Genealogy Beyond Critique: Foucault’s Discipline and Punish as Coalitional Worldmaking

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221103296
• Published date: 01 April 2023
• Date: 01 April 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221103296

Political Theory

2023, Vol. 51(2) 331 –354

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917221103296

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Article

Genealogy Beyond

Critique: Foucault’s

Discipline and Punish as

Coalitional Worldmaking

Luke Ilott1

Abstract

Michel Foucault was an energetic activist, yet his bleak depiction of totalizing

power and his refusal to make normative claims have led many to judge that

Discipline and Punish (1975) did not sustain a positive political project. This

article offers a new, contextualist account of Foucault’s political purposes by

reading Discipline and Punish as a tool for coalition building through historical

worldmaking. Addressing the division and marginalization of movements

on France’s “alternative left” like feminism and gay liberation, Foucault

wove together their differentiated concerns into a shared historical world.

His apparently demoralizing identification of the same forms of power

everywhere in fact revealed new possibilities for alliance. Focusing on

Foucault’s unifying historical narratives reveals a positive project beyond

the negative, denaturalizing “critique of power” we usually associate with

his political thought. Foucault’s coalitional work of worldmaking may offer a

model for genealogical political theory today.

Keywords

Foucault, genealogy, history, critique, coalition

1University of Cambridge Christ’s College, Cambridge, UK

Corresponding Author:

Luke Ilott, University of Cambridge Christ’s College, St Andrew’s Street, UK.

Email: lai23@cam.ac.uk

1103296PTXXXX10.1177/00905917221103296Political TheoryIlott

research-article2022

332 Political Theory 51(2)

In the severe vision of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, the school

and the hospital come to resemble prisons: sites where “disciplinary power”

subjugates individuals and takes hold of their most minute motions (Foucault

[1975] 1995, 228). For many readers, power has seemed inescapable, so

“omnipresent” that “there could be no resistance” (Dosse 1998, 251).

Moreover, by foregoing normative commitments in his Nietzschean “genea-

logical” histories, Foucault denied himself the tools to explicitly criticize the

status quo or justify the pursuit of alternatives. He described power in great

historical detail without passing judgment on its legitimacy. Various promi-

nent critics have judged that the ultimate consequence of his thought is

“political quietism,” supplying “a world-historical alibi for the sense of pas-

sivity and helplessness that gripped so many of us in the 1970s” (Said 1983,

245; Berman 1988, 35).

Yet we know that Foucault was anything but passive. In the early 1970s, he

was more active in radical politics than at any other time in his life. He helped

organize a network of committees campaigning over prisons, housing, and

health, and suffered injuries in frequent clashes with police (Macey 2019,

257–322). In a 1975 interview, he declared that “one must bring as much gai-

ety, lucidity and doggedness to the fight as possible. . . . Writing only interests

me insofar as it is incorporated into the reality of a combat, in the form of an

instrument, a tactic, an illumination. I would like my books to be a kind of

scalpel, Molotov cocktails or undermining tunnels, and for them to burn up

after use like fireworks” (Foucault [1975] 2001, 1593). There is an apparent

mismatch between the energy of Foucault’s activism and the demobilizing

implications of his books. If he was both “activist” and “philosopher,”

Rancière (2013, 386) observes, “there is a serious uncertainty in understand-

ing the relation between the one and the other.” By foregrounding Foucault’s

construction of unifying historical narratives, this article contributes a new

way to understand the relation between the author and the activist.

The possibility of a mobilizing Foucauldian politics is often seen as being

hindered by Foucault’s refusal to make normative judgments. Most readers

have gauged that Discipline and Punish is meant to galvanize us to resist

“normalizing” mechanisms of disciplinary power—but why? “Only with the

introduction of normative notions,” argues Fraser (1989, 29), “could he begin

to tell us what is wrong with the modern power/knowledge regime and why

we ought to oppose it.” Although scholars including Allen (2010) and

Lorenzini (2020) have found normative justifications for resistance in

Foucault’s genealogies, this seems to stray from his antinormative ambition