Michel Foucault died in 1984, but his intellectual influence continues to shape debates about power, surveillance, identity and political resistance. Four decades after his death, his ideas are finding renewed relevance in discussions about artificial intelligence, digital monitoring, gender politics and the changing relationship between individuals and institutions.
For French philosopher Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, one of the leading contemporary specialists on Foucault, the continuing appeal of the French thinker lies precisely in his refusal to provide comfortable answers or fixed political prescriptions. Instead, his work offers a framework for questioning the systems of power that shape everyday life.
In an interview with El País, Potte-Bonneville argues that Foucault’s philosophy is particularly relevant at a time when humanity increasingly views the future not as a promise of progress but as a source of anxiety.
“Our great tragedy is that we perceive the future as a problem,” he says, pointing to climate change and artificial intelligence as two developments that have profoundly altered contemporary expectations of what lies ahead.
Potte-Bonneville, a professor at France’s École Normale Supérieure de Lyon and director of the Department of Culture and Creation at the Centre Pompidou, has devoted much of his intellectual work to Foucault. His engagement began with the discovery of The Order of Discourse, a work that demonstrated how philosophy could be both intellectually rigorous and politically subversive.
Foucault’s continuing relevance, he argues, stems partly from the extraordinary breadth of his work, which brought philosophy into conversation with history, literature and the social sciences. His influence extends to contemporary thinkers including Judith Butler, Achille Mbembe and Gayatri Spivak, whose work draws on concepts developed by Foucault despite his not having directly addressed some of their central subjects.
Potte-Bonneville describes the present intellectual climate as a moment of “Foucault 2.0”, in which his ideas are being reconsidered through problems that did not exist during his lifetime.
Artificial intelligence offers a particularly striking example. An artistic collective recently developed an AI programme called Foukenstein, combining Foucault’s name with Frankenstein, which uses his writings and simulated voice to respond to questions. For Potte-Bonneville, the experiment raises questions about authorship and intellectual identity, recalling Foucault’s famous engagement with the idea of the death of the author.
Yet he cautions against treating Foucault as a prophet who anticipated every contemporary technological development. Foucault did not predict automated surveillance or algorithmic control. His importance, rather, lies in providing tools to examine how power operates, changes and adapts.
That approach is particularly relevant to the expansion of digital surveillance and the growing influence of technological systems over private life. Foucault’s exploration of the relationship between personal identity and political power also offers a framework for examining contemporary masculinist movements, which Potte-Bonneville describes as connecting masculine sexual identity directly with the exercise of power.
He argues that violence against women and children has become part of an increasingly interconnected international masculinist movement, while also generating resistance across significant sections of society.
But perhaps the most provocative aspect of Foucault’s philosophy concerns the future itself. Earlier twentieth-century philosophical traditions frequently associated progress with emancipation and the possibility of a better society. That confidence has weakened considerably. Climate disruption and the uncertainties surrounding artificial intelligence have made it increasingly difficult to imagine a future that inspires optimism.
Foucault, according to Potte-Bonneville, deliberately avoided offering predictions about what was to come. When questioned about the future, he preferred to concentrate on political action in the present. Effective politics, in this understanding, requires confronting existing structures of power rather than waiting for an imagined future to resolve present problems.
This rejection of nostalgia is, for Potte-Bonneville, one of Foucault’s most liberating contributions.
His understanding of resistance is equally complicated. In France, the word carries considerable historical weight because of its association with the Second World War and the resistance against Nazi occupation. Potte-Bonneville explains that Foucault was cautious about the term, recognising that resistance should not automatically be romanticised or treated as inherently emancipatory.
A revolt against one form of oppression does not guarantee that another will not emerge. What interested Foucault was the moment when people interrupt the exercise of power and create the possibility of something different.
Potte-Bonneville sees an example of this ambiguity in France’s Yellow Vest movement, which emerged in 2018. Initially confusing and politically difficult to categorise, the movement exposed the grievances of people living far from political decision-making centres. Its protests brought into public view economic and social frustrations that had largely remained invisible.
For Foucault, such movements would have been interesting not necessarily because they offered a coherent political alternative, but because they disrupted established arrangements of power.
As the centenary of Foucault’s birth approaches in 2026, his ideas continue to resonate far beyond academic philosophy. His enduring challenge is not to predict what humanity will become, but to question the structures shaping what it is today. In an age increasingly dominated by technological uncertainty, political anxiety and competing claims to authority, that may be a more urgent intellectual task than ever.
