoliberal theorist's focus on indivudal market behaviour, making personal consumers the key mechanism for value in the market, where workers where more participants in the means of production than dependent on it, where consumer choice was absolute and perfect, a kind of return to the idea of the ordeal, that we could be free agents unnumbered by biopolitical governmentality on a neutral plain. Foucault's completey insane, hopelessly abstract and utterly whitewashed view of a new 'left govermentality', capable of vaulting over the old leftist paradigms of class and state, to a new world where mutliplicities of self would create little fairies able to transform themselves as if they were soft turds being played with by a child, was a nauseatingly stupid, quite astoundingly incurious look at neoliberalism. As Zamora and Dean shoe, he based his model of neoliberalism on a very narrow French strain that had emerged at France at that time, one with connections to the German SDP, that seemed vaguely progressive. It therefore be reminded that his now revered lectures of neoliberalism are now not only irrelevent (his notion of neoliberalism was harshly limited by the historic conditions he was writing in, ignorant of its wider regime of authoritarianism and force in the New York debt crisis and Chile), but also actively positive, an endorsement of its new techniques of neiberalism, not a criticism.
His subsequent stanning for the theocrats leading the Iranian revolution was another disastrous path his hatred of rationality, reason, truth or any governmental frameworks left him. Like all smug bourgeois middle class men living in the twilight of the greatest period of worker expansion seen, he felt a need to indulge in personal narcissism, hence leading to hisn'experiments' (Foucault's word for amoral intellectual indulgences) with hippy circles, LSD taking, and Taoist and Buddhist ideas. In these, he saw a 'politicised spirituality', which which saw as being a radical and fresh new way to combat techniques of biopower, with the same self-obsession he thought was now key in the post-Revoultion age being the key to creating tiny pockets of pathetic mental resistances in the framework of all consuming control. The legacy of chopped heads, repressed women, dead gay people and child suicide bombers in the subsequent years of Iran is testimony to just how disaterously wrong he was.
Seen in this light, no one, and I mean no one, can ever cite Foucault positively again. Again, this is not just an odd relapse, this is the only logical direction the entirety of his thought could have gone. The consequences of neoliberalism have of course been devastating. The lack of any economic planning has meant a calamitous fall into the cracks of precarity and poverty for millions, the obliteration of any standards of knowledge or rationality have led to the rape of democracies, drowning under the weight of sillicon valleys conspiracy theory, fake news generating algorithms. Science, the greatest achievement of modern civillisation, has been reduced to market mechanisms, the standards of peer review lying in ruins, and the science we so badly needed to be aware of, that of climate science, was buried by fossil fuel companies for years. The role of political meaning and participation the old communist and socialist parties and unions used to provide are functionally dead, and in place of them the hungry ghouls of anti-modern fine de siecle reactionarism have come roaring out, fangs blaring, salivating at the mouths, from Islamic fundamentalism, to spiritual woo, to self-help Jungian frauds, to neo nazism, to Catholic extremism, to Hinduvata neo-fascism, to esoteric blood and soil ecolofascism, UFO cults and techno-dystopia singularly techno-feudalists, sometimes all at the same time. This nightmare world of unremitting horror and brutality, of insane cruelty and mindless misery, where one can turn on the news and hear about out of control plauges, then flick to another channel and watch in gawping, helpless horror at the wildfire storms burning everywhere, is proof that the death of communism was also, implicitly, the death of the future.
Foucault is obviously not to be blamed for this. Intellectuals in the academia love to inflate their own sense of self-importance at the best of times, they don't need encouragement from anyone else. But where does this lead us with Foucault, and the rest of the postmodernist clowns whose ponderous tomes of irrational, obscuratian nihillism are shoved down the throats of indebtted and bored cultural theory students? It means we must see him as a product of his time. A well off, privileged, pampered, middle class bourgeois intellectual, who, seeing the tumult of class agitation all around him at this time, realised that in the case of revolution he would be on the other side of the barricades. Like Nietzsche and Weber before him, he tried to engage in an anti-Marxist, anti-egalitarian project to understand power relations (and at times quite critical of them), but one that would never actually go after the actual class structure involved or make any active attempt to challenge the exploitative foundations it was built on. Confounded by his intellectual baggage of reactiinary Nietzschean hyper-relativsm and his contradictionary postures of radicalism, he simply imploded, leading his dead end libertarian anti-Marxist radicalism into celebrations of pointless micro resistances, cults of archaic pre modern anti rationality, ruthless neoliberal assaults on working class institutions, and bizzaro religious rivalrism. Zamora and Dean also point out, most brilliantly, how many of the trends Foucault rode on where widespread in the post-68 left, that far from a crude imposition from evil (probably Anglo-based) right wingers, the French left (and the wider left on fact) actively dug their own graves. Hating the repressive state became very easily hating the state full stop (as Owen Hatherly once noted, no one hated welfare states more than the generation that most benefitted from it). Valorising indivudal acts of resistance became valorising the individual in and of itself. "Politcising everything" meant taking nothing seriously. Being open to "anti-toltalising" grand narratives meant being open to anything, divorced from political principle or class praxis. Historicisation turned into complete reductive relativism. In short, the post war, post 68 left was a disaster, which led to the absolute ruin of the left, so intellectually lobotomised by Foucault and his pack of fellow intellectual criminals it meant the left had no way to respond to the 08 crash. Foucault deserves all the hatred, scorn and abuse he can get for his role in the development of these affairs.
A word on the writing. This is an exhaustive book. Zamora and Dean meticulously go through the oft times agonising contours of Foucaults thought, wading through the dense pages of uncommitted hedging, endless neologisms and subtle intellectual maneuvers he engaged in to bring out the clear, consistent, and overaching themes of his writing. What makes this book so devastating in fact is how neutral it is. It is not a polemic, it is not a right wing screed, it is a serious, detailed and profoundly thoughtful exploration of Foucaults work, sustained with consistent evidence, and a well of insight to the man's work. They are strangely neutral throughout, which can be jarring considering how grotesquely despicable much of Foucault's work is. But this, if anything, makes it all the more obliterating, as far from trying to smash him to pieces, they appear more like disinterested taxonomers gently extracting the internal organs of some odd, rare breed of chicken. They simply, often at times giving far too much credit to Foucault, show the bankruptcy of Foucaults entire intellectual framework by doing little more than simply quoting him and following his line of thought to the bitter, logical end. It is a stunning, staggering work of intellectual archaeology, unparalleled to my mind, and needs to become the go to work on Foucault from now on.
Foucault once said that "Marxism exists in nineteeth-century thought like a fish in water; that is, unable to breathe anywhere else". How ironic, that now in the age of semi-permanent crises for capitalism, where class is back on the agenda like never before, where capitalism exploitation is more rancid than ever, where the challanges we face will require a state of positive biopolitical control (as Bejamin Bratton has brilliantly described) more than anything Foucault could have conceived in his wildest drug trances, it is Marx who has returned his rightful place as the greatest thinker of modernity, a titan of the mind, while poor, sad Foucault is being reduced to a dusty museum piece. Here, stuffed, and sat in a glass box staring dumbly out with glazed eyes, the last man of 68, a unique example of what an intellectual looks like during an age of class reaction, sits. He is now to be regarded as a historical joke, much akin to Piltdown man, something once regarded as serious and profound but now largely reduced to a snigger, as people wonder to themselves how such otherwise intelligent people could be taken in by such a patent, abject, ridiculous fraud.
Foucault lies in ruins after this book, his legacy is one of ash. Philosopher's get things wrong. They are, alas, only human. But for a philosopher to get things wrong so completey, so utterly, so comprehensively wrong, to allay themselves so vocally with the most retrograde, reactionary, anti Marxist and anti leftist voices in France, to be so blind towards the vicious tendencies of neoliberalisms apparent (even then) ponchont for authoritarianism (in the most extreme cases like in Chile, in the more pernicious and subtle means by the death of a thousand cuts welfare "reform" procedures, forcing disabled people to perform gymnastic gyrations to appeal to a cruel and merciless system just to prove their basic right to live as a human), to be so utterly contemptible of the liberatory and emancipatory properties of Marxism (of which he seemed to both have little interest or knowledge of), to neglect questions of moral agency, of rights and of being an active particpant in the material issues of today, marks Foucault out not just as stupid (which he is) but quite possibly the most intellectually negligent philosopher of the modern age. This would be acceptable, if the smug, preening, amoral, and at times (with his complete disregard to crimes commited against gays and women in Iran, to sex crimes against children and to rape against women) borderline sociopathic Foucault was merely a harmless crank. But to be still the source even to this day of cult like adoration, if his poison wasn't still poured into journals, articles, books and our way of even discussing issues of power and agency, marks it out as especially alarming. Colonising vast swathes of the humanities departments, Foucalian thought, like some ginormous mushroom creature slowly spreading across the rotten corpse of the neoliberal, marketised academy, has become less a body of work to be engaged with and debated, and more akin to a religious creed, with all the theological trappings of impenetrable obscurantianism and in built tendencies for uncritical route regurgitation of established dogmas. Marxism has been all by exterminated in the academy, yet Foucault flourishes everywhere (the Times Higher Education ranked the writers most cited in humanities in 2007, predictably, Foucault was first. Marx? A lowly 36), a sad state at how utterly intellectually degenerate the state of academia was.
Foucault's thought was garbage from the start. Early and insightful reviewers of his work, like Stuart Hall and Alex Callinicos, were already aware of the damaging aspect of his writing. His biopower framework was an explicit alternative to the Marxist framework of understanding power. Divorced from almost any system of political economy, uninterested in class, it instead decided to turn power into a kind of God, an all consuming, all enveloping force that existed everywhere, all the time, forever reinscribing its logic into the fabric of modern society, enmeshed in every social function, now so hegemonic that even ideas claiming to combat it (like humanism) were itself another function of power and its operation. The state, and with it, the analysis of the class relations within it, the sources of its power, the means and ways it operated, the locations of its power, as well as its contradictions and weaknesses, fanished into a puff of deconstructionism, simply being turned into a matrix constellation of seemingly endless multiplying sources of barely detectable control. Reality was turned into a kind of glorified hall of mirrors, one so airtight that it left one a mere helpless wanderer, desperately trying to discern which mirror was the accurate reflection, and constantly outdoors every time. In Foucaults world we each inscribed power in our own daily habits and thoughts, power was not just something imposed on us but also something we engage in ourselves. For for Foucault, everyone was both jailer and prisoner, slave and master, guilty and innocent, a uniquely suffocating and constraining vision of agency. This perspective of power was paranoid, laced with conspiracism, politically disabling, and, most importantly, perfectly compatible with capitalism. Foucault founded his analysis on the idea that the concept of revolution, and everything that went with (states, classes, wars, struggles for and against, capitalism, power blocs, and most importantly, the invocation of truth through the process of interpretation) were now over. On its place would come the aforementioned multiplicity of biopwer. Wrapped up with biopower was Foucaults overriding obsession, of the use of knowledge as a mechanism of power, the quantification, regulation, statistical analysing functions that are hallmarks of modernity. Far from, as most sane people would, see this as not only inevitable but in fact desirable (replacing the arbitarty cruelty of the monarch and the monopoly of truth from the church, and replacing it with, albeit it highly imperfect and at first unequal, democratic apparatus that were birthed out of it, such as the University, science, the welfare state, the health service - see Charles Tilly for this) to Foucault this was just another mutation of power and its attempt to control people.
Where on earth can one even remotely go with such an analysis? If power is everywhere, who can we possibly oppose it? If even truth is a form of oppression, who we combat its machinations? Foucaults awnser was that we drive ourselves into the fucking ditch, that's where. As there were no 'power centers' to destroy or combat, and as according to Foucault, attempts historically to overcome oppressive power structures (through the revolutionary party, the mass union, the revolution itself, the agents of history most capable of doing so) were itself just another attempt to operate 'governmentality' (Foucaults wanky piece of academese to describe pretty much any form of even minimum centralised control) and therefore implicitly totalitarian, all that was left was insular microrebellions of the self. Through a long and tortrous procedure, Foucault claimed (on dubious and questionable history, although he, by his own admittance, admitted he was more writing "historical fiction" than anything, playing around with ideas and discourses in a totally slap-dash and unprincipled way, incapable and unwilling to normatively identify with anything, unconcerned with actually generating any overeaching theory of knowledge) that the ancients had a better, more genuine form of recreating the Self, through the process of thr ordeal. By a show of strength, instead of a ferocious introspective communion of the internal self, as Christianity developed, truth was decided not by its actual truth value but by whether it simply won. This included trials by combat, and even up torture. This bizzare fetishing of brutal might makes right turned truth into a matter of power plays, a conquest of wills, one in which outside institutional filtering (Foucaults main target) was an irrelevance. He saw in this a kind of renewed way of combating biopower and governmantality, by taking matters of truth outside of the scientific institution or the welfare state,and into people's own active agency. Patently, this insane framework led comfortably into neoliberalism's fetish for the atomised individual, that change starts within oneself, that society does not exist and that there are only individuals and their families and so on and so forth (*sniff, sniff, shirt tug*). Neoliberalism's cruel, miserable view of humanity, where human beings are subdued to the disciplinary whip of market forces, forced to remould themselves to be better and active participants in the market society, more "sellable" (the 'learn how to code' bullshit), as a displacement of the universal rights inherent in the notion of a social democratic welfare stare, was precisely what Foucault found so appealing in light of his overall project. He felt that in the emerging neoliberal theorist's focus on indivudal market behaviour, making personal consumers the key mechanism for value in the market, where workers where more participants in the means of production than dependent on it, where consumer choice was absolute and perfect, a kind of return to the idea of the ordeal, that we could be free agents unnumbered by biopolitical governmentality on a neutral plain. Foucault's completey insane, hopelessly abstract and utterly whitewashed view of a new 'left govermentality', capable of vaulting over the old leftist paradigms of class and state, to a new world where mutliplicities of self would create little fairies able to transform themselves as if they were soft turds being played with by a child, was a nauseatingly stupid, quite astoundingly incurious look at neoliberalism. As Zamora and Dean shoe, he based his model of neoliberalism on a very narrow French strain that had emerged at France at that time, one with connections to the German SDP, that seemed vaguely progressive. It therefore be reminded that his now revered lectures of neoliberalism are now not only irrelevent (his notion of neoliberalism was harshly limited by the historic conditions he was writing in, ignorant of its wider regime of authoritarianism and force in the New York debt crisis and Chile), but also actively positive, an endorsement of its new techniques of neiberalism, not a criticism.
His subsequent stanning for the theocrats leading the Iranian revolution was another disastrous path his hatred of rationality, reason, truth or any governmental frameworks left him. Like all smug bourgeois middle class men living in the twilight of the greatest period of worker expansion seen, he felt a need to indulge in personal narcissism, hence leading to hisn'experiments' (Foucault's word for amoral intellectual indulgences) with hippy circles, LSD taking, and Taoist and Buddhist ideas. In these, he saw a 'politicised spirituality', which which saw as being a radical and fresh new way to combat techniques of biopower, with the same self-obsession he thought was now key in the post-Revoultion age being the key to creating tiny pockets of pathetic mental resistances in the framework of all consuming control. The legacy of chopped heads, repressed women, dead gay people and child suicide bombers in the subsequent years of Iran is testimony to just how disaterously wrong he was.
Seen in this light, no one, and I mean no one, can ever cite Foucault positively again. Again, this is not just an odd relapse, this is the only logical direction the entirety of his thought could have gone. The consequences of neoliberalism have of course been devastating. The lack of any economic planning has meant a calamitous fall into the cracks of precarity and poverty for millions, the obliteration of any standards of knowledge or rationality have led to the rape of democracies, drowning under the weight of sillicon valleys conspiracy theory, fake news generating algorithms. Science, the greatest achievement of modern civillisation, has been reduced to market mechanisms, the standards of peer review lying in ruins, and the science we so badly needed to be aware of, that of climate science, was buried by fossil fuel companies for years. The role of political meaning and participation the old communist and socialist parties and unions used to provide are functionally dead, and in place of them the hungry ghouls of anti-modern fine de siecle reactionarism have come roaring out, fangs blaring, salivating at the mouths, from Islamic fundamentalism, to spiritual woo, to self-help Jungian frauds, to neo nazism, to Catholic extremism, to Hinduvata neo-fascism, to esoteric blood and soil ecolofascism, UFO cults and techno-dystopia singularly techno-feudalists, sometimes all at the same time. This nightmare world of unremitting horror and brutality, of insane cruelty and mindless misery, where one can turn on the news and hear about out of control plauges, then flick to another channel and watch in gawping, helpless horror at the wildfire storms burning everywhere, is proof that the death of communism was also, implicitly, the death of the future.
Foucault is obviously not to be blamed for this. Intellectuals in the academia love to inflate their own sense of self-importance at the best of times, they don't need encouragement from anyone else. But where does this lead us with Foucault, and the rest of the postmodernist clowns whose ponderous tomes of irrational, obscuratian nihillism are shoved down the throats of indebtted and bored cultural theory students? It means we must see him as a product of his time. A well off, privileged, pampered, middle class bourgeois intellectual, who, seeing the tumult of class agitation all around him at this time, realised that in the case of revolution he would be on the other side of the barricades. Like Nietzsche and Weber before him, he tried to engage in an anti-Marxist, anti-egalitarian project to understand power relations (and at times quite critical of them), but one that would never actually go after the actual class structure involved or make any active attempt to challenge the exploitative foundations it was built on. Confounded by his intellectual baggage of reactiinary Nietzschean hyper-relativsm and his contradictionary postures of radicalism, he simply imploded, leading his dead end libertarian anti-Marxist radicalism into celebrations of pointless micro resistances, cults of archaic pre modern anti rationality, ruthless neoliberal assaults on working class institutions, and bizzaro religious rivalrism. Zamora and Dean also point out, most brilliantly, how many of the trends Foucault rode on where widespread in the post-68 left, that far from a crude imposition from evil (probably Anglo-based) right wingers, the French left (and the wider left on fact) actively dug their own graves. Hating the repressive state became very easily hating the state full stop (as Owen Hatherly once noted, no one hated welfare states more than the generation that most benefitted from it). Valorising indivudal acts of resistance became valorising the individual in and of itself. "Politcising everything" meant taking nothing seriously. Being open to "anti-toltalising" grand narratives meant being open to anything, divorced from political principle or class praxis. Historicisation turned into complete reductive relativism. In short, the post war, post 68 left was a disaster, which led to the absolute ruin of the left, so intellectually lobotomised by Foucault and his pack of fellow intellectual criminals it meant the left had no way to respond to the 08 crash. Foucault deserves all the hatred, scorn and abuse he can get for his role in the development of these affairs.
A word on the writing. This is an exhaustive book. Zamora and Dean meticulously go through the oft times agonising contours of Foucaults thought, wading through the dense pages of uncommitted hedging, endless neologisms and subtle intellectual maneuvers he engaged in to bring out the clear, consistent, and overaching themes of his writing. What makes this book so devastating in fact is how neutral it is. It is not a polemic, it is not a right wing screed, it is a serious, detailed and profoundly thoughtful exploration of Foucaults work, sustained with consistent evidence, and a well of insight to the man's work. They are strangely neutral throughout, which can be jarring considering how grotesquely despicable much of Foucault's work is. But this, if anything, makes it all the more obliterating, as far from trying to smash him to pieces, they appear more like disinterested taxonomers gently extracting the internal organs of some odd, rare breed of chicken. They simply, often at times giving far too much credit to Foucault, show the bankruptcy of Foucaults entire intellectual framework by doing little more than simply quoting him and following his line of thought to the bitter, logical end. It is a stunning, staggering work of intellectual archaeology, unparalleled to my mind, and needs to become the go to work on Foucault from now on.
Foucault once said that "Marxism exists in nineteeth-century thought like a fish in water; that is, unable to breathe anywhere else". How ironic, that now in the age of semi-permanent crises for capitalism, where class is back on the agenda like never before, where capitalism exploitation is more rancid than ever, where the challanges we face will require a state of positive biopolitical control (as Bejamin Bratton has brilliantly described) more than anything Foucault could have conceived in his wildest drug trances, it is Marx who has returned his rightful place as the greatest thinker of modernity, a titan of the mind, while poor, sad Foucault is being reduced to a dusty museum piece. Here, stuffed, and sat in a glass box staring dumbly out with glazed eyes, the last man of 68, a unique example of what an intellectual looks like during an age of class reaction, sits. He is now to be regarded as a historical joke, much akin to Piltdown man, something once regarded as serious and profound but now largely reduced to a snigger, as people wonder to themselves how such otherwise intelligent people could be taken in by such a patent, abject, ridiculous fraud.
June 22, 2022
I enjoyed reading this book about the changes to Foucault’s thinking post-1975 acid trip. I have some familiarity with Foucault, as a PhD in the humanities, but wanted to know more about why, exactly, someone who was in the pantheon of intellectuals also was so enamored with neoliberalism. This book provided the through line there.
I appreciated the clarity of Dean and Zamora’s explication of Foucault’s politics: that his anti-Marxism was a distrust of ideological loyalty/purity, that his fascination with neoliberalism was part of the post-1968 turn away from class politics/solidarity to transforming the “relation of self to self,” and that in neoliberalism he saw the possibility of the flourishing of new subjectivities centered on local resistances to power. While I disagree with his diagnoses of the possibilities offered the subject under neoliberalism—and while some of his blind spots to inequality and totalitarianism, especially his unnuanced analyses of the Iranian Revolution—I still come away from this book with some respect for Foucault’s commitment to personal transformation. I just wish it came with more class politics.
I appreciated the clarity of Dean and Zamora’s explication of Foucault’s politics: that his anti-Marxism was a distrust of ideological loyalty/purity, that his fascination with neoliberalism was part of the post-1968 turn away from class politics/solidarity to transforming the “relation of self to self,” and that in neoliberalism he saw the possibility of the flourishing of new subjectivities centered on local resistances to power. While I disagree with his diagnoses of the possibilities offered the subject under neoliberalism—and while some of his blind spots to inequality and totalitarianism, especially his unnuanced analyses of the Iranian Revolution—I still come away from this book with some respect for Foucault’s commitment to personal transformation. I just wish it came with more class politics.
May 21, 2022
This is a good critical perspective on Foucault's politics related to neoliberalism. The book needs a content warning for discussions of sexual violence and child sexual abuse, as those are topics.
Foucault's perspective on governmentality is interesting and influenced by neoliberals like Gary Becker as documented in this book. The title would have you believe this is more Hunter Thompson than it is political philosophy, but it is entirely a theory book.
I found it enlightening and worthwhile even though I am less familiar with Foucault's source material. I intend to read more of his works directly after this. Worth reading if you're really into Foucault but it's probably a bit too specific for everyone else.
4/5
Foucault's perspective on governmentality is interesting and influenced by neoliberals like Gary Becker as documented in this book. The title would have you believe this is more Hunter Thompson than it is political philosophy, but it is entirely a theory book.
I found it enlightening and worthwhile even though I am less familiar with Foucault's source material. I intend to read more of his works directly after this. Worth reading if you're really into Foucault but it's probably a bit too specific for everyone else.
4/5
July 5, 2022
Simply don't understand what the point of this book is, it's so inconsistent. Is this supposed to be an indictment of Foucault? a gotcha? a survey of his philosophy? a sympathetic account of his faults? the tone is so all over the place and frankly so much more dense and dry than this book needed to be, I'm puzzled. There were certainly a handful of enlightening moments, but the dust jacket promises something much more enticing than the full text delivered for me.
side note: I don't appreciate the way the authors only really invoked Foucault's sexuality and works on sexuality in relation to his entering the "gay scene/gay lifestyle" in California as proof of his devolving into a more individualistic politic, smells a bit homophobic to me idk.
side note: I don't appreciate the way the authors only really invoked Foucault's sexuality and works on sexuality in relation to his entering the "gay scene/gay lifestyle" in California as proof of his devolving into a more individualistic politic, smells a bit homophobic to me idk.
December 12, 2025
The thesis is simple: the late Foucault ciphers politics not through institutional power, but rather through subjectivity, or rather, a critique of subjective formation as such: taking its cue from Barthes' "The Death of the Author," Foucault takes subjection to arise from the belief that an interior self exists, and that who one is is at least in part reducible or determined by this unchanging and unchangeable core, an "identity." The late Foucault's relation to neoliberalism, then, is founded in his belief that neoliberalism offers a model for "Left governmentality" that, in its ruthless assault on the State, erodes subjectivation by the State. The attack against welfare, then, in this perverse funhouse mirror world, actually becomes the promotion of freedom. This is fundamentally tied to Foucault's virulent anti-Marxism, which also emerges via his massive lacunae as regards the realities of class, exploitation, and inequality, cementing Foucault as an ineluctably bourgeois figure. One can see the throughline between Foucault's earlier work, such as that found in Discipline and Punish, and this later critique of a core interior self: for example, Dean and Zamora mention Foucault's pushing back against the singling out of rape as a sex crime, as any different than a punch or a stab, due to his linking of this treatment to reifying a notion of "rapist" under a penal regime as an unchanging core of a person's identity. We see a couple more lacunae emerge here: Foucault's dismal track record as regards women's issues (despite his intermittent lip service), and his refusal of a psychoanalytic notion of sex, lacunae which largely intersect: from a psychoanalytic point of view, it is much easier to see why the rape of women is far more traumatizing than being stabbed or punched, why sex is not merely a capacity of the body, on the same level as bare materiality, but rather exists on an ontologically distinct plane. This refusal of a psychoanalytic notion of sex, of sexual trauma, also explains his endorsement of pedophilia: while psychoanalysis is perhaps singularly oriented towards the trauma that comes from the child being introduced to the adult discourse of sex, Foucault is seemingly unwilling to come to terms with this problematic (one can see his inability to tackle questions of inequality in power relations emerge here again). The lacuna regarding women's issues arises again regarding his analysis of ancient Greek homosexuality, noting that "true love" was confined to relations between men and boys (apparently missing the obvious fact that it is due to the hypermisogyny of ancient Greek society that relations with women, along with women themselves, were so severely undervalued). Foucault's philo-Hellenism, though, not only reflects his misogyny, but also his Orientalism: to understand his writings on the Iranian Revolution, it is important to note, as Dean and Zamora do, that he saw in it a kind of "Mediterraneanism," a potential continuity with past Greek forms, a constant fixation for Foucault. It is not that Foucault saw in Iran a potential counterpoint to a sort of Fukuyamist "end of history" thesis avant la lettre, but rather something closer to its opposite: Foucault was forwarding his own "end of history" thesis, the end of revolution. (I am interested in reading Ghamari-Tabrizi's Foucault in Iran just to see how his account squares with the one found here.) One can also see Foucault's Orientalism in his dabbling with Zen Buddhism, which is also an extension of his general fascination with American counter-culture, including psychedelics and the BDSM scene (one could very well ask how well the hedonism of the latter squares with the asceticism of the former). The Orientalism is also to be found in his reaction to '68 in Tunis: for some reason, despite his allergy to the dogmatism of Marxism, he has the fundamentally opposite reaction in the face of the conviction of the Tunisians (and later, of the Iranians). But he is fundamentally incorrect to see in this a revolutionizing of the self instead of an attempt to seize State power: despite his reluctance to call the Iranian Revolution as such, it is clearly still a revolution, operating on the same logic as Communist upheaval. The model Foucault wants to forward/endorse, is simply means of "The Care of the Self," as his aptly-titled fourth volume of The History of Sexuality attests to. There, he returns to his philo-Hellenism to excavate ancient modes of caring for the self. But there is something fundamentally conservative regarding his genealogy work: following Heidegger, Foucault takes it that if one can demonstrate that a certain mode of thinking only emerged recently, then that is automatically a critique of that mode of thinking. Of course, this move can be helpful to denaturalize reified concepts that become taken as having always been the way we think from the beginning of history, but this way of thinking also forecloses the idea that progress is possible: that perhaps new modes of thinking are better than old ways of thought. However, the late Foucault's neoliberal turn is oddly at ends with this genealogical presupposition: suddenly, we need to look to the present for new modes of thinking, instead of looking to the past to shake us out of our present. Overall, Dean and Zamora provide a compelling historiography and reading of Foucault's late turn, especially in relation to neoliberalism. The critique is far more expositional than polemical, which I think greatly helps with the prose style on display here.
September 8, 2021
Not enough LSD. At this point in time I simply do not care or have any use for the minutiae of Foucault's political leanings. I might return to it another time.
December 30, 2023
"Foucault is unlikely to go away soon or get “cancelled” for being too neoliberal – anymore than for being too libertine, immoral, obscurantist, or epistemically relativistic. None of these descriptions exhausts his philosophy. Despite the vast cottage industry of cliched, substandard, and rote uses of Foucault in the social sciences, there is still much untapped potential in his output for serious intellectual engagement. The publication of the Collège de France transcripts has opened up a treasure trove of many new “Foucaults” (in the plural). The neoliberalism controversy is only the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, I hope that ideological debate does not overshadow his theoretical work. But Dean & Zamora’s gripping narrative demonstrates that Foucault’s rather brief theoretical encounters with neoliberalism had deep and long-lasting connections to his anti-totalitarian and emancipatory normative commitments. It also demonstrates the fluidity of his political alignments, united only by a common concern for reimagining and reinventing relations of power and knowledge in ways that leave more room for minority practices, experimentalism, and “limit experiences.” After books like this, it is no longer possible, without qualification, to characterize him as a “man of the left,” although it would be equally wrong to describe him as a “conservative” or “neoliberal” either. To the extent that he partook in the project of the “Second Left” and other manifestations of post-60s radicalism, he was part of the “neoliberal-curious” segment(s) of the libertarian left. As such, he was interested in expanding the repertoire of 20th century “left governmentality” in ways that can break away from the dogmatic, statist, and totalitarian tendencies underlying the Marxist dreams of a perfected revolution. (...) Scholars should pursue further synergistic connections between the Foucauldian and neoliberal analyses of emancipation, experimentalism, decentralized “power-knowledge,” and agential self-creation. And new questions should be asked: “Are our old conceptual tools and ideological categories ill-equipped to tackle the novel challenges of 21st century emancipatory politics? What does it mean to rethink social emancipation, beyond the hegemonic left-right mapping, after Foucault?” Dean & Zamora’s book, aside from being an informative, provocative, and fun read, prompts many questions and challenges us – in one of Foucault’s favourite phrases – to think and act differently."
An excerpt from my review for the CSGS website: https://csgs.kcl.ac.uk/book-review/de...
An excerpt from my review for the CSGS website: https://csgs.kcl.ac.uk/book-review/de...
November 11, 2023
This is a must read for all zany weirdo, over-eduacted, self-identifying leftists, intoxicated by the magic of Foucault's analysis of power relations and subjectivity.
The Last Man Takes LSD comprehensively demonstrates not only Foucault's *total rejection of institutional socialist politics* (whether of the social democratic or state-socialist type), but also Foucault's *absolutely central role* providing intellectual cover for the rise of neoliberalism with the old institutions of the left.
If you're a weirdo, this will be a great exercise in deprogramming yourself. If you're someone engaged in building serious collectivist politics, this will be a useful theoretical instrument for understanding why so much of the so-called left always turn out to be the useful idiots for the worst kinds of neoliberal politics (there's a great bit on how Foucault left-washed Milton Friedman's ultra-right wing ideas about Universal Basic Income).
Dean and Zamora's execution job on Foucault is cold, dispassionate, methodical and systematic. It leaves little more than a soggy puddle on the ground where the towering figure of Foucault-the-leftist once stood. It's an elegant work, as lethal as it is restrained. To paraphrase - 'we're sure if Foucault was writing today, he wouldn't be quite so enthusiastic in his defence of pederasty' (!!).
I'm giving it four stars instead of five because its still quite a challenging read for someone not well used to the arcane liturgy of critical theory writing. It's not a book I'd be handing out at trade union branch meetings, but a useful tool for those looking to do a bit of advanced study.
The Last Man Takes LSD comprehensively demonstrates not only Foucault's *total rejection of institutional socialist politics* (whether of the social democratic or state-socialist type), but also Foucault's *absolutely central role* providing intellectual cover for the rise of neoliberalism with the old institutions of the left.
If you're a weirdo, this will be a great exercise in deprogramming yourself. If you're someone engaged in building serious collectivist politics, this will be a useful theoretical instrument for understanding why so much of the so-called left always turn out to be the useful idiots for the worst kinds of neoliberal politics (there's a great bit on how Foucault left-washed Milton Friedman's ultra-right wing ideas about Universal Basic Income).
Dean and Zamora's execution job on Foucault is cold, dispassionate, methodical and systematic. It leaves little more than a soggy puddle on the ground where the towering figure of Foucault-the-leftist once stood. It's an elegant work, as lethal as it is restrained. To paraphrase - 'we're sure if Foucault was writing today, he wouldn't be quite so enthusiastic in his defence of pederasty' (!!).
I'm giving it four stars instead of five because its still quite a challenging read for someone not well used to the arcane liturgy of critical theory writing. It's not a book I'd be handing out at trade union branch meetings, but a useful tool for those looking to do a bit of advanced study.
April 4, 2022
งานของดีนและซาโมร่าชิ้นนี้ไม่มีอะไรใหม่จริงๆนัก เพราะทั้งคู่ก็ยังคงหมกมุ่นกับการตีความให้ฟูโกต์เป็นนักคิดเสรีนิยมใหม่ให้ได้ สิ่งเดียวที่แปลกใหม่คือการไป hype ช่วงต้นเล่มเรื่องที่ฟูโกต์เคยเทค LSD แล้วโยงไปว่าประสบการณ์ใหม่เกี่ยวกับตัวตนที่ฟูโกต์ค้นพบจากการเทคยานั้น คือจุดเริ่มต้นของการคิดค้นเรื่องตัวตนที่มีเสรีนิยมใหม่เป็นคำตอบ ซึ่งส่วนตัวแล้วคิดว่าเป็นการตีความที่ทั้ง misread และ too far
อีกเรื่องที่ทำให้ผมมีปัญหากับงานชิ้นนี้ ก็คือผู้เขียนพยายามวางข้อถกเถียงไปที่การพูดถึงงานเขียนช่วงท้ายของฟูโกต์ แต่ทั้งคู่กลับอ้างงานช่วงท้ายของฟูโกต์แบบตัดแปะเพื่อเอามาสนับสนุนข้อถกเถียงของตนเองอย่างผิดบริบท เช่นการอ้างคำบรรยายปี 80 ที่ College de France ซึ่งเป็นคำบรรยายของฟูโกต์เรื่องความรักและเพศวิถีในกรีกโบราณ โดยทั้งคู่ได้โยงประเด็นนี้เข้ากับการเมืองอัตลักษณ์และการเมืองตัวตนในฐานะการเมืองแบบเสรีนิยมใหม่ที่ตัดขาดจากการเมืองของชนชั้น ราวกับว่าคำบรรยายเรื่องกรีกโบราณของฟูโกต์นั้นเป็นเพียงอุปลักษณ์เพื่อส่งต่อทัศนะทางการเมืองที่มีต่อบริบทร่วมสมัยของเขา ซึ่งผมคิดว่าเป็นการตีความที่เลอะเทอะไปหน่อย เพราะทั้งคู่ตีความแบบคิดเองเออเอง ไม่ได้ดูบริบทเลยว่าคำบรรยายของฟูโกต์ในปีนั้นมันเป็นคำบรรยายที่ต่อเนื่องจากปีก่อนซึ่งพูดเรื่องอำนาจในฐานะกลไกการปกครองตัวตน โจทย์ของคำบรรยายในปี 80 จึงเป็นเรื่องของการค้นหา practice ที่ช่วยกลับมาสร้างตัวตนที่เป็นอิสระจากอำนาจในรูปของการปกครอง โดยฟูโกต์เลือกศึกษาผ่านกรณีของความรักและเพศวิถีในกรีกโบราณ ในแง่นี้ การพูดเรื่องความรัก เรื่องเพศวิถีในคำบรรยายปี 80 จึงไม่ได้เกี่ยวหรือมีนัยยะอะไรไปที่การเมืองอัตลักษณ์แบบเสรีนิยมใหม่เลย อันที่จริง ถ้าอ่านคำโน๊ตคำบรรยายในปีนั้นทั้งหมด จะไม่ปรากฏคำว่า "เสรีนิยมใหม่" เลยด้วยซ้ำ
อีกเรื่องที่ทำให้ผมมีปัญหากับงานชิ้นนี้ ก็คือผู้เขียนพยายามวางข้อถกเถียงไปที่การพูดถึงงานเขียนช่วงท้ายของฟูโกต์ แต่ทั้งคู่กลับอ้างงานช่วงท้ายของฟูโกต์แบบตัดแปะเพื่อเอามาสนับสนุนข้อถกเถียงของตนเองอย่างผิดบริบท เช่นการอ้างคำบรรยายปี 80 ที่ College de France ซึ่งเป็นคำบรรยายของฟูโกต์เรื่องความรักและเพศวิถีในกรีกโบราณ โดยทั้งคู่ได้โยงประเด็นนี้เข้ากับการเมืองอัตลักษณ์และการเมืองตัวตนในฐานะการเมืองแบบเสรีนิยมใหม่ที่ตัดขาดจากการเมืองของชนชั้น ราวกับว่าคำบรรยายเรื่องกรีกโบราณของฟูโกต์นั้นเป็นเพียงอุปลักษณ์เพื่อส่งต่อทัศนะทางการเมืองที่มีต่อบริบทร่วมสมัยของเขา ซึ่งผมคิดว่าเป็นการตีความที่เลอะเทอะไปหน่อย เพราะทั้งคู่ตีความแบบคิดเองเออเอง ไม่ได้ดูบริบทเลยว่าคำบรรยายของฟูโกต์ในปีนั้นมันเป็นคำบรรยายที่ต่อเนื่องจากปีก่อนซึ่งพูดเรื่องอำนาจในฐานะกลไกการปกครองตัวตน โจทย์ของคำบรรยายในปี 80 จึงเป็นเรื่องของการค้นหา practice ที่ช่วยกลับมาสร้างตัวตนที่เป็นอิสระจากอำนาจในรูปของการปกครอง โดยฟูโกต์เลือกศึกษาผ่านกรณีของความรักและเพศวิถีในกรีกโบราณ ในแง่นี้ การพูดเรื่องความรัก เรื่องเพศวิถีในคำบรรยายปี 80 จึงไม่ได้เกี่ยวหรือมีนัยยะอะไรไปที่การเมืองอัตลักษณ์แบบเสรีนิยมใหม่เลย อันที่จริง ถ้าอ่านคำโน๊ตคำบรรยายในปีนั้นทั้งหมด จะไม่ปรากฏคำว่า "เสรีนิยมใหม่" เลยด้วยซ้ำ
December 15, 2025
So, I picked this up after it was sitting out on a display at The Strand, thinking it would be an exploration of how psychedelics/psychedelic culture affected the trajectory of critical theory, both its concerns and causes. This was not that book. It ended up summarizing some of Foucault's most impactful texts and relating them to the growing power of neoliberalism. This was not all that disappointing of a bait-and-switch, to be fair. But, I think the tie between changing cultural norms around recreational drug use and its uses in self-exploration and the gradual retreat of the Left from party politics and issues of governing is an interesting one, perhaps a movement Foucault could have anticipated. Rather, this is a more limited intellectual history, placing Foucault in convesation with broader inter-Left rifts around questions of the use of political power and the role of the market in society. The sections on Foucault's journalism covering the Iranian Revolution were unknown to me and fascinating. All in all, worth a read if you haven't read much theory since college and would like an at-times entertaining explainer that relates it to the important political changes of the last fifty years.
April 4, 2022
The best word to describe this book is "fine." I was lured in by the promising title and looked forward to a deep analysis of Foucault, but only got about half of that. The title really only applies for the first two or three chapters, after which the book changes into being more about the transition of France into the neoliberal political world after 1968. While that's perfectly fine on its own, its not really what the book sells itself as. The concepts of "the last man" and his use of LSD are minuscule parts of a thesis that is actually a critique of neoliberal government through a marxist lens. The authors also heavily critiques the works of Foucault, which is fine on the surface, but a not all of the critiques seem equally worthy of being in here. This would have been better as a long article or essay and really did not need to be a whole book, with it feeling kind of trite by the end. Overall, the book was fine, I really enjoyed it at the beginning and that enjoyment waned as the chapters continued. By the end I was just relieved to have finished it. I don't regret reading it, but am unlikely to read any other work from these authors.
September 16, 2025
Dipped in and out of this for my dissertation relating to Foucault and bio-politics. However, enjoyed it beyond that with the discussions on Foucault’s relationship with neoliberalism and the neoliberalism of our time in which it lacks a political movement rather is stuck between liberal globalism and chauvinistic nationalism.
“Neoliberalism as a thought collective and path dependency has largely succeeded in the economic ‘neutralisation’ of the political left for the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The search for a left governmentality, or the making of the welfare state a ‘vast experimental field’ by centre-left parties, together with a widespread intellectual anti-statism and rejection of a formal politics in favour of local social movements and the vitality of civil society, has undermined labour and social democratic parties’ organic concerns with the conditions of the working and precarious populations, leaving little effective voice of discontent other than anti-globalist appeals to a ‘walled sovereignty’.
“Neoliberalism as a thought collective and path dependency has largely succeeded in the economic ‘neutralisation’ of the political left for the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The search for a left governmentality, or the making of the welfare state a ‘vast experimental field’ by centre-left parties, together with a widespread intellectual anti-statism and rejection of a formal politics in favour of local social movements and the vitality of civil society, has undermined labour and social democratic parties’ organic concerns with the conditions of the working and precarious populations, leaving little effective voice of discontent other than anti-globalist appeals to a ‘walled sovereignty’.
September 29, 2025
As someone who hasn’t engaged much with Foucault’s work, especially his late work, I was surprised to learn that Foucault trended towards Neoliberalism in his late career. I knew about his late anti-Marxist tendencies but never investigated where that led.
In Foucault’s anti-statist and anti-Marxist quest of “not being governed as much,” he fails to recognize how the state and other “leftish” institutions can shield us from the governance of individuals and non-state institutions. Corporations and the “hands free” governance of Neoliberal states can also be brutally oppressive to lay people as this book touches on. A good read!
However, it is a bit dense at times, so I won’t recommend it offhand to anyone unless they happen to really want an analysis on Foucault’s late work or are familiar with academic philosophy. If you’re into that sort of thing, it’s a fun read.
Also, there’s just not enough LSD in this thing. It felt like a marketing gimmick to make it part of the title. It gave us a banger of a cover at least.
In Foucault’s anti-statist and anti-Marxist quest of “not being governed as much,” he fails to recognize how the state and other “leftish” institutions can shield us from the governance of individuals and non-state institutions. Corporations and the “hands free” governance of Neoliberal states can also be brutally oppressive to lay people as this book touches on. A good read!
However, it is a bit dense at times, so I won’t recommend it offhand to anyone unless they happen to really want an analysis on Foucault’s late work or are familiar with academic philosophy. If you’re into that sort of thing, it’s a fun read.
Also, there’s just not enough LSD in this thing. It felt like a marketing gimmick to make it part of the title. It gave us a banger of a cover at least.
May 14, 2024
This book was assigned by Dr. Roger Lancaster in his Social Institutions course that I took in the fall of 2023. It was a very illuminating exploration of Michel Foucault's period of engagement with neoliberal economic and political ideas towards the end of his life, particularly during the period of time in which he lived in the Bay Area in California. The book did attempt to whitewash Foucault's championing of ideas that have come to seem increasingly problematic in light of events which have transpired since Foucault's death in the early 1980s. It did provide a lot of insight into the factors which led Foucault to look to these ideas in the ways in which he did as a potential way out of the oppressive forces he saw playing out in reference to other political formations. I understand Foucault, particularly his late period, much better as a result of having read this book.
August 1, 2021
This was my first non superficial contact with Foucault work. The author goes through some, nowadays, "hard to defend" points of view, like being against criminalization of adults and teenagers sexual relationship and tries to contextualize in a much deeper interpretation of liberties.
The book is well written and have some interesting information. One of the good points is the quality of reference and rather extension of journalistic research. I add a couple in my future to do list.
The author also tackle some main incongruences into Foucault's work in advocating for neoliberalism. The main focus of his work is the shift from state-way of thinking to individual experience and revolution.
I would for sure recommend this book.
The book is well written and have some interesting information. One of the good points is the quality of reference and rather extension of journalistic research. I add a couple in my future to do list.
The author also tackle some main incongruences into Foucault's work in advocating for neoliberalism. The main focus of his work is the shift from state-way of thinking to individual experience and revolution.
I would for sure recommend this book.
February 21, 2025
A pretty good overview of Foucault‘s last decade (that being also the title of another book on the same topic, which I’d like to read soon for comparison), and also a good introduction to neoliberalism as a theory and a practice that has decimated the world for the last three decades. Despite the title, the authors don’t manage to convince me that Foucault‘s LSD experience had anything to do with his transition into being a neoliberalism advocate, so I’m not really sure the title is an accurate representation at all. I guess they were going for the „hot goss“ angle.
July 6, 2025
A bit dense, especially as someone unexperienced with Foucault's philosophy. The tie to LSD is clear but also kind of confusing and I frankly find it hard to see how it plays into the story. Interesting bit of history, some great quotes, and fascinating dialogue that plays well into the current political and idealogical landscape. Will be interesting to return to after I've learned a bit more about Foucault and neoliberalism.
July 20, 2024
As a Californian resident, I particularly relished the book's research of Foucault's time in the late 70's in the Bay Area, and its connection to the hippy movement and US origins of neoliberalism. I also enjoyed the last chapter where the authors reflect on the contemporary state of Western politics from the neoliberal lens. Overall, a fun, educational and provocative read.
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August 11, 2021Offers an understanding of Foucault's understanding of neoliberalism as it relates pitential to the self. It would help to have a larger understanding of Foucault, which I do not have. I feel sad that I don't have enough time in my life to attack all the philosophers I find brilliant. Oh well😔
October 14, 2021
It was ok. A bit repetitive and the "clickbait" title had little relevance to the book which is mainly an apology for his positions on the Iranian revolution and neoliberalism. It felt like a magazine article that was then commissioned to be extended into a book.
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