Politics in Foucault’s later work: A philosophy of truth;or reformism in question

Abstract

Drawing on Foucault’s late seminars this article contrasts political reformism, favoured in the English-speaking tradition of ‘Foucauldian’ criminology, with Foucault’s own ‘return’ to philosophy. Of late, given the relative failure of ‘histories of the present’ to produce effects of resistance, the very usefulness of a Foucauldian framework for criminologists has been called into question. But in his final work Foucault envisaged a different instrumentality for philosophy as ‘the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself ’. In this perspective, the genealogical method appears more clearly as a mode of resistance to political power, and above all as a modality of the relation of self to self among others explored by Foucault in his last work.