James Faubion announces that the aim of his new book, Foucault Now, lies far beyond the usual collection of interpretations and applications of Foucault’s groundbreaking work. Instead, Faubion sees this latest study as “coming to fresh terms and making fresh work with the conceptual details and the broader scope of the programmatic dimensions of Michel Foucault’s thought” (p. 1). In this volume, leading voices in the field reflect on the ongoing significance, impact and relevance of this revolutionary thinker who, despite his untimely death in 1984, foresaw many of the problems that face societies in our time, and he anticipated the complex, situated Power/Knowledge dance that undergirds the politico-socio-economic world that has unfolded since his death. This volume offers analytical clarification, as well as very practical suggestions regarding how Foucault’s methodological and critical project can be applied to undercut conventional wisdom about social and political realities and to rethink the relentless mythologies (“veridification”) that sustain late capitalism even as its problems grow more and more overt and undeniable.

Foucault is generally agreed to be the most important thinker of the past half-century whose “historical ontology of ourselves” retains the power to unseat ossified assumptions about self and world, and power and truth, and exposes the technologies that shape our subjectivity and our Power/Knowledge systems. A brief biography of the thinker and his work recounts his major themes and discoveries—sovereign power/disciplinary power; Power/Knowledge; biopower; the undecidability of phenomena, and many more. Then six essays raise the question of the use and abuse of Foucault in modern interpretations and co-options. One of the highlights of this first section is James Laidlaw’s compelling study of Foucault’s anthropology of ethics, “The Undefined Work of Freedom,” which meditates on Foucault’s treatment of the historical and socio-cultural contingency of subjectivity and the way that freedom and relations of power are co-constituted. Another fascinating highlight of the first section is the essay by John Forrester, “Foucault’s Face: the Personal is the Theoretical,” which exposes how Foucault’s de-ossifications of subjectivity undercut our modern liberal preoccupation with our particularity, our unique individuality, always seeking a self that is free and not merely existing for the state or for the God. Forrester shows how Foucault goes beyond Max Weber by overcoming the simplistic definition of power as mere sovereignty and the simplistic definition of history as a sequence of revolutionary events whereby one interest group supplants another. Forrester argues the critical distinctions for Foucault delineate, not merely between sovereign power and disciplinary power, but between: political power, after the classical Greeks, which maintains within the legal framework of unity and under the rubric of fame; and pastoral power or biopower over the distinctively modern “individual” produced through the panoptical power of the disciplinary society, which operates under the rubric of shame by identifying and treating deviance from norms in all facets of life (criminology, psychiatry, military regulations and surveillance, education, etc.).

In the second section of the volume, scholars capture the most prominent of the many analytical purposes in service of which Foucault’s corpus has been or could be put. Eric Fassin’s “Biopower, Sexual Democracy, and the Racialization of Sex” clarifies the political and sociocultural dynamics of sexualization of race and the racialization of sex and sexuality, by exploring how such causes as gay marriage, gay adoption, and immigration exploit Foucault’s ideas to raise questions about the ethical and political status of these outgroups. For me, Laurence McFalls and Mariella Pandolfi offer the pièce de résistance of the volume with their article, “Parrhesia and Therapeusis: Foucault on and in the World of Contemporary Neoliberalism.” This essay sees Foucault foretelling the contemporary state of the socio-economic world thirty years after his death, and it shows how biopolitical technologies of power have come to assume far more insidious forms than the neoliberal subject and the neoliberal trade system of corporate domination that has spread across the globe with (scandalously false) promises of prosperity for all. Humanitarian non-governmental organizations and the classic welfare state also rely on “therapeutic domination” to justify their existence, their policies and their interventions, by constructing distinctive subjects for their domination such as “the sick,” “the damaged,” “the vulnerable,” and “the displaced.” Humanitarian discourses set us up for uncritical acceptance of these organizations and for approval of their actions, which tend overwhelmingly toward neoliberal economic fixes to every structural misfortune, applied crisis after crisis. McFalls and Pandolfi argue for Foucault’s prescience in 1979 of the political and economic crises currently facing Europe and the brutal reinforcement of market reason in the shape of recent “austerity measures.” These most insidious modes of domination and subjectivation (in a self-interested economic individual, homo oeconomicus, rationally calculating his cost, benefits and risks) defy moral challenge precisely because these are framed as “therapeutic.” The authors show how the “velvet cage of therapeusis” rests on the “iron-fisted” law of the neoliberal market. Toby Miller’s “Foucault, Marx, Neoliberalism: Unveiling Undercover Boss” is another truly excellent article that extends the exposure of an insidious market logic and language of “market veridification” (truth-making discourse) from an anthropomorphized economy to the economization of all forms of life. We see signs of the ever-extending colonization of the politico-socio-cultural world by the logic of the market in: the journalistic veneration of the market; the “financialization” of the news and current affairs through the increasing theoretical vocabulary of the monetary significance of news stories to investors; the heroizing of business executives; and the increasing focus of news reporting on stock markets, earnings and profits. Reality shows, such as Undercover Boss, continues Miller, demonstrate the neoliberal logic that subjectivates us: the TV show is suffused with normative messages promoting individual responsibility, avarice, possessive individualism, hyper-competitivism, and commodification, and emphasizing the responsibility of each person to master their desires and harness their energies to improve their jobs, homes, appearance, and relationships. Of special interest to us academics is Miller’s exposure of the “mimetic managerial fallacy” of the colleges and universities of the United States, which details how administrators over the past thirty years have increasingly modelled the university after the corporate world and applied the logic and language of the market to the higher education setting. Colleges now are “big business,” Miller argues, both resembling and serving big business; research universities act as tax havens, with trustees seeking returns on collective and individual investments. Signs of “market veridification” in higher learning institutions include gross distention of the managerial arm of the university (managers have increased from one-tenth to one-fifth of the college employees), with the creation of more and more junior and senior level administrative positions until presently faculty make up only one-third of campus workers. For Miller, the news and entertainment industry cloak the horrors of a late capitalist system, whose higher educational arm: casts the children of the working class into generational debt; values faculty grantsmanship over scholarship; touts change for its own sake as an unproblematic good; and (despite the deleterious effects of George W. Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” outcome-riveted program on educational quality) increasingly links budget to outcomes, even as faculty/student ratios soar, as hiring begins to mirror Walmart’s hiring policies (as part-timers with lesser qualifications take on the brunt of teaching duties for ever diminishing pay), and as reporting, surveillance, and administration increase exponentially in size, power, and cost. These articles show the profound relevance of Foucault’s corpus for understanding and approaching remedies for the ills of the modern state.

The title, Foucault Now, reminds the reader that Foucault is as relevant now to politico-social and philosophical discourse, as he was during his lifetime. The book is truly a tour de force, which will thrill all students of this eminent thinker. The volume will be found accessible by readers of some philosophical expertise. It would serve well as a graduate seminar text or as a study to orient a philosophy conference.

© 2015 Wendy C. Hamblet

Wendy C. Hamblet, Ph. D., NC A&T State University.