Description
Decolonial, anti-colonial and indigenous scholarship has generated “uncomfortable insights about how even critical re-combinations of the international, the political, and the sociological can coalesce into exclusionary formations” (Lisle, Squire and Doty, 2017:3). We explore the pertinence of these concerns to Foucauldian scholarship and set the agenda for a post-Foucauldian orientation, better able to engage the violences of capitalist extraction and colonial history. At the heart of our analysis is the status of ontology and – in particular – the constitutive tension we emphasize in Foucault’s project between a focus upon the historical contingency of all ontological claims and a concurrent desire to address “questions of general import” (Foucault, 1997b:118). This vacillation leads Foucault, and consequently Foucauldian scholarship, to invest in implicit and potentially totalizing ontologies of contingency and finitude, and of reality as play of forces that are unable to recognize ontological difference. Engaging Foucault’s philosophical project in dialogue with decolonial thought, STS and the broader epistemological tradition from which Foucault’s project arose, we offer an alternative route to critical engagement with the international, the political and the sociological that can do justice to how ontological commitments are invoked, transformed and multiplied within struggles against capitalist extraction and coloniality.
