Foucault and the Chinese Cultural Revolution

Abstract

ABSTRACT:The Chinese Cultural Revolution spanned the period of Michel Foucault’s intellectual production from the month after the publication of The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences in April of 1966 to two months before the publication of The History of Sexuality: Volume One: An Introduction in November 1976. However, nothing elaborate appears to have been written about his attitudes toward this revolution. This paper seeks to fill this gap in the literature by situating Foucault’s movement from an enthusiasm for the Cultural Revolution to harsh criticisms of it in a range of historical, political, theoretical, and personal contexts. His interest in the Cultural Revolution dissipated as it became painfully clear that it had lost the political possibilities it had opened up, and he gravitated toward a highly reductive understanding of the event. But Foucault’s ultimate word on the event does not diminish in the least the importance of his core insight from his earlier reflections on the Cultural Revolution. That insight is simple but powerful: power relations matter in the construction of communism. Attempts to develop communism without reconfiguring microphysical relations of power create the conditions for a return to capitalism.