Foucault’s Solitude

Engaging contemporary critiques of Foucault’s politics, this article resituates his relationship to neoliberalism within the challenges posed by the experience of state socialism and social democracy in the twentieth century, which calls for a reconstruction of the relationship between what are supposedly Foucault’s cultural orientation and the economic orientation of socialist states and parties. This vantage point shows that Foucault’s late conceptions of the subject are not an involution into neoliberal individualism, but a way of thinking through the crisis of emancipatory politics.