"Hoffman manages to achieve that rarest of feats: a return to Foucault's texts that puts us back in touch with some of the pressing political motivations behind the theorisations many of us know so well (and that in other hands have become somewhat tired, mantric, platitudinous)." - Ben Golder, University of New South Wales, Australia, Foucault Studies
"A powerful reinterpretation of Foucault's work and his political activism. It contains the best account in English of his work with the Group for Information on Prisons, and pairs an analysis of his well-known writings on Iran with his neglected writings and actions in relation to Poland at the time of Solidarity and martial law. The integration of these engagements with his published works and lecture courses sheds new light on many of his concerns." --Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography, University of Warwick, UK, and editor of the journal of Society and Space
"This is the kind of reading and appraisal of Foucault's thinking on power I have long waited for. It strikes a stark contrast with the overwhelmingly depoliticized engagements which have dominated the Anglo-American reception of his thought. For here, finally, and substantially, we read an author taking Foucault's militancy seriously, and contextualizing it brilliantly, within the larger problems of his analyses and theories of biopower and population, to produce an account of how Foucault helps us to think beyond the biopolitical subject of liberal modernity. Hoffman has done Foucault a great service in writing this book.
" --Julian Reid, Professor of International Relations, University of Lapland, Finland and author of The Biopolitics of the War on Terror.
"Marcelo Hoffman's book proposes to examine the relationship of Foucault's own extra-theoretical political practices to his political theory. In doing so, Hoffman emphasizes radical commitments often disregarded in recent scholarship that reduces Foucault's thought to liberal banality. By seeing his radical practices juxtaposed with his radical thought, we get a convincing portrait of a radical Foucault. Hoffman's account of each of these two dimensions is excellent." --
Radical Philosophy "Marcelo Hoffman's clear and cogent interpretation of Foucault's work in light of his political activism, from the start of the 1970s until his death, strikes the right chord to alert us that for Foucault it was always personal and it was always political, always subject and power. Combining some of the best aspects of intellectual biography with the interpretive acuity to be gained from archival research in Paris, Hoffman portrays Foucault as a consistently activist thinker." --
Contemporary Political Theory "The Foucault that emerges as a result of Hoffman's handling is one whose writing is motivated by deep concern for others, the result of careful self-reflection, and in service of social justice broadly. Hoffman's Foucault is a militant, yet compassionate. In this way, Hoffman presents a generous and sympathetic portrait of a much maligned iconoclast." --
New Political Science "Hoffman clearly challenges readings of Foucault that demarcate his thinking according to the break with one theory of power in lieu of another. Hoffman conducts a nuanced and precise study of how subsequent iterations of power bear the residuals of predecessor accounts or are informed by them in significant ways." --
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews "For the first time, an author extensively analyses Michel Foucault's political activities and not only his involvement in the Iranian Revolution. Hoffman also connects these political activities to Foucault's theory of power and does not refer to them only as biographical information ... A great advantage of the book is its absolutely clear structure which, combined with the intelligible writing of the author, makes it very comprehensible to anyone interested in Foucault, from students and researchers to non-academic, but systematic readers of his work...Marcelo Hoffman's theoretical venture gives us very useful insights. Through the highlighting of the dialectical relationship between theory and practice in Foucault's work, the author primarily provides us with a new tool with which to approach the work of Foucault." -Antonis Galanopoulos,
Political Studies Review
