ABSTRACT
This article rethinks the concept of the political from a posthumanist rather than a humanist vantage point. More specifically, it engages in an extended discussion of Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos and its claims regarding the relationship between neoliberalism and the economic and political spheres, as exemplified in Michel Foucault’s lectures, The Birth of Biopolitics. While sympathetic with Brown’s views on the deleterious effects of neoliberalism, it takes issue with her critique of Foucault’s “notorious late-1970s antagonism to Marxism” and its effects on his understanding of the relationship between the political and the economic, as reflected in the phenomenon of neoliberalism. This article argues instead that Foucault’s work in The Birth of Biopolitics does indeed have an important genealogical relationship to Marxism, but it is not the humanist Marxism that frames Brown’s analysis. What motivates Foucault’s interest in neoliberalism is not his insufficiently Marxist understanding of the relationship between the economic and the political, but rather his larger project of exploring a theory of social complexity in which the economic does not and cannot unilaterally steer the other social systems, including the political. This understanding is utterly consonant with Foucault’s larger discussion of the qualitative shift from disciplinarity to governmentality, and evinces a genealogical through-line from Althusser’s analysis of structural causality to Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics, to Luhmann’s social systems theory—one that fundamentally changes how we must think the concept of the political within a new understanding of social complexity.
