The essay analyzes Michel Foucault's outright dismissal of the shift from politics to the political in a lecture he gave at the Collège de France in February 1983 against the background of the political and theoretical discussion on the topic within Italian workerism in the 1970s. Mario Tronti's theory of the autonomy of the political, which took Carl Schmitt as a fundamental point of reference, is briefly discussed and presented as a possible polemical target of Foucault. His critique of the shift to the political is presented as a symptom of his enduring fidelity to the legacy of mai'68 and of his continuous search for a politics beyond the state.
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© 2011 Duke University Press
2011
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