LAUSR

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Michel Foucault appealed to a truly astounding, if not dizzying, array of rights: the rights of prisoners, the right to asylum, human rights, the right to suicide, the rights of the governed, and relational rights. How are we to make sense of his appeals to these rights? What do they tell us about Foucault’s commitments? How can they illuminate rights talk more generally? One of the many merits of Ben Golder’s Foucault and the Politics of Rights is that it pursues these questions with an unparalleled depth, rigor, and eloquence. In the hands of some of his more prominent interpreters, Foucault’s effervescent rights talk has simply served to leverage the edifying view that he finally came around to liberalism before his untimely death in 1984. Golder not only masterfully distances Foucault’s late rights talk from his putative embrace of liberalism, but also convincingly demonstrates that Foucault heralded a whole new praxis of rights. In Golder’s words: