Abstract

Recent literature has claimed that Michel Foucault’s late work amounts to a rejection of politics and an embracing of a neoliberal logic and an individualizing ethics. This thesis is situated in a response to this recent literature which reads in Foucault’s late work several political commitments and avenues for investigation that remained unfinished. Specifically, this thesis examines two understandings of politics in the work of Foucault: politics as civil war and politics as singular thought. The introduction situates this thesis’s content in the context of the crisis of Marxism in the 1960s through to the 1980s, as Marxist conceptions and practices of politics began to meet their limits. The first chapter of this thesis traces the development of an initial concept of politics as civil war in Foucault’s work over the course of several years utilizing a method of reading from Étienne Balibar’s examination of the same concept in the work of Karl Marx. The second chapter of this thesis provides a comparative reading of the work of Sylvain Lazarus and the later work of Michel Foucault to illuminate their differing concepts of singularity and the irreducibility of politics. Reading Lazarus’s critique of Foucault’s conception of singularity presented in The Order of Things and an exchange between Foucault and a group known as the Cercle d’Épistémologie points the way to Foucault’s late work on spirituality and the transformable subject and a new theory of politics as singular thought founded on a political spirituality and a rupture of the everyday.