Foucault News

Diana Stypinska, On the Genealogy of Critique Or How We Have Become Decadently Indignant (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

11 January 2026

Diana Stypinska, On the Genealogy of Critique Or How We Have Become Decadently Indignant, Routledge, 2020

Description
On the Genealogy of Critique intervenes into both contemporary academic debates on critique, and today’s mainstream criticism, by reflecting upon the relationship between criticality and social change in the age of post-politics.

What does it mean to be critical? When we are told that civilisation is facing extinction, does the idea of critique still hold any value? Today, more than ever, we seem to be critical of everything. Yet, paradoxically, our criticism exerts very little political influence. Taking this problematique as its starting point, this book reclaims the transformative potential of critique, challenging the common assumptions about criticality. It presents a counter-history of criticism, demonstrating how the modern notion of critical subjectivity embodies an imperative to the securitisation of the status quo. In elaborating on a range of contemporary critical (dis)positions, the book advocates new ways of thinking about critique and social change. Through this, it equips the reader with analytical tools useful for thinking the way out of our post-political predicament.

This book is of relevance to anyone concerned with social change. Particularly, it will be of use to academics, postgraduates and advanced undergraduate students working in the areas of sociology, politics, philosophy and cultural studies.

Diana Stypinska is Lecturer in Social Theory in the School of Political Science and Sociology at University of Galway, Ireland. Her work traverses critical theory, continental philosophy and critical sociology. She is the author of On the Genealogy of Critique: Or How We Have Become Decadently Indignant (2020, Routledge), Social Media, Truth and the Care of the Self: On the Digital Technologies of the Subject (2022, Palgrave Macmillan) and Social Media Frenzies: Digitalized Agitation and Social Change (2025, Routledge).

Foucault News: Statement about Generative AI (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

9 January 2026

Editor: I have added the following statement to the About page on Foucault News.

Statement about generative AI

I do not support the outsourcing of research and writing to generative AI. This is sometimes (often) very hard to detect. If you notice posts on work that falls into this category, please let me know. The use of grammar and translation software by non native speakers is not included in this category – as long as the original words were authored by a human writer/researcher.

References
Callum Cant, James Muldoon, Mark Graham, Feeding the Machine. The Hidden Human Labor Powering A.I., Bloomsbury, 2024.

Kate Crawford, Generative AI’s environmental costs are soaring — and mostly secret, Nature 626, 693 (2024) https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00478-x

Sharon Kabel, A bibliography of genAI-fueled research fraud from 2025. Sharon Kabel’s blog, 23 December 2025.

Dmitry Kobak et al. Delving into LLM-assisted writing in biomedical publications through excess vocabulary, Science Advances, vol 7, Issue 27 (2025). DOI:10.1126/sciadv.adt3813

Steven Gonzalez Monserrate, The Cloud Is Material: On the Environmental Impacts of Computation and Data Storage, MIT Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing, Winter (January) 2022. https://doi.org/10.21428/2c646de5.031d4553

James Muldoon interviewed by Sabrina Provenzani, AI is an extraction machine. But resistance is possible, The Citizens, 17 September 2024.

Retraction Watch, Tracking retractions as a window into the scientific process.

Édison Flávio Fernandes & Alice Casimiro Lopes, When data speaks, what issues are silenced? Evidence, statistics, and curriculum (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

8 January 2026

Édison Flávio Fernandes & Alice Casimiro Lopes (2025) When data speaks, what issues are silenced? Evidence, statistics, and curriculum. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 33(86).
https://doi.org/10.14507/epaa.33.9195

Abstract:
This paper presents a discussion that operates within the tension between deconstructionist philosophy—centered on the event as a rupture of stable meanings—and statistical practices in education, which seek to standardize data and suppress uncertainties. It argues that statistics, as a tool for curriculum design, reduce social complexities to homogeneous patterns, rendering alterity and adversity invisible, as well as neglecting contingency and the unpredictability of events in educational and curricular policies. We contend that the undecidability of the event displaces the notion of data neutrality in describing reality, exposing the erasure of uncertainty as an effect of power. Combining an interdisciplinary review (philosophy, statistics, curriculum studies) with an interpretation of evidence-based policies, this paper argues that deconstruction allows for a rethinking of educational assessments and their effects on the curriculum. This argument aligns with the defense of hybrid models for education policy that integrate quantitative rigor while recognizing uncertainty not as a flaw, but as an ontological condition of education and curriculum—thus contributing to a more critical and democratic debate in the field.

Keywords:
deconstruction; educational statistics; uncertainty; curriculum policy

Giorgi Vachnadze, Genealogies of Formal Systems. Substack (2025-)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

7 January 2026

Giorgi Vachnadze, Genealogies of Formal Systems. Substack (2025-)

Giorgi Vachnadze is a writer and researcher focused on Foucault and Wittgenstein, working at the intersection of philosophy, critical theory, and contemporary issues such as AI, education policy, and algorithmic governance.

Recent posts include:
Ἑαυτοῦ Ἡνίοχος: Piloting the Self
Liberating the Care of the Self from Plato and Christianity

Savoir: The Knowledge that Transforms the Subject
Ethopoiesis, Phusiologia, and Useful Knowledge

Two Conversions: The Oldest Technology of the Self
Between Platonic Epistrophē and the Christian Metanoia

Steven Maynard, Michel and Mathurin: Finding Foucault in the Archives (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

7 January 2026

Steven Maynard, Michel and Mathurin: Finding Foucault in the Archives, Archivaria 100 (Fall/Winter 2025): 44-73
https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view/14061

Abstract
In this article, we follow Foucault into the archives. Foucault spent much of his working life reading and researching in libraries and archives, and yet he most often figures in the archival literature as the creator of the rarified concept of “the archive.” As a counterpoint, this article explores Foucault’s work in archives, his use of archives in his work, and the significance he attached to archival research. Ultimately, I contend that it is impossible to understand the abstract archive as concept without first grounding it in the experiential, epistemological, methodological, and political dimensions of finding Foucault in the archives.

RÉSUMÉ
Cet article nous invite à suivre Foucault dans les archives. Foucault a passé une bonne partie de sa vie professionnelle en tant que lecteur et chercheur dans les bibliothèques et les archives; toutefois, dans la littérature archivistique, il apparaît le plus souvent comme le créateur du concept ésotérique de “l’archive”. En contrepartie, cet article explore le travail de Foucault dans les archives, l’emploi qu’il fait des archives dans son oeuvre, et la signification qu’il attribue à la recherche dans les archives. Finalement, je propose qu’il soit impossible de comprendre l’archive abstraite en tant que concept sans l’ancrer d’abord dans les dimensions expérientielle, épistémologique, méthodologique et politique de la rencontre avec Foucault dans les archives.

Steven Maynard is an adjunct associate professor in the Department of History at Queen’s University, where he teaches the history of sexuality. His article “Queer Parrhesiast,” in “Devotion: Today’s Future Becomes Tomorrow’s Archive,” a special issue of PUBLIC: Art/Culture/Ideas 33, no. 65 (2022), is a study of the personal archives of gay-left thinker Alexander Wilson, who interviewed Foucault during his stay in Toronto in the spring of 1982. The article, which reproduces the manuscript of the interview with Foucault found in Wilson’s papers, is part of a book Steven is writing on Foucault’s visits to Canada/Québec and his impact on local activist-intellectuals. A previous article, “Police/Archives,” in Archivaria, no. 68 (Fall 2009), won the Association of Canadian Archivists’ W. Kaye Lamb Prize for the article that most advances archival thinking in Canada.

Paul Flaig, From the Tramp to Trump: On Sovereignty and Screen Comedy (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

5 January 2026

Paul Flaig, ‘From the Tramp to Trump: On Sovereignty and Screen Comedy’, in William V. Costanzo, and Peter C. Kunze (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Screen Comedy, Oxford Handbooks (2025; online edn, Oxford Academic, 21 Aug. 2025)
https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197675502.013.0026

Abstract
In recent years, critics and scholars have anxiously observed that the subversive force of satire, jokes, and gags on-screen has become not only toothless but positively embraced by populist leaders and political demagogues. From Silvio Berlusconi to Donald Trump, Boris Johnson to Jair Bolsonaro, the figures of the sovereign and the court jester have merged into what Michel Foucault, in a prescient passing phrase, once called “grotesque sovereignty.” In this chapter, I build on Foucault’s concept to situate this recent entanglement of comic subversion and sovereign power within a wider genealogy of screen comedy. If sovereignty has, over the last century, become defined by a grotesque excess it has been, in large part, through the mediating power of screens, whether cinematic, televisual, or viral, which have produced, in turn, comic forms of satire and parody as inevitable blowback. Yet far from understanding sovereignty and comedy in opposed terms, I emphasize their shared status as states of exception in which sovereign and clown appear as inverted, reproducible images of one another.

Emphasizing this complicity of sovereignty and comedy, I begin by tracing the essential relationship between theories of sovereignty and theories of humor before turning to three case studies of grotesque sovereignty as it has been comically fictionalized on screen: Hollywood’s crazy dictator films of the early 1930s, the comedy of sovereignty’s media apparatus as portrayed in the works of Armando Ianucci, and the sovereign’s double as embodied by Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator.

Keywords: sovereignty, satire, Chaplin, Foucault, Ianucci

Matteo Polleri, From Adversity to Heresy: Towards a Disjunctive Conjunction of Foucault and Marx (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

2 January 2026

Matteo Polleri, “From Adversity to Heresy: Towards a Disjunctive Conjunction of Foucault and Marx.” Genealogy+Critique 11, no. 1 (2025): 1–21.
https://doi.org/10.16995/gc.23083

Open access

Abstract
Over the last decades, influential critical thinkers have creatively mobilized Foucault’s ideas to renovate the Marxist lens. However, while recognizing key proximities between Marx’s and Foucault’s works, Étienne Balibar has argued that these attempts necessarily face fundamental obstacles. In his view, the “point of heresy” connecting Marx’s and Foucault’s thought must be understood as a fundamental “adversity.” By critically discussing Balibar’s argument, this article shows that a “conjunctive”, rather than “adversative,” interpretation of the “point of heresy” might be used to develop a cross-reading of Marx and Foucault. The article thus poses methodological reflections for a systematic reassessment of the Marx-Foucault relationship.

Keywords: Marx, Foucault, Balibar, Marxism, heresy

Monica Greco, Biopolitics (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

29 December 2025

Monica Greco, Biopolitics. In Eds. Arpad Szakolczai and Paul OʼConnor, Elgar Encyclopedia of Political Anthropology, Elgar, 356–359
https://doi.org/10.4337/9781035310494.00075

Abstract
While Michel Foucault was not the first to use the term ‘biopolitics’, his formulation of this concept transformed its meaning fundamentally for subsequent generations of scholars. Through this concept, Foucault turned the tables on a tradition of research that would seek in ‘nature’, and specifically in organic life, the foundational matrix for political life. Instead, he inaugurated a rich seam of research into the processes through which ‘life’ came to be constituted as a political problem and as an object of governance. The theme of biopolitics was initially developed in the context of a genealogy of the modern state but remains relevant in a broader context of governance characterised by liberal and neoliberal modes of thought and operation. The relationship between biopolitics and ‘life’ itself is one of dynamic tension. If biopower can be imagined as a form of the exercise of power that seeks to capture, define, and channel the powers of living beings, the vitality of such beings lies precisely in the extent to which their creativity always exceeds and escapes definitive capture.

Diana Stypinska and Andrea Rossi, (2025). Pastoral Power: Perspectives on the Present. Introduction to special section on Pastoral Power Today (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

27 December 2025

Diana Stypinska and Andrea Rossi, (2025). Pastoral Power: Perspectives on the Present. Theory, Culture & Society, Online 26 December 2025
https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764251397525

Open access

Abstract
This introduction to this special section of Theory, Culture & Society focuses on the formation of power that Michel Foucault – in a number of texts and lectures from the late 1970s and early 1980s – analyzed under the label of ‘the pastorate’. Stressing the ongoing socio-political relevance of pastoral power, the article outlines some of the ways in which it continues to directly influence and animate an array of secular governmental techniques in manners that other critical paradigms can only partially account for. In this, it takes as its focal point two interrelated problematiques: (1) the relation between truth and subjectivity as a constitutive element of modern power relations and (2) the theological subtexts of modern governmentality – demonstrating how they are elaborated upon by the articles comprising the special section.

Tim Christiaens, Joost de Bloois, Stijn De Cauwer, An Introduction to Contemporary Italian Thought. From Posthumanism to Cyberfascism (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

26 December 2025

Tim Christiaens, Joost de Bloois, Stijn De Cauwer, An Introduction to Contemporary Italian Thought. From Posthumanism to Cyberfascism, Bloomsbury, 2025

Description
Over the past three decades, Italian thought has emerged as a major field within continental philosophy. But what are the latest developments since Italian theory rose to a peak of popularity in the 2000s? This book offers an accessible and incisive introduction to contemporary Italian thought, revealing above all its continued relevance to some of the most pressing political, social and ethical conflicts today.

Broadening the idea of Italian thought beyond biopolitics, An Introduction to Contemporary Italian Thought engages with a number of leading and upcoming philosophers, including Silvia Federici, Rosi Braidotti, Donatella di Cesare, Emanuele Coccia, Sandro Mezzadra, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi and Federico Luisetti. It demonstrates how Italian theory resonates in a wide variety of current debates, from digital technology, pandemics and populism to cyberfascism, environmentalism and decolonization. This not only uncovers the fruitfulness of Italian philosophy but further allows for fresh perspectives on debates dominated by well-trodden and often dated arguments. In consideration of populism, for instance, this book does not so much examine Donald Trump but rather turns to Silvio Berlusconi and Giorgia Meloni, just as its discussions of the digitization of work look beyond Silicon Valley to working conditions in EU and Global South from the perspective of Italian (post)workerism, and the Anthropocene is considered in light of radical zoological egalitarianism as it emerges in contemporary Italian thought.

Tackling head-on the complex and porous notion of what constitutes ‘Italian thought’, Christiaens, De Bloois and De Cauwer bring new understanding to contemporary Italian theory and, with it, novel perspectives on current critical issues.

Tim Christiaens is Assistant Professor of economic ethics at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. He is the author of Digital Working Lives (2022) on the gig economy and worker autonomy, and has published on topics like Italian thought, philosophy of technology, neoliberalism, and biopolitical theory in journals like European Journal of Social Theory, Italian Studies, Big Data & Society, and Foucault Studies.

Joost de Bloois is Senior Lecturer of Cultural and Literary Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His publications include Politics of Withdrawal (with Pepita Hesselberth), a special issues of Rethinking Marxism on Italian post-workerism (with Monica Jansen and Frans-Willem Korsten), essays on Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito and Erri de Luca, as well as a monograph on the work of Alain Badiou and several co-authored handbooks in cultural studies.

Stijn De Cauwer is Assistant Professor at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society, the Netherlands. His publications include Critical Theory at a Crossroads: Conversations on Resistance in Times of Crisis (2018), Critical Image Operations: The Work of Georges Didi-Huberman (2019), and writings on topics such as visual studies, cultural theory, German literature (including a monograph on the work of Robert Musil), Italian philosophy and biopolitics.