Foucault’s Late Politics, edited by Gavin Walker, a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 121, no. 4 (Duke University Press).

In recent years, Michel Foucault’s late work has been the target of a certain orientation within Marxist theory, hostile to what it perceives to be the cultural politics and inward, micropolitical turn of the great French thinker. But recent attempts to reexamine this complex material from the late 70s and early 80s reveal instead the richness and political commitment of the late Foucault, from the complex figure of “political spirituality” in the texts of the 80s, to his remarkable late internationalism, traversing the globe from Iran to Japan to Brazil and across North America, even his political experimentation with new possibilities for the political subject. In this special issue, we refuse the facile reduction of Foucault’s late politics to an ambiguous or even reactionary individualism, instead emphasizing the crucial dimensions of his late work, whose insights and contours largely remain to be discovered as a repository of emancipatory, radical politics for our time.