Foucault and the Politics of Rights [Paperback]

This book focuses on Michel Foucault's late work on rights in order to address broader questions about the politics of rights in the contemporary era. As several commentators have observed, something quite remarkable happens in this late work. In his early career, Foucault had been a great critic of the liberal discourse of rights. Suddenly, from about 1976 onward, he makes increasing appeals to rights in his philosophical writings, political statements, interviews, and journalism. He not only defends their importance; he argues for rights new and as-yet-unrecognized. Does Foucault simply revise his former positions and endorse a liberal politics of rights? Ben Golder proposes an answer to this puzzle, which is that Foucault approaches rights in a spirit of creative and critical appropriation. He uses rights strategically for a range of political purposes that cannot be reduced to a simple endorsement of political liberalism. Golder develops this interpretation of Foucault's work while analyzing its shortcomings and relating it to the approaches taken by a series of current thinkers also engaged in considering the place of rights in contemporary politics, including Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Jacques Ranci?re. Ben Golder offers an invigorating new political defense of rights grounded in the works of Michel Foucault...this book offers a revitalized reading of Foucault's work in relation to rights and secondary Foucauldian scholars more generally.Foucault and the Politics of Rightsis a meaningful contribution for both advocates and critics of Foucault alike due to its resistance to resort to a normative (liberal) definition of rights while still advocating that rights do something, and, accordingly, should not be overlooked by anyone in conversation with rights, politics and power. I really enjoyed this book. To the Foucault scholar, it presents a series of close readings of late texts that are generous, penetrating, and persuasive. To the critical lawyerlƒ°