Michel Foucault: a dialogue about power In Krytyka, No. 1-2 (51-52), 2002, pp. 11-13.

According to the author, the reception of Michel Foucault's philosophy in the CIS is significantly distorted. The article substantiates the thesis that Foucault's intellectual project is in opposition to the key provisions of leftist ideology. The author highlights the following typical features of the latter: the basic opposition between «direct/artificial», the understanding of lies as the language of power, the existence of a scenario of radical liberation from coercive relations, and the universalization of the idea of the common. In contrast, according to the author's observations, Foucault's philosophy can be distinguished by a number of meta-concepts that attest to its opposition to leftist mythology: the interpretation of man as a product of power relations, the rejection of the postulate of ideology as «false consciousness», the presence of a scenario of salvation through philosophy, and the presence of fundamental nominalism. The author warns that borrowing individual elements of Foucault's concept of power without reconstructing his holistic philosophical position leads to misinterpretations in the study of Soviet and post-communist statehood.