Foucault, der nietzscheanische Kommunist? Bericht zur Tagung "Foucault and Marx. Ambivalences, Legacies, and Future Struggles" (Oktober 2024, Universität Wien)

From 18th to 19th of October 2024 the symposium "Foucault and Marx. Ambivalences, Legacies, and Future Struggles," held at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, traced the ambivalent relationship between the two thinkers, scrutinizing Foucault's both critical and affirmative reference to Marx on a wide range of topics. Drawing on concepts such as discipline, ideology, or biopolitics, some of the talks followed a recent trend of re-reading Foucault with Marx. Other contributions reconstructed more remote connections between Foucault and Marxism, e.g. by tracing Foucault's early confrontation with the Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko in the 1950s. While the conference succeeded in painting a detailed picture of the relations between Foucault and Marx(ism), greater focus on some of the heterogeneous reorientations in Foucault's work would have been desirable in order to avoid reducing Foucault's oeuvre to its Marxian references.