Foucault' s encounter with marxism

Abstract

Both Marxist and postmodern discourse have tended to place Foucault's work in an antagonistic juxtaposition to Marx's, seeing him as directly confronting both Marx's politics, epistemology, and subject matter. Ample evidence — in his words and intellectual practice — supports this view. However, such positions suffer from two main weaknesses. First, they often conflate the different levels of abstraction in Marx's work, leading to problematic analytical comparisons between elements in his work vs. Foucault's. Second, interpretations of Foucault as Marx's foil must ignore and/or downplay equally compelling evidence — also in his words and intellectual practice — that place him squarely within Marx's epistemological, if not political, camp. To the extent Foucault positively engaged Marx's work itself is the extent to which postmodern claims of the declining relevance of Marxism fail.

Citation

Paolucci, P. (2002), "Foucault' s encounter with marxism", Lehmann, J. (Ed.) Critical Theory: Diverse Objects, Diverse Subjects (Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Vol. 22), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 3-58. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0278-1204(03)80004-X