Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications Since 1984 [Paperback]

Jeffrey Nealon (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 080475702X | ISBN-13: 978-0804757027 | Publication Date: November 12, 2007

In Foucault Beyond Foucault Jeffrey Nealon argues that critics have too hastily abandoned Foucault’s mid-career reflections on power, and offers a revisionist reading of the philosopher's middle and later works. Retracing power’s “intensification” in Foucault, Nealon argues that forms of political power remain central to Foucault's concerns. He allows us to reread Foucault’s own conceptual itinerary and, more importantly, to think about how we might respond to the mutations of power that have taken place since the philosopher’s death in 1984. In this, the book stages an overdue encounter between Foucault and post-Marxist economic history.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"In his slim volume on Foucault, [Nealon] has offered a fascinating interpretation of Foucault's work, one that brings to light previous neglected elements of his thought. Although the stated motivation for Nealon's discussion is to counter the current interpretation of Foucault's ethical works, the result is one of the most interesting interpretations of Foucault to emerge in many years."—Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

"Foucault Beyond Foucault is the first major renovation of the critical representation of Foucault's system in the past twenty years. Jeffrey Nealon successfully challenges the critical prejudices and assumptions that have defined Foucault's legacy, particularly in the North American academy, and stakes out new terrain by productively synthesizing recent developments in political and economic theory with Foucault's own analysis of power and subjectivity in the age of "bio-power." In fact, this is the first book that manages to successfully explain the concept itself, a concept everyone is talking about, though no one seems to understand." —Gregg Lambert, Syracuse University

About the Author

Jeffrey T. Nealon is Professor of English at Penn State University. He is the author of Double Reading: Postmodernism after Deconstruction (1993), Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity (1998), and The Theory Toolbox (2003).

Product Details

• Paperback: 152 pages
• Publisher: Stanford University Press (November 12, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080475702X
• ISBN-13: 978-0804757027
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #936,109 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Intensification, November 17, 2008

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This review is from: Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications Since 1984 (Paperback)

Jeffrey Nealon's work in Foucault Beyond Foucault is a major achievement on a number of levels. Importantly, Nealon provides the invaluable service of clearly and convincingly reading Foucault's trajectory through the "middle" and "late" works by following a Foucaultian type reading of Foucault's interests in following power through its "intensifications" (this last term being the conceptual hinge for much of Nealon's important work in the book.) Nealon's counter-reading of Foucault (which to my mind doesn't feel so much like a "reading" as it feels like Foucault himself, which I think is significant) stands against the line which would like to read Foucault as a reformed political liberal, the kind of reading where Foucault "reclaims" the enlightenment and the humanist subject in his "ethical" works. As Nealon shows, such a reading goes well against what Foucault was actually doing.
If this service weren't enough, Nealon goes on to re-intensify Foucault to go beyond Foucault, to analyze our world in the 20 some years since Foucault's death, and after the intensifications of finance capital and neo-liberal globalization. In fact, Nealon makes very good use of economic rationalities to make a number of obervations.
Nealon also reads Foucault alongside a Marxist and Deleuzian approach in a manner which, I am convinced, does not sell out or assimilate a Foucault, but productively follows the intensifications of biopower in our time.
His work on confronting the so-called "problem of agency" is also on point and significant.
All in all, this is terrific scholarship. Not only that, but it is very readable and an enjoyable read, too. It is readily relevant to both "our world" and of course to Foucault studies in particular. It's one of the most engaging works of scholarship I have had the pleasure of reading.

Very highly recommended.