Negri on Foucault
* Article / Interview: - Negri on Foucault. Libcom, 9th October, 2004
URL = http://libcom.org/library/foucault-michel
Description
"In this interview Negri discusses the influence of Michel Foucault on his work, stating how as the radical Italian left drifted towards vanguardist armed struggle after 1968 __“we understood that this military drift was something which the movements would not be concerned with; and that it was not only a humanly unbearable choice, but also a political suicide. Foucault, and with him Deleuze and Guattari, warned us against this drift”.
Discussion
Reading Notes from Michel Bauwens:
(It's likely I read a French-language version of the article above, given the quotations selected)
There are three period in Foucault's work:
- 1) during the sixties, he engaged in the study of discourse of human sciences, modernity, as episteme - 2) during the seventies, he focused on the study of the relationship between knowledge and power; the disciplines and biopower; the history of sovereignty - 3) during the eigthies: subjectivation processes, its aesthetics and political aspects (i.e. “le rapport esthétique à soi; le rapport politique aux autres”))
Foucault did not discuss:
- the passage of the welfare state to its moment of crisis - the transition from fordism to post-fordism - the transition from Keynes to neoliberalism
Bourdieu was a sociological positivist, and denounced Foucault's "subjectivism", a feature that Negri denies.
Quotes
- “Foucault rejette le transcendantalisme, les conceptions qui prétendent pouvoir analyser la société de l'extérieur: la seule méthode qui nous permet l'accès au social, c’est celle de l’immanence absolue, de l’invention continue de la production de sens, et des dispositifs d’action.”
- “La subsomption réelle de la société au capital” = the totality of life and society comes under the logic of capital: “quand le capital investit dans la vie entière, la vie se révèle comme résistance".
- “Le commun, c’est ce que nous construisons ensemble pour assurer à l'homme la possibilité de se produire et de se reproduire.”
- “Dans le commun, rien de ce qui faisait nos singularités n’est suspendu ou efface: elles sont seulement articulées les unes aux autres pour obtenir un agencement; chaque puissance se trouve démultipliée par celle des autres, et chaque création est immédiatement aussi celle des autres.”
- “Pour Negri, le communisme est “la production du commun”, et le militant participe à cette production.”
More information
- See also: Antonio Negri: __Marx and Foucault: Essays__. (Cambridge: Polity, 2017. Pp. 200.) Cambridge University Press: September 2019;