"Exactly my point. Foucault seems to me to distance himself consciously from Marxism. I don't understand why Foucault fans don't just say 'yea, you are right. Foucault distanced himself from Marx.'"
Charles and Robert W.,
Robert Wood's reply to this is spot-on. Foucault did fluctuate and change views over the course of his life and in fact vigilantly defended his right to do so. Some interviews he is positively glowing with admiration for Marx and says he is "a Marxist without quoting Marx in my books," esp. in _Discipline & Punish_, but he was also very ticked off with the official French Communist Party and wanted little to do with them or to wrote stuff that would "play into their hands." At another time Foucault said it is also impossible to be a serious historian without being a Marxist. He also complained that he had been dubbed a crypto-Marxist, an anarchist, and a nihilist. There's some truth in all of it, actually.
Here's FOUCAULT: "The interest in Nietzsche and Bataille was not a way of distancing ourselves from Marxism or communism -- it was the only path toward what we expected from communism." (_Power_, p. 249)
The Nietzsche-Foucault-Marxist area of thought is an area I'm extremely excited & interested in. Does anyone know of a list (a "left-Nietzschean" list) that explores this specific area? Not a list run by Fou-Cult gurus, but one a bit more liberal and lax? I'm interested in other writers that have plumbed these depths. Like I mentioned, _The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche_ by HL Mencken, with the explanatory intro by anarchist Charles Bufe, is excellent, esp. where the Bufe into lays out where Nietzsche converges and diverges with left-libertarian thought. ANd again there is the book _I Am Not a Man, I Am Dynamite: Nietzsche and the Anarchist Tradition_ which reveals his influence on anarchism, even though Nietzsche explicitly condemned anarcists as suffering from ressentiment.
Additionally, French writer Daniel Colson wrote about Nietzsche's influence on early French and European syndicalism. We know some ex-syndicalists (like Mussolini) went on to fascism; yet other syndicalists *fought* fascism and paid with their lives. And yet both would claim at one time or another an intellectual debt with Nietzsche.
It's an area I'd like to discuss in depth, but LBO's 3-post a day limit would relegate it to a sideshow here and I'd rather not expend my 3 post iimit on it. This is my 4th for today, i think.
-B.