Villacañas, a reader of Foucault. On the question of anthropology

Over the last 15 years, José Luis Villacañas has been producing a body of work that deploys a decisive re-reading of Michel Foucault’s philosophical program. 2 Within this context, the Spanish philosopher’s main thesis is that Foucauldian archaeo-genealogy ought to lead us to think of life under a strictly social and historical dimension, in its extensive and organic expansion. Such a thought would thus allow us to understand life’s enormous capacity to articulate new forms and its reactive power against the repetition of the same. This would inevitably require salvaging from within Foucauldian thought a certain degree of minimal convergence between skepticism about universals and anthropological reflection. In what follows, I will present this analysis in a succinct form. In doing so, I would also like to express my gratitude towards Villacañas’ intellectual work, which has had a profound influence on the orientation of my own research. This branch of Villacañas’ work consistently unfolds over the span of several articles that I consider must be referenced: Foucault 1648, Res Publica (2010), Ethos y economía: Weber y Foucault sobre la memoria de Europa , Daimon , (2010), Dispositivo: la necesidad teórica de una antropología (published in 2016 by Escolar y Mayo as a chapter of the book La actualidad de Michel Foucault , which I edited alongside Adán Salinas), Foucault-Kant: la prehistoria de la obra foucaultiana (published by Dado as a chapter of the book Foucault y la historia de la filosofía which we co-edited together), Cuidado de sí/cuidado de nosotros: Populismo y republicanismo» (a book chapter appearing on Populismo versus republicanismo , published by Biblioteca Nueva in 2018), La última neutralización: Ordoliberalismo y Foucault (a chapter in Para una crítica del neoliberalismo , published by Lengua de Trapo in 2021, and co-edited by Emmanuel Chamorro and myself). Lastly, this list would remain incomplete without a book in which the interpretation of Foucault’s plays such an important role as is Neoliberalismo como teología política. Habermas, Foucault, Dardot, Laval y la historia del capitalismo contemporáneo (NED, 2020).