Foucault News

Sam Binkley, The double life of the dangerous object: phobogenecity from doctrinal to relational racism (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

9 August 2026

Sam Binkley, (2026). The double life of the dangerous object: phobogenecity from doctrinal to relational racism. Culture, Theory and Critique, 1–15.
https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2026.2683961

ABSTRACT
Foucault’s genealogy of race traces the racial to the normalising functions of the biopolitical state. Thus conceived, racism is deeply invested in the doctrinal practices of racial government, while little attention is paid to racism as a relational, interpersonal phenomenon. This essay considers Foucault’s inattention to the relational character of racism by considering the contradiction between doctrinal and relational racisms. A theory of what I term racial grafting describes the overlay of doctrinal racism across the relational forms of ordinary, everyday racial resentment. Moreover, through a consideration of Frantz Fanon’s phobogenic object and Foucault’s race war, it is proposed that grafting occurs around the phobic production of dangerous objects. Dangerousness, which serves as both an ontological condition and a propensity for possible actions, describes a deeply ambivalent object that straddles racial being and racial doing, and as such serves as a pivotal point around which doctrinal and relation grafting occurs. This analysis concludes with a discussion of Foucault’s treatment of the Social Defense criminological movement (for which the course Society Must Be Defended was named) wherein criminological dangerousness provides the framework for contemporary racism. Such a discussion demonstrates Foucault’s relevance to contemporary critiques of racial civility in public life.

KEYWORDS:
Racism Foucault Fanon phobogenesis, grafting, doctrinal racism, relational racism, social defense, criminology

Emily Eakin, The Frenchmen. Or, My Life in Theory (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

8 August 2026

Emily Eakin, The Frenchmen. Or, My Life in Theory, Penguin Random House, 2026
Review by Dayna Tortorici, New York Times, 23 July 2026

Description
When Emily Eakin arrived at Harvard in the late 1980s, she fell under the spell of an eclectic body of philosophical texts by a handful of French authors. This was French theory, a set of recondite ideas that had taken American campuses by a storm during the preceding decades. In retrospect, the influence of these men and their writings seems both extraordinary and improbable. The Frenchmen argued that language is all-powerful, meaning unstable, and the self is an illusion. Their prose was brilliant, dazzling even, but often mystifyingly elaborate and highly abstract. Yet American students and scholars flocked to their books and lectures, intoxicated by a powerful new means of understanding—and perhaps even changing—the world. For Eakin, an unsophisticated graduate of a small-town Midwestern high school, theory was no mere intellectual exercise but a way of being—a heady shortcut to worldly glamour and wisdom.

The Frenchmen is the story of Eakin’s youthful love affair with French theory, alongside a wider examination of its rise and fall. Looking closely at Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Jacques Lacan, and the French-speaking Belgian Paul de Man, Eakin untangles their famously difficult works with peerless, delightful clarity. What’s more, she brings to light the eccentric, scandalous—at times criminal!—lives of thinkers who themselves were often highly averse to biography, in a daringly original weave of storytelling and exegesis.

As she explores the magnetism of their work, Eakin illuminates not just the Frenchmen’s enduring legacy but some of today’s deepest political, social, and intellectual arguments. She neither rejects nor flatters the Frenchmen’s ideas but instead reveals how they indelibly changed our understanding of power, truth, and identity. Eakin shows how, for better or worse, the Frenchmen continue to shape and unsettle our lives today.

Emily Eakin is a senior editor at The New York Times Book Review. The Frenchmen is her first book.

Michael C. Behrent, Becoming Foucault. The Poitiers Years (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

6 August 2026

Michael C. Behrent, Becoming Foucault. The Poitiers Years, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023

Though Michel Foucault is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, little is known about his early life. Even Foucault’s biographers have neglected this period, preferring instead to start the story when the future philosopher arrives in Paris.

Becoming Foucault is a historical reconstruction of the world in which Foucault grew up: the small city of Poitiers, France, from the 1920s until the end of the Second World War. Beyond exploring previously unexamined aspects of Foucault’s childhood, including his wartime ordeals, it proposes an original interpretation of Foucault’s oeuvre. Michael Behrent argues that Foucault, in addition to being a theorist of power, knowledge, and selfhood, was also a philosopher of experience. He was a thinker intent on making sense of the events that he lived through. Behrent identifies four specific experiences in Foucault’s childhood that exercised a decisive influence on him and that, in various ways, he later made the subject of his philosophy: his family’s deep connections to the medical profession; his upbringing in a bourgeois household; the German Occupation during World War II; and his Catholic education.

Behrent not only reconstructs the specific nature of these experiences but also shows how reference to them surfaces in Foucault’s later work. In this way, the book both sheds light on a formative period in the philosopher’s life and offers a unique interpretation of key aspects of his thought.

Michael C. Behrent is Professor of History at Appalachian State University.

Jeanne Favret-Saada et Patrick Weil, Continuer Foucault ? (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

3 August 2026

Patrick Weil et Jeanne Favret-Saada, Continuer Foucault ? , Le Grand Continent, 27 mai 2026
L’historien Patrick Weil s’entretient avec l’anthropologue qui, cinquante ans plus tard, rouvre le cas Rivière.

Jeanne Favret-Saada vient de publier un livre événement pour les sciences sociales. Cinquante-trois ans après que Michel Foucault eut dirigé la publication en 1973, dans le cadre d’un séminaire fermé du Collège de France, d’un dossier « Moi Pierre Rivière, ayant égorgé ma mère, ma sœur et mon frère… » auquel elle avait participé, elle rouvre ce cas de parricide au XIXe siècle.

Avec un esprit vif et acéré et une liberté de ton revigorante, elle se plonge dans le dossier Rivière en revenant sur les nombreux écrits qu’il a suscités parmi les historiens, criminologues, psychiatres et psychanalystes. Avec la même liberté, elle réfléchit aussi sur son propre travail et celui de ses collègues qui co-éditeurs Moi Pierre Rivière… avec Foucault.

Elle aborde sous un angle inédit, l’archive qui fait le caractère exceptionnel de ce dossier : le témoignage du meurtre de sa mère — quarante-neuf grands feuillets écrits de sa prison à l’intention de ses juges, pour expliquer son crime et son désir de sauver son père du martyre auquel sa mère le soumettait depuis leur mariage.

suite

Jeanne Favret-Saada, L’impossible famille Rivière. Retour sur un triple meurtre en 1835 (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

2 August 2026

Jeanne Favret-Saada, L’impossible famille Rivière. Retour sur un triple meurtre en 1835, Gallimard 2026.

Le 3 juin 1835, un jeune paysan normand, Pierre Rivière, égorge sa mère, sa sœur et son frère avant de s’enfuir. Arrêté le mois suivant, il rédige, dans l’attente de son jugement, un Mémoire d’une cinquantaine de feuillets pour expliquer son geste. Condamné à mort, puis gracié, c’est-à-dire emprisonné à vie, il se suicide dans sa cellule en 1840.

De cette affaire, il nous reste ce Mémoire très détaillé, redécouvert au début des années 1970 par Michel Foucault qui, entouré d’une petite équipe, en produisit l’édition. Jeanne Favret-Saada avait participé à cette entreprise éditoriale, qui se refusait à toute interprétation savante pour laisser la pleine page au jeune homme.

Dans le présent ouvrage, l’anthropologue revient sur ce qui s’est joué en 1835 – des élites donnant la parole à un « subalterne » que son acte jugeait d’avance –, mais en s’attachant au fond de l’affaire : quelle suite d’événements a conduit Pierre Rivière à ce triple meurtre ?
Contre l’interprétation qui réduit ce Mémoire à un discours psychotique, elle propose qu’on le soumette à une enquête qui conjoigne l’ethnologie et l’histoire. Elle examine ainsi les vingt-deux ans d’une vie familiale impossible, Victoire Rivière ayant refusé d’emblée la plupart des devoirs de l’épouse. Le mariage était alors régi par le Code civil napoléonien, pleinement confirmé par la coutume locale en matière de domination masculine. L’analyse serrée des péripéties rapportées par l’assassin montre alors les raisons de son geste meurtrier.

Daniele Lorenzini (ed.), The Foucauldian Mind (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

1 August 2026

Daniele Lorenzini (ed.), The Foucauldian Mind, Published July 29, 2026 by Routledge

Description
Michel Foucault is one of the most influential, and controversial, thinkers of the twentieth century. His work has had a transformative effect on the study of the humanities and social sciences. His engagement with topics such as truth, power, and language continues to exert significant influence on a huge range of disciplines, from philosophy, sociology, and anthropology to history, politics, law, literary, religious, and gender studies, and many others. Yet, paradoxically, Foucault’s work is rarely discussed systematically within philosophy in the Anglophone world.

The Foucauldian Mind is an outstanding exploration and assessment of Foucault’s thought, demonstrating its coherence, insight, and continuing relevance to current debates in a multiplicity of fields within philosophy, and beyond. Comprising over 40 chapters authored by an international team of expert contributors, it addresses the following topics and more:

• the formation of Foucault’s thought and his most important writings, from History of Madness and The Order of Things to Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality, and his later works on governmentality and the aesthetics of existence;

• Foucault’s theoretical and methodological engagements, including with phenomenology, existentialism, structuralism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, critical theory, pragmatism, and feminism;

• Foucault’s contributions to ethics, political philosophy, and law;

• Foucault’s often misunderstood engagements with science, race, and gender;

• the legacy of Foucault’s thought, including for environmental studies, biopolitics, migration studies, and philosophy of disability.

With its comprehensive analysis of Foucault’s work and its original discussion of both traditional and new topics, The Foucauldian Mind is a superb resource for anyone studying Foucault’s thought from a broadly philosophical standpoint.

Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors

Abbreviations of Works by Michel Foucault

Introduction: One Hundred Years of Michel Foucault Daniele Lorenzini

Part I: Mapping Foucault’s Thought

A: Before the Collège de France

1. Foucault on Absolute Knowing: Hegel, Transcendentality, and Historicity in the Diploma Thesis
Kevin Thompson

2. Phenomenology and Anthropology in Foucault’s Early Manuscripts
Elisabetta Basso

3. History of Madness: Foucault’s Spatial Archaeology of Experience
David Webb

4. Knowledge, History, Events: Archaeological Issues, between The Order of Things and The Archaeology of Knowledge
Philippe Sabot

5. From São Paulo to Tunis: The Critical Role of Ethnology between Philosophical Discourse and the Episteme as General Cultural Function
Orazio Irrera

6. Literary Constraint, Historical Determination: A Foucauldian Experiment
Judith Revel

B: Genealogies of Power, Truth, and the Subject

7. The Development of Foucault’s Conception of Power
Mark G. E. Kelly

8. Fragments of Truth: The Beginning of Foucault’s Project of a Genealogy of Truth-Telling
Valentina Moro

9. Narrating the Self: Biography and the Politics of Life in Foucault’s Psychiatric Power
Federico Testa

10. Foucault’s Genealogy of Scientia Sexualis
Daniele Lorenzini and Arnold I. Davidson

C: The Government of Self and Others

11. From Governmentality to Algorithmic Power: Foucault’s Legacy and the Crises of Neoliberalism
Laurence Barry

12. Political Spiritualities
Sajjad Lohi

13. The Late Ancient Christian Inauguration of the Modern Philosophy of the Subject
Niki Kasumi Clements

14. The Unsuspected Power of the Aphrodisia: Subjectivity and Truth, The Use of Pleasure, and The Care of the Self
Sandra Boehringer

15. Rhetoric, Truth, and Philosophy in Foucault
Paul Allen Miller

Part II: Critical Encounters

16. Foucauldian Positivism: Archive, Clinic, Laboratory
Peter Galison

17. Foucault and Structuralism
Stuart Elden

18. Psychoanalysis: “Dispositif” or “Counter-Science”?
Miguel de Beistegui

19. Heidegger, Foucault, and la pensée classique
Taylor Carman

20. The Desire for Peace/The Will to Resist: Hobbes, Foucault, and the Dialectic of Power
Hans Sluga

21. Impure Reason: Foucault and Critical Theory
Martin Saar and Frieder Vogelmann

22. Foucault and Existentialism
Liesbeth Schoonheim

23. Anachro-Subordination: Foucault’s Metaphors and Feminism’s Foucault
Penelope Deutscher

Part III: Critical Engagements

A: Theoretical Engagements
24. Foucault’s Methods: Archaeology, Genealogy, Empiricity
Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson and Colin Koopman

25. Foucault and the Philosophy of Art
Arianna Sforzini

26. Foucault’s Philosophy of Language
Tuomo Tiisala

27. Late Foucault in the Early Foucault
James I. Porter

28. The (Middle) Eastern Foucault: Genealogy and Its Counter-Geographies
Ege Selin Islekel

B: Ethical and Political Engagements

29. Foucault, Testimonial Injustice, and Power/Knowledge
Catarina Dutilh Novaes, Solmu Anttila, and Merel Talbi

30. Foucault and the Ambivalences of Race
Sabeen Ahmed

31. Foucault and Latin America: Colonial Formations of Biopolitics and Pastoral Power
Don Thomas Deere

32. Religion and Revolutionary Subjectivity: Gerrard Winstanley, the Diggers, and Some Notes on a Foucauldian Philosophy of Religions Daniel Louis Wyche

33. Foucault’s Journey to Ethics
Piergiorgio Donatelli

34. Does Critique Have a Future?
David M. Halperin

Part IV: Foucault’s Legacies

35. Foucault and Feminism: A (Not Quite) Love Story
Dianna Taylor

36. Foucault: The Premier Disabled Philosopher of Disability (My Love Letter to Foucault)
Shelley Lynn Tremain

37. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975): A Reader’s Companion for 2026
Bernard E. Harcourt

38. Foucault, Normativity, and the Genealogy of Law
Ben Golder

39. Situating the Biopolitics/Necropolitics Debate: A Discussion on Foucault’s Legacy
André Duarte and Maria Rita de Assis César

40. Life’s Entanglement with Power: Michel Foucault, Biopolitics, and Eco-Governmentality
Nicolae Morar

41. Geography’s Foucault
Stephen Legg

42. Foucault and Critiques of Neoliberalism
Johanna Oksala

43. Migrations with Foucault: Biopolitical Hold, Infamous Subjects, and the Deadlocks of Critique
Martina Tazzioli

44. Queer-Minded
Lynne Huffer

Index

Sarah Wieners, Eva Bulgrin; Susanne Maria Weber, Re-imagining mentoring programs from privilege to equality – intervening in academic gaze orders (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

29 July 2026

Sarah Wieners, Eva Bulgrin; Susanne Maria Weber, “Re-imagining mentoring programs from privilege to equality – intervening in academic gaze orders”. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, 5 June 2026
https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-01-2025-0047

Abstract
Purpose
This conceptual article discusses academic mentoring programs from a Foucauldian power-knowledge analysis. How is mentoring entangled in the rationalities of the privileging and de-privileging gaze in academia? How does this power/knowledge imply organizational marginalizations and exclusions for Blacks and People of Color (BiPoc) female academics? The article proposes to discuss privileging and de-privileging as a discursive practice creating visibilities and invisibilities. It identifies the need to transform institutional gaze orders and explores how epistemic interventions may support such transformations. By understanding and designing mentoring programs as innovation labs, universities can be supported in shifting the gaze toward an ontology and epistemology of institutional solidarity and care.
Design/methodology/approach

From a Foucauldian perspective, the discursive “gaze” constitutes the other, producing differentiated and “othering” subject positions that privilege some while marginalizing others. This analytical lens enables an examination of the rationalities underlying institutional practices – particularly those that enact exclusion. From a Foucauldian perspective, we see innovation labs as discursive interventions into and potential openings of institutional gaze orders.

Findings
This article adopts a power/knowledge-critical, epistemic perspective and proposes a transformative design approach to mentoring programs for female academics. It conceptualizes knowledge orders as contested terrains that both constrain and enable shifts in subject positions through discursive practices. From this perspective, the often invisible, exclusionary mechanisms embedded in mentoring programs for women scholars are brought to light. Moreover, this approach advocates for discursive interventions into institutional gaze orders. By actively confronting discursive gaze orders of privilege and exclusion and engaging various stakeholders in mentoring programs, mentoring can become a starting point for re-imagining gaze orders – opening space for discursive innovation and institutional transformation.

Originality/value
Little research exists on the exclusionary practices of mentoring programs despite the declining proportions of female academics with international, migration or BiPoC backgrounds. Moreover, studies suggest little attention to institutional change in mentoring programs and criticize insufficient focus on intersectional perspective on gender equality. Our approach contributes to a broader understanding of how institutional mentoring programs and practices can be re-imagined as vehicles for epistemic transformation.

Keywords:
Mentoring, Higher education, Gender, Race, Power/knowledge, Gaze orders, Critical whiteness

Pascal Engel, Foucault et les normes du savoir (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

26 July 2026

Pascal Engel, Foucault et les normes du savoir, Eliott éditions, 2024

L’œuvre de Michel Foucault est une réflexion sur les normes. C’est de ses conceptions des normes du savoir que traite principalement ce livre, et de son projet d’une généalogie et d’une histoire de la vérité. Foucault renverse les positions classiques : au lieu de parler de vérité, il parle des procédures de véridiction et des techniques de vérité, au lieu de parler de justification des connaissances, il traite de la volonté de savoir et propose une éthique de la vérité.

Mais jusqu’à quel point traite-t-il vraiment de vérité et de savoir ? Ne réduit-il pas à de simples effets ces notions, qui disparaissent sous les pratiques, les institutions et les formes sociales ? Et si elles perdent toute objectivité et toute visée universelle, comment peuvent-elles servir à l’entreprise de libération que visait Foucault ?

Pascal Engel est l’auteur de Va savoir ! De la connaissance en général (2007) ; Les vices du savoir. Essai d’éthique intellectuelle (2019) ; Manuel de survie rationaliste (2020) et de Les lois de l’esprit. Julien Benda ou la raison (nouvelle édition, 2023).

A review translated into English:
Does Truth Have a History? by Thomas Boccon-Gibod, 5 May 2026 [20 mars 2025], translated by Arianne Dorval, with the support of Cairn.info, Books and Ideas, Collège de France

In his latest book, Foucault et les normes du savoir (Foucault and the norms of knowledge), Pascal Engel offers a critique of Foucault’s conception of truth and of its uses by some of his successors. [1] In doing so, he follows in the footsteps of Jacques Bouveresse, [2] who, in Nietzsche contre Foucault (2016), sought to demonstrate that Foucault was less consistent than Nietzsche in his approach to the notion of truth and therefore less respectful of it. [3] The criticisms formulated by Bouveresse were precisely those that led Engel to distance himself from Foucault, after having long been his fervent disciple. [4] Thus, although this goal is not explicitly stated, Foucault et les normes du savoir can be read both as a retrospective look at Engel’s own philosophical journey and as a testimony to how that journey was shaped by his conception of the proper relationship to truth. While Engels’ critiques are sharp, his tone is measured and free of acrimony, opening up space for dispassionate discussions.
[…]

Heather Dundas, Michel Foucault in Death Valley: A Boom interview with Simeon Wade (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

25 July 2026

Heather Dundas, Michel Foucault in Death Valley: A Boom interview with Simeon Wade, Boom California, September 10, 2017

[…]
One early follower of Foucault’s thinking was Simeon Wade, assistant professor of history at Claremont Graduate School. A native of Texas, Wade moved to California in 1972 after earning his Ph.D. in the intellectual history of Western civilization from Harvard in 1970. In 1975, Foucault was invited to California to teach a seminar at the University of California, Berkeley. Following a lecture, Wade and his partner, musician Michael Stoneman, invited Foucault to accompany them on a road trip to Death Valley. After some persuasion, Foucault agreed. The memorable trip occurred two weeks later. This interview was conducted by Heather Dundas on 27 May 2017, and has been edited for length, clarity, and historical accuracy.
[…]

Critical Theory Working Group, Wokeness Must be Defended. Podcast (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

24 July 2026

Critical Theory Working Group, Wokeness Must be Defended. Podcast on Patreon, 4 April 2026

JE, Cam and Re interrogate Foucault’s mid 1970s lectures at the Collège de France, Society Must be Defended. They discuss Foucault’s method, his genealogy from Race Wars to Racism and modern conspiratorial thinking among other things.