Jonathan Simons - Foucault and the Political - Routledge, Uk, 7 March 2013 (Kindle Edition)

Foucault and the Political

By Jonathan Simons

7 March 2013 (Kindle Edition)

15th December 1994 (Paperback)

Michel Foucault's involvement with politics, both as an individual and a writer, has been much commented upon but until now has not been systematically reviewed. This is the first major introductory study of Michel Foucault as a political thinker.

Jonathon Simons explores the importance of the political in all areas of Foucault's work and life, including important material only recently made available and the implications of various revelations about his private life. Simons relates Foucault's work both to contemporary political thinkers such as Michael Walzer, Charles Taylor and Jurgen Habermas, and to those challenging conventional political categories, especially people who write on feminist and gay theory, such as Judith Butler.

Students of Foucault and of political and social theory, as well as those working in lesbian and gay theory, and feminist studies, will find this book essential.

Read more

Michel Foucault as a political philosopher

Hans Sluga,

‘Could you define the sense you give the word “political”’? Michel Foucault as a political philosopher

History of the Human Sciences October 1, 2011 24: 43-59

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Foucault’s political thinking is focused on the concept of power relations. Under the influence of Nietzsche he proposes two different accounts of how power is related to human action. Nietzsche had argued, on the basis of a reading of Kant’s antinomies of pure reason, for two different accounts of that relationship. On the one hand, he had sought to understand action as a phenomenon of the will to power; on the other, he had also spoken of the will to power as an aspect of human agency. On Nietzsche’s views, we need to assert both positions even though they are for us irreconcilable. In his writings on power and action Foucault finds himself driven into adopting a similarly dual view. While he speaks of action in the nineteen seventies as subsidiary to power relations, he reverses himself in the nineteen eighties by treating power as a feature of human action. Just like Nietzsche, he offers us no way of reconciling these two distinct accounts.