Mark Olssen is one of the leading social scientists writing in the world today. Inspired by the writings of Michel Foucault, Olssen’s writing traverses philosophy, politics, education, and epistemology. This book comprises a selection of his papers published in academic journals and books over thirty-five years.

This book comprises a series of staged confrontations between the thought of Michel Foucault and a cast of other figures in European and Anglophone political philosophy, including Marx, Lenin, Althusser, Deleuze, Rorty, Honneth, and Geuss. Focusing on the status of normativity in their thought, Mark G. E. Kelly explains how Foucault's position in relation to political theory is different, and, over the course of the book, describes a distinctive Foucauldian stance in political thought that is maximally anti-normative, anti-theoretical, and anti-political. For Foucault aims to undermine attempts to discern the appropriate form of political action, instead putting forward a rigorously critical program for a political theory that lacks any moralizing or totalizing dimension, and serves only to side with resistance against power, and never with power itself. Looking at attempts to think radically about politics from Marx to the present day, Kelly traces a novel history of political thought as a trend of attempts to overcome the constraints of normativity, theoreticism, and subordination to public policy. He concludes by assessing and rejecting recent attempts to reclaim Foucault for a form of normative politics by associating him with neoliberalism.

A Companion to Foucault comprises a collection of essays from established and emerging scholars that represent the most extensive treatment of French philosopher Michel Foucault’s works currently available. Comprises a comprehensive collection of authors and topics, with both established and emerging scholars represented Includes chapters that survey Foucault’s major works and others that approach his work from a range of thematic angles Engages extensively with Foucault's recently published lecture courses from the Collège de France Contains the first translation of the extensive ‘Chronology’ of Foucault’s life and works written by Foucault’s life-partner Daniel Defert Includes a bibliography of Foucault’s shorter works in English, cross-referenced to the standard French edition Dits et Ecrits

In popularizing the term ‘speaking truth to power’, now widely used throughout the world, Michel Foucault established the basis upon which a new ethics can be constructed. This is the thesis that Mark Olssen advances in Constructing Foucault’s ethics. Olssen not only ‘speaks truth’ to existing moral and ethical theories that have dominated western philosophy since Plato, but also shows how, by using Foucault’s insights, an alternative ethical and moral theory can be established that both avoids the pitfalls of postmodern relativism and simultaneously grounds ethical, moral, and political discourse for the present age. Taking the late ‘ethical turn’ in the philosopher’s thought as its starting point, this ambitious study seeks to construct an ethics beyond anything Foucault ever attempted while remaining consistent with his core postulates. In doing so it advances the concept of ‘life continuance’, which expresses a normative orientation to the future in terms of the quest for survival and well-being, giving rise to irreducible normative values as part of the discursive order of events. This approach is explored in contrast with a range of other, established systems, from the Kantian to the Marxist to contract ethics and utilitarianism.

Foucault's challenging view of power and knowledge as the basis for interpreting the international system forms the central themes of this book. As the application of international law expands and develops this book considers how Foucault's approach may create a viable framework that is not beset by ontological issues. With International law essentially stuck within an older framework of outmoded statist approaches, and overly broad understanding of the significance of external actors such as international organizations; current interpretations are either rooted in a narrow attempt to demonstrate a functioning normative structure or interpret developments as reflective of some emerging and somewhat unwieldy ethical order. This book therefore aims to ameliorate the approaches of a number of different 'schools' within the disciplines of international law and international relations, without being wedded to a single concept. Current scholarship in international law tends to favour an unresolved critique, a utopian vision, or to refer to other disciplines like international relations without fully explaining the significance or importance of taking such a step. This book analyses a variety of problems and issues that have surfaced within the international system and provides a framework for consideration of these issues, with a view towards accounting for ongoing developments in the international arena.

Michel Foucault's death in 1984 coincided with the fading away of the hopes for social transformation that characterized the postwar period. In the decades following his death, neoliberalism has triumphed and attacks on social rights have become increasingly bold. If Foucault was not a direct witness of these years, his work on neoliberalism is nonetheless prescient: the question of liberalism occupies an important place in his last works. Since his death, Foucault's conceptual apparatus has acquired a central, even dominant position for a substantial segment of the world's intellectual left. However, as the contributions to this volume demonstrate, Foucault's attitude towards neoliberalism was at least equivocal. Far from leading an intellectual struggle against free market orthodoxy, Foucault seems in many ways to endorse it. How is one to understand his radical critique of the welfare state, understood as an instrument of biopower? Or his support for the pandering anti-Marxism of the so-called new philosophers? Is it possible that Foucault was seduced by neoliberalism? This question is not merely of biographical interest: it forces us to confront more generally the mutations of the left since May 1968, the disillusionment of the years that followed and the profound transformations in the French intellectual field over the past thirty years. To understand the 1980s and the neoliberal triumph is to explore the most ambiguous corners of the intellectual left through one of its most important figures.

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 Rancière.