Mark G. E. Kelly

In this response, while agreeing with Balibar’s substantive positive position, I take issue with the way he situates it. Specifically, he casts it as a via negativa in relation to all previously existing thought. I suggest that it would be more accurate to say he is positioning the notion of the transindividual as a via media between two alleged extremes, individualism and organicism. I argue that the idea that there is an opposite and equal error to individualism is mistaken, and that in actuality Balibar’s concept of the transindividual is not a radical departure from a long history of anti-individualism.

This article deals with the relationship between the thought of Michel Foucault and that of Axel Honneth, arguing in favour of the former against the latter. I begin by considering Honneth’s early engagement in The Critique of Power with Foucault’s thought. I rebut Honneth’s criticisms of Foucault here as a misreading, one which prevents Honneth from coming to grips with Foucault’s position and hence the challenge that it poses to Honneth’s project. I then move on to offer a Foucauldian critique of Honneth’s own position, arguing for a Foucauldian alternative to Critical Theory.

ExcerptAt the beginning of 2025, Donald Trump and the GOP resumed control over state institutions that had been generally hostile to them, and indeed had worked to undermine and unseat the previous Trump administration. Given the role played by many within the state apparatus in opposing Trump, persecuting his supporters, and trying to jail him, dealing with this must appear to the new government as an urgent political necessity. However, this situation poses an immediate conundrum: to what extent can these institutions be made politically neutral or even turned into pro-Republican organs, and to what extent is it desirable or necessary to dismantle them?

ExcerptIn this essay, I discuss the role of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) discourse and policy in relation to contemporary higher education, principally with reference to the situation in the United States. I will argue that this discourse has raised significant challenges for the pursuit of truth in the university, both by determining a priori the answers to important questions and by feeding into an increasing subordination of truth to other concerns in the functioning of the university. In making this argument, I consciously echo David Pan’s recent commentary in this journal on the way DEI in higher education is undermining liberal democracy. I will argue, however, that DEI is imbricated in our society far more deeply than Pan’s analysis allows, with a vital role as the schema used paradoxically to justify increasing economic inequality. The appropriate response to the subordination of truth to DEI then, on my account, is to leverage truth to attack DEI by exposing its insidious and self-occluding social function.

ExcerptIn my assessment, the first Trump presidency was always something of a non-event: pace Trump’s rhetorical bloviation—which has provoked almost a decade of histrionics about fascism that have become an article of faith for the urbane left—his presidency did not represent any distinctive departure from American politics as usual,1 with the partial exception of a relatively dovish foreign policy that saw no new wars begun during his tenure. COVID-19 constituted an exceptional interlude but was hardly Trump’s doing, and his administration’s response to it (despite some contradictory statements from the man himself) was ultimately mainstream.

ExcerptAs I noted in Telos 205, in a narrow election result such as the 2020 one, almost any factor that affected the election could reasonably be deemed decisive.1 The 2024 result is no different: inasmuch as Trump’s victory rested on his ability to carry seven key states, it demonstrates nothing so much as the great power of marginal forces in American politics today. The consternation of so many on the left—how could this happen?— reflects a lack of awareness of the precariousness of their victory in 2020. That had been secured through overwhelming dominance over the public sphere, including a near-stranglehold on the media, both legacy and social, and a far larger fiduciary base enabling far higher campaign spending with more operatives. Little has changed in this regard in 2024 either, but there has been a marginal change in the media landscape, to which Trump’s victory can in my view be attributed. There are other factors that I think were equally decisive inasmuch as I think Trump would not have won without these: one would be Trump’s choice of J. D. Vance as his vice president and Vance’s subsequent commanding media performances; another would be Trump’s own appearances on podcasts; still another would be the Harris campaign’s contrasting strategy, including celebrity endorsements; another would be the choice, apparently by Joe Biden, of Harris as replacement candidate, after a catastrophic failure by the DNC to manage Biden’s decline with an open primary race. However, without Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, I suspect none of these other factors would have been able to influence the race decisively, insofar as such things can only influence the public to the extent and in the manner that the media allow the public to be exposed to them.

ExcerptIn this essay, I analyze the modern institution of liberal democracy in the context of the historical development of “biopolitics,” as conceptualized seminally by Michel Foucault in the mid-1970s. I will argue that the principal virtue of liberal democracy is its social stability, and that the principal danger to it—and by extension the stability of Western societies—is its underlying tendency toward “autoimmunity,” as classically theorized by Jacques Derrida, which is to say, toward destroying itself in an attempt to safeguard itself against misidentified threats.

ExcerptIn 2021, in the pages of this journal, I contended that a coalition of interests in the United States had coalesced in opposition to the presidency of Donald Trump and duly taken power through the vehicle of Joe Biden.1 This coalition includes the Democratic Party, corporate elites, the media, academia, and—the subject of the present article—the national security (natsec) state. In that earlier piece, I focused on particular components of this coalition: legacy and social media. I went on in a subsequent Telos piece to examine another of its elements: the academy.2 These fractions all appear, however, to be relatively minor players. While I argue that the legacy media have staged a counterrevolution to seize back control of the public sphere, this exhausts their parochial, pecuniary agenda; beyond this, they are simply part of a wider activist liberal cause. Contemporary liberal activism is in turn ideologically rooted in ideas propagated by sectors of the academy and hegemonic within it, but this has not, on my analysis, empowered the academy so much as the forces that make it increasingly redundant.

In this article, I consider the interoperation of twin contemporary governmental imperatives, fostering economic growth and ensuring biopolitical security, in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. At a theoretical level, I thereby consider the question of the applicability of a Marxist analysis vis-à-vis a Foucauldian one in understanding state responses to the pandemic. Despite the apparent prioritization of preserving life over economic activity by governments around the world in this context, I will argue that the basic problem that COVID-19 posed for the state was one of sheer unknowability and that the fundamental motive for the governmental response was a concern for security in Foucault’s sense, that is, ensuring a baseline predictability in the social field, upon which economic activity, like myriad other social activity, is premised. I argue that this drive for security motivated states to appeal to medical experts to determine the direction of their response, who in turn applied a default model of quarantine. While we cannot be certain that the medically-guided response was optimal in terms either of health outcomes or economically, I argue it served its essential purpose by providing a structured framework for social action in the face of the unknown. While this is vital for the maintenance of the basic coordinates of capitalist society, I argue it nonetheless cannot entirely be explained simply by an appeal to Marxist categories and instead requires Foucault’s insights into the medicalization of society.

IntroductionAs we near the semicentennial of the 1976 publication of the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, for all its influence in the interim, this work remains today extraordinarily challenging in relation to our sexual mores. In this article, I will attempt to reapply its insights to analyze contemporary trends in sexuality and gender. Questions that I will consider include the continuing applicability of Foucault’s analyses, to what extent and how they may need to be revised in light of historical developments, and what reading Foucault can tell us about our contemporary conjuncture. I will argue that volume 1 of The History of Sexuality remains highly relevant in this regard, although I will also indicate some ways in which things have moved on since Foucault’s time, and thus in which his thesis might be modified. Despite Foucault having apparently been extremely influential on academic thinking about sex, we seem nonetheless to have become or remained “other Victorians,” perversely mimicking the nineteenth-century sexology that Foucault pilloried. I will argue that we have continued to believe exactly the great myths about sex that Foucault sought to dispense with: namely, that sexuality has primarily been shaped by historic “repression,” that sexuality needs to be “liberated” from this repression, and that there is a “truth of sex” that is on the side of freedom. These beliefs have all mutated, however, to the extent that questions of sex (like many other social questions) are increasingly oriented around individual identities and the supposed sovereignty of the individual to determine their own truth.

Etienne Balibar, one of the foremost living French philosophers, builds on his landmark work 'Spinoza and Politics' with this exploration of Spinoza's ontology. Balibar situates Spinoza in relation to the major figures of Marx and Freud as a precursor to the more recent French thinker Gilbert Simondon's concept of the transindividual. Presenting a crucial development in his thought, Balibar takes the concept of transindividuality beyond Spinoza to show it at work at both the individual and the collective level.

A step-by-step guide to Foucault's History of Sexuality Volume I, The Will to KnowledgeIn the first volume of his History of Sexuality, The Will to Knowledge, Foucault weaves together the most influential theoretical account of sexuality since Freud. Mark Kelly systematically unpacks the intricacies of Foucault's dense and sometimes confusing exposition, in a straightforward way, putting it in its historical and theoretical context.This is both a guide for the reader new to the text and one that offers new insights to those already familiar with Foucault's work.

In this article I survey Foucault’s remarks on norms and normalisation from across his oeuvre, with a view to reconstructing his genealogy of norms, leaning at points – following Foucault himself – on Georges Canguilhem’s seminal work on the topic. I also survey in tandem the existing secondary scholarship on this question, maintaining – pace other schol-ars – that Foucault’s position has not been adequately explicated despite sophisticated attempts. I argue that Foucault’s idiosyncratic conception of the norm, overlooked or mis-understood by other readers, is consistently of an ideal model guiding human action in any particular sphere. This concept is a relatively modern one that may be contrasted to the older form of restricting human behaviour according to binary discriminations that may be called ‘laws’ or ‘rules’. Foucault traces the form of the norm specifically to medieval pro-cesses for dealing with the plague, which later become highly generalised and diffused to produce a normalising society. I conclude with a more speculative discussion of how this society of the norm continues to utilise binarising rules, arguing that norms are typically used in order to ground binarising condemnations of abnormal cases, but that the nebu-lousness of norms ultimately allows any particular case to be condemned by such stand-ards.

In this article, I re-examine the relationship between the thoughts of contemporaneous and associated late twentieth-century French philosophers Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, through the prism of the notion of the problem. I discuss the philology of the use of the noun “problematic” in French philosophy in relation to Foucault and Althusser’s use of it, concluding that while Althusser makes this a term of art in his thought, Foucault does not make any particular use of this concept. I nonetheless consider the possibility of the existence of a similar notion under a different name, episteme, in Foucault’s thought, but conclude that this is a distinct notion from Althusser’s “problematic.” I then consider Foucault’s later, idiosyncratic notion of problematization and its possible relation to Althusser’s conceptual framework. I conclude that, despite divergent vocabularies, Althusser and Foucault do have a common problematic and approach to problematization, though Foucault also problematizes aspects of Althusser’s problematic, effectively taking problematization a step further.

This paper critically examines the relation between problems and the formation and development of concepts in Bergson’s work, as well as in Bachelard, Canguilhem and Deleuze. Building on work by Elie During, I argue that it is not only Bergson but also Deleuze who shares with the French epistemological tradition an “anti-positivist” conception of concept formation, founded upon the posing and solving of novel problems as opposed to the acquisition and verification of empirical facts. Contrary to During, however, I argue that it is not Bergson but Deleuze who furnishes us with an “anti-positivist” conception of problems that is adequate to this anti-positivist conception of concept formation. Deleuze’s anti-positivist view of problems holds, firstly, that genuine problems require the creation of novel terms in which to state and solve them. He shares this view with Bergson, Bachelard and Canguilhem. Secondly, however, Deleuze holds that a problem’s “truth” is not to be evaluated with reference to its eventual solutions, nor with reference to some privileged and contentful experience of reality, but is rather a matter of its purely intrinsic productivity.