The Althusser-Effect on Foucault: From the Punitive Society to the Theory of the Reproduction

Abstract

This paper intends to study the impact of Althusser’s article, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses”, published in June 1970, on Michel Foucault’s 1973 Lectures at the Collège de France, The Punitive Society. It deals more specifically about the way Foucault proposes, facing Althusserian Marxism, a sort of “counter-Marxism”. Althusser’s article, by proposing the original hypothesis of the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA), is an outline of a theory of the reproduction of the capitalist society’s relations of production. Foucault’s Lectures, far from being just an analysis of the birth of a penal system focused on prison, is a genuine genealogy of the power relations which are necessary to the constitution of the capitalist society: to do that, Foucault studies how labour force has been produced throughout a set of institutional framings that he calls “institutions of sequestration”, which consist in an obvious response to Althusser’s ISA. The paper ends the examination of the confrontation between Foucault and Althusser by shining a light on their fundamental divergences about the way to conceive the social struggles.