Critical Theory/Intellectual History

In the following interview Foucault situates himself in relation to the pantheon of modern European intellectual thought—Marx, Nietzsche, Freud—and addresses the issues surrounding the myths associated with history and politics. Foucault explains the direction his critical activity has taken him as a response to a certain dissatisfaction with the phenomenological theory of the subject. In its place he opts for an analysis of the historical conditions and forms of rationality in which the human subject positions itself as an object of knowledge. In asking the question what is the nature of the present, Foucault concludes by describing a new kind of Left thought and articulating his reaction to the decline of Marxism in contemporary France. The interview was conducted by Gérard Raulet and published as “Structuralism and Post-Structuralism: An Interview with Michel Foucault,” in Telos 55 (Spring 1983), 195–211. The translation is by Jeremy Harding.