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How Michel Foucault, drugs, California and the rise of neoliberal politics in 1970s France are all connectedIn 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.
List of contents
Acknowledgements
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
About the author
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.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.
