Reading Michel Foucault Today: In Conversation with Philipp Sarasin

Philipp Sarasin is emeritus professor of modern history at the University of Zurich and one of the foremost scholars of Michel Foucault in the German-speaking world. Among his many publications are Darwin und Foucault. Genealogie und Geschichte im Zeitalter der Biologie (Darwin and Foucault. Genealogy and History in the Age of Biology), and Michel Foucault zur Einführung (An Introduction to Michel Foucault), the influential standard introduction to Foucault’s thought in German. His most recent book is the widely read 1977. Eine kurze Geschichte der Gegenwart (1977. A Brief History of the Present), in which he traces the cultural, political, and technological upheavals that have shaped the recent past. This interview is centred around the enduring political actuality of Foucault’s thought and what his analytical tools can still offer us in making sense of the present.

This interview was conducted on 22 May 2026.

CJLPA: The major crises of recent years—amongst them the pandemic and Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine—have generated a great many analyses drawing on Foucault, employing concepts such as biopolitics, discipline, and governmentality, amongst others. At the same time, these events have also exposed Foucault’s limitations: a virus that takes no interest in discourses, and a war that has demonstrated, at least in part, that classical categories such as sovereignty, ‘the West’, and old-fashioned geopolitics have by no means disappeared.

Do you think these crises have made Foucault’s limitations visible, or is it possible to understand them with Foucault?

Philipp Sarasin: Oh, a very large question indeed. During the pandemic, I genuinely asked myself what Foucault would have said about compulsory mask-wearing. On the one hand, there are clearly many elements in his work—above all, his treatment of medicine, hospitals, and the healthcare system as a whole—where one might superficially say: here is the state reaching out and controlling us all through biopolitical means. And there were indeed various contrarian thinkers, up to and including the Foucault reader Giorgio Agamben, who interpreted the situation in exactly that way. On the other hand, Foucault ultimately held a very strong and positive view of the natural sciences. He was in no way hostile to science as such. He was critical of dubious sciences such as sexual pathology and similar fields, including psychiatry, but the hard natural sciences—including biomedicine and its knowledge about viruses, for example—he absolutely endorsed. He was firmly on the side of science.

And he did also, in the lectures on governmentality at the end of the 1970s, speak of the potential release of pathogenic viruses as an absolute threat, alongside the omnipresent danger of a nuclear war. I would not say, therefore, that the pandemic exposed Foucault’s limitations, even though there are Foucauldian quotations that can be put to use if one wishes to respond to the pandemic in a contrarian spirit.

As for Russia’s war against Ukraine: Foucault was always highly critical of the Soviet Union. He was well aware that it was an imperial power, and, for example in 1977, expressed serious concern about its influence in Ethiopia, so much so that he fell into dispute with Jacques Rancière over it, with Rancière shaking his head at the vehemence with which Foucault argued against the Soviet Union. And when martial law was declared in Poland in 1980, he travelled with Simone Signoret and Bernard Kouchner to Gdańsk, brought medical supplies, and was of course wholly on the side of Solidarność. I have not the slightest doubt, therefore, that he would have had a clear political perspective on this war of aggression.

CJLPA: That is to say, you have sufficient confidence in his critical faculties that one does not need to take refuge in the unfinished nature of his work. Does the incompleteness of his work due to his early death save him in a sense too?

PS: Yes, perhaps. Because with respect to other topics, I am no longer quite so certain. At the end, of course, he presented a very positive reading of neoliberalism. Or rather, a positively engaged and also well-informed reading, one might say. And through his emphasis on technologies of the self and this care of the self, he certainly foregrounded a theme that can, shall we say, be interpreted in neoliberal terms. How that would have developed further, I have no idea. But I think he would certainly have continued to attract criticism had he pursued that line further. And yet, having said that, one must also note that he was always politically clear-sighted. He was always fully aware that liberalism can also have an extremely violent face. He harboured no illusions about the power that neoliberalism deploys. But this stance of shaping oneself, of leading and taking one’s own life into one’s own hands, of making a work of art of it, all of these things can be interpreted in neoliberal terms. To be honest, I don’t know how that would have played out in his further thoughts. But the possibility certainly exists that he might have become, how shall I put it, more conservative.

CJLPA: Foucault’s work stands at a historical threshold—which you yourself have written about in your last book, 1977: A Brief History of the Present—where a fundamental shift is occurring in the matrix of modernity: the certainties, such as belief in evolution and social-state management of the population, are entering into crisis and eroding. Against this background, one must also ask whether this development is irreversible. Are we now in the postmodern age? What does the postmodern world look like?

PS: I think this would represent a limit of Foucault’s theoretical horizon. He had not thought about postmodernity, although one can argue that he contributed certain elements to it. He in fact resisted the term, saying he did not even know what it meant, and so on. On this topic, I recently wrote an essay on Jean-François Lyotard—on his 1979 book The Postmodern Condition—in which I argued that, from that vantage point, with Lyotard’s concept of postmodernity, one can certainly make the case that we are living in postmodernity. We are self-evidently living in a postmodern age, because— as you have just indicated—several of the certainties and constitutive matrices of modernity have shifted or even dissolved. Foucault, however, wanted to remain a modern thinker, and ultimately to hold fast to the certainties of the Enlightenment. He was genuinely concerned with rationality, despite what some people claim to the contrary: that claim is simply incorrect. It is quite clear that, in an elementary sense, the critique of power proceeds from the perspective of a critical reason, without reason being hypostasised into something supra-historical. To be sure, reason remains historical and contingent, but it is a potential, an instrument available for the criticism of power. And that is something in which Foucault retained belief.

Lyotard speaks of language games, and Foucault’s concept of discourse has overlaps with the model of language games, but Lyotard goes several steps further in the multiplication of possibilities of truth. In Foucault, there is of course no absolute concept of truth, but discourses are larger blocks, so to speak. Although they are of course contingent, they are, in a given historical moment, the almost insurmountable horizon. Lyotard on the other hand sort of ‘dynamises’ this concept much more strongly and sees more an unfolding diversity of possible language games, each of which can generate its own truths, without there being a meta-language that declares: but this is how things really are. That is, of course, absent in Foucault too, but the discursive formations in Foucault are somewhat more stable. They are still slightly more modern; the grand formations: physics, medicine, and others constitute the horizon on which truth is asserted. In Lyotard’s postmodernity, that is more thoroughly dissolved.

CJLPA: But at the same time, throughout his entire work Foucault is strongly interested in the non-modern, in what lies outside modernity, in the sense of what modernity excludes and what transgresses it. And on the basis of these analyses, there is not one Reason but rather rationalities, which are historical.

PS: Exactly. Rationalities are historical, that is absolutely clear. But it is still an instrument that one can use to criticise power. In fact, Foucault initially made the attempt to criticise modernity from ‘outside’, from the perspective of madness, focusing on ‘the great madmen’ such as Friedrich Hölderlin, the Marquis de Sade, Friedrich Nietzsche, or Antonin Artaud. But it became clear to him that this was a perspective he could not genuinely adopt: it is simply self-contradictory and unliveable. But of course, the gaze towards what is excluded, towards the margins, towards those who do not fit into modern conceptions of normality—that is indeed important. Yet I would not say that Foucault thereby developed a concept of the postmodern. Rather, these are critical self-interrogations within the logic of a modern thinking that inevitably excludes this or that. And this awareness of ‘we in fact exclude this (or them)’ meant for Foucault: we have to take to the streets for these people and fight so that they can be heard. Or we distribute questionnaires in prisons so that they can speak, so that these voices become audible.

One of the most important texts, from my own perspective, is the essay on the Iranian Revolution, the 1979 piece ‘Inutile de se soulever?’ (‘Is it useless to stand up?’), where Foucault describes precisely this: it is not a question of morality, but, as he says, of reality and realism, of perceiving these voices. That does not mean the voices speak the truth. The voices of prisoners, of the oppressed, of the mad do not necessarily speak the truth. But they are there, and we must take note of them, in order to live in a society where these voices could ultimately also be included, or where one at least understands how the mechanisms of exclusion function. That is critical thinking about exclusions and power relations, ultimately from the perspective of a critique of power.

Much of modern thought is critique of power, it has to be said. After all, the whole of liberalism is a critique of absolutist power, and of state power, to be sure. In that sense, this is a classically modern stance. Radicalised, without doubt. But classically modern.

CJLPA: Does that mean one has to translate Foucault into the language of the postmodern? Or how should one relate to modern thought in general, in order to render it pertinent for the present-day world, for a postmodern actuality? Is there an entirely new thinking to be initiated, or does one need to modify or break with modern ways of thought?

PS: Well, what in postmodernity—speaking schematically from my own perspective—is added or radicalised, is basically the erosion of the metaphysical, of meaning, of central meaning, of shared meaning, and that is: truth. For Lyotard, and I guess he was right, this subversion of truth begins already with Nietzsche, or with Robert Musil. Nevertheless, for a long time modernity holds things together, as Foucault has put it, under conceptions of normality and authoritatively deployed truths, without ultimately knowing on what grounds. The metaphysical foundation for these claims is ultimately absent. Lyotard, for his part, says: well, we simply have a set of language games, and the only thing one can do is trust in communication, just as Jürgen Habermas too essentially has argued.

I would say that what Foucault does in this situation is to go back to these antique technologies of the self—on the notion that, ultimately, each individual can only stabilise for themselves what is true, what is good for them, how they can live. There is no one, and no universal law derived from some metaphysics, to tell me how I must live. Ironically, the technologies of the self are a genuine modern concept because it draws on the ancient Greeks. That reference, that invocation, is indeed a classically modern move, like what is found, for instance, in the modern thinking about hygiene, in the political concepts of democracy, or in Le Corbusier’s architectural theory. They all refer to the ancient Greeks.

CJLPA: And yet it is a modernity that is inflected from the East…

PS: Yes, indeed, there enters, not untypical of the 1950s to 1970s (and right up until today…), this fascination with Eastern religions. That comes in and is of course incorporated, as one can clearly see in many of Foucault’s interviews in the 1970s and early 80s. Though significantly, he then deals, in his latest books, with Greek and Roman antiquity rather than with Japan, which was in any case closer to him and better known to him. But yes, it is the attempt to ask: how can one lead one’s own life? How can one give oneself rules of conduct without being subject to a universal law that would ultimately require a metaphysical grounding, which he of course rejects? And in this regard, he was clearly fascinated by the techniques of Zen Buddhism.

CJLPA: It seems rather difficult to articulate the political content of Foucault’s late turn, this shift towards the subject and the technologies of the self that you have just mentioned, as it tends to be interpreted either as apolitical, or as a turn towards neoliberalism, as previously mentioned, where politics plays out only within the individual sphere. Is there, in the late Foucault, a political theory to be unfolded? Is his late thinking pertinent to today’s conditions, where neoliberalism has had markedly negative effects?

PS: In the governmentality lectures of the late 1970s, the concept of technologies of the self is famously not present. But of course it is already the case there that Foucault says liberalism is a technique of power, or a form of government, that to some extent limits the reach of state power over individuals. That is what distinguishes it from absolutism, from the police state. Thus his question was: how was it possible to overcome the absolutist police state, hence the Panopticon? Because it became clear to him that in fact we do not really live in a Panopticon. And to that extent, this core idea of liberalism—that the state cannot fully control society, cannot, first of all, set prices, and that it therefore must, to some degree, respect the ‘opacity’ of society and the individual freedoms and actions of individuals—that imposes essentially a certain limit on power. And for him, as a long-standing critic of power, one might say: ‘Well, Michel, you have come to this rather late’. But anyway, that is, in a sense, the core idea of liberalism. And it is for this reason that I am absolutely appalled that Slavoj Žižek has now come out openly with a book called Liberal Fascisms, essentially arguing that fascism brings the essence of liberalism to light. I mean, it is simply nonsense.

I know what liberalism can mean in concrete terms, beginning with colonialism, or with Chile 1973, or the exploitation and extraction of natural wealth in the Global South still today—all of that is true. But the critical potential of a social theory that says one must set certain limits on state power through equality before the law, through division of powers, through the rule of law, through recognition of individual freedom—that is a potential that is fundamentally at odds with any form of fascism. Liberalism differs from fascism at its very core. And to smooth that over and say that it is actually just another form of fascism is, I find, politically utterly disastrous, a catastrophe. Foucault would certainly not have gone along with that. There are indeed readings of Foucault and governmentality which claim that Foucault allegedly said that neoliberalism is in fact only an even more perfidious form of control. Yet in the second series of his governmentality lectures, he explicitly says that this is not the case. He addresses precisely this interpretation and rejects it. Liberal freedom is fundamental. Partially free, not absolutely free—historically structured and constrained, of course—but it is fundamental and is not a ruse for yet more power. I find that very important.

And in this respect, I believe he then wrote about technologies of the self because that was the problem ultimately closest to him personally, meaning: how can I, as a homosexual man, lead a decent life? That was, in a sense, his central question since his time at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he attempted suicide and had problems with alcohol, and had always said: if I kiss a man, I am committing a criminal offence in France—which was indeed the case. So, to shorten up very briefly his long and winding road of thoughts: for Foucault, the technologies of the self represent the only possible form of giving oneself one’s own law, and therefore appeared to him as the one theoretical concept he had always been looking for.

CJLPA: And yet there is also still that dimension, particularly in the late work, where Foucault insists, together with liberalism, on a certain rule of law and also mentions human rights, as for example in his writings on Iran. And I then wonder how human rights—without recourse to a new humanism, which Foucault would certainly have rejected—can function without being rather easily undermined?

PS: Yes, starting in 1977, he suddenly comes out with claiming absolute rights—inalienable human rights—and one does not know where they come from. Things moved obviously very quickly in these years. Even in the lecture ‘What is Critique?’ he says: we want to be governed, ‘but not too much’. So he invokes some right that we do not wish to surrender; everyone has this right, and it is fundamental. However, Foucault is not very explicit and rather vague on this topic.

CJLPA: What would you say—from a perspective sharpened and informed by Foucault—in a time where the singular and the particular have very strongly come to dominate: are the political solutions to be found in a return to certain structures of the universal? Or is what is required rather a new way of thinking the particular that does not lead to deregulation and a complete erosion of shared structures?

PS: I think this would probably go beyond Foucault, but I do genuinely believe that what is needed is a way of thinking the particular without losing what is shared—not necessarily the universal in the sense of abstract sameness, but that which connects, which is held in common, while simultaneously strengthening and maintaining it. And of course there are forms of universality—universal equality before the law, for example—that one would not wish to abandon as a concept. Unfortunately, that is indeed happening; these rights are under pressure. Look at the United States, where with the recent Supreme Court decision, Black Americans are once again being disenfranchised. I find this a very difficult and very large question: how must one think this anew?

What is of course also happening is that we now live in the age of AI, of generative AI. At present we are in any case being re-sorted by machines and algorithms that radically individualise us. A machine can tell me which songs I will enjoy on Spotify, and then it turns out to be right, the wretched thing. With more than a billion songs on Spotify, this is extraordinary, is it not? It works like this, of course, because the system know my previous choices. And of course there are small or big groups of consumers with similar preferences, hence I’m also ‘part’ of such a group. But this has nothing to do with real live communities, with something ‘in common’, even universal. It consists only in the fact that I too am listening to an artist with 31 million or so monthly listeners…

CJLPA: That is to say, it would be a false universal, which then...

PS: Yes, exactly, it’s a fake universal, certainly no longer the modern universal, but something quite different from modern universals like shared societal norms, values or ideals. It’s technically produced, and it can always only appear as the radical particular, as the expression of my own choices and preferences. But obviously, even this ‘particular’ is an illusion, manufactured by algorithms. And therefore, speaking of power: A small number of people are in fact producing this illusion of the particular and this fake universal. If anything, that is truly postmodern—or rather, it goes completely beyond anything to do with modernity.

CJLPA: In your book, 1977, you also wrote about identity as this new catchword of modern politics. It is something that is in some respects ambivalent: on the one hand, it can provide safe spaces for people who have always been oppressed, but on the other hand it also involves a retreat into the particular self that can become rather too rigid. I think Foucault himself would, in my view, have been very sceptical of identity politics, precisely because he emphasised becoming very strongly over being—including in relation to his own homosexuality. What would a Foucauldian identity politics look like? Does such a thing exist, or would he have been a strong critic of such politics?

PS: No. There are important texts—like ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ from 1969—where he explicitly criticises the idea of a stable identity; something like that simply cannot exist for him. This goes all the way to his readings of Charles Darwin and Nietzsche. The notion of stable identities is a chimera. One must constitute oneself. That is indeed the trick of the technologies of the self. There is no inner core that is stable and simply waiting to unfold; rather, subjects create themselves. But with a certain degree of freedom, one can create oneself and is not simply created. That is the game: either power constructs us, normalises us, and so on, or we have techniques with which we can carve out for ourselves a certain space of withdrawal from power, a space of protection, such as within liberalism itself, without that being an expression of some permanent and stable identity. This is a concept that radically contradicts Foucault. In that sense, I would be extremely sceptical of the identitarian left.

CJLPA: Yet there is something I have not entirely understood in the whole business of the technologies of the self: there does after all remain an entity that can create itself, that can somehow constitute itself as free. I have the feeling that a psychological dimension is missing in Foucault’s late thought. This might be due to his strong criticism of, for example, Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytical notions of universal symbolic laws. It sometimes seems to me as if his late thought adopts a very technical vocabulary, and that the entire social-psychological dimension of the subject has been weeded out along with Lacan.

PS: Yes, I think that is right. I would myself lean more towards Lacan, who says—to take the classic example—one is born into language, and language makes us equal; without it, we would each be in our own individual madness. And language also creates psychic structures: how one relates to oneself, the relationship of the self to itself. For Foucault, by contrast, that is a technical question of how one steers this, as you rightly say. I am not a psychologist, but yes, I think one can say the concept is somewhat thin. It is not a strong concept of what a person actually is. Others have thought much more about this: what does it even mean to be conscious, to have self-consciousness, to be a person, to be able to relate to oneself? Of course, he does give a strong role to the body—bodily experiences and impressions do constitute what one calls a person. But what interests him about all this, exclusively, is: what can I do? That technical aspect of constructing a subject that is not a sujet, meaning not subjected, but rather follows its own rules. One could say it is somewhat masculine and bourgeois in character. And, as has often been criticised, there is not really an other, no social relations apart from instrumental ones: how does one deal with women, with slaves, with young men? But that only in relation to the question of how one governs one’s desires.

But there is no concept of dependency, of mutual relatedness. And that is where I would see Foucault’s most significant limitations, because the fundamental concept of dependencies and relatedness—not only bodily, but the fact that we are language-beings and must communicate in the same idiom, and without that we are lost—he simply rejects as a metaphysical blunder mascarading as ‘law’.

CJLPA: But could one say with Foucault, as you yourself have written in the concluding section of 1977, that the collapse of shared structures of truth, or rules of truth, began in some sense in the 1970s, and that the effects of that are very directly visible today, further exacerbated by social media and all the technical developments we have been discussing? Can one think facts or factuality with Foucault? Because I have the feeling that Foucault himself has often been held responsible and charged with being someone who hollowed out truth, one of those who contributed to the present situation where nothing has any validity and nothing is stable. How can one assess the current erosion of shared facts through Foucault’s thought?

PS: As I said at the outset, he does genuinely believe in the natural sciences and does not call them into question. And that is not contradicted by his saying that these are, of course, historically contingent formations of truth, but not as mere language games. One cannot simply say: tomorrow we shall just do things differently. There are unimaginably densely woven discursive machines for the production of truth. With historical or other large-scale distance, they certainly show their contingency; other perspectives on the natural sciences would have been conceivable, other concepts possible. That happens within the natural sciences themselves, including at great ruptures, paradigm shifts, where it becomes apparent that what we previously took to be the whole truth was actually a rather limited perspective.

There is in Lyotard an interesting passage where he says: yes, there are these new language games, but the claim to truth does not thereby disappear; it must, however, be arguable within the bounds of our best available possibilities, demonstrable in the sense that there are techniques of proof and of argument. This process does not take place in some ideal heaven of ideas; it is woven into our world, but it is the best explanation that we have available. One cannot simply say there is a pink elephant out there and the answer would be: oh, yes, alright, I suppose I believe you. That is not how it works.

CJLPA: That would then also be a strong distinction from Paul Feyerabend and from ‘anything goes’.

PS: I would certainly argue that, yes, of course.

CJLPA: Although one might say that in other cultures there are different forms of scientificity or rationalities that are not necessarily to be rejected outright following the situatedness of knowledge theorised by Foucault.

PS: Yes, they are conceivable, of course. And within their context they are truths that are produced, which, however, just like our own truths, stand in competition with other language games or discourses. However, as is the case for all discourses and language games, at some point a certain piece of evidence might collapse. You might come to the point of saying: this might actually not be correct, or this framework is no longer helping us to understand the world—there are better explanatory forms that offer us more possibilities. That is never excluded, how could it be? Hence, to that extent it is a false opposition to say: either absolute truth or pure contingency and pure chance. Inbetween lies the historically mutable character of truth.

CJLPA: In your book Darwin and Foucault, you attempted to wrest Foucault from a pure culturalism and to show that he operates with considerable nuance, evading both biologism and culturalism. Can you elaborate on that, and delineate the thesis of your book: in what sense does Foucault descend from Darwin?

PS: Oh, if I can still recall it… I wrote that book a long time ago. Well, firstly, one can say: Foucault had read Darwin, he knew his work. Of course the translator was often Nietzsche, who had himself read Darwin and deeply understood him—despite a few disparaging remarks. What unites the perspectives of Darwin, Nietzsche and Foucault, though, is for all three of them the fundamental concept of genealogy: the tracing of derivations, of lineages that contain no identity. There is no original plan and its unfolding, in fact no ‘evolution’. The term ‘evolution’ does not—fun fact, but important—appear in Darwin writing until the sixth edition of the Origin of Species (it was recommended to him by Herbert Spencer). And it does not really correspond to his concept at all. His concept is descent, meaning lineage, derivation, or Herkunft, as Nietzsche has put it, which, however, does not imply any shared ‘essence’ which ‘evolves’.

Darwin thus emphasises, for example, that the apes of today have nothing whatsoever to do with the apes of some distant antiquity. And the fact that human beings descend from apes also doesn’t mean that there is an ‘identity’ between apes and humans; there is rather a long history of permanent change, and these changes are contingent, dependent on particular circumstances and conditions. (That does not mean that certain patterns cannot stabilise: the vertebral column and four limbs, for instance, proved to be quite useful and establish themselves as a stable pattern.) Well, and quite a bit—no, in fact, all—of this thinking can be seen very clearly in Foucault’s essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, focused an the one fundamental idea: there is no origin, there is no plan, there is no creation, and there is no identity.

What is most fundamental in Darwin is that the absolutely decisive factor for the whole of evolutionary processes is ‘the relation of one organism to another’. The relation between organisms is what determines whether they survive, and thus any further development. And now, Foucault says, equally clearly, that there is nothing fundamental in society, in history, in human beings, but that there are only relations, ie relations of power. The entire web of power relations is precisely Darwin’s web of relations between organisms. There are stronger and weaker ones, of course, dominant and less dominant ones, but it is a web of relations.

I think those are the main features of this genealogical thinking that Foucault derived from Darwin. And I would argue that this is actually the most radical mode of thought that modernity has produced. Please note that the Origin of Species has a title that is highly ironic, since Darwin says in book length that there is no origin and there are no species as such. There is no lion-in-itself as a stable entity. That is merely an optical illusion because we have so little time in our own lives. Rather, there is permanent flux. So the irony is clear. It is the irony of modernity as such: modern thought permanently dissolves stability, it fundamentally undermines the idea of a plan and an order. Darwin was absolutely fundamental in this respect, and Nietzsche and Foucault follow very explicitly in this track.

CJLPA: This modern critique—that of genealogy—how can one extend it to the present day, in the sense that all that is solid melts into air?

PS: Well, that is Marx, yes.

CJLPA: Yes, all of that. But today, in a time where contingency, fragility, and flux are far more pronounced, is this still a pertinent form of critique?

PS: Good question. Well, one cannot simply place unconditional trust in such criticism, since the Right has now adopted the concept of disruption as something to celebrate, because everything keeps breaking down: the critique as such seems therefore no longer valid.

However, I would hold on to this form of critique. Of course there are forms of destruction and fantasies of disruption that are cynical. But there are still plenty of forms of power that attempt to ground themselves in something eternal through trying to assert concepts of the human being or the world, or defending certain truths against their historical transformation. And there, this critical thinking still has, at the very least, the potential to be important.

CJLPA: To conclude, can you say which aspects of Foucault one must clearly historicise—by pointing out he was a child of his time—and which aspects of his thought you would wish to highlight for today, those with which one must continuously work, and which have not lost their relevance and actuality?

PS: Yes, it is an interesting question, and not a simple one. On the one hand, what one must retain is this mode of historically critical thinking—of genealogical thinking, to be more precise. I find the scepticism towards claims of identity very central, very important.

On the other hand, I would say, no longer so terribly relevant are perhaps his conceptions of the Panopticon, which describes societies as excessively controlled, as prison-like. Well, today societies are certainly controlled in various ways—and one might consider whether the technological change we have talked about constitutes a ‘Panopticon’. But this was simply beyond Foucault’s technical horizon, of course, and therefore the metaphor doesn’t fit today.

What I do find enduringly valuable are certain ideas about the organisation of politics, as they appear in the lecture ‘What is Critique?’. Roughly: we certainly must be governed, but not excessively so. That ‘not too much’ is somehow very important. Or likewise the essay already mentioned, ‘Is it useless to stand up?’, his conclusions from the Iranian Revolution: the recognition that people are excluded. That does not mean that they speak the truth, but we must listen to them, because their voices form part of reality. Those are things I find fundamental still, yes. The technologies of the self is not my favourite topic, let us say.

CJLPA: And yet Discipline and Punish also contains the famous concept of the ‘history of the present’—that programme, if I am not mistaken, which is also at work in your own work.

PS: Yes, the idea that as a historian one does not imagine oneself to be writing origin stories and evolutionary progressions towards something better, higher, and pre-given, but rather that one practices genealogical deep-drilling as a historian based on the issues and stakes emanating from the contemporary. Yes, that is fundamental, it has to remain.

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Mats Inauen is a historian whose research interests include poststructuralist thought, anthropology, the history of science, and twentieth-century intellectual history. He holds a BA in Politics and Modern History from the University of Zürich and an MA in Political Theory from Goethe University Frankfurt, which included an Erasmus semester at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. At the University of Cambridge, he is pursuing a PhD examining the relationship between philosophy and anthropology in 1980s France.