Luke Ilott
I am a historian and political theorist with a focus on the productive moment in French political thought in the decades surrounding May 1968.
My PhD, entitled 'Michel Foucault and the Politics of Coalition, 1968-1980', is a contextual study of Michel Foucault's political thought. Drawing on thousands of pages of newly released archival material, I emphasise Foucault's constructive political ambitions, showing how he used historical narrative to foster new alliances among emerging left-wing movements in France like feminism, gay liberation, immigrant organising, anti-psychiatry and ecology. This helps us re-value aspects of Foucault's political thought which have often been seen as pessimistic, like his description of the 'universal reign' of disciplinary power across the prison, school, hospital and factory. This was, I propose, a way to underscore what various movements had in common, urging struggles in sites like the factory and the prison towards productive alliances across class and identity boundaries. The upshot is to challenge a commonplace association between Foucault's post-structuralist political thought and the fragmentation of the political left through the endless play of differences and specificities. We can instead see Foucault as responding constructively to the ongoing disintegration of traditional subjects of radical politics in the 1960s and 1970s, trying to suture together stronger fronts of resistance from the debris. This has implications for Foucauldian political theory today, encouraging genealogists to go beyond the critique of power towards the worldmaking work of forging coalitions and new collective subjects.
In future projects, I will address the postcolonial contexts for the rise of ecological thought in Europe after 1965. I have interests in post-structuralist thought, new materialisms, and the political thought of the new social movements of the 1970s, and am also interested in the use of intellectual history and 'genealogy' as modes of political thought in their own right.
At undergraduate level, I supervise papers on History of Political Thought to c. 1700, History of Political Thought, c. 1700-1890, Political Philosophy and the History of Political Thought since c. 1890, and The Modern State and its Alternatives. I have delivered undergraduate lectures on power and seminars on intellectual history and on the political thought of decolonisation.
Conference papers
· Foucault’s Anglophone Influences and the ‘French School’ of Intellectual History. Presented at 'From Cambridge to Bielefeld - and back? British and Continental Approaches to Intellectual History', Humboldt University Berlin, 2-4 June 2022.
· Foucault's parodic histories. Presented at 'Continental Philosophy and its Histories', Warwick Continental Philosophy Conference, 25-27 March 2021.
· Michel Foucault on the limits of ‘the political’, 1978-84. Presented at ‘Limits and Boundaries in the History of Political Thought’, 11th annual London Graduate Conference in the History of Political Thought, September 2020.
· Foucault reading the ‘English analysts’ in Tunisia, 1966-68. Presented at ‘Transcultural Conversations’, Graduate Conference in Intellectual History at the European University Institute, Florence, 23-24 January 2020.
· Michel Foucault, France’s Machiavellian moment and the uses of history for political thought. Presented at ‘Machiavelli and Contemporary Politics’, 4th biennial Ideas in Politics conference at Charles University and Anglo-American University of Prague, 15-16 November 2019.
· Thomas Hobbes on the legibility of bodies. Presented at ‘The Body and Politics’, University of Cambridge Graduate Conference in Political Thought and Intellectual History, 18 March 2019.
Workshops
· Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and the French reproduction debate, 1970-1975. Presented at University of Cambridge Political Thought and Intellectual History graduate workshop, 24 October 2019.
· The Birth of Biopolitics beyond neoliberalism: Foucault, civil society and the critique of the state in late 1970s France. Presented at University of Cambridge Modern European History graduate workshop, 17 October 2019.
Contact
Tags & Themes
Key publications
'Genealogy Beyond Critique: Foucault's Discipline and Punish as Coalitional Worldmaking', Political Theory (forthcoming), available online.
'Generalizing Resistance: The Coalition Politics of Foucault's Governmentality Lectures', The Review of Politics (forthcoming), available online.
Review of Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality vol. 4: Confessions of the Flesh, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 2021), in Cambridge Humanities Review, no. 17 (summer 2021), available online.