A spectre is haunting the contemporary culture wars, Ben Burgis jokes in Myth and Mayhem: the spectre of “postmodern neo-Marxism”.[1] This polemical blend-word, presently animating conservative and farther Right figures from Jordan Peterson to Viktor Orban, names the enemy par excellence. It is, nevertheless, somewhat uncanny that this faux Cold War construction is presently being bought and sold by millions around the world. For, although those on the Right clearly have little incentive to recognise this, the leading French theorists reviled as “postmodernist” [2] made their names by breaking with the universalist, progressivist, modernist legacy, including that binding Marx back to Hegel and the enlightenment. As any number of studies have shown, and as the primary thinkers never concealed, the postmodern theorists led by Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, and Michel Foucault instead took as their principal inspirations deeply antiliberal, but also avowedly anti-socialistic thinkers led by Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.[3]
In today’s context, the appearance in English translation of Jan Rehmann’s work, Deconstructing Postmodern Nietzscheanism: Deleuze and Foucault, is therefore timely in numerous ways.[4] This long book, written from a broadly Marxist perspective, analyses in great depth the Nietzschean bases of “postmodernism”, or what the book’s German title called “Left Nietzscheanism [Links-Nietzscheanismus]”. In the process, it also goes a long way in highlighting how distant the basic orientations of some of “postmodernism’s” key proponents were from promoting any form of political Marxism or democratic socialism. Based on a 2004 text which originally appeared in Rehmann’s native German, Deconstructing Postmodern Nietzscheanism stands in the legacies both of earlier Marxist criticisms of “post-structuralist” theory in thinkers such as Terry Eagleton, Alex Callinicos, and Fredric Jameson, as well as critical works on Nietzsche and his postwar legatees, by thinkers such as Richard Wolin, Peter Dews, and (one of Rehmann’s avowed inspirations), the late Italian scholar, Domenico Losurdo.[5] In contrast to these works, Deconstructing Postmodern Nietzsche is wholly dedicated to the task of critically examining the interpretations of Nietzsche informing the works of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. The importance of these two French theorists in the global outreach of “French theory” since 1980 is unquestionable—although, of course, one could always wish for a more complete treatment of any field, and Rehmann’s focus on the two mens’ Nietzscheanism, of course, in no way excludes analyses of their other influences.[6]
By focusing on Deleuze’s and Foucault’s readings of Nietzsche, we are told, Rehmann’s book takes critical aim at what he alleges is:
an influential ‘Nietzsche-industry’ [which] has been announcing him as a brand new discovery for more than half a century … It is the success of an orthodoxy which has developed a tremendous inertia through the permanent evocation of the new. In France, which had been exposed to the poststructuralist Nietzsche image longest, the attraction seems to be exhausted to a great extent; in Germany and the English-speaking world the novelty value lasts longer …. (13)
In this orthodoxy, the German philosopher of the 1870s and 1880s, propounder of the will to power, the “pathos of distance” and the need to restore “rank ordering” to overcome nihilistic modernity—the philosopher who had, before 1945, been embraced by Edwardian eugenicists, fascists from many nations, and German National Socialists as a principal “high cultural” inspiration for their attempts to engender the “new man”[7]—was reborn between World War Two and the later 1960s. The philosopher’s new clothes became those of “the ‘new’ plural-differential Nietzsche”: soon enough, casting off even the reserved attire of the apolitical, perfectionist artist-philosopher of Walter Kaufmann’s 1950 reconstruction,[8] to sport the more colourful wares of the nomadic rebel “against everything normative” of Gilles Deleuze (14), or the “grey, meticulous” genealogist and liberator of suppressed, minoritarian histories of Michel Foucault.[9]
The extraordinary success of the readings of Friedrich Nietzsche proposed since 1960 by figures led by Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault is shown by the fact that, in many intellectual circles, any suggestion of a link between Nietzsche and the historical or contemporary Far Right is greeted with outrage and polemical hostility. In the discipline of philosophy—in striking contrast to that of history, it has to be said[10]— a weighty burden of proof now lies on the shoulders of any scholar, like Rehmann, bold enough to seriously broach this link: one which, during the interwar period, was nevertheless widely accepted.[11] It is not enough for these scholars to patiently remind readers of the many places in Nietzsche’s own texts wherein the philosopher expresses deep anti-democratism, anti-modernism, and hostility to all forms of egalitarianism (as “slave morality”); wherein he celebrates “rank ordering”, despotic figures like Julius Caesar, Cesare Borgia, and Napoleon Bonaparte, or the need for “exploitation” and “slavery” to advance “the plant ‘man’”;[12] or, wherein, in his post-1883 writings, he develops and seemingly radicalises contemporary discourses surrounding eugenics as a means to combat modern “decadence”, “decline”, or “degeneration”.[13] As well as this, they also need to show that philosophers like Deleuze and Foucault, who underwrite contemporary Left Nietzscheans’ disbelief that the celebrated philosopher could have maintained such unpalatable positions, have badly misrepresented the German thinker.
Much of Rehmann’s Deconstructing Postmodern Nietzscheanism is dedicated to meeting this heavy burden of proof. Knowingly brooking outraged polemical responses, the book aims to show that, at the heart of the “new Nietzsche” of the last decades, is a “widespread refusal to take cognizance of Nietzsche’s open stance of radical aristocratism” (70): that metapolitical stance which the philosopher himself avowed, when the label was suggested to him by his friend, Georg Brandes.[14] There are four discernible, key contentions of Deconstructing Nietzsche, that help understand the scale of the counterhegemonic break with the “postmodern Nietzscheanism” this work by Jan Rehmann ventures:
- That Deleuze and Foucault, far from being unimpeachably authoritative interpreters either of Nietzsche, or figures such as Hume, Spinoza, and Marx, as many have supposed, present reconstructions of these authors’ ideas which are more “creative” than accurately representative of the originals’ ideas, if they are not decisively mistaken;
- That Deleuze and Foucault, through different but convergent means, both selectively screen out or recode Nietzsche’s central ideas as a philosopher of domination, hierarchy, and aristocratic rebellion against liberal, democratic and socialist thought and institutions;
- That, far from representing a vanguard of critically alert, discerning readers of Deleuze, Foucault and Nietzsche, a good deal of academic commentary on the French philosophers’ works tend to be uncritical, accepting that Deleuze’s and Foucault’s Nietzsches are the real thing, without adequately testing their claims against the Nietzschean originals:
In general, credulity prevails, by which it is tacitly assumed that Deleuze [and Foucault] will have correctly read his Nietzsche. For the most part Nietzsche quotations have the function of illustrating the interpretation and not of examining it critically. This is true not only of the lovers of a postmodernist Nietzscheanism, but also of prominent critics of the same [such as Habermas] … ;(14)
- That, in line with Eagleton, Callinicos, Harvey, and other Marxist critiques,[15] and far from representing a deep counterhegemonic challenge to the cultural logic of consumerist neoliberal capitalism, postmodern Nietzscheanism is deeply ideologically consistent with today’s marketised cultural logics. Beneath the wolf’s clothing, and the most radical anti-cultural gestures, postmodern Nietzscheanism serves as an intellectual resource for turning students and intellectuals away from the social critique of capitalism, towards its aestheticist modulations,[16] which sit far more comfortably with the lived conditions of the professional managerial class to which intellectuals belong, and within whose milieu they continue to work and move.
There are hence inescapably political implications at stake in Rehmann’s challenging book. If Rehmann’s core theses hold, then readers will be required to question some of the deepest intellectual foundations of the postmodernist intellectual Left, which has made deep inroads into syllabi across multiple disciplines in the humanities. Postmodern Nietzscheanism would stand accused of a kind of political blindness which has seen intellectuals repackaging the same ideas which continue to inspire thinkers on the radical Right, without either recognising this, or critically examined what in the radical German thinkers’ ideas has allowed them, again and again, to inspire political and cultural reactionaries. As Rehmann asks, pointedly, of Foucault:
The problem can be brought to a point with the following question: what does it mean theoretically that, in the midst of a supposedly radical critique of power and the subject one is again and again referred to a philosopher whose anti-metaphysical thinking, primarily in his late phase, is connected with the most radical enthusiasm for hierarchical power and domination and whose proto-fascist and fascist effect is an unquestioned fact, i.e. independently of the various debates around his ‘true’ motivation or the ‘abuse’ and ‘misunderstanding’ of his role in the Nazi-state? (16)[17]
In the review essay that follows, we will examine Rehmann’s second contention (as listed above), by looking at his reading of Deleuze’s Nietzscheanism (part 1), and then his fourth, more directly political contention, by looking at his reading of Foucault’s Nietzscheanism, and his later rapprochement with the neoliberal Right (part 3). The two parts are connected by a consideration of the normative transformation that lies at the heart of the two French theorists’ readings of Nietzsche, whereby violence, untethered to any concrete political project, is recoded as liberatory (part 2). We will suggest that what Rehmann’s book most deeply challenges is what could be dubbed a two-fold alchemy at play in “postmodern Left Nietzscheanism”: firstly, the process of transforming Nietzsche’s own, avowed radical aristocratism into a kind of culturally refined, and even seemingly progressive, libertarianism consumable by liberal intellectuals, in the ideological vacuum following the discrediting of Stalinism and Eurocommunism (part 1); and, secondly, the process of thereby successfully turning many radical intellectuals away from the older progressive values of equality, solidarity, and the desire to transform avoidably unjust social institutions (tainted by Nietzscheanism as reactive, slave-ish, the product of ressentiment), towards more individualistic, culturalist and anarchistic termini more conversant with hegemonic forms of neoliberal subjectivity (part 2).[18]
- Rehmann’s Deleuze
Critical debate surrounding Nietzsche is complicated by the postmodernist claims that the significance of the German philosopher’s work was to short-circuit all attempts to stabilise meaning, as the false or reactive gesture of a self-deluding subjectivity, which can never be in sovereign control of its own drives or signifiers. Whilst notably not denying the contents of Nietzschean texts which “nourished and still nourish [sic.] a great many young fascists”, Deleuze in 1973 responded that one should shift the debate away from “the level of textual analysis”.[19] Nietzsche’s texts should, rather, be seen as an “exterior field” striated by fascist, bourgeois, and revolutionary “forces”, wherein the “problem” was one of interpretive selection, “finding, assessing, and assembling the exterior forces that give a sense of liberation, a sense of exteriority to each various phrase”.[20] Foucault, in a similar, seemingly radically anti-authoritarian gesture, disarmed all critical anxieties that he might not be accurately representing the German philosopher whose authority he claimed:
The only valid tribute to thought such as Nietzsche’s is precisely to use it, to deform it, to make it groan and protest. And if commentators then say that I am being faithful or unfaithful to Nietzsche, that is of absolutely no interest.[21]
Many readers have celebrated this hermeneutic insouciance, whilst others have wondered whether it licenses making anything of our preferred authors by declarative fiat, foreclosing critical debates about interpretive accuracy. Either way, its limits are quickly revealed when Left Nietzscheans respond to Rightist appropriations of the philosopher’s texts, or critical suggestions such as those of Rehmann, that we need to take these appropriations of Nietzsche seriously. Faced with these readings, postmodern Nietzscheans tend to respond, just as if Nietzsche was a respected traditional authority like any other, whose sovereign intentions (which they take to be broadly liberal and generous, if culturally radical) needed to be piously preserved from barbarous, “unfaithful” misrepresentations. Once more, we discover that Nietzsche’s explosive perspectivism and pluralisation of value and subjectivity had definite limits, and that not all “deformations” of the philosopher, to use Foucault’s word, would be equal after all.
Rehmann’s confrontation with Deleuze’s and Foucault’s readings of Nietzsche avoids such contradictory imperatives (Nietzsche as harbinger of infinite interpretive play; Nietzsche as authority to be protected from unpalatable misreadings). Whilst he acknowledges the presence of the passages in Nietzsche’s oeuvre which, taken by themselves, have licensed the postmodern readings (51-53), Rehmann also does not bracket those passages in the German philosopher asserts that even the act of subjective willing, within the plural forces of the decentred subject, involves the hierarchical logics of commanding and obeying (53-55).[22] Indeed, Rehmann’s reading of Deleuze and Foucault sets out to show that, once we bracket the expectation that the French philosophers must have been careful readers of their German predecessor—an expectation formed, despite their own avowals to the contrary, which we have seen—by returning to the originals, we see a form of interpretation which “prevents any serious criticism of Nietzsche, but also defeats the possibility of being aware of the ideology-critical potentials of his blunt discourse of unfettered domination” (14).
Rehmann’s reading of Deleuze principally turns on identifying and contesting the hermeneutic feat whereby the French theorist takes Nietzsche’s repeated later affirmations about the need for a “pathos of distance” of the ruling masters towards the slave-types, and turns this into a benign celebration of horizontal “difference”[23] consistent with liberal, or even apparently more or less socialistic, values. In Genealogy of Morals I, 2, for instance, Nietzsche uses the term “distance” to describe the relationship between “noble” and “base” strata of society:
the noble, the mighty, the high-placed and the high-minded, who saw and judged themselves and their actions as good, I mean first rate, in contrast to everything lowly, low-minded, common and plebeian.[24]
In Beyond Good and Evil §257, we are told that a “pathos of distance” “grows out of the ingrained differences between stations, out of the way the ruling caste maintains an overview and keeps looking down on subservient types and tools …”.[25] In case there could be any doubt about the socio-political referents of his thinking here, Nietzsche further affirms in this place that this distance is necessary for “the development of states that are increasingly high, rare, distant, tautly drawn and comprehensive, and in short, the enhancement of the type ‘man’, the constant ‘self-overcoming of man’ (to use a moral formula in a supra-moral sense).”[26]
Nevertheless, at the very start of Nietzsche et la philosophie, Deleuze wholly depoliticises Nietzsche’s passages linking the “pathos of distance” to a naturalised “long ladder of rank order” and vertical “distinctions between men”[27] Deleuze claims that, when he spoke of such a pathos, Nietzsche was concerned not with sociopolitical relations between human beings, but with the origin of “value” per se, in a transcendental, post-Kantian register. This “value” would hail not from any universalist grounds, but from “the pathos of difference or distance”[28] (italics ours, at 41). As Rehmann notes, the problem is that Nietzsche never speaks of a “pathos of difference”. Nor does he set up a disjunction of “distance” with “difference” which would suggest that the terms could be equivalent: the difference-talk is Deleuze, posing as Nietzsche. To support the idea that Nietzsche was a philosopher of “difference”, not “distance”, Deleuze proposes to quote from the Genealogy of Morals. As Rehmann shows, however, his apparent proof text itself (Genealogy of Morals I, 2) speaks again only of the “pathos of distance” in enabling “the noble, the powerful, those of high degree, the high minded” to create the values at the origin of human societies. With their “pathos of nobility and distance” from the many, these “nobles” develop the “feeling” of being a “higher race (Art) … in comparison to a subservient race (Art), to a ‘below’” (GM I, 2 at 42).[29]
We will soon enough, in this Nietzschean text, arrive at declarations that “everywhere ‘aristocrat’, ‘noble’ in the social sense is the root idea out of which ‘good’” has developed (42)—not to mention his alleged derivations of this word ‘good’ from words for “the warrior” and “a blond person in contrast to the dark-skinned, dark-haired native inhabitants” of the Italian peninsula.[30] As Rehmann comments, on any relatively competent reading of the Genealogy of Morals I, “Nietzsche asserts an aristocratic rule at the origin of human history” which is deeply historically, anthropologically, and, of course, normatively contentious (43-44).
Nevertheless, all the German thinker’s “blunt language in the strong and extremely contestable sense” (42) disappears under Deleuze’s pen, through this displacing of Nietzsche’s “pathos” of sociopolitical “distance” and “order of rank”[31] into a hypostatisation of quasi-metaphysical “difference”. As Rehmann assesses:
We can now estimate the extent of what has been abandoned in Deleuze’s difference-translation: both the social-historical material of ancient relations of domination, which Nietzsche claimed to decipher, as well as the inadequacy of his treatment. The recoding begins with the fact that in his Nietzsche quote Deleuze omits the noble powerful ones as subjects, which makes it possible for him to present their distance-pathos vis-à-vis the commoners as ‘difference’. (45)
A succeeding depoliticising translation magically transforms Nietzsche’s concerns for aristocratic “nobles”—”e.g. ‘the powerful’, ‘the lords’, ‘the commanders’”[32]—into “nobleness” (noblesse) as an ironically universal, disembodied quality. Not about concrete individuals, bloodlines, or inherited traits, “’’[g]enealogy means nobility [noblesse] and baseness … in the origin’. They [these qualities] are what first make possible an ‘active’, ‘positive’, ‘creative’ wielding of the ‘differential element’”.[33] If the reader who has Nietzsche on his desk alongside Nietzsche et la philosophie has begun to wonder at this point whether Nietzsche’s subject has somehow been changed and rendered metaphysical, they would be right. From a contentious aristocratic retelling of the story of human origins in Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, we quickly arrive in Deleuze’s Nietzsche et la philosophie in a world of ontologised forces whose political valences have been completely transcended:
But what do ‘noble’ and ‘base’ mean? The answers are to be found farther on, at the end of the second chapter: noble is presented as [per Deleuze] ‘energy … which is capable of transforming itself’. ‘What Nietzsche calls noble, high, and master is sometimes active force, sometimes affirmative will. What he calls base, vile and slave is sometimes reactive force, sometimes negative will’. (45)
When Nietzsche refers to the “slave”, we are asked to believe that he would primarily intend not a kind of human being, or the human “type” that would characteristically, supposedly embrace a reactive, life-denying morality,[34] but pre-eminently “that which, whatever its strength, is separated from what it can do”.[35] Again, under Deleuze’s pen, the Nietzschean term ‘hierarchy’ would no longer implicate the aristocratic origins and pinnacles of human achievement that Nietzsche would celebrate, by overcoming the Jewish-Christian slave revolt in morals and its modern, democratic legacies. In perfect abstraction from any historico-political context, hierarchy “means nothing more than the superiority of the active in relation to the reactive forces, or the triumph of the latter over the former”.[36]
As we see, and as Rehmann comments, Deleuze’s recoding of Nietzsche works by a series of “almost imperceptible omissions and shifts” (46). Through this operation, “Nietzsche” is transformed, at the same time as his authority is claimed for positions which are no longer his. Beyond the violent assertion of those who feel themselves superior to the “malus”[37], Deleuze ushers us into a kind of vitalistic ontological idyll:
Already on the first pages of his interpretation, Deleuze has dissimulated the domination and gender relations, which Nietzsche interpreted as the origin of morality. As soon as ‘nobleness’ has taken the place of class-based nobility a hermeneutic displacement is initiated, into which the Nietzschean master discourse is allowed to feed in again smoothly, but now solely as metaphor. While the material strength of the Nietzschean genealogy is abandoned, its ideological nature becomes even more obscure: if with Nietzsche the imaginary consisted primarily in the fact that he disguised the aristocratic rulers as the ‘active ones’, although he himself knew exactly that they live from the domination and exploitation of the active ones who do the work for them, for Deleuze in the origin there is only ‘active’ and ‘reactive’, ‘affirming’ and ‘negating’ forces, which are called allegorically ‘noble’ and ‘base’. (46)
Rehmann questions all attempts to see this Deleuzian depoliticising of Nietzsche as in any way radical. It “moves in the traditional paradigm of a highly speculative re-philosophising, by means of which outsiders, e.g. Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Marx, Benjamin, Bloch and also Nietzsche, are smoothed out and brought back into the dissimulating discourse of institutional philosophy” (46). The operation has nevertheless been “extremely successful” (46). For, in what is arguably the fundamental basis for all postmodern Nietzscheanism, it has allowed left-liberal readers who take Deleuze’s word to imagine Nietzsche as an untimely celebrant of pluralistic “difference[s]”, rather than a later 19th century philosopher of aristocratic reaction.
Rehmann shows how the same sophistics of small displacements plays out in Deleuze and Guattari’s (D&G’s) remarkable presentation of Nietzsche’s aristocratic vision of the origin of human societies in Genealogy of Morals, one of whose aspects we have already glimpsed, into a libertarian celebration of anomic rebellion. On the one hand, D&G adapt Nietzsche’s claim that the pre-social origin of human language, memory, and the sense of obligation possible, lay in creditor-debtor exchanges.[38] In these exchanges, creditors would take “enjoyment” from making their debtors suffer, “cutting … the debt from the body” or, as D&G figure it, marking their bodies with a “terrible alphabet”[39] of “savage inscription”[40] (74).
On the other hand, with a gesture to Marxist categories which Rehmann contests,[41] D&G introduce a distinction between “the primitive social machine [of these creditor-debtor relations] and the despotic-imperial ‘machine’ of the state” (74). According to D&G, with the advent of “Asiatic production”,[42] the primitive village communities of creditors and debtors are “over-coded”[43] by centralising “state-imperial inscriptions” (75). At this point, as Rehmann writes:
debt, which in the pre-state society we are told existed in the shape of mobile, open, and finite debt blocks [blocs de dette mobiles, ouverts et finis] is transformed into infinite debt. It is to Nietzsche’s credit [according to D&G] that he pointed out how the despotic state has made every perspective of liberation impossible through the machinery that ‘renders the debt infinite’ [infinitivation]. (75)
One can wonder how, on just what textual basis, Nietzsche is supposed to have achieved this credit. What anyway results from this “theoretical mix”, as Rehmann calls it, is that “Nietzsche suddenly [ends up] standing on the side of a decentred pre-statehood and arguing against a totalitarian state despotism” (75-76). Only the first mystery about this sudden revelation is that the decentred pre-state we are asked to celebrate as a site of nomadic liberty, in opposition to “the despotic state”, is, as Rehmann lightly comments, “an original debtor-creditor relationship, in which the enjoyment side of the rhizomatic streams might have to be found more on the side of the enjoying creditor eye than on that of the tormented body of the debtor” (76). The second mystery is that D&G would position Nietzsche as an enemy of “the state” per se, anticipating their own quasi-anarchistic position, which posits an “Ur-Staat” as “eternal model” and “horizon of all history”: or as they write dramatically, “under every Black and every Jew is an Egyptian”[44] (at 77).
In fact, D&G base this assessment on the passages in Genealogy of Morals wherein the German philosopher assigns the advent of the state per se to the conquest of masterly, prehistorical, blonde barbarians:
the shaping of a population, which had up till now been unrestrained and shapeless, into a fixed form, as happened at the beginning with an act of violence, could only be concluded with acts of violence, – that consequently the oldest ‘state’ emerged as a terrible tyranny, as a repressive and ruthless machinery, and continued working until the raw material of people and semi-animals had been finally not just kneaded and made compliant, but shaped. I used the word ‘state’: it is obvious who is meant by this – some pack of blond beasts of prey, a conqueror and master race, which, organised on a war footing, and with the power to organise, unscrupulously lays its dreadful paws on a populace which, though it might be vastly greater in number, is still shapeless and shifting. In this way, the ‘state’ began on earth. [45]
Far from wanting to simply condemn this ghastly tyranny and uphold the formless nomads against their blonde oppressors, Nietzsche’s point is to overturn the liberal, social contractarian idea that the state could ever have originated in the consent of the governed:
Whoever can command, whoever is a ‘master’ by nature, whoever appears violent in deed and gesture – what is he going to care about contracts! Such beings cannot be reckoned with, they come like fate, without cause, reason, consideration or pretext, they appear just like lightning appears, too terrible, sudden, convincing and ‘other’ even to be hated. What they do is to create and imprint forms instinctively, they are the most involuntary, unconscious artists there are … They do not know what guilt, responsibility, consideration are, these born organisers; they are ruled by that terrible inner artist’s egoism which has a brazen countenance and sees itself justified to all eternity by the ‘work’, like the mother in her child.[46]
Nevertheless, once D&G have set up all of human history as operating according to a neo-romantic opposition between “despotic” states and environing, nomadic peoples who would exist outside of molar, statist domination, Nietzsche’s state-founding blonde barbarians are retrofitted—absurdly—as nomadic, anti-statist freedom fighters:
Nietzsche’s description of the founders of the state, who fatefully and ‘suddenly as lightening’ are there, is now supposed to refer to a ‘war machine’, which suddenly ‘from without’ breaks into the dualism between the magic-despotic and priestly-judicial bodies of the state. In contrast to Nietzsche, now the state no longer attacks a roaming population ‘from without’, but ‘without’ now means outside of the state. Now there is no more holding back for Deleuze and Guattari: from the assumption that the ‘war machine’ cannot simply be reduced to the state apparatus, they come to the conclusion that the next step is to define it as the ‘pure form of exteriority’ [pure forme d’extériorité]. Thus, it is established that the ‘war machine’ holds the segmentary [non-state] society together, and is directed against the sovereignty of the state. War, with whose assistance the conquerors created their state according to Nietzsche, has … morphed into the most secure mechanism against the development of the power organs of the state. Invented by the ‘nomads’, the war machine is decentral, multiple, mesh-like, ‘rhizomatic’. Their intellectual is Nietzsche, because with his aphorisms he makes thinking into a war machine … (78)
- From Deleuze to Foucault, via the violence of the text
At this point, we in fact arrive at what Rehmann contends—and of course, this contention will be heatedly rejected by Deleuzians—is the fiery heart of the alchemical transformation of Nietzsche from a radically aristocratic talisman, into an unlikely precursor of new forms of libertarian leftism amongst the professional managerial classes in later capitalism. It involves the recoding of violence (in the previous citation, “war”) as liberatory, rather than simply necessary, under condition, as well as potentially simply destructive. Since violence contests or upsets centralising, rational, “molar”[47] order, it is, hence, always putatively “progressive” or, in some way liberatory:
Romance of the guerrilla war, Pol-Pot terror or fascist death squads? Plausible here is Manfred Frank’s notion of an ‘inclination to “dangerous thinking”’ per se, which poses no threat to real domination, and at the same time can be exploited by left as well as right. For their aestheticisation of Parisian ‘gauchisme’ Deleuze and Guattari have actually sought out exactly the most irrational components of its war and violence rhetoric, imported from the ‘third world’ (or rather projected onto it), which also have a firm place in the ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric of right-wing populist and fascist movements. (78-79)
As Rehmann specifies, and as less critical readers of Deleuze will protest against his reading, it is not a question of D&G’s own subjective political stances. At the philosophical level, once “the state” per se, or reason, organisation, solidarity, and order has been identified as always “despotic”, anything which undermines any existing order is positioned as “positive”. The price, on one side, is that our ability to distinguish between better and worse forms of social order is undermined: socialist, democratic, traditional, fascistic, utopian … On the other side, our position can no longer distinguish leftist calls to overthrow exploitative social relations from far-right agitation, which violently attacks democratic orders with a view to reestablishing unashamed forms of domination by some groups over others, as well—of course—by men over women.
The same alchemy, in whose forge our ability to make needed political distinctions is burned away, Rehmann shows also characterises Michel Foucault’s postmodern Nietzscheanism. Foucault adopted Nietzsche’s radical epistemological fictionalism from very early on. This is the view that there is no objective truth, only competing perspectives on the truth, each of which would be equally “fictional”: “metaphysics, morality, religion, science – they are … considered only as different forms of the lie: with their assistance there is faith in life [wird an das Leben geglaubt]’”, as Nietzsche had proposed (Nietzsche, 156). Foucault thus claimed in 1963 that we should challenge received philosophies by removing “all ‘contradictory words’ of a confrontation of subjective and objective, inside and outside, reality and imaginary and replace them with a ‘language of fiction’ [langage de fiction]”.[48] In 1966, Foucault would affirm that fiction is “the order of narration [régime du récit]”, “the grid [trame] which is the basis for the relationship between the speaking person and the spoken”.[49] It is in this vein, too, that we know that Foucault would advertise, with a kind of sovereign insouciance, that he himself only produced works which were at most “toolboxes” for others to draw upon as they pleased.[50]
Nietzschean fictionalism allows one a position of permanent criticism vis-a-vis all positions that naively take themselves to be aiming at a discourse-independent reality. Yet, as Rehmann identifies, this superficially radical Nietzschean stance once again comes at serious cognitive and wider costs. “Fictionalism gobbles up cognition altogether”, as Ernst Bloch noted. It transforms all ideas:
most usefully into share certificates which fluctuate according to the given situation … [and] makes the doubt about the Being graspable today into one about anything and everything. It thus runs through large parts of modern thinking, easy, comfortable, faithless. (Bloch, at 156)
It also soon licenses the cynical stance that all claims to truth are really assertions of a will to power, set against other such wills: what Foucault calls in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” the playing out of “instinct, passion, the inquisitor’s devotion, cruel subtlety, and malice”[51] (1984, 151; cf. 156), rather than a collaborative pursuit of knowledge. In the resulting universe, any truthfulness worth talking about can only involve recognising without anxiety or nostalgia the groundlessness of one’s own assertions, whatever epistemic or other violence this might involve. We should own, under the sign of a radical disillusionment, the idea of discourse “as an event … as a violence which we do to things, or in any case as a practice which we impose on them” (loc cit., 158).[52]
It is therefore wholly consistent that in “The Order of Discourse”, Foucault should follow Nietzsche in identifying Platonic philosophy, with its claim to discourse-independent Truth, as the principal obstacle to recognising the operation of the “will to knowledge” in Western history. By contrast, as Nietzsche had done—and as Deleuze also celebrates in the figure of Callicles[53]—Foucault valorises sophists like those Socrates confronts in the Platonic dialogues, for their “precious and desirable discourse … linked to the exercise of power”.[54] As Foucault presents things, when in post-Socratic thinking sophistry is discredited, claims to truth are displaced from the authorised “act of enunciation, towards the utterance itself” of the sophists, and a “will to truth” triumphs which trumps the “will to knowledge”.[55]
It is remarkable here that Foucault’s criticism of claims to truth leads to a celebration of the desirability of the l’état, c’est moi, self-validating claims of “the exercise of power” which have been the subject of philosophical criticism since Socrates: “yes, but what is it that you are saying, and why?” Once more, an apparently liberatory oppositional stance blends undecidably into a position which opens the door to irrational self-assertion. The alchemy here is once more that Foucault’s Nietzscheanism presents itself, and has been taken for, a radical gesture, rather than as a reversion (exactly) to a philosophy of power with deeply ambivalent ethico-political prospects.
This political ambivalence of Foucault’s Nietzscheanism is perhaps most evident in the 1976 lecture series, Society Must Be Defended.[56] In this series, Foucault explores what he calls the Nietzschean “hypothesis” concerning society, which he contrasts with more traditional models of political understanding. This is the hypothesis that relations of power emerge from war and that, reversing Clausewitz, politics is a continuation of war by other means. Power, Foucault tells us, should not be understood as “surrender”, “contract”, “alienation”, nor in terms of relations of production. It is “conflict, confrontation, and war”[57] (184): beneath the semblances of peace, the efficient truth is “a sort of primitive and permanent war”[58] (252).
The proximity of this hypothesis with far-right positions, for which life is struggle (lutte, Kampf) or even “race war” does not detain Foucault (cf. 252-256). He traces this warlike, putative counter-discourse back to early modernity; the period wherein modern states were emerging which put an end to forms of “private warfare” by claiming territorial monopolies on the legitimate use of force. Highlighting how politically ambiguous an appeal to war as the basis for a critical “counter-history” is, however, Foucault identifies not one, but two sources for this early modern counter-discourse. The first, from below, lies in emerging, popular demands against the throne in pre-revolutionary England of the 1630s.[59] The second, from above, involves voices of aristocratic “bitterness” against Louis XIV’s consolidation of monarchical power, principally including Henri de Boulainvilliers (1658–1722), whose counter-discourse to the emerging modern state appealed to the archaic, “barbarian” strength of the Francs, and exalted “a freedom of egoism, of greed—a taste for battle, conquest and plunder” to be exercised “only through domination” (253),[60] against the centralised despotism of the Sun King (253-54).
As Rehmann comments, Foucault’s Nietzscheanism here again poses, at a conceptual level, as a more “radical” alternative to liberal, republican, or Marxian understandings of political life:
it challenges the ‘Roman’ tradition of historiography that was designed to reinvigorate the discourse of power; it breaks the continuity of glory, disrupting the identification of the people with the sovereign; it ‘cuts off the king’s head’, ‘inverts the values’ of sovereign power, providing an ‘explanation from below’; and is closely tied to the idea of revolution. (252)
Nevertheless, just as in D&G, these theoretical reorientations “from below” come at the cost of the loss of the political ability to distinguish egalitarian revolt from the blackest aristocratic reaction. Foucault’s Nietzscheanism likewise blanks out our ability to assess their competing normative and political visions: the “liberatory” embrace of the idea of politics as war becomes all. Whereas, in D&G, Nietzsche’s warrior-aristocratic founders were repackaged as nomadic libertarian anti-statists, in Foucault’s new Nietzscheanism, the reactionary aristocrats of pre-revolutionary France are aligned as co-rebels with popular, “bourgeois, petty bourgeois … struggles against the absolute monarchy”[61]:
by means of this conceptual arrangement, the political perspective of an embittered and nostalgic aristocracy bemoaning ‘the lost age of great ancestors’ and invoking ‘the rights and privileges of the earliest race’ is re-baptised as a ‘revolutionary’ project ‘from below’. (252)
At this point, the presupposed identification of Foucault’s discourse as politically radical, as against theoretically reactionary, seems itself to be the datum worthy of critical reflection. The alchemy wherein Nietzsche has been adduced as a friend to leftist causes has brought with it, and participated in, a further transformation; that metamorphosis whereby elements of the political Left have been merged into new-right discourses and values.
- Postmodern Nietzscheanism, from Gauchisme to Neoliberalism
For Gilles Deleuze, the “plague of philosophy”[62] is criticism without creating, a slavish endeavour “inspired by ressentiment”.[63] Rehmann’s riposte is that the postmodern appropriators of Nietzsche engage in a kind of hermeneutic creation without criticism, which sees them indirectly sanctioning the aristocratic reactionary ideas of their intellectual touchstone. As we have seen, the omission or transformation of Nietzschean passages in which the heroised philosopher expresses his admiration for unfettered domination serves a decisive ideological function. According to Rehmann, this silence is “‘necessary’ in order to be able to join Nietzsche with the antiauthoritarian domination critique of the movements of ‘68” (176). With regard to Foucault, who forms the subject of the final three chapters of Deconstructing Nietzscheanism, this ideological rapprochement is achieved through the “concept of genealogy developed in Nietzsche, Genealogy, History and the concept of power developed in the Order of Discourse” (176). In turn, Rehmann argues, Foucault’s replacement of criticisms of injustice or exploitation from Marxian and socialist perspectives, with his neo-Nietzschean critique of “power” (i), facilitates a rapprochement in his final years with forms of neoliberal anti-welfarism (ii). It is these transformations that we turn to now.
- The analysis of “power” and its political ambivalences
The uncertain political valences of Foucault’s turn to the power concept are revealed in Foucault’s remarkable 1971 exchange with a group of high school students. In this discussion, Foucault argues that the role of the knowledge presented within French schools is one of exclusion, and that popular movements are driven by hunger, not as movements aiming to acquire “power”. The reason is that power is “excluded from the ‘knowledge’ of our society” (176). Foucault sees this exclusion emanating from two specific levels: on one level, there is Roman law and its establishment of the sovereign right to property. The second level belongs to what he calls “humanism”, which he tells the students contains “everything in Western Civilisation that restricts the desire for power”.[64] Far from being a positive, as we might suppose in this celebrated critic of power, Foucault calls for the “restriction” of this “desire” of “power” to be overcome through a “de-subjugation” of the will to power. This de-subjugation can be achieved both through class warfare, in a Marxist or gauchiste reference, but secondly, through what Rehmann dubs a “cultural destruction of the subject” (176), via the abolition of sexual taboos and drug use.[65]
The students’ responses to Foucault are strikingly critical. One notes that what is required in order to change society for the better are theoretical reflections which go beyond the confines of lived experience. Others talk of the need for constructive, even utopian alternatives. Foucault counters that we must “reject theory and all forms of general discourse”.[66] For these would emanate from the very system which one seeks to overcome. What is needed, he argues, is not utopianism or collective endeavours, but experimentation with “drugs, sex, communes, other forms of consciousness, and other forms of individuality”.[67] Surely, the political movement should not be confined to such a “‘vague, unsubstantial underground ideology’”, the students reply (177), which does not “‘endorse any form of social work or community service, any action that requires going beyond the immediate group. It’s unable to assume the responsibility for the whole of society, or it may be that it’s incapable of conceiving of society as a whole’” (177).[68] For Foucault, in response, it is “‘precisely that [idea of the whole of society] which should not be considered except as something to be destroyed. And then, we can only hope that it will never exist again’”.[69]
The radically anti-socialist direction of Foucault’s Nietzscheanism here reveals itself, for Rehmann, as a disempowering dismissal of any claims to ethical responsibility or solidary engagement. All appeal to difference aside, Foucault also reduces almost the entirety of Western thought to a “homogenous unity” (“humanism”) in which almost all cats appear grey (176).[70] Moreover, Rehmann sees, within this uncanny gauchiste anticipation of Margaret Thatcher’s claim that “society does not exist”, the seeds of what will form Foucault’s contested later relationship with neoliberalism. For in this revealing discussion with the students, rights and law per se get subsumed under the mantle of what Foucault calls ‘sovereign power’ and become mere instruments of domination: “the law is the right of the royal command”.[71] As Rehmann duly notes, echoing Poulantzas, such a reductive approach misses that law and right are not merely instruments of domination, but are also a “contested site where social struggles are fought out” (180), as well as the codifications of the advancements which were won by labour in its ongoing historical struggles against capital (see below).
Foucault’s gauchisme, with its emphasis on the Nietzschean concept of power, also forecloses any possibility of connecting the notion of class struggle—which still gets evoked in Foucault’s exchange here—with the concepts of universalism and humanism, in favour of what will become the “war” hypothesis for thinking about social relations (see 2 above).[72] The class struggle, he tells Chomsky, is not fought to fulfil the presently partial and formal aspects of the tricolour― freedom, equality and fraternity―nor the ideas of justice and human rights, but is set against these in the name of the will to power. Foucault’s passing lauding of a “justice” which would “give everyone its share” in “The Order of Discourse” (cited above) indeed shows itself up as a radical anti-normativism which defaults into the uncritical sanctification of force. Faced with Chomsky’s claim to base a sense of justice in human nature, as Rehmann writes:
[Foucault’s] counter-position consists of delegitimising the question of justice in the name of a ‘question of power’, which he justifies with a mixture of class warfare rhetoric and Nietzsche’s will-to-power: we live in a class dictatorship, ‘which imposes itself by violence, even when the instruments of this violence are institutional and constitutional’. This class power based on violence must be detected in apparently independent institutions (family, school, university, medicine). With reference to Nietzsche, he explains that the idea of justice itself was ‘invented’ as ‘instrument of a certain political and economic power’ or as weapon against it. Now, however, the proletariat declares ‘war’ on the ruling class not because this is just, but ‘for the first time in history it wants to take power’.[73]
After 1972, it is therefore little wonder that Foucauldian “power” begins to detach itself from any reference to class. Foucault famously argues that, while Marx discovered exploitation, what has been neglected is this “enigmatic thing which we call power, which is at once visible and invisible, present and hidden, ubiquitous” (181). An understanding of power cannot be obtained through the use of old Marxian concepts. Instead, Foucault introduces a multitude of “new centres of power” (182), such as the judge or union representative. This leads to a division between proletarian class politics and the criticism of power. From here on, Rehmann notes, uncontroversially:
1) ‘power’ is introduced as its own reality, which is in juxtaposition to the ‘exploitation’ analysed by Marx, and whose criticism is to make an alliance between intellectuals and workers possible; 2) ‘power’ designates, at the same time, a reality which is to be found under or beneath meaningful human behaviour and its signifiers, and which, due to this basis-position (‘sous-sol’) allows the struggle to become ‘general’. Foucault’s rhetoric of power’s ‘diversity’ is [hence] inseparably connected with the claim to have found ‘power’ located at a level of reality beside and beneath social production and reproduction, as well as gender relations and relations of domination in general (182).[74]
Yet, it is a mark of Foucault’s rhetorical élan that this hypostasised power, in which more concrete relations of inequality tend to disappear, comes to appear as diverse, differentiated, and as testimony to a kind of epistemic liberation. Foucault’s self-presentation is always one of ‘overcoming’ the supposed reductionism of Marxist social critique, with its focus on the economy, exploitation, the state, and ideology. Instead of power emanating from a centre, which can be located through an analysis of the historical, material and social relations, the new Foucauldian micro-physics of power “represents a complex net of multiform processes with multiple origin[s]” (224). The putative discovery of this micro-physics of power is hence accompanied by, or correlative to, a neo-Nietzschean methodology of “decentred genealogy” (138) which seeks to overcome the idea of history “stretched between a search for an origin and a teleological goal” (138), instead seeking out “various beginnings” (138).[75] As one Foucauldian scholar puts it, Foucault’s achievement here would be to teach others “to think of difference rather than resemblance, of beginnings rather than a beginning, of exterior accident rather than internal truth” (Barret cited 138). However, this diversification of power, by Foucault’s own admission, leads to a “society penetrated through and through with disciplinary mechanisms.” (MF, 224). As Rehmann comments, in an observation that has been made by earlier critics of Foucault:
As soon as the new disciplinary dispositif asserts itself, its propagation functions ‘uniformly’ and with ‘continuity’; the ‘great carceral network’ extends from the compact institutions over the charitable societies and workers’ housing estates ‘seamlessly’ [sans rupture] into the most remote areas and penetrates the entire social body. The formation of the disciplinary society exhausts itself in a ‘motion of extension’. It is as if the historical linearity against which Foucault introduced the Nietzschean concept of genealogy has reasserted itself behind his back. (224)
The problem with Foucault’s notion of “disciplinary power”,[76] Rehmann argues, does not stem from the isolated idea that there are multiple origins of the disciplines, which in itself expands the loci in which different forms of social power might be examined. It hails from the fact that Foucault does not concern himself with the differences between these different origins of disciplinary power, as well as the way that these forms of power interact. These differences cannot be examined via his methodology, as this would require a social analysis and would not fit with his concept of a hypostatised power. Rather than paving the way for an analysis of differences concerning disciplines, the Foucauldian “diversity rhetoric” closes them off in favour of an all-consuming power concept. As Rehmann writes:
To be explained is nothing less than the comprehensive social disciplining of modern bodies, the development of the modern ‘scientific-legal complex’ with a new universalistic ‘system of truth’, the common ‘matrix’ of criminal law and human sciences, as well as ‘a piece of the genealogy … of the modern “soul”’. From the birth of the prison we arrive at the ‘birth of man as an object of knowledge for a discourse with a “scientific” status’, which Foucault had already described in the Order of Things for the same period. Discipline directly ‘produces’ ‘individuals’ and an ‘individuality’ which is cell shaped, organic, evolutionary and combinatorial. (200)[77]
There is, Rehmann notes, no analytical tool within Foucault’s philosophy which explains how the micro-physics of power can form or come together in the state and its apparatuses. This is problematic, given that Foucault’s own examples, like the 17th century plague monitoring system and the 18th century disciplining of the soldier’s body, have an intimate connection with the development of the modern state (227). As Rehmann puts it, “as soon as one asks the question of the accumulation of power concretely, one encounters the instances of the economic, the state and the ideological which Foucault excluded from his concept of power” (227). Instead, Foucault talks of a “panoptic society”, as if the model of imprisonment would have become all-pervading and indistinguishable from health and educational institutions:
Foucault stylises a partial aspect of the coercion apparatus into the hegemony model of modern society altogether and then sublimates it into the ‘normative’, as if the deterrence function of the prison, and with it the repressive apparatuses in general, had disappeared from bourgeois society completely. The over-generalisation of the aspect of coercion leads to its imaginary abolition. (232)
This contradiction ideologically smooths out the differences between those confined in brick-and-mortar prisons, and those on the ‘outside’, who are now imprisoned by the normative ‘prison’. This is concretely exhibited in Foucault’s ambivalent attitude towards the prison reform and abolitionist movements. Instead of attempting to create a more just, humane approach to the criminal and penitentiary systems, such reformers and abolitionists can only be inadvertently implementing another form of social control, in a configuration oddly reminiscent of invariant neoconservative rhetoric surrounding “unintended consequences”:
For Foucault, it is not about whether the penal system could be humanised, so that it contributes to healing and reintegration (this would be a possible application of reform proposals), and also not about the question of ‘whether we should have prison or something other than prison’ (this amounts to a radical, ‘abolitionist’ challenge), but about the ‘steep rise in the use of these mechanisms of normalization’ per se. To the extent that Foucault dissolves the prison into the flexible ‘norm’, he gives up on struggles against the repressive detention systems of bourgeois society. (233-234)
Rehmann, in this part of the text, makes systematic contrasts between Foucault’s analyses of disciplinary power and Rusche and Kirchheimer’s classic work, Punishment and Social Structure. Notably, while Foucault sees modern prison reforms as all forming a single line leading from sovereign forms of deterrence and direct violence against offenders, to the oppressive normativity of modern societies, Rusche and Kirchheimer show that the history of the bourgeois penal system was divided, contested, and affected by economic and political factors which Foucault’s analyses absent from the frame. Modern punishment, for Rusche and Kirchheimer, was always the subject of competing notions prioritising its deterrence, exploitative, and ‘improvement’ functions, as well as involving disparate European and American developments. Which forms were adopted in different places and periods was always overdetermined by economic factors, notably the wage levels and levels of unemployment (with high unemployment favouring more repressive deterrence against the undeserving poor), as well as competing ideological notions of criminality (esp. 198, 205-6).
Following 1875, Rusche and Kirchheimer contend, due to the higher real wages and workers’ increase in mass consumption, there was a decrease in criminal offences, and with it an attitudinal shift which criticised the need and causes for terms of imprisonment (189-190). It is in this context that prison reformers succeeded in advocating for the rise of socio-political measures such as “fines, probationary sentences and removal of the social ills, to remove as many delinquents from the prisons as possible, as well as to reduce the duration and severity of the sentences” (196). All of these proposals contributed to an improvement in the conditions of the prison: “the suicide and the death rate declined, and from 1882 to 1932, an increase of the fines in approximately 50 percent of the theft and fraud cases is registered” (196). It was in fact just this improvement, Ruche and Kirchheimer note, that the Nazis would dub the “Weimar prison paradise”,[78] instead rolling back all “liberal” or “humanitarian” considerations of the social basis of crimes, instead refiguring criminality as “betrayal of the community” (196), as well as of course reintroducing the “massive use of the death penalty” (196), a worsening of prison conditions, an increase in the number of inmates and length of sentences (196). Foucault’s criticism of the modern disciplinary prison system is silent about these definitively reactionary, brutal developments; effectively making them disappear within the larger depiction of modern societies per se as always panoptical.
- Foucault and the neoliberal reaction against the (welfare) state
In “Forays into the Late Foucault”, Rehmann highlights what he perceives to be both Foucault’s positive contributions to the critical analysis of neoliberalism, as well as a growing accommodation of neoliberal language which culminates in clear sympathy for its more reactionary prescriptions, especially surrounding social welfare (261-264). Nevertheless, here as elsewhere, with the exception of scholars around Daniel Zamora, Foucault’s academic commentators have tended to assume that his work is exclusively critical concerning right wing economic theory, at most wrestling inconclusively with the telling methodological changes evident in his 1978-79 lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics, and Foucault’s unclear subject position with regard to the neoliberal texts of Gary Becker and others which he examines (277-80).
A critical aspect of neoliberalism which Foucault uncovers is the generalisation of the ‘enterprise form’ (262, 264). Neoliberalism aims to create individual subjects who can readily adapt to changes in market conditions, taking private responsibility for their own selves. Whilst Marx saw capital as dead labour feeding on living labour, neoliberal figures like Gary Becker refigure labour not as the basic human activity underlying the production of value, but as a kind of lowly form of ‘capital investment’ which dehistoricised, preference-maximising subjects make, on a par with trading in stocks, or any other form of economic activity (265). Far from developing a critique of this neoliberal overturning of the labour theory of value, Foucault sees in it a fruitful criticism of the Marxist position. This he presents, amazingly, as presenting labour as a “commodity” which is “passive and submitted to capitalist logic” (265)[79] when, as Rehmann notes, this is in fact to take what Marx analysed as the alienating effects of capitalist production and present it as his own analysis of labour as such. For Foucault, Becker’s neoliberal concept of human capital is that which would enable the worker to become an “active economic subject” who undertakes “rational conduct”[80] based on their responses to their environing conditions.[81] In doing so, this social-theoretic abstraction closes the door on “any possibility for comprehending the structures of power and of domination”. Instead, it naturalises the:
reprogramming of liberal governmentality without considering the development of capitalism, its transformations, its effects on income polarisation and precarisation, etc., … based on the questionable methodological assumption that it is possible to study a change in governmental ‘power’ patterns without analysing the actual power relations of which they are a part, and by which their change is propelled. (266)
Rather than a suite of interconnected policy initiatives pushed by an international network of think tanks and newspapers, backed by concerted business support, aiming to disband trade unions, internationalise money flows and supply chains (which facilitate capital flight and have disempowered democratic nation-states), and redirect social and economic risk back onto individualised subjects (269), neoliberalism becomes emancipatory in Foucault’s rhetoric:
an optimization of systems of difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes, in which minority individuals and practices are tolerated … in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals. (267-68)[82]
What we witness in the last Foucault, Rehmann contends, is how neoliberal ideology and it “anti-statist” posture (which is in fact anti-regulatory, anti-welfare, but far from simply anti-repressive) co-opts elements from gauchisme—notably, its hostility to “the state”, and appeal to modes of transgressive individual limit experience as cyphers of forbidden freedom. Libertarianism of the Left makes the way straight for libertarianisms from the Right, as the aesthetic critique of capitalism—to use, with Rehmann, the category from Boltanski and Chiapello[83]—turns against any remnants of the social critique of capitalism: that is, a critique of capitalism’s economic and political functioning “anchored in the labour movement and focused on the struggle against exploitation and social injustice” (271). Foucault is clear. What is at stake with neoliberalism, he tells us, is “whether a market economy can in fact serve as the principle, form and model for a state which … is mistrusted by everyone on both the right and the left … Can the market really have the power of formalization for both the state and society?”[84] The question of whether “the market” itself has a history or plural histories, and does not in all its variations soon encode forms of social domination, has disappeared here: it would become instead the medium in which intrusive disciplinary power could be supposedly avoided, by distant, benevolent governors acting not on subjects directly (like disciplinary power) but rather on “their economic and social ‘environment’” (267).
We see concretely the resulting, uncanny affinity between Foucault and neoliberalism when analysing Foucault’s comments on the negative income tax. This tax, initially proposed by Milton Freidman, proposes that the poor are provided a minimum standard of living via a one-rate-fits-all cash benefit. This policy would, as Rehmann notes, enable business to argue that minimum wage rises are unnecessary and justify the cancelation of social welfare programmes such as food stamps, Medicare rebates, bulk billing services, free public education, etc. (273). According to this neoliberal ambit proposal, such a scheme would not only provide the poor with a minimum form of security. It would also contest “the idea that society as a whole owes services like health and education to each of its members”.[85] In Foucault’s 1983 interview with Robert Bono, in the course of elaborating his critique of law and rights as concepts which belong to the outdated idea of sovereign power, the philosopher then explicitly questions the humanistic idea of a “right to health”[86] which, as Rehmann points out, was recognised (despite Hayek’s protests) as a human social right in the 1948 Universal Declaration. Foucault demurs:
if one specifies the ‘right to health’ as a right to medical care, healthy work conditions, etc., the question arises as to whether a society ‘must try to satisfy by collective means individuals’ need for health’. As soon as its practical realisation is considered, this question cannot be answered positively. (275)[87]
Bono, picking up on the potentially social-Darwinistic echo that could sound here, asks the philosopher to clarify whether he would effectively propose that we return to “a certain way of eliminating the most biologically weak individuals”.[88] Far from stridently denying this implication, Foucault responds cryptically that “such choices are being made all the time” and that he has “no solution to offer”, which is hardly convincing.[89] Once again, in this postmodern Nietzschean who is still reviled on the Right, and who is widely taken to have been a beacon of elements of the post-socialist, intellectual Left, we encounter a basic aversion to progressive achievements, an aversion whose own genealogy looks back clearly to Nietzsche’s criticism of egalitarian slave morality, and its modern successors. Nietzsche, who worked a century earlier than his French admirer, in a far more culturally reactionary climate when these ideas were in the air, was much more direct. “The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And they should be helped to do this”[90], he declaims in the second section of The Anti-Christ. As Rehmann shows by citation cites, this is far from the only example of calls to combat modern “degeneracy” with forms of extermination in his post-1883 writings (69).[91]
Conclusions
Jan Rehmann’s Deconstructing Postmodern Nietzscheanism is a work of wide scope and far-ranging scholarship on divisive textual materials. We have necessarily focused here on unpacking the key theses that Deleuze and Foucault, through different but convergent means, both selectively screen out or recode Nietzsche’s central ideas as a philosopher of inegalitarian, aristocratic reaction; and that, far from representing a radical challenge to the cultural logic of later capitalism, postmodern Nietzscheanism leads, in the later Foucault, directly towards accommodation with forms of neoliberal rightist libertarianism. Much more could and should be debated about this work, and we especially regret not being able to pursue Rehmann’s counter-analysis of Spinoza here, which challenges the Deleuzian assimilation of the latter with Nietzsche as a thinker of power (esp. 57-70). Likewise, there is Rehmann’s analysis of Foucault’s extraordinarily flimsy claim that socialism is “racism from the outset” (Foucault, 251), a claim which he bases on a non-existent, supposed 1882 letter from Marx to Engels: a textual confusion which Rehmann analyses at some length (254-255).[92]
As our introductory remarks made clear, Rehmann’s book strikes us as especially important in the present cultural-political conjuncture. Today, as the transatlantic Right and its principal progenitors become more openly authoritarian, we see forces ideologically rallying around opposition to the spectres of “cultural Marxism” or “postmodern neo-Marxism”. These notions work by obviating the deep differences which Rehmann’s book so clearly documents: between forms of avowed neo-Nietscheanism in figures like Deleuze and Foucault, and older forms of progressive and socialist thought, in which the values of equality, justice, and solidarity were prominent. Postmodern Nietzscheanism is predicated on taking its distances from Marxian problematics, like those of ideology, exploitation, alienation, progress, and human species-being, as well as from forms of solidary, bottom-up socialist politics. It valorises becoming, transgression, creativity, and difference. As the character Ricardo in the 1980 film Maledetti Vi Amero with which Rehmann opens his book comments, the mystery in this cultural-political conjuncture lies not in the supposedly “deep” continuation of Marxian, socialist ideas in the present dispensations of countercultural and identity politics, etc. It is how a conjuncture has emerged in which, within elements of the tertiary-educated professional-managerial class:
Eroticism is left, pornography is right. Even penetration is right, whereas foreplay is left. Heterosexuality is right, but homosexuality has deep merit as transgression and is therefore left. Hashish is left, but amphetamines, coke and heroin are right. Nietzsche has been re-evaluated and is now left, but Marx is right. (1)
Rehmann’s Deconstructing Postmodern Nietzscheanism is an essential document in any attempts to understand this profound cultural-political shift, and how it became possible. What the book shows is that, at its heart, there is the transformation of Nietzsche from a philosopher of the reactionary Right, writing in (and against) the German Second Reich and then appropriated by the Third, into the principal progenitor of much of postmodern sensibility and intellectual life, not simply in France, but in the US, Australasia, and elsewhere. What Rehmann critically documents, in ways which will almost certainly anger many readers from this milieu, is how the metamorphosis was predicated on deeply contestable, selective re-packagings of the German philosopher. To think differently on the Left today or tomorrow, will involve thinking differently about this Nietzscheanism, and its legacies.
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[1] Burgis, in Burgis, Hamilton, McManus & Trejo 2020, p. 152.
[2] This itself vexing, contestable term which Rehmann defines by combined recourse to David Harvey and Fredric Jameson: “not … as an analytical concept, but … provisionally and fluidly … the description of ideological and cultural shifts [in the European and anglophone worlds], over whose general features the literature is … amazingly united, despite all the contradictions when it comes to evaluation: an understanding of time, with which modernistic waiting for the fundamentally new is replaced by an orientation toward events and breaks; a celebration of immediacy and availability oriented toward commodity aesthetics; a fragmenting, which, following Lacan’s definition of schizophrenia, can be described as the tearing of coherent chains of signifiers; a lack of aesthetic depth….; a loss of historicity, which is compensated for by tendencies to spatialisation, the preference for ‘eclectic facades, pastiches and quotation art’; an ‘era of indifference’, i.e. of ‘exchangeable individuals, relations, values and ideologies’.” Rehmann, 2022, p. 12. In this text, we will accept that it is meaningful to speak, as Rehmann does, of Deleuze and Foucault as “postmodern”, and also, as Rehmann sometimes does, use the term “post-structuralist” to describe shared theoretical orientations in these figures, but also Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Félix Guattari, and Jean-François Lyotard. We acknowledge that each of these terms is contestable.
[3] Dews 1987; Wolin 2004; West 2010; Ferry & Renaut 1990.
[4] Rehmann 2022. Hereafter, as here, page references to this text will be included in brackets within the text. The translation updates and extends Postmoderner Links-Nietzscheanismus: Deleuze & Foucault. Eine Dekonstruktion, published by Argument Verlag GmbH, 2004. For a review article of the German edition see Haug 2007.
[5] See Eagleton 1996; Callinicos 1989; Dews, 1987; Jameson 1991; Wolin 2004; Losurdo 2020.
[6] It is worth noting that, although we can’t pursue this in this review, that Rehmann pays especial attention to Deleuze’s readings of Spinoza. See Rehmann 2022, pp. 57-70.
[7] Dagnino, Jorge, Matthew Feldman and Paul Stocker 2018.
[8] Kaufman 1974 [1950].
[9] Foucault 1977, 139.
[10] Historians who examine Nietzsche’s importance in the ideological climate which birthed fascism and National Socialism, as well as within the Nazi-state itself include: Mayer, Lichtheim, Hobsbawm, Struve, Ritter, Pareto, Nolte, Conrad-Martius, Schmuhl, and Bracher. We add Aschheim 1992, working specifically on the German context, and German-language authors like Zapata-Galindo 1995.
[11] See Voegelin 1944; Brinton 1940, 1941; Russell 2004 [1946]; McGovern 1941; Lukacs 2021 [1955].
[12] Nietzsche 2002, §62, §257, §259, §44.
[13] See for these themes, see amongst other passages, Nietzsche 2002, §61, 62, 228; 1998 [KSA] XI, 69; XII, 479; 401–2; XIII, 156, 471–2; 2005, §2; 2006a III 14; 2006b, I §20 [“On Child and Marriage”]; cf. Taureck 2018.
[14] When, in correspondence, Brandes described Nietzsche’s philosophy as ‘aristocratic radicalism’, Nietzsche accepted the definition, in a letter dated 2 December 1887 (Nietzsche 1975ff. [B, III, 5], p. 206). See Losurdo 2020, p. 355.
[15] See note 5 above.
[16] See Boltanski and Chiapello 2007, pp. 36ff., 167 ff., 198, 326, 441 ff.; Rehmann 2022, p. 217.
[17] If Rehmann is right, no one should be surprised that Jordan Peterson’s crusade against the “collectivist” “neo-Marxist” Left, and his attempts to re-naturalise hierarchy on neo-Darwinian, neo-Jungian bases draws deeply from the same thinkers whom he and his followers revile—starting with Friedrich Nietzsche.
[18] In the context of tracing Rehmann’s analysis of this remarkable double alchemy, Rehmann’s criticisms of Deleuze and Foucault as readers of Nietzsche, and their critics’ reception of this constellation, will necessarily find their places.
[19] Deleuze 1995, p. 145.
[20] Deleuze 1995, p. 146.
[21] Foucault 1977, pp. 53-54.
[22] See esp. Nietzsche 2002 §19: “Accordingly, the one who wills takes his feeling of pleasure as the commander, and adds to it the feelings of pleasure from the successful instruments that carry out the task, as well as from the useful ‘under-wills’ or under-souls – our body is, after all, only a society constructed out of many souls –. L’effet c’est moi: what happens here is what happens in every well-constructed and happy community: the ruling class identifies itself with the successes of the community. All willing is simply a matter of commanding and obeying, on the groundwork, as I have said, of a society constructed out of many ‘souls’: from which a philosopher should claim the right to understand willing itself within the framework of morality: morality understood as a doctrine of the power relations under which the phenomenon of ‘life’ arises …” [italics ours].
[23] Deleuze 1983, p. 2.
[24] Nietzsche 2006a, I, p. 2.
[25] Nietzsche 2002, §257.
[26] Nietzsche 2002, §257. As the opening of Beyond Good & Evil §257 has made very clear: “Every enhancement so far in the type “man” has been the work of an aristocratic society – and that is how it will be, again and again, since this sort of society believes in a long ladder of rank order and value distinctions between men, and in some sense needs slavery. Without the pathos of distance as it grows out of the ingrained differences between stations, out of the way the ruling caste maintains an overview and keeps looking down on subservient types and tools, and out of this caste’s equally continuous exercise in obeying and commanding, in keeping away and below…”
[27] Nietzsche 2002, §257.
[28] Deleuze 1983, p. 2.
[29] Here we are quoting Rehmann’s, a native German speaker, translation of GM I, 2. The translation of the German Art as ‘race’ will undoubtedly engender criticism in the postmodern corners of Nietzsche scholarship. We note that the term Art in GM I, 2 is also translated as ‘race’ by Samuel, while Diethe translates it as ‘kind’, and Kauffmann and Hollingdale as ‘order’. Diethe’s translation, while softer, is still closer to Rehmann and Samuel’s translations than Kauffmann’s and Hollingdale’s. These varied translations speak to the broader debate concerning Nietzsche translation, a debate which cannot be pursued in detail here. See Losurdo 2020, pp. 994-997; Scarpitti n.d., pp. 36-37: “Kaufmann’s translations of Nietzsche have been regarded, for decades, as the ‘gold standard’ for faithfulness. My own work in translating these texts has revealed that Kaufmann was determined to ‘rehabilitate’ Nietzsche, to make him seem a much less fearful figure than the one which the Nazis and others before them had created to serve their purposes, and that Kaufmann was not above some careful, calculated, and not easily detected ‘whitewashing’ to accomplish this. The isolated case, the slip of the pen, can be forgiven, but the systematic repression of anything that does not conform to Kaufmann’s ideal, to what he wants Nietzsche to be, cannot be passed over in silence. Kaufmann, whether deliberately or subconsciously, systematically softened Nietzsche’s harshest, most vehement and provocative pronouncements, sometimes simply by making them ‘opaque’. He also substituted esoteric neologisms for the ordinary German terms Nietzsche used. A result of this distorted portrayal, Nietzsche, who had once been dismissed in respectable circles as a proto-Nazi, has been embraced by the academic world and now, cleansed of his hubris and everything else that makes Nietzsche Nietzsche, he is taught in philosophy classes to impressionable and callow youths. The truth is that Nietzsche did indeed say some things that seem unacceptable to many today, in the post-war West. These things cannot be wished away or dismissed. Reading Kaufmann’s translations, though, one gets a different impression of Nietzsche.” Scarpitti n.d, pp. 36-37.
[30] Nietzsche 2006a, I, p. 5.
[31] On order of rank, central to his later thought, see all of Nietzsche 2002, §§30, 62, 203, 212, 219, 221, 228, 257, 260, 263, 265, 270, 285, and 287; cf. rank orders of drives at §6, and of values at §224 & §268.
[32] Nietzsche 2006a,. I, p. 5.
[33] Deleuze 1983, p. 2 at Rehmann 2022, p. 45.
[34] Yet, Nietzsche talks at length of a slave revolt in morals which he associates with particular peoples, the Jews (GM I, 7-8), the lower castes in the Roman world, as well as particular individuals, the prophets, Christ, and, above all, Saint Paul.
[35] Deleuze 1983, p. 61.
[36] Deleuze 1983, p. 60, at Rehmann 2022, p. 45.
[37] Nietzsche 2006a, I, p. 5.
[38] Nietzsche 2006a, II 4-6, p. 8.
[39] Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p. 145.
[40] Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p. 185.
[41] Or take the concept of “desiring production”. This emerges as part of D&G’s criticism of Freudian psychoanalysis, which would allegedly reduce the infinite plasticity of human drives into the oppressive “Papa-mama-I” triangle. As Rehmann identifies, the critique is carried out first by claiming to release desire from any (Lacanian) sense that it is predicated on lack. It is instead “productive” from beginning to end. D&G assert that human desire is better seen as “a free flow of anonymous manifoldness of ‘a schizophrenic out for a walk’” (Deleuze & Guattari 1983, p. 2)—presumably because this model would be more accurate to the data, but at least since it is more normatively appealing, as they see things. Secondly, however, D&G then claim that this productive desire should be considered, all by itself, as a form of “social production”. Indeed, in a startling departure from anything we find in Marxian or other social theory, it becomes for them a part of the “infrastructure” of society: desire “… always belongs to the infrastructure, not to ideology: [it] is in production as social production, just as production is in desire as desiring-production’” (Deleuze & Guattari 1983, p. 104). With this putative equivalence established by definitional fiat, we are freed to talk of “the production process” of desiring, which would be a “workshop”, “industry”, “desire machine” or “factory” (Deleuze & Guattari 1983, 55), whilst never examining workshops, industries, machines, or factories. D&G clearly want readers to accept that this process of catachresis establishes their bona fides to a “materialist”, even meaningfully Marxian, anti-capitalism. But one can be sceptical that what is playing out here is not something closer to the reverse: the unwarranted claim, through linguistic operations, to assert Marxian credentials to which D&G have no right. This, for the very basic reason that they carry out no concrete socioeconomic analyses, nor show any understanding of material sociopolitical data like the extraction of surplus value, the tendency of the rate of profits to fall, etc. Manfred Frank calls D&G’s conception of a negativity-free desire “a mere fantasm from a precritical age”. Rehmann identifies it a kind of “Dionysean” transcription of the Bergsonian elan vital, “using Freudo-Marxist rhetoric” (72). One certainly struggles to square this almost manic-seeming notion with Nietzsche’s insistence on the necessity of suffering for the forging of the higher men, let alone the philosopher’s own life (127-28).
[42] Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p. 194.
[43] Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p. 219.
[44] Deleuze and Guattari 1983, pp. 217-218.
[45] Nietzsche 2010, bk. II, p. 17
[46] Ibid.
[47] Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p. 280.
[48] Foucault 1998, p. 104, at 155.
[49] Foucault, 1998b, p. 137, at 155.
[50] Foucault 1975, p. 16.
[51] Foucault 1997, p. 162.
[52] Foucault 1981, p. 66f.
[53] Deleuze 1986, pp. 58-59.
[54] Foucault 1981, p. 54; Rehmann 2022, p. 157.
[55] Foucault 1981, p. 65, at 157.
[56] Foucault 2003. But see below on Foucault’s famous 1972 exchange with Noam Chomsky.
[57] Foucault 2003, p. 15.
[58] Foucault 2003, pp. 46-47.
[59] Foucault 2003, pp. 49-50.
[60] Foucault 2003, p. 148. Rehmann notes the proximity here to Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals II, 17, as above, with the blond warriors who found the state. Foucault himself is remarkably clear that he, in contrast to many of those whom he has influenced, recognizes the darker side to Nietzsche. In this aristocratic war discourse, he writes at Foucault 2003, p. 149: “Here we have the beginnings of the famous great portrait of the “barbarian” which we will go on finding until the late nineteenth century and, of course, in Nietzsche, [for whom] freedom will be equivalent to a ferocity defined as a taste for power and determined greed, an inability to serve others, and constant desire to subjugate others.”
[61] Foucault 2003, pp. 49-50.
[62] Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 28.
[63] Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 29.
[64] Foucault 1977, p. 221, at Rehmann 2022, p. 176.
[65] Foucault 1977, p. 221.
[66] Foucault 1977, p. 231, in Rehmann 2022, p. 176.
[67] Ibid.
[68] Student, in Foucault 1977, p. 232.
[69] Foucault 1977, p. 233, at Rehmann 2022, p. 177.
[70] “Humanism” for Foucault 1977, p. 221, contains “everything in Western Civilisation that restricts the desire for power”, a datum which positions “it” negatively in his view.
[71] Foucault 2003, p. 25 and p. 28, at Rehmann 2002, p. 180.
[72] Foucault 2003, pp. 15-17.
[73] Foucault and Chomsky 1974, p. 182.
[74] Compare this to Poulantzas’ earlier analysis of power as relational, in which power (as Foucault would agree) is not a possession or essence of a particular class, but the “capacity to assert its own interests” (182), “constituted on the field of social practices and … determined by the respective relations of force with the other classes of the social formation” (182). This similarity aside, Foucault, by contrast, renders power an abstract immutability by conceiving of it as ‘beside’ and ‘beneath’ social relations and practices, which excludes the analysis of any structural power relations which exceed the “micro” scale. As Rehmann comments, concerning structural inequality between the sexes: Foucault in a ‘rule of the constant variations’ specifies that the question ‘who within the range of sexuality has power (the men, the adults, parents, the physicians), and who is robbed of it (the women, … the children, the patients)’ plays no role in the investigation; instead it may only be asked which ‘pattern of modifications’ the relations of force imply ‘by the very nature of their process’ [par leur jeu même]. Thus, Foucault’s allegedly ‘relational’ concept of power is robbed of its relations; the ‘relations of force’, which ‘by their process itself’ constitute power, must have nothing to do with the real relations of force between the genders (185). The foundation of the Foucauldian power relation is power itself, “it becomes a pure ‘situation’ in which power is always immanent; and the question what power and power to do what appears as a mere obstacle.” (Poulantzas 2000, p.149.) As such, any struggle is, in this Foucauldian schema, corrupted by power because it has as its foundation power, as evident in his reactions to the students and Chomsky’s appeals to universalism, ethics, justice and humanism. Foucault conceives of one form of struggle/resistance which is not corrupted by power, that is, that ‘something’ which is external to power, which limits the “ensnaring substance” of power by escaping it. However, this ‘something’ which is meant to limit power is unfounded, as it cannot reference any real relations, nor can its resistances be justified theoretically. All Foucault leaves us with is “groundless resistances and hypostasised power” an abstraction which forms the basis for both the war hypothesis and the later freedom/ethics hypothesis (185).
[75] Whose fidelity to Nietzsche Rehmann shows can be cogently criticised, pp. 160-167. Rehmann shows that the distinction which Foucault says marks out Nietzsche’s distance from other teleological approaches, that of Herkunft versus Ursprung is not consistently observed in the original, and Foucault’s “proof text” in Human-all-too-Human 1 does not make the point Foucault wants it to. According to Rehmann, “It is as if he wanted to demonstrate in practice what he a short time previously in the Inaugural Lecture at the Collège de France laid out theoretically: to conceive discourse as a ‘violence’ which we do to things” (166). Foucault’s idea of genealogy is closest to elements in the middle Nietzsche, when his friendship with Rée (whom he acknowledges a debt to, in terms of his sceptical criticisms at this time of the egoistic bases of morality) was closest, as against in the later period after 1888, wherein Nietzsche was concerned to “… fight the thought that egoism is harmful and despicable: I want to create the egoism of good conscience” (166-176). Due to considerations of space, we cannot consider this in the depth we might desire here.
[76] When analysing the Foucault’s genealogy of disciplinary power and its derivation from a “multiplicity” of “minor processes” and “different origins”, such as, the soldier’s body in the late 18th century, the monitoring system during the plague at the end of the 17th century, schools, hospitals, and other institutions. Rehmann notes that while it is rather conceivable that the disciplines develop variously and at different points of society, this phenomenon is connected with, among other things, the ambiguity of the term discipline and its derivation from the Latin discere, meaning to learn, education, training, etc. (225). Moreover, the use of this term has different meanings depending on the socio-historical contexts: “there are the most varied attempts at a ‘disciplining’ of the lower classes, as well as the oppositional attempts at a ‘self-disciplining’ in the workers’ movement for the purpose of a democratic self-socialisation” (225). Thus, the term discipline is both ambiguous and contested; it may have a different character to opposing groups and in different socio-historical moments.
[77] Cf. This contradiction, the sublimation of power into the normative, is the theoretical point on which Foucault shifts from disciplinary power to his later biopolitics or biopower, from a focus on the individual body to the species body. Here the emphasis dovetails rather than overcomes, for biopower contains disciplinary power and its techniques:
The normalising society is therefore not … a sort of generalised disciplinary society whose disciplinary institutions have swarmed and finally taken over everything … [It] is a society in which the norm of discipline and the norm of regulation intersect along an orthogonal articulation. (Foucault 2003, p. 238)
Once again, Rehmann reveals Foucault’s lack of socio-historical analysis and overgeneralisation. For Foucault supports his concept of biopolitics with recourse to examples as varied as mandatory school attendance, modern social security, and health care. All without examining their context and role within historical social struggles, instead, “philosophical speculation … [replaces] the task of a historical materialist analysis.” (240)
[78] See for example Schmitt 2003, p. 167: “Vouloir transformer le droit pénal en une grande carte blanche donnée au criminel, en « magna charta du criminel » (Fr. v. Liszt) était caractéristique de l’aveuglement de la pensée libérale de la loi (Gesetzesdenken) à l’égard du droit.’’
[79] Foucault 2008, pp. 220-223.
[80] Foucault 2008, p. 222, cf. Rehmann 2022, p. 266.
[81] This is what he calls the “essential epistemological transformation” (Foucault 2008, p. 223, cf. p. 266) of neoliberalism: the move from an economic analysis of the modes and relations of production to one which takes as its primary unit individuals’ choices, examined as a form of capital investment.
[82] In truth, this representation of neoliberal governmentality removes the ideas of class and state power altogether, no less than do Becker et al. Foucault completely misses the dominatory aspect of neoliberalism, in which forms of “liberalism” are available for those at the top through de-regulation and forms of “self-regulation”, whilst those unable to succeed in the game of individual self-investment are subjected to increasing immiseration, material hardship and disciplinary practices, as we see most spectacularly in the explosion of the American penitentiary system (including disproportionate imprisonment of people of colour) in the neoliberal decades.
[83] Rehmann 2022, pp. 271-272.
[84] Foucault 2008, p. 117.
[85] Foucault 2008, p. 203; see Rehmann 2022, p. 273. As we see, here, Foucault’s critical attack here on forms of power in no way excludes those aspects of the state which have been won by labour and social movements throughout since the great depression, which have a humane as well as a disciplinary function resented by the Right, and which came under systematic international attack since the early 1980s. Moving with his times, Foucault declares in 1982, just as Thatcher, Reagan and many others were at that moment, that the state “can no longer … be a welfare state” (Foucault 1979, at p. 274).
[86] Foucault 1988, p. 170.
[87] Cf. Foucault 1988, p, 170.
[88] Bono in Foucault 1988, p. 172.
[89] Foucault 1988, p. 172.
[90] Nietzsche 2005, §2.
[91] For a full examination of the exterminist passages in Nietzsche, see Losurdo 2020, pp. 353-382, 582-606.
[92] As well as the analysis of Foucault’s enthusiastic review of Glucksmann’s The Master Thinkers, which Deleuze took his distance from (pp. 256-258).
