Foucault with Marx

by Jacques Bidet, Steven Corcoran (Translator)

Overview

With this timely commitment, Jacques Bidet unites the theories of arguably the world's two greatest emancipatory political thinkers. In this far-reaching and decisive text, Bidet examines Marxian and Foucauldian criticisms of capitalist modernity.

For Marx, the intersection between capital and the market is crucial, while for Foucault, the organizational aspects of capital are what really matter. According to Marx, the ruling class is identified with property; with Foucault, it is the managers who hold power and knowledge that rule. Bidet identifies these two sides of capitalist modernity as 'market' and 'organization', showing that each leads to specific forms of social conflict; against exploitation and austerity, over wages and pensions on the one hand, and against forms of 'medical' and work-based discipline, control of bodies and prisons on the other.

Bidet's impetus and clarity however serve a greater purpose: uniting two souls of critical social theory, in order to overcome what has become an age-long separation between the 'old left' and the 'new social movements'.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781783605385
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	07/15/2016
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.81(d)

About the Author

Jacques Bidet is a French philosopher and social theorist. Currently professor emeritus in the Philosophy Department at the Université de Paris X - Nanterre. His most recently translated books are Exploring Marx's Capital: Philosophical, Economic and Political Dimensions (2007) and A Critical Companion to Contemporary Marxism (2007), in 2014 he wrote the Introduction to Louis Althusser's On The Reproduction Of Capitalism (2014).

Steven Corcoran is a writer and translator living in Berlin. He has edited and/or translated several works by Jacques Rancière, including Dissensus (Continuum, 2010), two works by Alain Badiou, Polemics and Conditions, and Alienation and Freedom (Bloomsbury 2017) by Frantz Fanon.

Table of Contents

Notes on the translation
Abbreviations

Introduction: Why Unite Marx and Foucault, and How?

1. The Marx/Foucault Difference: Discipline and Governmentality
1.1 Discipline society/class society: surveillance and punishment
1.2 Civil society against class state: the Collège de France lectures of 1977-79

2. Property-Power and Knowledge-Power
2.1 Foucault explores the ‘pole’ that Marx left in a grey zone
2.2 Foucault, theoretician of the knowledge-power of “competent-elites”
2.3 Foucault, historian and critic of ‘competent-elites’

3. Marxian Structuralism and Foucauldian Nominalism?
3.1 Micro-relations of power and macro-relationships of class
3.2 Apparatuses of power versus class structures
3.3 Shortcoming and relevance of Marx and Foucault

4. Marx’s ‘Capitalism’ and Foucault’s ‘Liberalism’
4.1 The historical productivity of ‘capitalism’
4.2 The history of ‘liberalism’

Elements of Conclusion: A Strategy from Below

Marx’s strategies
Foucault’s strategies
Provocation and interpellation
Strategy and hegemony
The dispersed order of strategy from below
Beyond class horizons

References
Index

Editorial Reviews

“Competent and lucid. . . . Hold[s] out hope of reconnecting what used to be called the ‘new social movements’ with struggles against capitalism.

Marx and Philosophy Review of Books

“The ongoing confrontation between Marx and Foucault is a primary theoretical issue implicit in every political struggle today, whether domestic or international.  Bidet's careful and detailed staging of the intersections of these two quite different bodies of theory is an indispensable exercise.

Fredric Jameson

“In this important work, Jacques Bidet shows with patient and piercing insight why it is necessary to think Foucault with Marx (and Marx with Foucault) in order to make sense of the contemporary world. It will undoubtedly become an essential work for anyone seeking to think through the productive relations between the two thinkers.

Nick Srnicek

“Bidet creatively interrogates Marx’s critique of property and class relations and Foucault’s critique of knowledge-power relations to produce an original synthesis that informs a novel approach to resistance and struggles for counter-hegemony in the present neoliberal conjuncture.

Robert Jessop

“In the growing literature confronting and combining the legacies of Marx and Foucault, Bidet’s contribution will stand out with exceptional relevance. It is both firmly anchored in the author’s doctrine of the ‘dual’ nature of capitalist domination (capital as property and capital as knowledge) and full of imaginative readings of the texts.

Etienne Balibar