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The Bleak Genius of Michel Foucault
Tuesday marks the 40th anniversary of the death of Michel Foucault. Four decades since complications from AIDS brought his career to a premature end, the French philosopher—a role he both embraced and pushed away—continues to top rankings of the most-cited scholars in the humanities.
It impels your average museum director to agonize over how the visual forms and curatorial lingo used to represent indigenous communities might perpetuate colonial domination; or a prestigious medical association to stage interminable critiques of its own long-standing role in upholding racism and patriarchy; and on and on. This inspired a new figure, the political economist, to educate statesmen as to the benefits of treating relations with external states not as a zero-sum war over a scarce amount of gold; but as a series of win-win partnerships based upon comparative advantage, set against a planetary backdrop of ever-growing markets. Except, and here was Foucault’s most unsettling turn, M would now encompass individual human bodies: not a class of persons forced to sell their labor power in exchange for wages, but a multitude of human-body-shaped capitals, entering the sphere of circulation at birth in the hope of valorizing themselves and maximizing returns on investment over the course of their life spans.
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