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Presents a partisan model of genealogy by reinterpreting Foucault in the context of anti-prison struggles and his engagement with Marxism.
Michel Foucault has exerted enormous influence on our understanding of power and penal systems, above all with his work Discipline and Punish. However, the latter is often read as a pessimistic text that resigns us to accepting the unshakeable hold of power and the futility of resistance. Eli B. Lichtenstein challenges such pessimism by reconstructing the radical critique of penal power that Foucault developed prior to the publication of Discipline and Punish. He argues that in the early 1970s, Foucault employed a distinct genealogical method designed to further struggles against penal systems, and that he expanded critiques of repression and the prison to encompass broader social structures. This book also reconsiders Foucault's much-debated relationship to Marxism. It argues that Foucault extensively engaged Marxist theory in order to more adequately theorize the links between capitalism and other modes of domination. Through its major reinterpretation of Foucault's political thought, Partisan Genealogy offers a timely examination of the capitalist foundations of penal power and explains how genealogy crafts tools for use in the urgent struggles of the present.
"Eli Lichtenstein's wonderful book shows that Michel Foucault's genealogy is the method of a materialist philosophy bound up with political struggles. At a time when genealogy has garnered wider attention but is often stripped of its critical punch, this important intervention is required reading far beyond Foucault scholarship." — Frieder Vogelman, University of Freiburg
Eli B. Lichtenstein is a philosopher and writer based in London.