Tivadar Vervoort

This paper explores the differences and similarities between Foucault’s genealogical method and feminist standpoint theories. Both approaches rely on the marginalized position of subjugated knowledges to challenge dominant regimes of power. However, standpoint theory and Foucauldian genealogical critique engage with the interrelatedness of power, knowledge, and resistance on a different level. Standpoint theories take a situated, first-person perspective to further knowledge claims which are based on situated knowledge claims. Foucauldian genealogy, on the other hand, delves into subjugated knowledge claims from an outsider or third-person perspective, mobilizing subjugated forms of knowledge to genealogically critique dominant regimes of power-knowledge. Despite this difference, this paper suggests that both approaches are invested in problematizing dominant regimes of power-knowledge by looking at subversive and marginalized knowledge practices that contest dominant regimes of power and knowledge.

This interview was conducted in the Summer of 2024 as part of a publishing project about surplus populations and their modes of resistance for the Flemish literary journal nY. Lietje Bauwens and Tivadar Vervoort interviewed Daniel Loick for the occasion of his newest book, Die Überlegenheit der Unterlegenen (Suhrkamp 2024), which discusses a standpoint-theoretical approach to the politics of counter-communities—marginalized social groups that develop better forms of life than those typical of hegemonic social formations.

In his introduction to Canguilhem’s Le normal et le pathologique, Michel Foucault claims that the “question of Enlightenment” has been taken up differently in the German and French philosophical traditions. Nevertheless, Foucault signals a “correspondence” between the works of Georg Lukács and the Frankfurt School, on the one hand, and the French epistemologists (including himself), on the other. In this article, I deepen this correspondence by assessing Foucault’s and Lukács’s respective relations to the neo-Kantian problem of the form and content of knowledge. In theorizing the problem of reification, Lukács mobilizes Emil Lask’s understanding of the concept “form of objectivity.” He starts from Lask’s unification of the form and content of knowledge by suggesting that the commodity form emerges as the form of objectivity that constitutes both objects and subjects of knowledge in capitalist societies. I show that Foucault’s use of the notions episteme, historical a priori, and regime of truth shares the neo-Kantian concern with of the content of knowledge. By arguing that Foucault’s critique of the philosophical anthropology underlying Marxism does not apply to Lukács’s neo-Kantianism, I make room for considering both of their philosophical strategies as a “critique of social forms.”

ABSTRACT Michel Foucault’s work has immensely enriched the way critical social theorists understand power. Beyond his work on disciplinary normalisation, Foucault’s genealogy of the modern state has discussed governmental power as the conduct of conduct of subjects and populations. Foucault reserves his understanding of norms and normalisation for explaining the prescriptive force of disciplinary power. Accordingly, he hardly uses the language of norms to explain how neoliberal policies interfere in social conduct. In this paper, I aim to elucidate what kind of normative intervention neoliberal governmentality encompasses. By mobilising Rahel Jaeggi’s understanding of forms of life as ensembles of normatively imbued social practices, I suggest that neoliberal governmentality introduces the rationality of market competition into the problem-solving horizon of social conduct, thereby creating and instituting a “neoliberal form of life”. Hence, I argue that neoliberal governmentality is a form of domination that intervenes in ethical norms and social practices that build everyday forms of life.

In this interview, Estelle Ferrarese elaborates on her account of vulnerability and care to highlight its political and social, as opposed to its ethical, dimensions. Drawing on, amongst others, Adorno, Tronto, Castell, and Laugier, she argues that vulnerability and care should not be understood ontologically, as an antropological exposure of the body, but rather socially, as the normative expectations and material conditions under which care work takes place. Situating her approach in anglophone and francophone discussions on vulnerability and precarity, she discusses her approach to normative expectations and how it informs her account of vulnerability of living at the mercy of someone else's agency, as well as the politicization of vulnerability. She also discusses the political implications of her account of vulnerability and care with regard to a range of contemporary issues, such as the Men's Right Movement, the posthuman turn and the Antropocene, and mutual aid and the neoliberalization of the welfare state.

The claim that there is “no alternative”, to contemporary neoliberal capitalism is widespread today. This paper proposes a reinterpretation of the notion of reification to scrutinize the alleged necessity of the capitalist social order. Developed by Georg Lukács, the problem of reification refers to the experience of social arrangements as thinglike entities rather than as products of social construction. By addressing the problem of reification within a social ontology of forms of life, the occurrence of reification is understood as resulting from the normatively neutral self-presentation of the capitalist form of life. To de-neutralize social norms that shape the capitalist form of life, this paper argues that social critique should turn to shared standpoints from which reification is experienced as a problem. Such standpoints can be found in social practices that are already involved in shared, normatively imbued forms of life beyond the reified logic of the capitalist form of life. Hence, it is argued that alternative forms of life are positioned to de-reify the norms that guide the capitalist form of life at large.