The Productive Body by Didier Deleule and François Guéry

Making an old book new again … by translating it into English.

Progressive Geographies

An important 1972 book, mentioned by Foucault in Discipline and Punish, is finally coming out in English translation in March 2014, with an excellent introduction by the translators.

Productive BodyThe Productive Body asks how the human body and its labor have been expropriated and re-engineered through successive stages of capitalism; and how capitalism’s transformation of the body is related to the rise of scientific psychology and social science disciplines complicit with modern regimes of control. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault cited Guéry and Deleule in order to link Marx’s diagnosis of capitalism with his own critique of power/knowledge. The Productive Body brings together Marxism and theories of the body-machine for the goal of political revolution.

  • Very interesting analysis… The technological mutations of the apparatus of production, the division of labour and the elaboration of the disciplinary techniques sustained an ensemble of very close relations (cf. Marx, Capital,  vol. i, chapter XIII and…

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