Foucault and fugitive study

Abstract

Michel Foucault was one of the 20th century’s great practitioners of study. Time in the archives and library, teaching, reading, thinking, and writing were all integrated aspects of his tireless labor to find lines of escape out of the confines of Western humanism and totalizing approaches to power and history. Drawing on Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France and the work of James Bernauer, this article discusses Foucault’s mode of study as a practice of freedom. It then mobilizes Foucault’s analyses of biopolitics and neoliberal reason to address new enclosures of academic labor that push against study within the university. The article argues that Foucault was not able to anticipate how the biopolitical horizon would become ever-more dependent on extraction, including from the value generated by academic labor. It then draws on ideas of fugitivity and undercommons to supplement Foucault’s study as a mode of resistance.