Foucault Beyond Foucault Poer and Its Intensifications Since 1984 [Paperback]

InFoucault Beyond FoucaultJeffrey Nealon argues that critics have too hastily abandoned Foucault's mid-career reflections on power, and offers a revisionist reading of the philosopher's middle and later works. Retracing power's intensification in Foucault, Nealon argues that forms of political power remain central to Foucault's concerns. He allows us to reread Foucault's own conceptual itinerary and, more importantly, to think about how we might respond to the mutations of power that have taken place since the philosopher's death in 1984. In this, the book stages an overdue encounter between Foucault and post-Marxist economic history. Foucault Beyond Foucaultis the first major renovation of the critical representation of Foucault's system in the past twenty years. Jeffrey Nealon successfully challenges the critical prejudices and assumptions that have defined Foucault's legacy, particularly in the North American academy, and stakes out new terrain by productively synthesizing recent developments in political and economic theory with Foucault's own analysis of power and subjectivity in the age of bio-power. In fact, this is the first book that manages to successfully explain the concept itself, a concept everyone is talking about, though no one seems to understand. Jeffrey T. Nealon is Professor of English at Penn State University. He is the author ofDouble Reading: Postmodernism after Deconstruction(1993),Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity(1998), andThe Theory Toolbox(2003).This book retraces power's intensification in Foucault in ways that both allow us to reread Foucault's own conceptual itinerary and, more importantly, to think about how we might respond to the mutations of power that that have taken place since his death in 1984. In his slim volume on Foucault, [Nealon] has offered a fascinating interpretation of Foucault's work, one that brings to light previous neglected elements of his thought. Althl“%