Foucault 1979 CdF, Chapter 2, 17 January 1979

Political economy is also a concern of Foucault’s in The Order of Things. However, it is here where he defines it fully in its emergence. He’s historicizing the Marxists, i.e., examining political economy as an object that has emerged. Further, he’s articulating the conditions of the particular regime of veridiction that can give rise to the ability to talk about political economy. Also interesting that he’s talking about liberals rather than Marx. Why? B/c dialectical logic is simplistic (42), which can be construed as an implicit criticism of Marxist thought. (Note: almost word for word the same description that Deleuze and Guattari give of their philosophy of history in 1000 Plateaus.)

May be avoiding a Marxist formulation of political economy because of its reliance upon notions of desire/repression for its explanation of historical change. Rather, the logic remains heterogenous and spatial rather than temporal, or, rather, a spatialization of temporality. Yet, at the same time, he’s still talking about history and how the present came to be, so temporality must be entailed in Foucault’s analyses. Yet, there is no Aufhebung in Foucault’s philosophy of history; in other words, there is no historical necessity in the description of historical change. Also, as he mentions in Security, Territory, and Population, because we cannot determine the strategies for intervention based upon determinate negation. The strategies for change must arise out of the contingent circumstances in which we find ourselves; Foucault’s imperative is non-paradoxical as is the Marxist imperative for historical change: we can find no reason to rise to arms if history is necessarily unfolding in a process of determinate negation. This is scary: a Foucaultian philosophy of history cannot guarantee that capitalism will ever be reformed, etc.

In addition, we must recognize that he’s spending most of his time tracing the utilitarian strand of the development of political practice (i.e., radical), rather than the contractarian (i.e., revolutionary or rights-based). It may be the case that Foucault privileges the ‘radical’ strand as a description of practice, whereas ‘revolutionary’ language is what we continue to use to justify our political practice.

Finally, leaving Marx off of the table may be justifiable because liberalism is the practice that defines 20th c. political life. If we analyze the way that the present regime has stabilized itself, we may begin to understand how we might resist in the present; this can be distinguished from culling descriptions of resistances in the past and trying to remotivate those for our present strategic political purposes. This can be further distinguished from thinkers like Deleuze and Badiou, who theorize the novel and contingent event that is outside of the present, an event which can rupture contemporary practice and provide novel means for political struggle.

Jurisdiction and veridiction (34). Regimes of veridiction: regimes of truth and falsity. Regimes of jurisdiction: regimes of external, axiomatic, deductive means of limitation on sovereign power. These are objects of analysis by which we might map heterogenous assemblages. Veridiction is compared to autolimitation, or internal limitation of government (or raison d’Etat), whereas jurisdiction is compared to law, or the external limitation of government. Another way of stating this same distinction is between an axiomatic, deductive approach (jurisdiction) versus an empirical, inductive approach (veridiction). Under the conditions introduced with the advent of political economy, there is no longer an ‘outside,’ so to speak. There is as further distinction among regimes of veridication, that which operates under disciplinary power and that which operates under biopower.