Howard Richards. Following Foucault: The Trail of the Fox. Cape Town: Sun Press, 2018. ISBN 978-1-928357-62-9, 978-1-928357-63-6 (ebook). Pages: 267. Cost not mentioned.
The book is the printed form of a collection of lectures given by Howard Richards in Pretoria, South Africa, back in 2013, under the auspices of the South African Research Chair in Development Education organized at the University of South Africa. His lectures were based on the French philosopher Paul-Michel Foucault (1926-1984). It tries to offer an analysis of Foucault’s thought from a pragmatic (neo-Deweyan), economic-cultural (neo-Keynesian) and, above all, critical realist point of view. Through these lectures, he endeavors to reassess and highlight the key issues that Foucault addressed throughout his active philosophical career and to highlight the relevance of his ideas and conclusions to the world today. Richards, offers a novel and interesting reading of Foucault, which has garnered praise (see back cover) undeterred by its limitations and risks.
There are fifteen lectures, each followed by a discussion between the speaker and two well-known scholars, Evelin Lindner and Catherine Odora Hoppers, except for the last two lectures which have only a brief commentary written by Lindner. The initial discussions, though brief (in terms of volume), go off on a tangent as they stem from the vested interests of the participants. Later, as one settles into the mode of presentations, one can better place the discussions that follow. Although it must be said that while the discussions have something pertinent to offer, especially in terms of practical application, they hide their richness like needles in a haystack. One must sift through multitudes of words to find those few slivers of gold that lie silent among them. The epilogue is provided by Hoppers, who brilliantly and succinctly summarizes Foucault’s key ideas, not all of which were made explicit in the course of the lectures, notes his positive and constructive contributions, and finally offers some pointers to areas of ongoing investigation. , development and implementation of Foucault’s thought. Lectures are untitled and simply dated, which is a negative in my book, as a title would help situate the lecture while highlighting the key focus. The lack of a title leaves one searching for what exactly is the crux of the conference. Considering Howards’ style, the fact that these are lectures, and the nature of the discussions that followed each lecture, it would certainly have helped to provide a title.
Richards is well aware of both his own prejudices against Foucault and the limitations of his presentations. As for the points of contention, he lists: “Foucault is against authority. I am for authority. Foucault blatantly favors dedicating one’s life to the pursuit of pleasure… I am in favor of social norms… Foucault sides with the sophists, I’m with Plato, he sides with Nietzsche, I side with religion… I believe there is an objective basis for ethics in physical reality, he believes that discourse defines its objects. I believe in truth. Foucault… no. I explain social reality to a certain extent in terms of rules. He explains it in terms of power. I have a large number of proposals to resolve the main problems of humanity. Foucault has none” (p. 20).
Crain Soudien’s foreword provides a good opening and introduction to what follows (considering the book has no introduction of its own). It selects the key concepts, terms and ideas from the lectures as well as the discussions and presents them to the reader at a glance. Magnus Haavelsrud, who gives the prologue, seems to be taking a slightly different path than the one Richards will take later. He attempts to show how Foucault’s concepts of ‘power’ and ‘knowledge’ have influenced worldviews and formed the foundations of ‘multiparadigmatic science’. Haavelsrud’s prologue, while not perfectly in sync with the rest of the work, has something interesting to say. Foucault’s ‘hermeneutically suspect’ reading of it leads him to ask pertinent questions, questions that have deep meaning and vital relevance for our time.
The title of the book is interesting. Hardly any explanation is offered until about halfway through the book. While the title is relatively easy to follow, the subtitle is not that revealing. Perhaps, that can be explained by personal ignorance. I wondered why he referred to Foucault as a fox and found the answer on page 173, where Richards notes that his nickname is “the fuchs“(the fox) probably because, as his (Foucault’s) close friend Georges Dumézil commented, he ‘always wore a mask’ and ‘always changed his mask’.
The cover is imaginative but rather bland; however, it illustrates the title quite well. There are a fair number of typos and grammatical errors scattered throughout the book. Richards, for the most part, has used the verbatim words of the authors he cites. So in Foucault’s case, there are a lot of words in French. While sometimes a translation is offered, sometimes it is not. This is likely to annoy a modest reader who is not well versed in the authors’ thoughts or their mother tongues.
The book offers an interesting insight into Foucault’s mind and times. Richards constantly compares, contrasts, and strengthens Foucault’s ideas with citations from a variety of authors, mostly social thinkers and economists, as well as contemporaries of his time and those he drew inspiration from. Thus, you will find a good number of references to the work of Heidegger and Nietzsche, both characters that Foucault idolized at different times in his life and from whom he drank deeply. Just a brief glance at the 15-page long list of reference material is enough to give an idea of the kind of material one can expect to find within. The last chapters deal specifically with individual books by Foucault, his most famous works, Discipline and Punish (1975) and History of sexuality, vol. ME: The Will to Know (1976). The last chapter is a study of Foucault’s fundamental concept: power. Richards not only traces the emergence of the concept, but also verifies its relevance both in Foucault’s time and in the present.