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symploke, Volume 16, Numbers 1-2, 2008, pp. 375-377 (Review)

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DOI: 10.1353/sym.0.0078

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Jeffrey T. Nealon.
Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and Its
Intensifications Since 1984. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008. 152 pp.
In this concise yet highly charged volume, Nealon challenges the
now influential perception of Foucault as a thinker who in mid-career
found himself at a theoretical dead-end, having construed power in too
totalizing a fashion, so that in the last analysis each variety of agency and
resistance always becomes recuperable as already a function or condition
of power itself. Thus, so the story goes, the research program of his
middle period was jettisoned by and large by Foucault in favor of an
aesthetics of subjectivity which, in emphasising the artistic self-creation
of the individual through a reexamination of classical origins, offered
possibilities of resistance that required something of a theoretical retreat,
in that they entailed a less hostile critical engagement with
Enlightenment and humanist traditions of ethics, agency, and selfhood.
For Nealon, this very same narrative about Foucaults career, with its
neo-Hegelian understanding of change as development, correction, or
progress, remains inimical to the tenor and tenets of Foucaultian
thought. Moreover, Nealon worries that, since privatized individual
self-creativity has become a wholly normative feature and discursive
effect of neoliberal consumer capitalism, such a Foucault offers little
critical force in the present, whereas the reevaluation of his thinking of
powerfar from remaining rooted in a now nearly obsolete history of
the statemay help equip us to rethink global (panoptico-bio) politics
and resistance today.
Nealon therefore argues for a notion of
intensification as a better way to track the movement through Foucaults
research career from one project to the next (he claims that it is power
that always sets the Foucaultian itinerary), and indeed to elaborate the
very logic and practice of power as it mutates from the historical form of
sovereignty through social and disciplinary epochs to the biopolitical
forms of power we now endure. Nealon places the accent on a
conception of intensity which keeps its distance somewhat from a
subject-centered discourse of affect, bodily sensation, or aesthetic
experience. Intensity instead names powers desire to penetrate the
entire field with maximal efficiency (or, to put it another way, least
expenditure/cost), generating in the process tipping points at which
saturation at threshold level leads to a mutation in the field of operation
of power itself. Nealon argues that a detailed reading of Foucaults texts
frequently demonstrates his rich understanding of the complex interplay
between emergent, dominant, and residual forms and techniques of
power, giving rise to transitional moments as this logic and practice of
intensification plays itself out. Such reading offers a productive
challenge to those simpleminded interpretations of Foucault which
argue that, in presenting us with totalized systems of power in

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Book Notes

successive epochs, he provides no way to think the transition from one to

the next.
For Nealon, the late work on subjectivity represents not so much
Foucaults acceptance of the inescapable centrality of the human subject
construed as autonomous, rational, and auto-foundational; instead, his
return to the thought of Kant stresses the Enlightenment legacy which
discovers the subject only in relation to the concept, or rather amid a host
of conceptual relations or, indeed, a network of functions and practices
which grant the subjects possible form. Nealon suggests, then, that such
a reading of the late Foucault allows for an intensification of the question
of power that becomes all the more relevant as power itself intensifies
beyond disciplinary and institutional limits (while of course still
harnessing and adapting the techniques of power that, say, governmentality and institutions offer), pervading remorselessy and seemingly
inexhaustibly the highly virtualized spaces of the twenty-first-century
self or, rather, life.
Nealon draws our attention to the undoubtedly shrewd question
Foucault frequently asks of theoretical and methodological decisions
What does it cost? (both for oneself and others)and suggests that
such a question is well attuned to the analysis of neoliberal capitalism as
desiring maximum economy in its transaction with the entire field, and
indeed to a strategic (rather than heroically oppositional or classically
revolutionary) thinking of the forms that resistance may now take amid a
host of relations thus costed. As finance capital wages itself on future
markets without fundamental recourse to capitals traditional mediation
by the products or markets associated with the classical commodity, its
intensification beyond any possible new territories or objects (in other
words, the very force of its production) ushers in a new world of
controlas Deleuze would have itrather than simply of oldfashioned discipline (although, as we know, the most extreme
disciplinary techniques are still called upon when needed). Here, it is
not conformity and sameness that guarantee powers domination;
instead, difference is intensified as the means by which neoliberal
economics maintains control at increasingly intense micrological
levels, notably through the privatization of value.
Here, Nealon obliges himself to weigh the always-ongoing
transaction between power and resistance precisely in view of such allpervasive privatization. He detects in Foucaults wish (often cited
from Archaeology of Knowledge) to write without a face not a romantic
desire for anonymity or infamy which in practice manifests itself only for
those who have already laid claim to the scarce resources of celebrity and
notoriety, but rather a statement of solidarity with the common or
mundane lives of those whom Foucault frequently wrote about, those
whose lives appear to us historically only in the brief (and often fatal)

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intensity of their encounter with power. From this, Nealon is able to

elaborate, not an all too costly image of resistance as the rare preserve of
an authentically heroic elite, but rather a Foucaultian ethics of the
common, calling us to think about possible lines of flight, possible
resistances costed out from the place(s) where all of us live, in the most
ordinary and banal ways, amid myriad terrains of power and control.
(Doubtless, sharing in the common involvesabove an overly
homogenized view of commonaltyvery singular acts, decisions, or
wagers each time of asking, in order to determine which resistances are
significant and which not: the question is how to theorize this condition
without risking overgeneralization, and how to act on it significantly.)
For Nealon, then, the colonization of everyday life by biopower calls
us to think this ethics of the common amid an increasingly intense
array of forces. In affirming this task as perhaps one of the most
compelling potential legacies of Foucault, he not only makes a powerful
contribution to Foucault scholarship and debate, but perhaps more
significantly adds a forceful voice to the larger project of reactivating the
memory and archive of theory in ways that may yet prove telling in
the intensifying strugglesat once global and everydaythat lie
ahead.
Simon Morgan Wortham, Kingston University, London
Jerrold Seigel. The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western
Europe since the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2005. 732 pp.
Seigels monumental history of an idea assimilates a daunting range
of modern European thinking about the self. What daunts is not only the
protean nature of the self and the list of notables consulted, but also the
various types of writing that one must account for, including Humes
epistemology, Smiths political economy, Rousseaus novels, Mills
autobiography, Hegels theology, Freuds psychology, and Derridas
criture. Proving himself an exceptional interdisciplinarian, Seigel distills
an enormous range of thinking while providing a clear and incisive
commentary on these and many other key thinkers.
Seigels work modestly avoids claiming to provide an ultimate
theory of the self, yet it does provide a powerful conceptual grid that
uses corporeality, sociality, and reflectivity as its three dimensions,
whose interrelations allow Seigel a quite nuanced analysis of his authors.
Beyond its analytical utility, however, the grid implies the robust
theoretical conclusion that the self resists reduction to any single
elementsuch as reflection, instinct, sympathy, social construction, or