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Radical Legal Theory Today, or How to Make Foucault and Law Disappear Completely

Ben Golder and Peter Fitzpatrick: Foucault’s Law. Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon, 2009, 160 pp, Price £19.99 (PB), ISBN 978-0-415-42454-7 (PB)

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Notes

  1. In his 1978–1979 lecture course on The Birth of Biopolitics Foucault states that the general theme of the seminars for that year would be “the analysis of the transformations of juridical mechanisms and judicial institutions, and of legal thought, at the end of the nineteenth century”: see Foucault (2010, 150). And in his introduction to the third volume of The Essential Works, Colin Gordon notes that Foucault was increasingly interested in the rule of law, and had considered setting up a centre on the philosophy of law: see Gordon (2002, xxxi–xxxii).

  2. On power-resistance see Foucault (2002b); on limit-transgression see Foucault (2000b); on critical ontology see Foucault (2000a).

  3. R v Board of Visitors of HM Prison, The Maze ex parte Hone [1988] AC 379.

  4. For a critique of the question of Foucault’s “stance” on law, see Pottage (2011).

  5. See n 1 above.

  6. Indeed, it might be questioned whether Golder and Fitzpatrick give adequate consideration to the concept of “alterity”. For example, isn’t alterity concerned with the absolute difference of the other, a difference that is not capable of being grasped or subsumed without misrecognition and thereby doing violence to the other? See generally Libertson (1982). I’d like to thank Stewart Motha for drawing my attention to this point and providing the reference.

  7. Although we should not ignore the link between “radical” and “fanatical” in the context of religious fundamentalism.

  8. For the moment I take the radical theory and critical theory to be synonymous. On the (poststructuralist) crisis in critique see Chryssostalis and Tuitt (2005).

  9. This genealogy is derived from the online Oxford English Dictionary June 2010 draft revision of the entry for “radical” as an adjective and noun. Foucault briefly comments on the word radical in The Birth of Biopolitics. He suggests that the word first emerges from the end of the seventeenth century, and relates it first to an assertion of original rights against the sovereign, and later to a continuing questioning of government and governmentality from the perspective of utility: see Foucault (2010, 41).

  10. Interestingly, critique also has a medical sense. George Pavlich states that it was associated with “medical diagnoses of crisis stages for a given illness (for example, when someone is in a ‘critical’ condition)”: see Pavlich (2001, 143). See further Koselleck (2002, 236–247).

  11. It might be that the Deleuzian concept of “rhizome” can provide the site for a continued relevance of the terminology of “radical theory” in poststructuralist theory, as it offers an alternative, often silenced, lineage in the genealogy of “radical”. Many thanks to Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos for drawing my attention to this in conversation at the Critical Legal Conference 2010.

  12. Rose and Valverde (1998) provide a useful basis for such work, although perhaps go too far in the decentring of law. However, it need not entail working within “governmentality studies”. As Pearce and Tombs have pointed out, governmentality studies’ appropriation of Foucault “is in danger of assuming the mantle of an orthodox interpretation of his work … which … entails an unhelpful closure and so denial of much that his work offers to us as social scientists”: Pearce and Tombs (1998, 568).

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Maria Drakopoulou, Andreas Kotsakis, Yvette Russell, Brenna Bhandar, and Stewart Motha for comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

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  1. Kent Law School, University of Kent, Kent, UK

    Nick Piška

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Piška, N. Radical Legal Theory Today, or How to Make Foucault and Law Disappear Completely. Fem Leg Stud 19, 251–263 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-011-9189-y

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