Foucault’s Marx: Subjectivity, History, and the Present

In this article I will show that Michel Foucault’s scattered and unsystematic remarks on Marx and Marxism can be taken as a roughly consistent whole if read through the lens of the concept of subjectivity. By this, I do not mean that Foucault actually wanted them to constitute a unified corpus, nor that he wished them to be interpreted in such a way, merely that we can read them as such – and that doing so can be illuminating for both Foucauldian and Marxist scholars. I will thus provide a critical, diachronic reading of the main references to Marx and Marxism made by Foucault from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s. In the final section, I will reflect on the opportunities and risks of reconciling Foucault and Marx.