“The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of the Revolution.” (2021) by Dean, Mitchell & Zamora, Daniel. A book review.

Abstract

In the wake of the belated publication of Foucault’s 1978-1979 Collège de France lectures in English in 2008, under the title of “The Birth of Biopolitics,” an ever-expanding group of historians, philosophers, and economists have tackled Foucault’s complicated relationship to neoliberalism. The book is written in the same spirit as James Miller’s classic (although controversial) biography The Passion of Michel Foucault (1993). Both books offer the private life of Foucault as a skeleton key to understanding his philosophy, although Dean & Zamora do not reach into psychobiography to the same degree as Miller. Instead, they highlight some marginal and neglected biographical and political events, such as Foucault’s 1975 LSD trip in Death Valley, California (the subject of a recent autobiographical book by Simeon Wade), and the “liberalizing” French presidency of Giscard d’Estaing (1974-1981), as pivotal moments that influenced, shaped, and help to explain (although not necessarily explain away) his theoretical preoccupations and political judgments, including his interest in neoliberalism and, by extension, liberal-adjacent forays into anti-statist leftism.

Keywords: Foucault, neoliberalism, California, biopolitics, book review, anti-communism

JEL Classification: P14, D63, B52, B53