The aff’s use of Biopolitics academically sanitizes Marxist ideologies pretending as if political projects subvert, yet still playing into the hands of the academy only to reinscribe neoliberal dominance.

Daniel Zamora is a postdoctoral sociologist at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and Cambridge University. His book, Le Dernier Homme Et La Fin De La Révolution: Foucault après Mai 68 (The Last Man and the End of the Revolution: Foucault After May 68) coauthored with Mitchell Dean, was published in English by Verso in 2020; Can We Criticize Foucault?; ; [TMS—GK]

Debray writes in Modernes catacombes that Foucault, the rebel and subversive, has become an “official philosopher.” How do you understand this paradox? And how do you explain how Foucault can seduce so many of those in radical milieus who nevertheless affirm with force that they wish to put an end to the neoliberal era? It’s a very interesting question, but one I don’t have a satisfying answer to. I would, nevertheless, suggest that it’s in large part due to the structure of the academic field itself. You’d have to go back to Bourdieu and the precious works of Louis Pinto to better understand this evolution. It should never be forgotten that joining a “school,” or associating oneself with a certain theoretical perspective, means associating oneself to an intellectual field, where there is an important struggle for access to the dominant positions. Ultimately, calling oneself a Marxist in the France of the 1960s — when the academic field was in part dominated by self-identified Marxists — did not have the same meaning as it does to be a Marxist today. Concepts and canonical authors are obviously intellectual instruments, but they also correspond to various strategies for becoming part of the field and the struggles over it. Intellectual developments are then partly determined by relations of power within the field itself. Also, it seems to me that relations of power within the academic field have changed considerably since the end of the 1970s: after the decline of Marxism, Foucault occupied a central place. In reality, he offers a comfortable position that allows a certain degree of subversion to be introduced without detracting from the codes of the academy. Mobilizing Foucault is relatively valued, it often allows his defenders to get published in prestigious journals, to join wide intellectual networks, to publish books, etc. Very wide swaths of the intellectual world refer to Foucault in their work and have him saying everything and its opposite. You can be an adviser to the MEDEF and edit his lectures! [A reference to François Ewald, adviser to the main French business federation; see above.] I would say that he opens doors. And you can’t really say the same of Marx nowadays. This critique of the “margins” as the center of political combat could end up delighting all manner of counter-revolutionaries in France or Belgium. Aren’t you afraid of playing into their hands? I do think there exists a “conservative” critique of Foucault — and more broadly of what May ’68 represents in French social history. This critique is no longer marginal at all: you can find it among the thinkers of the conservative right like Eric Zemmour or within the National Front. It openly critiques the whole feminist, anti-racist and cultural legacy of May ’68 while having much less to say about the economic ravages of neoliberalism. It’s as if the problem were the political liberalism that came with the 1980s, and only by going back on these societal evolutions will we be able to “faire société.” One often hears this kind of thinking, according to which it was the destruction of family values or communitarian forms of the social bond that allowed the expansion of neoliberalism. There may be a grain of truth in these analyses, but they are totally deluded when they propose a return to more “traditional” ways of life. We’re heading towards a much more authoritarian kind of liberalism, with a return to family values, a return to a total fantasy of national culture, and the good old pre-globalized capitalism… As for the idea of “playing into their hands,” I don’t think it’s a problem. If there’s a problem with certain aspects of the legacy of May ’68, the role of the Left is not to close its eyes because the far right is saying it, but on the contrary, to render its own judgment, to formulate its own critique, so as not to totally lose the ideological battle. That is the task we need to get started on in order to reconstruct a left that is both radical and popular.