Foucault News

Melissa Pawelski, Michel Foucault’s Figure of les corps dociles Following a Critique of the Cartesian Cogito, French Studies Bulletin, Volume 43, Issue 164, Winter 2022, Pages 10–13,
https://doi.org/10.1093/frebul/ktac017
Open access

If we adhere to Michel Foucault’s argument that modern societies are governed by disciplinary power, we must take a critical stance on the Cartesian cogito, which Foucault understands not as a philosophical liberation but as a form of cognitive governance of the body and its senses. Thus the cogito, as a central rationalistic principle, fits within the development of modern discipline. Les Corps dociles are bodily figures modelled by disciplinary mechanisms, which Foucault depicts in the chapter of the same name in his Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison (1975).¹ Features such as docility and utility characterize this body, and their development can be traced back to René Descartes:

Le grand livre de L’Homme-machine a été écrit simultanément sur deux registres: celui anatomo-métaphysique, dont Descartes avait décrit les premières pages et que les médecins, les philosophes ont continué; celui, technico-politique, qui fut constitué par tout un ensemble de règlements militaires, scolaires, hospitaliers et par des procédés empiriques et réfléchis pour contrôler ou corriger les opérations du corps. (Œuvres II, p. 400)

This is the only time that Descartes gets mentioned in the book. I shall place my focus on the father of French rationalistic philosophy, leaving aside works such as Julien Offray De La Mettrie’s L’Homme-machine (1748) that Foucault mentions in the quotation above, to examine the way in which the meditative components of Descartes’s method translate into Foucault’s docile bodies. I want to suggest that Surveiller et punir can be read as exposing the political implementation, in part, of the Cartesian understanding of the body in the form of disciplinary governance.

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Dalgliesh, B. (2023). The idea of the university as a heterotopia: The ethics and politics of thinking in the age of informational capitalism. Thesis Eleven, 175(1), 81–107. https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136231169061

Abstract
Drawing on struggles within academe between faculty that promote critical education and advocates of New Public Management (NPM) who endorse instrumental learning, I reimagine the university as a counter-space that positions it as a counter-power to informational capitalism. Initially, I outline its twin threats: ethical, as self-entrepreneurial academics are valorised by NPM; and political, with informationalisation conflating spaces of thinking. I then detail Scott Lash’s specific account of how the info-comm society negates critique. However, his monistic understanding of informationalisation means Lash’s alternative of Informationskritik risks subsumption by it. I therefore defer to Jacques Derrida’s idea of the university. To ensure the autonomy of the principle of reason in a world of info-comm flows, the university is a supplementary body to society, yet intimately linked to it by its critical reflexivity, which is on behalf of society. Because Derrida does not elaborate the requisite institutional architecture, I conclude with Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia as a quasi-illicit site that is different and other. Such an institutional design enables the university as a counter-space that is a bank of reason and an archive of its manifestation in social practices. It also upholds a space for thinking, which in the form of nominalist critical history proffers a counter-power to society as an informational homotopia.

Legg, S. (2023). Carceral and colonial domesticities: Subaltern case geographies of a Delhi rescue home. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
https://doi.org/10.1177/02637758231174453
Open access

Abstract
This article explores a relatively rare archival account of female subjectivity, experience, mobility, and voice within a carceral institution in late-colonial Delhi. The capital’s “Rescue Home” was created to house women and girls removed from the city’s brothels under new legislation. While no brothels were closed in the first year of the laws functioning, the home accepted 18 women and girls and detailed their circumstances and experiences in its 1940 report. It was able to forcibly detain girls and was run upon disciplinary and racial lines, like other colonial institutions. But its inhabitants were not subject to detailed surveillance. Rather, their lives were ones usually beyond recording or whose stories were actively silenced. The 1940 Rescue Home report provides us with rich details of the commonplace, quotidian struggles which women and girls faced in colonial Delhi. The 18 case geographies of the Home’s inhabitants help us understand how sexuality and motherhood, education and character, and race all shaped routes into the home and destinations when people left. The accounts tell us of a carceral governmentality with influence beyond the disciplinary institution’s walls, but also of female subjects who resisted, spoke back, and absconded. This relationship between forced immobility and willed mobility suggests that brothels and rescue homes were not just connected, through the intended transfer of inhabitants, but can be directly compared as carceral domesticities.