Customer Reviews

Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications Since 1984

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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.