Foucault News

CFP: Byung-Chul Han and Contemporary Culture Online symposium (2026, 2027)

Clare O'Farrell

26 October 2026

Byung-Chul Han and Contemporary Culture. Online symposium. Hosted by European University Cyprus

Deadline for abstracts: Monday 18 January 2027

Byung-Chul Han engages extensively with Foucault’s work.

Byung-Chul Han’s slim volumes of philosophy now circulate widely in English, with more than twenty books translated since 2015. These books offer a cosmopolitan account of a digital age in which technology allows power to seduce rather than repress, and in which contemplation and even idleness become essential for the survival of love and community. His accounts of burnout, transparency, psychopolitics, the “infocracy,” the disappearance of ritual and of things, the loss or expulsion of the other, the necessity of shared time, and the crisis of narration have also travelled far beyond academic philosophy.

Yet within English-language critical theory his work, which seems to have a high degree of relevance to contemporary cultural objects and movements, has received comparatively little sustained application. The immediate aim of this symposium, then, is to put Han’s concepts to work as diagnostic tools: our focus is less on his philosophy in the abstract than on what it can do when brought to bear on specific cultural objects, texts and practices. Here we follow Deleuze’s remark that a theory “is exactly like a box of tools… It must be useful. It must function,” and indeed Han’s own pronouncement in The Agony of Eros that theory is “an essential decision that causes the world to appear […] in a wholly different light.”

We welcome contributions from across the humanities and social sciences, including literary studies (print and digital), cultural studies, media and communication studies, film and television, games studies, theology, visual culture and art history, design, and more. Papers will as standard be 15 minutes, though we are prepared to be flexible in terms of length and format.

We are delighted that Professor Steven Knepper will be the keynote speaker for this symposium. Professor Knepper is, among his other achievements, co-author of Byung-Chul Han (Polity, 2024), the only full-length critical introduction to Han’s work.

Depending on the number and quality of responses, and the range of subjects covered, the aim is for this symposium to result in publication, either a focused journal special issue or a broader collection of essays with a university press. Scholars at any stage of their career are very welcome to submit.

Possible topics

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

Burnout and the achievement-subject in fiction, film, art or games
Psychopolitics and the shaping of subjectivity by platforms, apps or other technologies of mediation
Storyselling in social media influencer personae, autofiction, and other forms of self-presentation
Counterexamples: digital practices that sustain ritual, contemplation and/or community
The Crisis of Narration applied to fiction, journalism or online culture
The shitstorm/swarm as mode of digital communication
Non-things: smartphones, digital artworks, e-books, Instapoems, text on screen more broadly
The aesthetics of the smooth in art and design
Generative AI and cultural production as technology of control (Infocracy, Non-Things)
Datafication’s assault on subjectivity
The defence of love/eros in the achievement society
Ritual and play as cultural practices under pressure
Boredom, contemplation and the vita contemplativa as manifested in cultural objects
Shanzhai: copying and translation in globalised culture
Han as a writer – essayistic form, brevity and/or readability as tactic

How to submit

Please send the following to j.mackay@euc.ac.cy by Monday 18 January 2027:

an abstract of 250–300 words, including the title
a brief bio-note of no more than 100 words

Papers should be given in English. There is no fee for attendance. For any questions, please contact the organiser at j.mackay@euc.ac.cy.

Foucault and Marx. Special Collection G+C (2025-2026)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

26 October 2026

Foucault and Marx, Genealogy + Critique, 2025-2026

Papers for the symposium “Foucault and Marx: Ambivalences, Legacies, and Future Struggles” (University of Vienna, 18–19 October 2024). The symposium was part of the World Congress “Foucault: 40 years after”, marking the 40th anniversary of Foucault’s death.

The special collection “Foucault and Marx,” edited by Eva-Maria Aigner, Ralf Gisinger, Christoph Hubatschke, Eva Jägle, and Jonas Oßwald, explores key aspects of the ambivalent relationship between Foucault, Marx, and Marxism. Despite the significance of Foucault’s supposed anti-Marxism for the tensions and polemics between poststructuralism, critical theory, and Marxist theory, their relationship remains surprisingly underexplored. With the recent publication of Foucault’s early lectures, particularly Penal Theories and Institutions and The Punitive Society, a much more nuanced picture of Foucault’s account of Marx began to emerge than commonly assumed. The special collection aims to investigate this constellation against the backdrop of this latest perspective, shedding new light on questions of theoretical lineage and discontinuity as well as contemporary approaches, uses, and continuations of the Foucault–Marx nexus.

Editorial

Eva-Maria Aigner, Ralf Gisinger, Christoph Hubatschke, Evi Jägle, Jonas Oßwald, “Foucault and Marx: Ambivalences, Legacies, and Future Struggles,” Genealogy+Critique 12, no. 1 (2026). https://doi.org/10.16995/gc.31073

Articles

– Matteo Polleri, “From Adversity to Heresy: Towards a Disjunctive Conjunction of Foucault and Marx,” Genealogy+Critique 11, no. 1 (2025). https://doi.org/10.16995/gc.23083

– Chiara Stefanoni and Francesco Aloe, “The Queer ‘Standpoint of Reproduction’: De Lauretis as a Reader of Althusser and Foucault,” Genealogy+Critique 11, no. 1 (2025). https://doi.org/10.16995/gc.22918

– Gordan Maslov and Atila Lukić, “As the Earth Falls into the Sun: Marx, Foucault and the Problem of Destruction,” Genealogy+Critique 11, no. 1 (2025). https://doi.org/10.16995/gc.22995

– Tanja Wischnewski and Johann Szews, “Modern Times: Zeitregime der Moderne bei Michel Foucault und Moishe Postone”, Genealogy+Critique 12, no. 1 (2026). https://doi.org/10.16995/gc.23664

– Friederike Beier, “The Biopolitics of Social Re_production: Feminist Foucauldian and Marxist Perspectives,” Genealogy+Critique 12, no. 1 (2026). https://doi.org/10.16995/gc.23004

Laurent Olivier, The Dark Abyss of Time. Archaeology and Memory (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

25 October 2026

Laurent Olivier, The Dark Abyss of Time. Archaeology and Memory, trans. Arthur Greenspan, Bloomsbury, 2024.

Description
The field of archaeology continues to face a major crisis of interpretation. The traditional view is that the basic business of archaeology is to reconstruct the history of cultures and civilizations through their material productions. Olivier challenges this view with a new approach to archaeological remains based on the works of French theorists such as Foucault, de Certeaux, and Derrida, with insight from Darwin and Freud. His thesis is that archaeology does not study the past itself but rather what materially remains of the past in our present. Olivier also develops an interpretation of material culture based on Aby Warburg’s and Walter Benjamin’s work in the anthropology of art. With wider implications for history and all social sciences, The Dark Abyss of Time is a major contribution to the theory of time, memory, heritage, and archaeology. This flawless translation makes Olivier’s elegantly written work available in English for the first time.

Nicolas Chevassus-au-Louis, Série: Foucault, penseur du présent (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

23 October 2026

Nicolas Chevassus-au-Louis, Série: Foucault, penseur du présent, Mediapart, octobre 2026

Né il y a tout juste cent ans, le 15 octobre 1926 et mort du sida en 1984, Michel Foucault est aujourd’hui le philosophe français le plus cité au monde. Jusqu’où sa pensée nous est-elle contemporaine ? Quelle part peut aujourd’hui nous paraître obsolète ? Comment celui qui n’a écrit qu’un paragraphe sur la colonisation a-t-il créé une boîte à outils utilisée par presque toutes les études postcoloniales ? Pourquoi sa pensée radicale sur les prisons n’a-t-elle guère fait école ? Une série en quatre épisodes, alors que les inédits éditoriaux de Foucault prolifèrent à l’occasion de son centenaire, en dépit de ses volontés posthumes.

Réservé aux abonné·es

Judith Butler : Entretien « L’écriture de Michel Foucault est trop ironique, trop subtile pour correspondre au stéréotype du wokisme » (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

23 October 2026

Judith Butler : Entretien « L’écriture de Michel Foucault est trop ironique, trop subtile pour correspondre au stéréotype du wokisme » , Le nouvel obs, Propos recueillis par Marie Lemonnier, Publié le 17 octobre 2026

Entretien L’autrice de « Trouble dans le genre » rend hommage au philosophe dont on fête cet automne le centenaire. Elle évoque les pistes fécondes qu’il a ouvertes, notamment pour le féminisme.

Comment avez-vous rencontré la pensée de Michel Foucault ?
[…]

Article réservé aux abonnés

Aline Courtois, Simon Marginson, Catherine Montgomery, Ravinder Sidhu (eds), The Future of Cross-Border Academic Mobilities and Immobilities. Power, Knowledge and Agency (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

22 October 2026

Aline Courtois, Simon Marginson, Catherine Montgomery, Ravinder Sidhu (eds), The Future of Cross-Border Academic Mobilities and Immobilities. Power, Knowledge and Agency, Bloomsbury, 2025

Open access

Description
This open access edited collection brings together reflections on the fast-changing and crisis-ridden global context and develops new ways of conceptualising academic mobilities, and immobilities, against a backdrop of a conflicted and precarious future for global higher education. The result is a set of vivid cutting-edge contributions, some of which take a global view and others which explore a country perspective, including China, France, Malaysia, Philippines, Spain, Thailand, Turkey, Vietnam, and more.

The book foregrounds critical approaches to academic mobility, with topics covered including blockages to mobility in the context of geopolitical tensions and the upsurge of national particularism and nativism, the intersection of academic (im)mobilities and power, political subjectivities and race, class and gender. Traditional understandings of academic mobility as physical mobility from global South to North are questioned as exclusionary and alternative models of mobility are offered. These include those appropriate to post-colonial national and regional contexts, those responsive to the changing needs of students, academics and their communities, those using online modes as well as those involving physical transfers of persons, and those about the mobility of knowledge as well as people and learning.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by UKRI.

Béatrice Giblin, La rencontre oubliée de Foucault et la géopolitique (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

21 October 2026

Béatrice Giblin, La rencontre oubliée de Foucault et la géopolitique, Le Grand Continent, 18 octobre 2026

En novembre 1975, Yves Lacoste pousse la porte de l’appartement parisien du philosophe.

Béatrice Giblin, témoin de cet échange décisif, en raconte pour la première fois les coulisses et le surprenant retournement.

L’année 2026 marque le centième anniversaire de la naissance de Michel Foucault, mais aussi les cinquante ans de la création de la revue Hérodote, dont le premier numéro s’ouvrait sur un long entretien accordé par le philosophe au géographe Yves Lacoste. Alors élève de ce dernier, la géographe Béatrice Giblin, actuelle rédactrice en chef d’Hérodote, a assisté à l’unique rencontre de ces deux intellectuels marquants du XXe siècle. À l’occasion de la journée d’étude sur Michel Foucault et la géopolitique, organisée le 13 octobre 2026 par l’Institut géopolitique d’études avancées, elle est revenue sur cet épisode marquant dans un témoignage dont nous publions la retranscription.

[…]

Dans mon souvenir, c’est par l’intermédiaire de François Châtelet que Lacoste obtient un rendez-vous avec Michel Foucault. Il a lieu au domicile du philosophe, rue de Vaugirard. Je l’ai accompagnée, impressionnée d’assister à cette rencontre entre deux grands intellectuels.

[…]

Peter McLaren, The Smell of a Dying Republic (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

20 October 2026

Peter McLaren, The Smell of a Dying Republic, LA Progressive, Oct 13, 2026

Courts, universities, newspapers, and elections may survive even as their democratic purpose is stripped away. The danger is not simply political collapse, but learning to accept it as ordinary life.

[…]
I was chosen to serve as a tour guide for Michel Foucault when he visited Toronto. There is something almost comical about the memory now: the young man who had travelled by Greyhound bus and hitchhiked through a continent, carrying his questions in the same battered luggage as his clothes, suddenly entrusted with guiding one of the great philosophical interrogators of the twentieth century through a city whose secrets were written in back alleys, bars, and the hidden cartography of desire. Hitchhiking teaches you that the world is not quite the orderly place it pretends to be.
[…]

Foucault understood that beneath the respectable surface of a city another city is always breathing. He had spent years investigating the invisible architecture of power: the rules that enter our bodies, the categories that sort our desires, the institutions that teach us which lives are normal and which must be hidden in the shadows. Toronto had its own underground passages through this architecture. The Barracks, at 56 Widmer Street, belonged to that secret geography, a place associated with the city’s gay underground and with forms of desire that respectable society preferred not to acknowledge. I remember the encounter not as a lecture delivered by a philosopher to a grateful audience, but as a collision between the life I had stumbled through and the questions that had animated his work. The road had taught me that human beings are never quite the creatures their official descriptions claim them to be. Foucault gave that intuition a sharper edge: perhaps the borders around our lives are not natural boundaries at all, but fences built by history, guarded by habit, and mistaken for the horizon.
[…]

Michel Serres, Hermes IV: Distribution (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

19 October 2026

Michel Serres, Hermes IV: Distribution. Translated by Randolph Burks. University of Minnesota Press, December 22, 2026

How order, meaning, and knowledge emerge from noise across science, literature, and philosophy

Description
Hermes IV: Distribution is the fourth and penultimate volume in Michel Serres’s landmark series on knowledge and communication across disciplines. This collection of essays investigates how order emerges from noise, using thermodynamics and information theory as structural models applicable to science, literature, and culture alike. Moving beyond the themes of interference and translation developed in earlier volumes, Serres focuses on distribution: the processes by which systems take shape, endure, and eventually disperse.

At the core of the book is a dynamic vision of knowledge as an unstable formation. Systems arise from chance encounters or deviations that, through repetition, harden into law. They resist entropy by remaining open to external inputs, forming temporary pockets of negentropy within a wider field of chaos. Space, time, energy, language, and meaning are all shown to emerge from such conditions of mixture and imbalance.

Serres develops his argument through a striking range of materials, including fables, myths, literary texts, philosophy, and the history of science. The result is an uncommon synthesis of hard science and the humanities that reveals shared structures across domains while affirming the irreducible plurality of their laws and methods.

Michel Serres (1930–2019) was author of more than sixty books, including Biogea, Variations on the Body, and The Parasite (all available in translation from Minnesota). He was widely known for his poetic prose and interdisciplinary form of thought.

Randolph Burks is an independent scholar who has translated many works by Michel Serres, including Biogea, Variations on the Body, Hermes II, and Hermes III, all published by the University of Minnesota Press.

From Wikipedia (19/10/26)
Serres taught philosophy from 1958 to 1968 at the University of Clermont-Ferrand. There, he notably associated with Michel Foucault and Jules Vuillemin. At Clermont-Ferrand Michel Serres regularly exchanged ideas and viewpoints with Michel Foucault on themes that would later take shape in Foucault’s book Les Mots et les Choses (The Order of Things).[6]

At the invitation of Foucault, Serres was appointed to University of Paris VIII, where he briefly took part in the Vincennes experiment in 1968–1969.

Frédéric Gros, Violence de la propriété (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

19 October 2026

Frédéric Gros, Violence de la propriété, Albin Michel, 2026

Il existe une part maudite de la propriété privée. Celle qui affirme que ce que je possède est à moi seul ; que devenir propriétaire prive un autre de ce que j’ai ; que ce qui fonde mon droit de propriété, c’est d’être autorisé à en user et à en abuser. Les grandes crises climatiques, sanitaires, sociales, relationnelles, géopolitiques peuvent se lire comme une conséquence du déchaînement de cette appropriation prédatrice.

Mais l’appropriation n’est pas par essence du côté de cette dernière. Son sens premier – celui d’une appropriation réciproque, mutuelle, régulatrice, écologique – se retrouve dans trois activités fondamentales qui permettent de construire un rapport harmonieux de l’homme au monde : habiter, apprendre, accueillir. Ainsi, habiter ne signifie plus occuper tout l’espace ; apprendre, consommer à outrance ; accueillir, assimiler coûte que coûte. C’est bien là tout l’enjeu de ce livre que de retrouver le sens perdu de l’appropriation.

Essai politique, livre de combat, Violence de la propriété propose une nouvelle définition de cette dernière : plus juste, redistributive, consentie. En un mot : heureuse.