Ben Golder, Foucault and the Politics of Rights, Stanford: Stanford University Press, xi + 246 pp, cloth $85.00.
| Author | Jacopo Martire |
| Date | 01 July 2017 |
| Published date | 01 July 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.12284 |
bs_bs_banner
REVIEWS
Ben Golder,Foucault and the Politics of Rights, Stanford: Stanford University
Press, xi +246 pp, cloth $85.00.
In recent times, Ben Golder has emerged as a pivotal figure in the field of
Foucauldian legal studies, reviving an area of research that seemed to have
encountered a dead-end. Foucault, especially in the English-speaking world,
has been criticised by a vast array of authors – ranging from Habermas to
Poulantzas – for excessively downplaying the role of law in modern society.
For many years, the received wisdom (expressed at its clearest in A. Hunt and
G. Wickham, Foucault and the Law: Towards a Sociology of Law as Governance
(London, Chicago: Pluto Press, 1994)) – was that the French philosopher had,
in effect, interpreted law only as a repressive machine that, in our days, was
progressively receding in the face of the advancement of new technologies of
power like discipline and governmentality. Foucault had thus allegedly ‘ex-
pelled’ law from the locus of power and was incapable of offering a useful
analytics to explore the contemporary declensions of the legal phenomenon.
Criticising these interpretations, Golder (together with P. Fitzpatrick, Foucault’s
Law (London: Routledge-Cavendish, 2009)) a few years ago proposed an in-
teresting alternative that does not see law as opposed to the system of discipline
and governmentality, but rather intimates a close, mutually structuring rela-
tionship between these two poles, a relationship that is at the same time one
of reciprocal support but also of unstable conflict. While in Golder’s earlier
work a clear picture of how law and discipline/governmentality legitimised
each other in a co-dependent connection was proposed, it was more difficult
to understand as solidly in what sense law was a discourse that, at the same
time, could undermine the ploys of power – a problem exacerbated by the fact
that Foucault himself conveyed a vision of power as an omnipresent inescapable
mesh that literally constitutes the thinking subject.
Foucault and the Politics of Rights reads as an ideal continuation of Golder’s
previous project as it addresses squarely the question of the possibility of a
Foucauldian use of rights as a subversive instrument against power. In the
present work, Golder’s starting point is the rejection of the well-rehearsed
trope of Foucault as a radical thinker who – in his late writings – embraced
the liberal canon and became a somewhat uncritical supporter of the use of
legal rights in political struggles. This vision would cause – if unchallenged –
devastating effects for Foucault’s legacy. First, because Foucault would emerge
as a confused scholar who first endorsed an antisubjectivist position only to
revert later to an essentialist ideal of the subject upon which the use of legal
rights is predicated. Second, because it would make Foucault little more than
a meek liberal who can offer few insights into the current legal debate.
Golder sets out to resolve this problem by proposing a theoretical conti-
nuity between Foucault’s later articles and interventions on rights, and the
C2017 The Author.The Moder n Law Review C2017 The Modern Law Review Limited. (2017) 80(4) MLR 766–774
Published by John Wiley& Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
To continue reading
Request your trial