Conclusion: Which Foucault? Which International?

This chapter responds to the many different Foucault’s animating the work presented in the preceding chapters by drawing attention to the many different versions of an international that are also present, but also to some that are absent. It also responds to the tension within Foucault’s own work between both his often cosmopolitan interests and sympathies and his resistance to reified categories of statist politics, on the one hand, and his systematic concerns with specific statist contexts and Eurocentric traditions on the other. Picking up on various comments made in the preceding chapters, as well as on Foucault’s brief engagement with Thomas Hobbes, the analysis works toward an ambivalent conclusion: that while Foucault did have much to say about phenomena that might be called international in some senses, other and arguably more important senses of the term receive only cursory attention. Nevertheless, given the degree to which what we call an international is now subject to considerable spatiotemporal rearticulation, many of Foucault’s conceptual innovations and methodological tactics offer powerful resources for political analyses that seek to elude heavily reified accounts of what both the modern state and the modern international must be.