On Tolstoy and Foucault: Intellectuals, Conscience, and the Entanglements of Bio-Power

Abstract

This paper examines the new understanding of power that emerges in the late works of Leo Tolstoy, as an early premonition of ideas subsequently elaborated by Michel Foucault, particularly his seminal conception of bio-politics. In works such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), and particularly the novel Resurrection (1899), Tolstoy undertakes precisely the kind of “struggle against power” which Foucault identifies as a fundamental task of the modern intellectual: “a struggle aimed at revealing and undermining power where it is most invisible and insidious”. In confronting the manifold manifestations of a new logic of power – a logic that he never manages to grasp fully – Tolstoy continues to rely on analytical perspectives he ostensibly denounces. Yet no one went further than Tolstoy in acknowledging and combating his own complicity with the system of power, both as a landowner and an intellectual. From this perspective Tolstoy heralds the transformation of the intellectual and conscience subsequently called for by Foucault.