Abstract
This chapter explores how Foucault and his works have come to influence the understanding of the postcolonial subjects in India, which refers to both a time and a place. The chapter observes, ‘ours is not Foucault’s time’, highlighting the difference between the stand and stake of Foucault and that of the postcolonial time, place and structure of thought. In this context, the article further notes that the conditions in which the anticolonial politics and the anticolonial and postcolonial critique took shape were akin to the situation when Marx had to disconnect the ties with philosophy in order to understand and change the reality dominated by the capitalist order. The author writes that with globalization, the colonial problematic has made a return today. In this perspective, it will be interesting to note as to how various postcolonial scholars have adopted their modes of inquiry – taking something from Foucault and adding something of their own in order to understand the reality critically. The author concludes that, perhaps, Foucault’s impact on postcolonial thought in India has to be seen therefore not merely as a matter of discursive development but in the historico-political lens of anticolonial thought.
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Notes
- 1.
I am aware of the intonation that this line may evoke, namely, that ‘Foucault is dead’. We also know the loss that Deleuze felt on Foucault’s death and said that the void was very difficult to be filled in. Also, there are other senses that have been evoked in ‘Foucault is dead’. However, in writing these words, ‘… Foucault cannot do anything about this’, I am referring to Foucault as a social text predicated by the autonomy of the postcolonial milieu.
- 2.
- 3.
“What is Enlightenment?”, p. 36.
- 4.
Thus, postcolonial investigations today speak of ‘colonial modernity’, ‘early modernity’, etc., just as in Foucault’s lifetime some of his contemporaries spoke of ‘late modernity’ or ‘post-modernity’, a term Foucault of course did not agree to.
- 5.
The referred line is to the famous Eleventh Thesis.
- 6.
One of the well-known historians of our time, Pierre Rosanvallon, has expressed the same sentiment while remarking on the close relation between the two: ‘I do not think there is a necessary gap between political history and political philosophy’ (Sebastian 2007: 712).
- 7.
Hind Swaraj (http://www.mkgandhi.org/swarajya/coverpage.htm – accessed on 3 July 2013); on Krishnacharitra, see, particularly, the ‘Introduction’ (Chattopadhyay 1886/1973: 707–723).
- 8.
The entire series is now available online – http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/ (accessed on 3 July 2013).
- 9.
For a summary of the debate on the transition to a capitalist agriculture in India, see Patnaik (1992).
- 10.
Both available online – for On Practice, see http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_16.htm (accessed on 28 June 2013); for On Contradiction, see http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm (accessed on 28 June 2013).
- 11.
In all, twelve volumes were published from 1982 to 2005, the first volume being published by the Oxford University Press, Delhi, and the last being published by the Permanent Black, Delhi. Detailed bibliographic information available at https://dl-web.dropbox.com/spa/zohkohb0i282t94/Area%20Studies/public/subaltern/ssmap.htm (accessed on 3 July 2013).
- 12.
For a critique of such culturalism, see Samaddar (2006).
- 13.
The ‘Frankfurt School’ refers to a group of German theorists who analysed the changes in Western capitalist societies in post-Marx period. The name is derived from the Institut fur Sozialforschung in Frankfurt, Germany, where these theorists worked in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Some of the most well-known theorists were Max Horkheimer, T.W. Adorno and Herbert Marcuse. They along with others wrote some of the finest accounts within critical social theory of the changing nature of capitalism. They also generated a tradition of critical cultural studies on the basis of their analysis of the processes of cultural production and political economy. The leading figures of the School sought exile in the United States after the rise of Hitler in Germany.
- 14.
We can read with interest Rabinow and Rose (2003).
- 15.
- 16.
- 17.
One of the finest examples is an autobiography of a Dalit woman, Viramma, recorded, written and edited by Josiane Racine and Jean Luc Racine (1997).
- 18.
- 19.
I am referring to the book of Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds.) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (1992).
- 20.
- 21.
One of the detailed instances of this new approach is the collection of writings in Kannabiran and Singh (2008).
- 22.
The significance of the difference in Western and postcolonial receptions of Foucault will be clear, if, for instance, one juxtaposes the Indian writings referred to in this chapter with the account given by Colin Gordon (1996).
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Samaddar, R. (2013). Michel Foucault and Our Postcolonial Time. In: Mezzadra, S., Reid, J., Samaddar, R. (eds) The Biopolitics of Development. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-1596-7_3
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