Program

Over the last decades, multiple and insightful discussions on the relationship between Marx and Foucault have predominantly centered on whether their concepts are inherently opposed or can be made compatible through philosophical and historical examinations. Scholars have examined and sometimes reshaped well-known categories such as “exploitation of labor” and “relations of power” (Leonelli, 2010; Renault 2015), “accumulation”, “war” and “violence” (Chignola 2015; Allen 2022), “alienation” and “subjectivation” (Read 2003, 2022; Mezzadra 2020; Oksala 2015, 2023), “normativity” and “ideology” (Macherey 2014; Legrand 2007) and they have proposed to either sever or articulate Marxian and Foucauldian frameworks. Thinkers from heterogeneous and irreducible Marxist traditions have developed new Marx-Foucauldian syntheses (Bidet 2016; Negri 2016, 2019; Dardot and Laval 2012, 2017) giving rise to several critiques, while others advocate for the improvement of a “possible relation” (Nigro 2001) or for a clear choice between Marxist and Foucauldian tools (Balibar 2020). Less attention, however, has been given to the surprising family resemblances between the political epistemologies that both Marx and Foucault employed in their respective “militant inquiries” (Haider, Mohandesi 2013, Hoffman 2018) into workers’ struggles and prisoners’ fights. What if we first focus on these epistemological similarities rather than on the primary conceptual differences between their most well-known ideas? Could these epistemological analogies be relevant in shifting the current debates about the supposed theoretical oppositions between Marx and Foucault? Might they provide a solid foundation for addressing the complex and ambiguous relationship between their different frameworks?
These questions guide my attempt to propose an epistemological reassessment of the Marx-Foucault relationship. In this paper, I will argue that, despite the apparent “theoretical antinomies” between their respective frameworks, Marx and Foucault can and should be read together starting from their “meta-theoretical analogies”. To support this hypothesis, I will first map out the discussions on the Marx-Foucault relationship, highlighting the absence of a crucial epistemological dimension. Next, I will examine the different practices of “militant inquiry” – the workers’ inquiry and the enquête-intolérance – that Marx and Foucault engaged in within their respective historical contexts, identifying both divergences and convergences. Finally, I will show that these practices are underlined by specific epistemological assumptions that resonate with each other, particularly regarding (i) the fields, (ii) the standpoint, and (iii) the norms of social criticism. In doing so, I do not propose a resolution to the controversy by choosing one side over the other. Instead, I aim to establish a preliminary basis for the conversations between Marxist and Foucauldian critical accounts. Rather than attempting to solve the theoretical conundrums posed by the articulation of Marxian and Foucauldian views on society, I seek to dissolve false problems and imaginary obstacles. This can help foster productive theoretical cooperation between multiple and diverse insights in contemporary critical theory. This endeavor is part of a much broader project aimed at clarifying the Marx-Foucault relationship both historically and theoretically (Polleri 2024), which began with my PhD but remains ongoing and open to further development.

In late 1978, Foucault made two trips to Iran as a special correspondent of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera to witness first-hand and report on the ongoing revolution in the country. Over a century earlier, in 1848, Marx embarked on a similar endeavour to document and assess the revolutions taking place across Europe. Foucault occasionally referred to this kind of discourse asphilosophical journalism, a distinctly modern form of philosophy that takes as its task the analysis of the present moment, with the aim of showing how contemporary events can rupture the understanding we have of history, politics, and ourselves. Through a close comparative reading of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire and Foucault’s articles and interviews on the Iranian revolution, this paper aims to show that both thinkers exhibit a strikingly similar attitude towards the present and the integral role it plays in critical historical analysis.
While acknowledging the many differences in context and content between the texts of Marx and Foucault, this paper argues that both thinkers shared a deep appreciation for the singularity of contemporary events. The Iranian revolution and the revolutions of 1848 were not simply opportunities to prove the validity of preestablished theoretical frameworks. Instead, they were events that resisted capture by those theoretical frameworks, ultimately rendering them inadequate. Even though Marx characterises the revolution of 1848 in France as a farcical repeat of the French Revolution, he is over the course of his analysis forced to confront the newness of what he is encountering, particularly in regard to his prior theories of the state, class interests, and revolution. Foucault, similarly, disregards the standard theories of revolution as a process of secularisation and rationalisation in order to emphasise the irreducible role played by Shi’a spiritual practices in the development of a revolutionary subjectivity.
By exploring Foucault and Marx as philosophical journalists, this paper aims to show how the supposed gap between the two on questions of revolution, historical methodology, the role of the intellectual, and political practice is not quite as wide as it is so often taken to be.

The work of theorists Michel Foucault and Stuart Hall can be seen to supplement Marx’s initial work on the relationship between historical change and subjectivity. Hall and Foucault contemplated identity in different but complementary ways. Their respective oeuvres are marked by an increasing commitment to identities as fluid, changing and unfixed; selves that can be shed like skins. The protean qualities of these bodies of thought – developing and adopting new and often contradictory concepts, approaches and styles of thought over time – can be measured through their scepticism towards formal identities. Against the fixed dogma of orthodox Marxism, they both experienced and helped to articulate what we might think of as a kind of ‘queerness’, queer in the sense of a future-oriented, fluid experience of both self and other that subverts and displaces rigid hierarchies. Their thinking reflects this commitment to fluidity at the lexical and philosophical levels. “Foucault carved numerous turns of phrase into ice sculptures,” the scholar Ian Hacking writes, “which had, for a moment, sharp contours. Then he walked away from them, insouciant, and let them melt, for he no longer needed them. His less gifted readers put the half-melted shapes in the freezer and, without thinking, reproduce these figures as if they still glistened in the midnight sun and meant something.” This paper (i) sets out the genealogical relationship between Marx, Foucault and Hall in relation to identity, (ii) looks to distinguish between ‘ice’ and ‘water’ in the ‘thoughtscapes’ of Hall and Foucault, identifying signal changes in physical state, and (iii) analyses the ambivalently Marxian approach to identity discernible in their work to consider how their respectively oblique articulations of identity unseat ossified understandings of the self and deepen our understanding of what identity is. It also considers some of the limitations of this approach to selfhood, both for the bearers of those identities and for wider political movements.

There has been a recent surfacing of the view that Foucault’s genealogical history can be brought into a fruitful dialogue with parts of the Marxian critical tradition (Laval et al, 2015, Bidet 2016, Negri 2017). In this context, it is not uncommon even to note that – beyond their fundamental disagreement in the assessment of dialectical thinking – there are several analogous critical traits between Foucault’s ideas and Lukács’s early Marxist project (Säynäjoki and Tiisala, 2023). This talk aims to go further in this direction by elaborating on two arguments. I will argue, on the one hand, that one can detect a close affinity between Foucault’s understanding of history and Lukács’s general historical vision as developed in his History and Class Consciousness, which consists not only in a belief in the pervasive power of historical conditioning behind social formations, but also in the adoption of a corresponding diagnostic philosophical approach focusing on the problem of historical “present.” On the other hand, I will also aim to point out that there is a profound difference between the two thinkers on the question of historical agency. While Lukács essentially focuses on cognitive agency grounded in class structure in the context of social struggles that may produce historical change, Foucault rejects the privileging of social cognition and replaces it with the coercive and liberating interplay of collective potentialities embedded in discursive and power relations. In this way, this cross-examination seeks both to highlight the relevance of Foucault’s historical thinking to radical critical theory and to stress some of the diagnostic merits of a post-foundationalist and post-historicist Marxist position in confronting social reality.

In this paper, I address the relationship between Foucault and Marx through Adorno’s Marxism. Marx’s most significant contribution—per his own confession to Joseph Weydemeyer—the necessity of historical agency for social transformation, marked the horizons of political thought throughout the 20^th century. The relationship between post-World Wars subjectivity and the possibility of human agency in history has marked strikingly different figures. From Adorno to Foucault, we have two figures whose notion of subjectivity has been shaped by this ghost, albeit in different ways—or so I contend. 
One might immediately wonder, wasn’t Foucault’s L’archéologie du savoir and Les mots et les choses extremely critical of Marxist readings of history, and of any attempts to posit man as the motor of history? I contend that the background of such criticism was highly informed by French Marxism, from the Parti Communiste Français (PCF)where Foucault was oncea member, to Althusserian academic circles. Thus, here I explore how a different strand of Marxism, the German Marxism of the Frankfurt School could reveal the compatibility between Foucault’s analysis of history and subjectivity and the possibility of human historical agency. Despite Foucault’s criticism of Marxist understandings of history, we can find a deeper affinity between their thoughts. This similitude lies in reading Foucault as a thinker whose analysis of history and modern subjectivity is shaped by the failure of the socialist revolutions of the early 20th century.
Our point of departure for reopening this inquiry is to rework the Foucauldian thesis of the end of Man: what caused this break in the transition from the 19^th to the 20^th centuries? While Foucault identified that an epistemological rupture took place, this description entailed only the general processes of knowledge construction, without diving into the concrete events that guided the new epistemological structure. I suggest that we can bridge this gap with an Adornian reading of the problem of the reification of subjectivity in the 20^th century. A Marxist reading of Adorno’s critique sheds light on the epistemological rupture through the lens of the failed attempts at socialist revolutions.  Their failures, for Adorno, embodied Marx’s 1852 question—of conscious collective agency as the motor of history. Thus, the aim here is not to address directly the political question of socialist revolutions but to take up Marx’s theory of the necessity for the construction of a self-conscious agency in history and its subsequent failure in the 20^th century. As such, I will link the problem of the reification of subjectivity to Foucault’s thought. This will allow us to reopen what is often taken as a closed door in Foucauldian studies—the congruence of his analysis of history with Marx and the possibility of historical agency or, man as the motor of history.

Ideology was a central concept in French political and philosophical thought in the post-war period, but from the 1960s onwards it became the subject of many heated debate, in which Foucault played a major role. In the pejorative and polemical sense given to it by Marx, ideology refers to a set of illusory representations, an inverted reflection of the existence’s material conditions, born of the division between manual and intellectual labor. Foucault’s criticisms of the concept are numerous throughout his work1. Among other concerns, the objections relate to Althusser’s opposition between science and ideology, or to the way in which ideology is conceived as a system of representations adopted by a subject.
The aim of this paper is to take a new look at Foucault’s objections regarding the concept of ideology. Moreover, it aims to put those objections back into perspective, to understand what role they played in the broader quarrel about the concept of ideology, which pitted its defenders against its destroyers during the second half of the 20th century. While we usually deal with this problem by focusing on the relationship between Foucault and Althusser, which seams right, it it necessary to change our focus and to examine the relationship between Foucault and the critics of Rancière, Bourdieu or Deleuze. The goal here is to re-establish the outlines of this quarrel and to clarify Foucault’s specific place in this critical apparatus: are Foucault’s criticisms specific of his working method, or are they part of a more general objection of the concept? How are we to understand the divergences between those thinkers? Are they merely strategic differences, as each sought to distance himself from Althusserian Marxism?
Among Foucault’s objections, one has especially caught my attention, particularly as it has received but little attention before, and because I hypothesize that it is nevertheless central to understanding the uses and status of the concept during that time, that is: Foucault’s question about the Marxist distinction between base and ideological superstructure. Indeed, it involves a special way of conceiving a non-Marxian materialism. In the matter, Althusser’s collection of lately published texts on ideology2 will enable this current research to shed a new light on the Marxian “topique” criticism.
This raises several issues. First, I will attempt to highlight Foucault’s ambivalent attitude with the concept: since he vehemently criticizes the concept, but uses the term nevertheless, to what extent can Foucault’s criticism be described as a “false exit3” from ideology? In a second time, I will go through a detailed chronology of these objections. We will show that the first signs of this critical distance with the concept of ideology can be observed from the beginning of the 1960s, and not only from 1970 onwards. This critical distance continued until the 1980s, even though it was directed at new adversaries. Finally, this critique must be replaced in a broader quarrel, which will allow me to question Foucault’s relationship with a certain dogmatic French Marxism, a regular target of his attacks, an aspect which the imposing figure of Althusser tends to overshadow.

Despite their differences in subject matter and methodology, scholars in the Marxist tradition (e.g., Montag, Charim, Rehmann) have examined the relationship between Marx and Foucault since the 1990s, framing their work as complementary through Althusser’s expanded conception of social reproduction. Althusser’s innovation lies in his ability to foreground the role of institutions like the family, the school, and “institutions of socialization” such as prison, as sites of labour-power production and training that function outside the direct economic sphere. Adopting this ‘viewpoint of reproduction’ allows us to read the work of Marx and Foucault as an investigation of the contexts of reproduction in modern society with Marx primarily focusing on economic dimensions and Foucault on extra-economic elements.
To deepen this ‘viewpoint of reproduction’, our presentation places queer-feminist theory at the center of the dialogue. It particularly highlights Teresa de Lauretis’ groundbreaking, yet often overlooked, insights into ‘technologies of gender’. We will address De Lauretis’ reading of Althusser’s notion of ideological interpellation and Foucault’s analysis of the dispositifs of alliance and sexuality, bridging them to include in the process of social reproduction also the fundamental way in which generative reproduction is organized in capitalist societies.
Ultimately, we argue that Foucault’s work, viewed decisively through De Lauretis’ critical queer lens, represents a culmination of both Althusser’s analyses of social reproduction and the materialist perspective on “the production of life” implicit in Marx and Engels’ research program.

My contribution aims to develop the philosophical and political consequences of the notion of ‘labour-power’ in Karl Marx’s thought. Indeed, only by exploring this notion in depth, is it possible to establish a serious and rigorous comparison with the Foucauldian notion of ‘biopolitics’ and to investigate the Marxian semantics of ‘power’.
For Marx, as he writes in the fourth chapter of the First Book of Capital, the notion of labour-power encompasses the totality of physical and intellectual aptitudes existing in the human corporeity. The capitalist acquires the generic capacity to produce from the worker: this capacity to produce is pure potentiality, dynamis, embedded in the worker’s body. The bios acquires specific importance in the capitalistic society because the worker’s life contains a generic capacity to produce (the labour-power) that allows the production of surplus-value.
Life is placed at the centre of politics in Marx given that labour-power is at stake. Borrowing the expression from Foucault, it can be said that for Marx, ‘biopolitics’ means the domination of capital over the life of the worker, insofar as his body is the substratum of labour-power. In the pages of Capital, Marx explains that in the manufacturing phase, the figure of the ‘collective worker’ emerges as an expression of the cooperative possibilities of labour as a socialised activity. In order to grasp the question of ‘power’ in Marx’s reflection, it has to be investigated the quality of social cooperation. ‘Productive cooperation’, as it emerges in Chapter XI of Capital, puts the process of capital valorisation in the context of the social dimension; capital reproduces the conditions of its power beyond the factory. Marx also uses the expression Verkehr, ‘social traffic’ (he uses this expression to translate into German the French term commerce), to denote the plurality of ‘power thresholds’ that cross society.
The Verkehr takes on the guise of alienating ‘practical powers’ with respect to the lives of individuals, which impose themselves unconsciously and which they internalise in the form of ritualised personal conducts. The plurality of networks of power formed within society are continually brought back to order and unity by the domination of capital over labour.
On the other hand, cooperation opens up emancipatory possibilities. For Marx, cooperation produces ‘collisions’ from which a multiplicity of figures, by acting, hope to change their condition. The proletariat, which aims to free itself from the oppressive conditions of wagelabour and the property regime, unifies without suppressing the plural character of this multitude of figures. The struggle of the proletariat is not predeterminable; indeed, proletariat is a subject that does not exist at the outset, because it is the result of the process of disidentification by the individualities that are part of it, in which each of them renounces a fixed identity determined by hierarchical power relations governed by capital.

In this paper, I want to theorise the governing of feminised and unpaid reproductive labour from a feminist Foucauldian and Marxist perspective. I critically assess the current international interest in governing unpaid care and domestic work, for instance in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 5.4), which purport to recognise and value such work. I argue for theorising the governing of reproductive labour as biopolitical governmentality from a feminist Marxist and Foucauldian perspective.
Many feminist scholars propose a Marxist and materialist reading of Foucault, which is reflected above all in Foucault’s conception of biopolitics and the domination of life (Hennessy 1990; Oksala 2015). Biopolitics include the governing of the body as a “productive force” (Foucault 2003: 31) (Foucault 1978: 141) and links the role of the state in governing labour power with the needs of the reproduction of capital (Althusser 2014; Foucault 1978: 141). From a feminist perspective, the governing of life is deeply gendered and refers to the construction of two genders and their sexual division of labour. Although the governing of life includes the reproductive labour involved in (re)producing such life, the theorisation of social reproduction as biopolitics remains a blank spot in feminist theory. Foucault’s conceptualisation of biopolitics also includes the rule and organisation of life beyond the body itself. Feminist Marxist scholars have most concisely theorised the function of reproductive labour for capitalist accumulation (e.g. Federici 2012; Vogel 1995). Those theorisations have, however, marginalised the state and its role in the governing of reproductive labour and how the state (re)produces its gendered (and racialised) divisions.
The paper addresses these gaps and brings together feminist Foucauldian and Marxist theorisations of reproductive labour. I argue that the application of biopolitics to the context of reproductive labour is a return to a Marxist Foucauldian conceptualisation of biopolitics, in which the regulation and enabling of the labour force through different mechanisms, for instance, the provision of child care, is the aim of the biopolitical governing of the population. I use the example of current international policies, that frame gender equality, family and social policies as the enablers of women’s ‘economic empowerment’. I argue, that the way the state forms the object of unpaid care and domestic work is based on the reproduction of the relations of reproduction (McIntosh 1978). I argue furthermore that the state appropriates Marxist feminist knowledges in the process.
This paper thus aims to contribute to the International Symposium by highlighting a feminist Foucault-Marx connection that is needed to understand how reproductive labour is governed and the mechanisms of appropriation by capitalist states.

The publication of The Order of Things (1966) led Foucault to engage in harsh confrontations with many Marxist thinkers for his reductive comments on Marx. Foucault’s controversial provincialisation of Marx within Ricardo’s earlier theoretical framework is then followed in the first half of the 1970s by his strong critique of Marx’s anthropology of labour. According to Foucault’s critique, as outlined in the 1973 course at the Collège de France titled The Punitive Society – and the lectures delivered in the same year in Brazil (‘Truth and Juridical Forms’) – labour power is not something that can be naturally found in human bodies as already shaped to be inserted within capitalist conditions of production. Rather, as he put it, the human capacity for labour needed to be synthesised and fixed to the apparatus of production by means of a series of disciplinary institutions.
In this paper, I will address and problematise Foucault’s 1973 charges to Marx for retaining an allegedly humanist, naturalist, and essentialist conception of the human disposition to produce. I will do so through an overview of Marx’s concept of labour power as found in the first volume of Capital alongside its preparatory drafts and other economic manuscripts written in the 1860s. Specifically, I will centre my overview on the question of time, which is crucial to the Marxian conceptualisation of capitalist exploitation.
In order to understand the shortcomings of Foucault’s critique of the anthropology of labour, one necessarily needs to come to terms with the registers of energeticism and potentiality that are found in Marx and that help us highlight how abstract time inscribes itself onto a potential disposition to produce. These registers, contra Foucault, allow us to reframe the construction of an anthropological understanding of the capacity for labour within capitalist conditions of production and the economic and scientific categories through which they have come to be grasped – epistemically, ideologically and conjuncturally.
The analysis of the temporal aspects of the disciplining of labour power is what allows Foucault to advance a corrective to the shortcomings of traditional ‘humanist’ Marxism. At the same time, he nonetheless misses the fact that the very concept of human labour power, in Marx, must be understood as specifically capitalist in the way time functions as the prime social mediation that makes labour power to appear as an inherent ‘natural’ trait of humanity. Over the span of his intellectual production, Marx’s view of labour ‘in general’ does retain an important dimension of naturalism (the realm of necessity). Yet one could say that this dimension is not sufficient to provide the grounds for Foucault’s accusation of essentialism, especially when we consider how Marx conceives of the specific form that labour power assumes under capitalist conditions of production in relation to the temporal measurement of its expenditure.
Ultimately, the underlying claim of my contribution is that even though Foucault’s reading of Marx may not be particularly accurate or generous, the questions he posed to Marx in the first part of the 1970s nonetheless allow us to rethink and problematise some lines of conceptualisation that were already in Marx, though they may only become truly legible after Foucault.

In the Grundrisse, Marx places the question of time at the center of his economic analysis: „Ökonomie der Zeit, darin löst sich schließlich alle Ökonomie auf.“ According to Marx, the significance of time for capitalist dynamics lies in the temporal mediation of central categories of capital, namely the commodity, value and labour. Capitalism is based on a form of abstract time that makes abstract labour as a form of socialisation possible in the first place and is directly linked to the abstract form of money: time is money. However, abstract time is not only a logical condition of capitalist socialisation, but also establishes a certain form of domination. In capitalism, the concrete dependency relations of feudalism are transformed into the abstract domination of value and time. The temporal dynamics of capitalism, which increasingly accelerate and intensify the utilisation of time, shape people’s experience of time and their form of life. Moishe Postone places this at the centre of his interpretation of Marx by criticising the empty time of capital as a domineering expression of the permanent exploitation of value. According to Postone, capitalism realises the domination of time over people or, more precisely, the domination by a historically specific form of temporality – namely Newtonian abstract time – which is historically linked to the commodity form. In my presentation, I will link Postone’s analysis and critique of capitalist time relations with Foucault’s perspective on the modern time regime. Unlike Postone, who himself argues for a greater distance between Foucault and Marx, I will argue in favour of the possible compatibility of Foucault’s analysis of power and Marx’s critique of the economy of time. Foucault supplements Marx’s critique of value with a critique of forms of subjectivation. According to Foucault, capitalist subjects are bound to a certain time regime and orientated towards the permanent increase of productivity. I will show the extent to which elements of a critique of the domination of time can be found in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish by reconstructing a critique of the micropolitics of the modern time regime. Following this I discuss the lecture The Punitive Society, in which Foucault specifically analyses the formation of a capitalist time regime against the background of his genealogy of the disciplinary society. Finally, I will illustrate the current relevance of a critique of the domination of abstract time and, in doing so, discuss struggles over working time and phenomena of acceleration.

An important chapter in Foucault’s intellectual trajectory is still little researched: his reception of Soviet Marxism, particularly theories of heredity by the infamous Ukrainian agronomist and plant thinker Trofim Lysenko. In August 1948, a report from the USSR Academy of Agricultural Sciences appeared in a French communist newspaper. Stalin’s favourite, the “proletarian” scientist Lysenko had proposed in Moscow a new and genuine biology that would break away from the “bourgeois” science of genetics. This report on heredity made a splash in French debates on epistemology and science; the “Lysenko affair” broke out. For over a year, all kinds of intellectuals took sides for or against Lysenko’s plant theories. Dominique Lecourt later wrote an important book on Lysenko’s (pseudo-)science. A student at the École normale, Foucault followed the heated debate, which, we argue, has to be contextually embedded in a broader Cold War divide within the philosophy of science.
We will suggest in this paper that Foucault’s shift away from Althusserian materialism, through what we call his “vegetal epistemologies”, takes place in the shadow of the Lysenko affair. In a 1976 interview, Foucault claimed that all his work on sexuality and psychiatry aimed to grasp the “political status of science and the ideological functions it could serve”, as they had been “raised in the 1950s around the Lysenko affair.” It is on the basis of the questions raised by Lysenkoism that Foucault developed a new view on science that included extensive work on vegetal biology, knowledge of heredity and agricultural practices. In dialogue with Soviet Marxism and the doctrine of dialectical materialism (Diamat), Foucault formulated a critique of ideology that hinged on the notion of “practised knowledge”, supporting the idea that knowledge is constituted within social institutions and practices.
Exploring themes of materiality, vegetality, heredity and history, organism and social organisation, our paper draws on unpublished material from Foucault’s archives. His reading notes at the French National Library bear witness to his interest in Lysenko and Soviet Marxist plant science. A series of notes on heredity, the alterability of genes and the theory of stages, dating back to 1940 or 1950, are devoted to Lysenko. The lectures that Foucault gave at Vincennes in 1969 all bear the hallmark of the science/ideology and theory/practice debates that prevailed French epistemology, sparked by the Lysenko debate two decades earlier. In 1969, as part of his application to the Collège de France, as the archives reveal, Foucault developed an entire teaching and research programme devoted to the “knowledge of heredity.” Finally, we explore how this work on heredity led him to turn away from an Althusserian epistemology towards reconfiguring (Soviet) Marxist epistemologies of vegetal life.

It seems as if we are living on borrowed time. We no longer live in a world of small catastrophes. Island pacific states set to go underwater, heat waves which are melting roads, drying rivers, are becoming normal everyday occurrences. Our milieu is being destroyed but (for now) life persists. In the paper we aim to put into the spotlight Marx’s and Foucault’s own apocalyptic proclamations, whether it be “the fall of the earth into the sun” (Marx), or Foucault’s triptych of nuclear war, deadly viruses and genocides as the destructive underside of his proposal of nurturing and productive “politics of life”. Refusing the temptation to understand these and similar enunciations in authors oeuvres as either merely rhetorical devices (in Marx’s case) or as a theoretical dead-end (in Foucault’s), we will attempt to reinterpret these apocalyptic statements of ultimate and total destruction and give them a far more important position than they are usually delegated. We will attempt to transform both authors’ thinking on destruction, and thus transformed turn them into the pivoting point around which one can assemble a new “problematic” around which their dialogue could be established. We propose that destruction is not a theoretical or “real” end of political analysis and/or the world itself, but an epistemological horizon through which we can analyze not only where we are but how we think about where we are – and how it forms our ideas about where we are going. In this way we aim to provide an alternative to the predominant syntax of the dialogue between Marx and Foucault; only by moving away from what we call the “productivist ontology” on which most of the reception of Foucault and Marx takes place, do we open the work of both to contemporary problems of climate and ecological destruction, war and the accumulation of capital as it is shaped in the beginning of the 21st century.