Last Man Takes LSD Foucault and the End of Revolution
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Mitchell Dean is Professor of politics and Head of Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at the Copenhagen Business School (CBS) and formerly professor of sociology at Macquarie University (Sydney) and the University of Newcastle. He is author of the bestselling Governmentality, a title that has been cited in the first edition of Foucault's lectures and the Oxford English Dictionary.Daniel Zamora is a professor of sociology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). He works on the history of social policy, of inequality and modern intellectual history. He is the co-of Foucault and Neoliberalism with Michael C. Behrent (Polity, 2015). His writing has appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique, Jacobin, Los Angeles Review of Books and Dissent among others.
The contribution of this important essay is to place Foucault's thought on neoliberalism in its political context of the time. This is the whole point of this essay, all the more fascinating since it offers an overview of the work on Foucault, in particular on its relation to neoliberalism.
- Olivier Doubre, Politis
In <i>The Last Man Takes LSD</i>, the sociologists Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora meticulously examine the turning point of the seventies to take a critical look at Foucault's political heritage, and to revive the debate on his relationship to the neoliberal school of thought.
- Mathieu Dejean, Les Inrocks
A volume that offers us an overview of the political field that gave rise to Foucault's ideas. The two authors enrich the debate by proposing to consider the alleged Foucaultian sympathy for neoliberalism as a moment where power seemed to criticize himself, making possible, on the one hand, a policy finally free from the conquest of the State and institutions, and on the other, the idea of an autonomous constitution of oneself - or, what would today be inexorably described as an entrepreneur of the self.
- Carlo Crosato, Il Manifesto
Michel Foucault saw neoliberalism as an opportunity to think about the revitalization of the left in civil society. The authors Daniel Zamora and Mitchell Dean explain why he lost sight of its authoritarian dimension.
- Pascal Jurt, Woz
Michel Foucault was among the most prescient analysts of neoliberalism but his own relation to it is now a topic of fierce intellectual dispute. In this brilliant and incisive book, Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora show that neoliberalism appeared to Foucault to offer a break with the normalization of the welfare state and a space for new political experiments and individual freedoms. Looking back from our context of generalised precarity, deep inequality and economic and environmental crises, they challenge us to break with this tattered utopia and move beyond Foucault's fascination with the aesthetics of the self to re-invent politics for our time.
- Jessica Whyte,
Dean and Zamora use Foucault's thesis of the dissolution of the Author as the key to understanding his later shift to issues of governmentality, neoliberalism, and his turn to subjectivity. By so doing, they violate his own injunction of resorting to the author's life to comprehend any work, and consequently produce the best account of his work I have ever encountered.
- Philip Mirowski, University of Notre Dame,
By locating Foucault's later work in the social and political context of the 1970s and 80s, in France, California, and elsewhere, Dean and Zamora have performed a double service. We finish their study better understanding the roots of Foucault's ideas, and the motivation for his dalliance with a nascent neoliberalism. But we also perceive the limited shelf-life of his idiosyncratic notion of freedom; in our time, it would be folly to carry on revering him as - in Sartre's phrase - the 'unsurpassable horizon' of radical thought.
- Peter Dews, University of Essex,
"When I say something," Foucault claimed, "I am speaking to the present." How ironic that so little of the discussion around Foucault, particularly in the United States, has focused on his present. In their riveting study, Dean and Zamora do just that, putting Foucault in dialogue not only with the anti-Marxist New Philosophers of the 1970s but also with a neoliberalism emerging from within French socialist circles after 1968. The result is a completely unexpected Foucault, more rooted in the struggles of his own time, yet still speaking, as a cautionary tale, to our own. One would be hard pressed to find a better book on such a complex thinker or a more compulsively readable introduction to the contradictory politics of the left in our current moment.
Corey Robin
The Last Man Takes LSD is the best account of Foucault's engagement with neoliberalism. The book raises a number of intriguing questions, not the least of which is: What is left?
- John Foster, The Battleground
Dean and Zamora do an excellent job contextualizing Foucault's research and ideas in his final years. They methodically trace the nuances of the era's prickly political climate, creating a sympathetic portrait of Foucault's promotion of a damaging and - for a thinker who fruitfully explored power and exploitation - self-defeating philosophical turn.
- Jonathan Russell Clark, Los Angeles Times
Not just a brilliant and well-timed exploration of Foucault's intellectual trajectory ... it is also a necessary addition to the literature that has emerged over the past five years on the intellectual history of neoliberalism.
- Gavin Jacobson, New Statesman
The Last Man Takes LSD questions the lingering significance of Foucault's work today, highlighting a greater gap in Foucauldian thought: the absence of a well-developed theory of the state.
- Samuel Clowes Huneke, The Point
A fascinating study of Foucault's American years.
- Stuart Jeffries, Spectator
Compelling.
- Jasper Friedrich, Foucault Studies
In May 1975, Michel Foucault took LSD in the desert in southern California. He described it as the most important event of his life, one which would lead him to completely rework his History of Sexuality. His focus now would not be on power relations but on the experiments of subjectivity and the care of the self. Through this lens, he would reinterpret the social movements of May '68 and position himself politically in France in relation to the emergent anti- totalitarian and anti-welfare state currents. He would also come to appreciate the possibilities of autonomy offered by a new force on the French political scene that was neither of the Left nor the Right: neoliberalism.
For this paperback edition, the authors have written an afterword responding to the debate occasioned by the book's first publication.
Introduction: The Last Man Takes LSD
1. The Birth of a Controversy
Foucault and the liberal arts of government
Foucault in his present
Neoliberalism
The intellectual
2. Searching for a Left Governmentality
Foucault against the post-war Left
Neoliberalism beyond Right and Left
Towards a 'new political culture'
3. Beyond the Sovereign Subject: Against Interpretation
Against the sovereignty of the author
Th e rise and fall of the modern subject
4. Ordeals: Personal and Political
Veridiction and forms of truth
Experimentation and knowledge through the ordeal
A 'political spirituality' against the sovereign
5. The Revolution Beheaded
Th e self as a battlefield
Resistance as 'desubjectification'
Proliferation against power
Neoliberalism: a framework for pluralism
An 'intelligent use' of neoliberalism
6. Foucault's Normativity
Sexuality and morality
Th e revolution
Inequality and neoliberal governmentality
The California Foucault
7. Rogue Neoliberalism and Liturgical Power
The 1970s: coming down
Towards a left governmentality
Confessional civil war
Epilogue
Afterword
Index
In December 2014, then doctoral student Daniel Zamora published an interview in Jacobin entitled “Can We Criticize Foucault?” that rapidly went viral. It was shared more than 30,000 times, read more than 200,000 times and translated in more than ten languages.,A book edited by Zamora with intellectual historian, Michael Behrent - Foucault and Neoliberalism (Polity Press, 2015) - was published a year later and shed a new light on Foucault’s last decade with its more contextual and intellectual history approach. The small Facebook page (@critiquerfoucault) that was created at the time to promote the book has now more than 11,000 followers and shown very large interest around the topic. The scholarly journal, History and Theory, devoted an entire special issue to the book in 2015.,Rather than receding, the controversy around the topic has been growing and has provoked many more leading scholars to enter the discussion.,This will be then the first comprehensive history of Foucault’s interest in neoliberalism in the broader context of the last decade of his life.,The authors of this new book complement one another in that they represent different cultural (Francophone and Anglophone) and generational perspectives on Foucault and his impact. They are both among the preeminent scholars in this fields. They have been part of the controversy since the beginning and have been brought into collaboration by its urgency. They will address the issues raised by this controversy within our present and for a broader public. They seek to expand the reach of this constitutive intellectual event and show how Foucault’s last decade still echoes within contemporary debates about social justice and social democracy, neoliberalism and sovereignty, and the rising, populistthreat to liberal democracy.,Examples of the international coverage of the controversy:
Daniel Drezner, “Why Michel Foucault is the libertarian’s best friend”, The Washington Post, December 2014.
Thomas Thiel, “Aufschrei der Unberuhrbaren”, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 2017.
Carlo Crosato, “Quel filo rosso che traversa le relazioni di potere”, Il Manifesto, November 2019.
R.M., review, « Le dernier homme », Libération, 30 August 2019.
Daniel Zamora, “Can We Criticize Foucault?”, Jacobin, December 2014.
Mitchell Dean, “Rebel, Rebel. Revisiting the radical legacy of Michel Foucault via David Bowie”, Stanford University Press Blog, February, 2016.
Daniel Zamora, Mitchell Dean, “Did Foucault Reinvent His History of Sexuality Through the Prism of Neoliberalism?”, Los Angeles Review of Books, 18th April 2018
Daniel Zamora “How Foucault Got Neoliberalism so Wrong”, Jacobin, September 2019.
Mitchell Dean, Daniel Zamora, “Interview: Ein Neoliberaler?”, Der Freitag, August 2019.
Mitchell Dean, Daniel Zamora, “Un essai relance la querelle sur Foucault et le néolibéralisme“, Les Inrockuptibles, 22 octobre 2019.,Endorsements from Corey Robin, Nancy Fraser, Melinda Cooper, Philip Mirowski and Sam Moyn
Produktdetaljer
Biografisk notat
Mitchell Dean is Professor of politics and Head of Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at the Copenhagen Business School (CBS) and formerly professor of sociology at Macquarie University (Sydney) and the University of Newcastle. He is author of the bestselling Governmentality, a title that has been cited in the first edition of Foucault's lectures and the Oxford English Dictionary.Daniel Zamora is a professor of sociology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). He works on the history of social policy, of inequality and modern intellectual history. He is the co-of Foucault and Neoliberalism with Michael C. Behrent (Polity, 2015). His writing has appeared in Le Monde Diplomatique, Jacobin, Los Angeles Review of Books and Dissent among others.