Book Reviews: Foucault and the Politics of Rights
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663916660920 |
| Date | 01 October 2016 |
| Author | Garrett Lecoq |
| Published date | 01 October 2016 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
Book Reviews
Book Reviews
BEN GOLDER, Foucault and the Politics of Rights. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015, pp. 246,
ISBN 9780804796491, £16 (pbk).
We live in an era of rights. From the right to asylum to the right to equality, rights
have become a common denominator in understanding our lived experiences in con-
temporary societies. In his new book, Foucault and the Politics of Rights, Ben Golder
offers an invigorating new political defence of rights grounded in the works of Michel
Foucault. Drawing upon Foucault’s concepts of critique and power-knowledge, Golder
maintains that rights are ambivalent through what Foucault and Golder define as a
critical counter-conduct. This critical counter-conduct illus trates how appealing to
rights is not an act of ‘relinquishing critique for something else, something more
conciliatory, practical, or pragmatic – but rather a matter of realizing through the
very movement of critique the latent political possibilities of rights’ (p. 58). It is worth
noting upfront that Golder is not looking to answer whether or not rights are ‘good’ or
‘bad’, but instead argues that rights could be a useful tactic in advancing broader
strategic critiques of underlying sociopolitical discourses and power relations. Thus
each invocation of rights, as the book advocates, operates as a technique that always
possesses the potential to destabilize – or rupture – current discourses of rights as a
form of counter-conduct instead of solely reifying their underlying conceptions of the
subject and the state.
The book starts by conducting an immanent critique of the orthodox liberal position
that suggests Foucault, in his increasing appeal to rights in the 1970s (most notably in his
books Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality Vol. 1 as well as his lectur es
Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics), was retreating from his
earlier critical oeuvre (developed in Archaeology of Knowledge and The Order of
Things) to a position that fully embraces normative liberal conceptions of rights. Golder
asserts that ‘[s]uch readings are plainly revisionist in intent’ (p. 31) and that Foucault’s
turn to rights was something far more critical than normative scholars such as Ju
¨rgen
Habermas (1997) and Nancy Fraser (1989) contend. In contrast to these revisionist
readings, Golder perceives Foucault’s return to rights as a form of destabil izing the
status quo – to allow not only for a resistance to current power relations but also as
an avenue to (re)appropriate them to be otherwise than they currently are. The second
and third chapters of the book build upon this foundation to argue that rights, for
Foucault, are relational, contingent and deliberatively ungrounded, lacking a normative
component typically characteristic of liberal conceptions of rights.
Social & Legal Studies
2016, Vol. 25(5) 630–641
ªThe Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663916660920
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