Foucault's Politics

Chapter 7 is the most explicitly political chapter we've read yet this term. In it, Foucault speaks more closely about his own politics than he has in the earlier interviews we read, albeit implicitly. There are two major themes I want to mention:

1. The fact that when the interview was arranged, in 1977, he was still forced to speak in an intellectual environment dominated by Marxist discourse. The 70s in France were the decade in which Marxism finally lost its grip on the academy and during which Marxists struggled with the legacy of the Gulag system in the USSR (hence all the space given over to that issue in the interview) and, often, abandoned Marxism (sometimes becoming irritatingly strident neo-liberals, alla Bernard-Henri Levy.) But what strikes me about this interview is that Foucault is forced to repeatedly point out the manifest absurdity of accusing people of "reformism," which on the left was like saying someone was a child molester. I think the best, and most accurate, quote of his regarding that is "the great States of the nineteenth century adopted a strategic mode of thought, while the revolutionary struggles conceived their strategy only in a very conjunctural manner, endeavouring at the same time always to inscribe it within the horizon of contradiction." (p. 144). In other words, the supposedly-"bourgeois" states worked with and through practical policies and were ideologically flexible, while the entire socialist movement seized on the revolutionary trope despite its increasingly dated character.

2. That said, it is clear throughout that Foucault considered himself "a leftist" of some kind; someone who was concerned about diagnosing power dyanmics and frameworks for the sake of (besides just accuracy) the potential of providing better tactics to "the left." I'd like to talk about this; I feel like he gets as close as he ever does to talking about his own politics in this piece.

-Chris