Foucault News

Shai Gortler, Foucault and the Prisons Information Group’s Counter-subjectivation (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

10 May 2026

Shai Gortler, 2026. “Foucault and the Prisons Information Group’s Counter-subjectivation.” Philosophy and Society 37 (1): 173–194.
https://doi.org/10.2298/FID2601173G

Abstract
Between February 1971 and December 1972, Michel Foucault co-founded and was an active member of the Prisons Information Group (Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons, hereafter GIP). Through demonstrations, direct action, and publications, the GIP sought to intervene in France’s carceral regime and the set of systems, ideas, and practices that sustained it, in order to bring about its transformation. The goal of Foucault and the GIP was not simply to improve prison conditions but to disrupt the constitutive conditions of the institution. The archival material that Foucault’s involvement with the GIP left to society, alongside his lectures and publications, invites scholars to consider a rearticulation of our understanding of subjectivity. Reading Foucault’s tracing of the genealogy of the category “guilty” and the GIP’s analyses of prison uprisings facilitates a thicker understanding of “counter-subjectivation.” In opposition to the structures of carceral subjectivity wherein incarcerated people could never hope to influence the standards according to which prisons seek to “rehabilitate” them, the GIP calls our attention to a more democratic work of subject formation.

Foukenstein. Interactive artwork by Distributed Gallery (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

10 May 2026

Foukenstein is a conversational performance that gives voice to an artificial figure freely inspired by Michel Foucault. Starting from a written question, the dispositif produces a spoken response by combining text generation, the mobilization of theoretical references, short-term memory, and speech synthesis.

It does not seek to simulate Foucault, nor to offer a faithful incarnation of him, but rather to construct a critical monster: an artificial, unstable, and ambivalent presence, capable of statements that are sometimes accurate, sometimes flawed. Through this synthetic voice, foukenstein questions how theoretical authority can be fabricated, replayed, and unsettled by a technical dispositif.

[…]
“Et je ne dis donc pas les choses parce que je les pense, je les dis plutôt dans une fin d’autodestruction pour ne plus les penser, pour être bien sûr que désormais, hors de moi, elles vont vivre une vie ou mourir une mort où je n’aurai pas à me reconnaître.” [Foucault]

Foukenstein prend Michel Foucault au mot. C’est un monstre, la profanation de Michel qui emprunte le timbre de sa voix pour le faire survivre hors de lui, dans une forme altérée, dérivée, et comme tout monstre, un peu buggée.

Foukenstein n’est rien d’autre qu’un fichier .PTH de 5.2 GO, le résultat d’un entraînement avec Coqui XTTS — un modèle de synthèse open source capable de cloner l’empreinte vocale pour l’autonomiser — branché sur Mistral pour simuler des règles de raisonnement et des valeurs que ses créateurs supposeraient aujourd’hui être celles de Foucault.
[…]

The distributed gallery is a collective of artists, craftmen and engineers established in the contemporary art worlds since 2017. They are mainly known for the creation of artworks based on distributed technologies such as blockchains.

Amin Zaini, Introducing noise cleansing: reading real-time censorship ambivalently (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

9 May 2026

Amin Zaini, 2026. Introducing noise cleansing: reading real-time censorship ambivalently. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 1–23.
https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2026.2670699

ABSTRACT
While censorship is often conceptualised as a retrospective and regulated practice, this study examines it as a real-time process of speech interruption and an under-explored dimension of contemporary surveillance. It foregrounds how silencing unfolds dynamically during the circulation of speech rather than through post-hoc content removal. Drawing on media examples involving microphone cut-offs in live discussions, the paper analyses real-time censorship as a mechanism embedded within discourse, power relations, and technological mediation. It demonstrates how surveillance infrastructures condition what can be articulated, heard, or curtailed at the moment of expression. Conceptually, the article introduces ‘noise cleansing’ to conceptualise real-time censorship in which dissenting utterances are interrupted as they emerge. Pedagogically, it proposes ambivalent reading as a critical literacy orientation for engaging with the epistemic conditions produced by noise cleansing. A classroom illustration shows how such interventions can be critically examined through ambivalence.

KEYWORDS:
Noise cleansing, ambivalent reading, real-time censorship, critical literacies, discourse, power relations

Kristian D’Amato, ChatGPT: towards AI subjectivity (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

7 May 2026

Kristian D’Amato, ChatGPT: towards AI subjectivity, AI & Society, 40, pp.1627–1641 (2025).
https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-024-01898-z

Abstract
Motivated by the question of responsible AI and value alignment, I seek to offer a uniquely Foucauldian reconstruction of the problem as the emergence of an ethical subject in a disciplinary setting. This reconstruction contrasts with the strictly human-oriented programme typical to current scholarship that often views technology in instrumental terms. With this in mind, I problematise the concept of a technological subjectivity through an exploration of various aspects of ChatGPT in light of Foucault’s work, arguing that current systems lack the reflexivity and self-formative characteristics inherent in the notion of the subject. By drawing upon a recent dialogue between Foucault and phenomenology, I suggest four techno-philosophical desiderata that would address the gaps in this search for a technological subjectivity: embodied self-care, embodied intentionality, imagination and reflexivity. Thus I propose that advanced AI be reconceptualised as a subject capable of “technical” self-crafting and reflexive self-conduct, opening new pathways to grasp the intertwinement of the human and the artificial. This reconceptualisation holds the potential to render future AI technology more transparent and responsible in the circulation of knowledge, care and power.

Marc Trabsky, Death. New Trajectories in Law (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

4 May 2026

Marc Trabsky, Death. New Trajectories in Law, Routledge, 2024

This book examines how legal institutions reify the value of death in the twenty-first century. 　

Its starting point is that bio-technological innovations have extended life to such an extent that death has become an epistemological problem for legal institutions. It explores how legal definitions of death are subject to the governing logic of economisation, how legal technologies for registering a death reshape what kind of deaths are counted during a pandemic, and how technologies for recycling cadaveric tissue problematise the legal status of the corpse. The question that unites each chapter is how legal institutions respond to technologies that bring death before their laws. The book argues for an interdisciplinary approach, informed by the writings of Georges Bataille, Wendy Brown, Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault, to understand how legal epistemologies are increasingly disrupted, challenged, and countered by technologies that repurpose death to extend, nourish and foster human life. It contends that legal theorists and social scientists need to rethink doctrinal perspectives of law when theorising how law defines the moment of death, shapes what kind of deaths count, and recycles the debris of the dead.　

This book will appeal to a broad international readership with research interests in critical theory, political theory, legal theory or death studies; and it will be particularly useful for teachers and students who are searching for an accessible entry point to the study of the intersections between law and death.

Dr Marc Trabsky is an Associate Professor in Law at La Trobe University, Australia.

Foucault Studies, Issue 39, Spring 2026

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

2 May 2026

Foucault Studies, Issue 39, Spring 2026

Open access

Table of Contents

Editorial
Daniele Lorenzini
pp. iii-v
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fou.00024

Critique Beyond Criticism: The Crisis and Potentials of Critique in Critical Times
Sverre Raffnsøe, Daniele Lorenzini, Dorthe Staunæs, Martina Tazzioli
pp. 1-25
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fou.00025

The Pressing Task of Critique
Bernard E. Harcourt, Robert Harvey, Sverre Raffnsøe
pp. 26-38
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fou.00026

Critique and Criticism, in Times of Crisis
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sverre Raffnsøe
pp. 39-72
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fou.00027

Criticism, Confidence and the Crisis in Critique
David Owen
pp. 73-87
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fou.00028

Critique “After” Foucault: Peter Sloterdijk, Affirmative Critique, and the Genealogy of the Critical Attitude
Erik Sporon Fiedler
pp. 88-108
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fou.00029

Genealogy as Critical Practice: Toward a Reading of Affective Genealogy
Mostyn Taylor Crockett
pp. 109-131
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fou.00030

The Impolitical Concept of Uselessness as a Heuristic Category for Critical Resistance to the Neoliberal Order: A Foucauldian Approach
Léa Antonicelli
pp. 132-157
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fou.00031

Sadomasochism in Foucault’s Thought and Its Potential Critical Dimension
Cristian Gonzalez Arevalo
pp. 158-174
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fou.00032

Critique, Counter-Conduct, Form of Life
Dawn Herrera Helphand
pp. 175-196
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fou.00033

“Toward the Life that It Is Preparing”: Dreaming and Fabulating as Critical Arts
Kris Pint
pp. 197-218
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fou.00034

Speculative Critique: Saidiya Hartman, Michel Foucault, and the Limits of the Archive
Miriam Schröder
pp. 219-239
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fou.00035

Problematizing Nature: A Foucault Against the Anthropocene
Stefan Rohrhirsch
pp. 240-258
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fou.00036

Black Thought Contra-Foucault? Critique, Counter-History, and the Search for an Originary Cut
Daniel J. Schultz
pp. 259-285
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fou.00037

Reviews

Foucault’s Aesthetics of Existence and Shusterman’s Somaesthetics ed. by Valentina Antoniol and Stefano Marino (review)
Silvia Capodivacca
pp. 286-289
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fou.00038

Young Foucault: The Lille Manuscripts on Psychopathology, Phenomenology, and Anthropology, 1952–1955 by Elisabetta Basso (review)
Sneha V. John, Thahiya Afzal
pp. 290-293
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fou.00039

Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group (1970–1980) ed. by Kevin Thompson and Perry Zurn (review)
Anil Kumar
pp. 294-297
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fou.00040

A Face Drawn in Sand: Humanistic Inquiry and Foucault in the Present by Rey Chow (review)
Naz Oktay
pp. 298-302
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/fou.00041

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

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

1 May 2026

Daniele Lorenzini, The Foucauldian Mind, Routledge, Forthcoming July 2026

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, literature, religion 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 forty 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

Introduction: One Hundred Years of Michel Foucault Daniele Lorenzini

Part 1: 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 Lhoi

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 2: 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 and Foucault on the exercise 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 3: 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 4: 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.

Melissa Pawelski, Languages of Punishment: Translating Foucault into English and German (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

29 April 2026

Melissa Pawelski, Languages of Punishment: Translating Foucault into English and German, Research Monographs in French Studies, 71 (Legenda, 2025)

The works of French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) form a multilingual network of ideas. It is for this reason that Foucault’s ideas are difficult to translate. Yet in Anglophone debates, the task of translation has not been critically discussed. Focussing on the challenges of translating concepts of the human body (corps), power (pouvoir), violence, and surveillance in the French language, these key concepts have been informed by German-language philosophy which complicates translating them back into German and English. In this trilingual study of the English and German translations of one of Foucault’s most famous works, Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison (1975), Melissa Pawelski proposes for the first time a careful investigation into the difficulties of translating Foucauldian ideas, showing why and how the English and German translations differ from the original and from one another.

Melissa Pawelski completed her PhD in French Studies at the University of Warwick.

Kélina Gotman, What is a thoughtful life? (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

26 April 2026

Kélina Gotman, What is a thoughtful life?, Manchester University Press, forthcoming June 2026

In fresh readings of Theodor W. Adorno, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, Barbara Cassin, Michel Foucault, Werner Hamacher, Martin Heidegger, and many more, Gotman rearticulates the foundations of broadly western philosophical thinking to carve out a shadowy space of recalcitrant thought ‘in dark times’. At once indebted to the legacy of critique and enmeshed in affective and performative approaches to language, anti-theatricality, critical race theory and gender studies, she weaves a poetic mesh of intimate fragments, reflections on what it means to think and to write, as she puts it, after spectacle. Almost but not quite a straight work of philosophy, distinctly literary and performative in its anti-genre, this book twists and turns, swerves and cuts, to show the work of thinking as an intimate act – a theatre of angles and openings, adjacencies and reverberations.

Kélina Gotman is Professor of Performance and the Humanities at King’s College London

With thanks to Progressive Geographies for this news

Onur Erdur, School of the South: The Colonial Roots of French Theory (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

23 April 2026

Onur Erdur, School of the South: The Colonial Roots of French Theory, Translated by Andrew Brown, Polity Press, forthcoming July 2026

Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous, Jean-François Lyotard, Étienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière: these were among the luminaries of France’s golden age of theory from the 1960s to the 1990s. What is less well-known is that all of these thinkers spent time in North Africa and their ideas were shaped by their encounters with French colonialism. In his remarkable history of ideas in eight portraits, Onur Erdur uncovers the colonial roots of French theory.

Erdur’s search for these colonial roots leads him to Algiers, where the young Pierre Bourdieu did his military service in the middle of the Algerian war; to the coastal village of Sidi Bou Saïd north of Tunis, where Michel Foucault developed an attitude of philosophical hedonism between sunbathing, walks on the beach and ritualised body culture; and to Casablanca, where Roland Barthes fantasised about becoming a novelist. How did these intellectuals end up in these colonial situations? How did they behave there? And how did the experiences of colonial life affect their theoretical works and ideas? French theory developed a style of thinking that opposed identity and stood for difference, that was against the centre and for the periphery. This book shows how this style of thinking emerged not in the hallowed rooms of Parisian libraries and universities, but on the beach in Tunis and in the streets of Algiers.

Developing a new perspective on the history of ideas, this enthralling book subverts the subversive and shows that some of the best-known works and ideas of the late twentieth century cannot be fully understood without taking account of their origins in encounters with French colonialism in North Africa.

Onur Erdur is an intellectual historian at Humboldt University of Berlin.

With thanks to Progressive Geographies for this news