Foucault and the Politics of Rights. By Ben Golder. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. 246 pp. $24.95 cloth.

Abstract

Foucault and Politics of Rights. By Ben Golder. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. 246 pp. $24.95 cloth.Nowadays, liberal political contexts revel claims to universal rights. Their discourses tend to frame latter as bulwarks of individual freedom, preventing arbitrary coercion, detention, torture and worse. Whiggish historical accounts cast as inevitable outcomes of social progress stretching back to ancient Greece though Enlightenment to mid-20th century declarations. But as Moyn (2012: 3) notes, current understandings of depart significantly from past iterations; they emerged, in 1970s seemingly from nowhere. Other critics (Brown, Butler, Ranciere) echo contingency here implied, reframing debates to focus on how might explicitly constrain rulers.Referencing these critics, Golder explores Foucault's evocations of his later analyses of political struggles, aiming to unearth a politics of rights that is anti-foundationalist, non- anthropologically grounded and tactically oriented towards intervening into existing formations of law, state and (3). This reading clearly contests Wolin's and Paras' claim that Foucault's later foray into (ethics and subjects) contradicts his past work by belatedly appealing to neo-humanist foundations. Instead, Golder argues that Foucault merely shifted emphasis his later writing, and continued genres of critique animating his earlier historical studies of power (sovereignty, discipline and biopolitics), and indeed archeological and genealogical methodologies.But what sort of critique did Foucaul tembrace? Golderextractsa historically-situated set of critical practices that disassembled limits so as to open, the contingent present to an undetermined future (32). Thus Foucault's approach to critique did not judge contexts against transcendental yardsticks; it called for local acts that refuse limits and so affirm alternative futures. It unhinges and displaces historical limits but always from within. Golder refers to Foucault's discussions on pastoral power to show how his counter-conduct concept refined ideas about resistance while simultaneously framing a critique that, tries to isolate and mobilize particular possibilities for change and contestation disclosed within and by those practices themselves (51). Here one detects a Nietzschean affirmation of what could be, an excavation rather than a pure rejection. In other words, this kind of critique exposes, human possibilities that are forgotten when contingent social and political formations come to be naturalized and rendered commonsensical (58). It embraces a hidden margin of freedom which enables subjects to exist otherwise than they presently do (58).Foucault's critique of should thus be understood a particular way. Rather than a blanket rejection, he approached within liberal political arenas as ordnances that may be used to further particular struggles. For instance, his discussions of Iranian revolution, Polish Solidarity Movement, and piracy summoned to place limits on dangerous forms of government. But there is no inevitability here, because Foucault recognized that are ambivalent counter-conduct sense that they can be used both to govern subjects and simultaneously to contest particular governing practices. In many ways, this approach echoed his nominal approach to power relations-a right (power) comes into play only through its alwayscontestable invocation (exercise). …