This tactical reading of Lyotard, Deleuze, and Foucault accomplishes a lot.
May provides something most of us did not expect by now�a truly fresh
understanding of the energies and ethical concerns of some of the most
important thinkers of this century."�Thomas L. Dumm, Amherst College
The political writings of the French poststructuralists have eluded
articulation in the broader framework of general political philosophy
primarily because of the pervasive tendency to define politics along a
single parameter: the balance between state power and individual rights in
liberalism and the focus on economic justice as a goal in Marxism.
What poststructuralists like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and
Jean-Fran��ois Lyotard offer instead is a political philosophy that can be
called tactical: it emphasizes that power emerges from many different
sources and operates along many different registers. This approach has
roots in traditional anarchist thought, which sees the social and political
field as a network of intertwined practices with overlapping political
effects. The poststructuralist approach, however, eschews two questionable
assumptions of anarchism, that human beings have an (essentially benign)
essence and that power is always repressive, never productive.
After positioning poststructuralist political thought against the
background of Marxism and the traditional anarchism of Bakunin, Kropotkin,
and Proudhon, Todd May shows what a tactical political philosophy like
anarchism looks like shorn of its humanist commitments�namely, a
poststructuralist anarchism. The book concludes with a defense, contra
Habermas and Critical Theory, of poststructuralist political thought as
having a metaethical structure allowing for positive ethical commitments.
Todd May is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Clemson University and
author of Between Genealogy and Epistemology: Psychology, Politics, and
Knowledge in the Thought of Michel Foucault (Penn State, 1993).
http://www.psupress.org/books/titles/0-271-01045-2.html
