Marx, Nietzsche, Freud

MARX

Despite Foucault's hatred of the PCF and the Eastern bloc--his hatred of totalitarianism--and his relegation of Marx's political economy to the 19th century episteme, Marx's term "historical materialism" is still a useful term for much of Foucault's work in DP and HS 1.

Marx showed how networks of differential force, the material and social relations of production, produce the seemingly natural identities of social categories: "owner," "worker," "product," "tool," etc.

What seems a stable unity is the product of an historically relative system of production, a system put in place by the revolutionary force of the bourgeoisie.
The productivity of the network of historical labor is masked by the seeming solidity of the thing and the vampiric "productivity" of capital, which Marx showed was simply the coagulation of past labor. [D/G break with Marx here on the notion of "machinic surplus value."]

Marx's insistence on dissolving the certainties and identities of everyday common sense by reference to networks of historical force reveals a "deconstructive" Marx purged of the eschatological promises of the inevitability of "The Revolution" into which he sometimes lapsed in his popular addresses and on which the PCF
"bureaucrats of the revolution" pounced as if scripture.

NIETZSCHE

Despite their surface opposition on political issues, Nietzsche has some striking similarities to the Marx we sketched above, for Nietzsche also dissolved received pieties through analyses of their construction by historical forces. Simply put, both thinkers are historical materialists; they both show material forces
producing identities--in Nietzsche's case the identity of the responsible individual, as in On the Genealogy of Morals. Crudely put, then, Marx dissolves "objective" identity and Nietzsche "subjective" identity by
reference to historical force networks.

FREUD

I have used the term "historical-libidinal materialism" to discuss the Foucualt and D/G wing. To appreciate the libidinal qualification, we turn to Freud. It's often said that there are two Freuds, the scientific materialist of the drives (the "energetic Freud") and the investigative hermeneut of the unconscious (the
"linguistic Freud"); the struggle to articulate the two is notoriously difficult, both for Freud himself and his.

The key for post-structuralism is to distinguish Freud's diagnosis of the patriarchal etiology of the neuroses from his prescriptions for their treatment. In the working out of his diagnoses through his case studies, Freud points to the historical, political, economic and social milieu of his patients, even if his
thematic focus on family dynamics often obscured the class and race contributions to the neuroses of his patients those case studies describe. Together with the materialist orientation of the energetic analysis of drives, we see here the elements of a historical-libidinal materialism, which, is brought out in the explicit
politicizations of Reich (1933) and Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 1980).
Although Freud is important in these other post-structuralists, Foucault doesn't have much good to say about him, ultimately implicating Freud in the modern construction of bio-power.