Review of Kelly’s The Political Philosophy of Michel Foucault

Kelly's book presents the first major attempt to systematically examine Foucault's approach to power and politics since Simon's Foucault and the Political (1995).The project is a significant one given the recent global introductory treatments of Foucault's philosophy, (e.g., May 2006;Paras 2006;O'Farrell 2005).Challenging the predominant reception of Foucault's works as lacking philosophical consistency, exemplified most recently by Paras (2006), Kelly, argues for it in Foucault's political philosophy (1-2).For this, the author should be commended.Drawing on a fairly comprehensive, if not always persuasive, exegesis of Foucault's work, Kelly's central argument, productively drawing on Deleuze (1988), is that Foucault's political philosophy consistently approaches matters of the constraints on becoming otherwise through a materialist and anti-subjectivist ontology of violence.Foucault's archaeological works are shown to be an analysis of the violence that discourse does to things thus shaping the macro-level of societal problematisations of existence.The genealogical works are then argued to highlight the microlevel of violence manifested in the intentional exercising of power by individuals over other persons.This distillation then serves as the backdrop for arguing that the practices of critique and ethics are the means for effectively resisting macro-and micro-violence respectively, without falling prey to the traps of humanism, essentialism and utopianism, thus, it is hoped, paving the way for a future revolution, the time of which awaits the announcement of critical intellectuals (137).Readers will find a comprehensive treatment of Foucault's conceptual emphases and the book is well organised.At the same time, since the project is defined in terms of an explication of a consistent ontology in Foucault subtending his approach to the political, Kelly purposely and unfortunately eschews any critical inspection of Foucault (4).The introduction usefully situates the stakes of the author's intervention for appreciating Foucault's consistency.This is then extended in Chapter 1, dealing with Foucault's epistemology, usefully arguing against the view that Foucault is a relativist (20-21).Suggestive parallels with Althusserian materialism are also discussed although surprisingly lacking any mention of Reading Capital (Althusser and Balibar 1970) in which Althusser, drawing on Foucault, lays out a materialist account of knowledge production, together with his concept of "problematic," a development endorsed by Deleuze (1994: 186).Chapters 2 and 3 deal with the concept of power, stressing the Nietzschean (and ultimately romantic) ontology of power relations that are then subsequently expressed in discourse.Kelly also challenges the notion that Foucault's shift away from the model of war around 1978, to that of games, thereby implies a change of his problematic (56).However, the two chapters on power fail to adequately distinguish between government, governmentality and governing, leading to a rather thin explication of the concept of government (e.g., 68).In this regard, some engagement with Rose's seminal

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.