Foucault on Law

Stanford Law Review, 1996

Journal of Law and Society, 2006

Foucault Studies, 2019

Professor Jacopo Martire's book, A Foucauldian Interpretation of Modern Law. From Sovereignty to Normalisation and Beyond, deserves careful attention. The book represents the author's project of making Foucault's thought compatible with modern legal theory. Dr. Martire (from the University of Bristol) tries to put together and reconcile two seemingly incompatible approaches to understanding the workings of modern society. Jürgen Habermas's forceful critique of Foucault still looms large. Other traditional interpretations of Foucault's work have emphasized "the expulsion thesis," that is, the fact that Foucault, relying too much on discipline and governmentality, effectively expelled law from the locus of power and excessively downplayed the role of law in our times. Martire's project is a recent attempt at reconciling Foucault and legal theory. The author devotes some attention to previous efforts, from Rose & Valverde to Golder & Fitzpatrick (pp. 9-21), and highlights what he sees as the shortcomings of such efforts. Martire's project forcefully contributes to overcoming such interpretations with a powerful work where he operates a logical and genealogical alignment of Foucault and modern law by postulating at the outset that power and freedom are "co-extensive" rather than opposite. This Foucauldian insight (originating in Nietzsche) is one of the core ideas of the book and one of the keys to understanding this book's project. Consequently, Martire postulates that "law and modern (biopolitical) regimes of power are not to be seen as incompatible or heterogeneous" […] "they both evolved isomorphically as normalizing technologies of government of the living, and exist in a relationship of co-production: law creates the universal subject of rights, who is reflected in the normal subject of biopolitical regimes, and viceversa" (p. 3). In order to avoid a characterization of the legal field that would fall prey to the expulsion thesis, Martire proposes to approach Foucault's theoretical toolbox by highlighting the complex intertwining of power, truth, knowledge, subjectivity and freedom. In Foucault, these terms are not "concepts" that can be neatly defined and separated from one another but rather overlapping fields (my term, not Martire's) in an epistemological sense.

Annual Review of Law and Social Science

Leiden Journal of International Law, 2012

This symposium concerns the utility of the work of the French philosopher and social theorist, Michel Foucault (1926–84), for international law as an academic discipline. It almost goes without saying that there are several different ways to approach this question of utility. We want to introduce the symposium by sketching just a few of the different avenues by which one could approach the question of Foucault's utility for theorizing international law. One dominant understanding within the extant legal literature on Foucault is essentially to ask after his own legal-theoretical credentials. This approach is based on the seemingly straightforward and widely shared presupposition that if his ‘work offers no plausible account of law, why should legal scholars take him seriously? If we seek to bring Foucault into law, must we not first seek to bring law into Foucault?’1 Here, a precondition to being taken seriously within the discourse of law is precisely the plausibility of one&#3...

Oriented around the theme of a ‘politics of philosophy’, this book tracks the phases in which Foucault’s genealogy of power, law, and subjectivity was reorganized during the 14 years of his teaching at the College de France, as his focus shifted from sovereignty to governance. This theme, Sandro Chignola argues here, is the key to understanding four features of Foucault’s work over this period. First, it foregrounds its immediate political character. Second, it demonstrates that Foucault’s "Greek trip" also aims at a politics of the subject that is able to face the processes of the governmentalization of power. Third, it makes clear that the idea of the "government of the self" is – drawing on an ethics of intellectual responsibility that is Weberian in origin – an answer to the processes that, within neoliberal governance, produce the subject as an individual (as a consumer, a market agent, an entrepreneur, and so on). Fourth, the theme of a ‘politics of philosophy’ implies that Foucault’s research was never simply scholarly or neutral; but rather was characterized by a specific political position. Against recent interpretations that risk turning Foucault into a scholar, here then Foucault is re-presented as a key figure for jurisprudential and political-philosophical research.

Foucault Studies, 2010