The Productive Body asks how the human body and its labor have been expropriated and re-engineered through successive stages of capitalism; and how capitalisms 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 Marxs 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.

Didier Deleule is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre-La Défense and President of the Société Française de Philosophie. François Guéry is Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at the Université Jean Moulin, Lyon. Philip Barnard and Stephen Shapiro are Professors, respectively, at the universities of Kansas and Warwick.