Foucault News

David Puaud, Foucault avant Foucault. Archéologie d’une jeunesse, Denoël, 2026

À l’occasion du centenaire de la naissance de Michel Foucault, première enquête sur la jeunesse de l’un des penseurs les plus influents du monde contemporain.

Raconter les années de formation de Michel Foucault, c’est comprendre comment une pensée prend forme. Il est étonnant de voir à quel point les thèmes qui jalonnent son œuvre – la psychiatrie, la religion, le système carcéral, le pouvoir arbitraire – sont inscrits dans les murs, les sols et l’histoire de sa ville natale, Poitiers.

Avec le jeune Michel, nous entendons les murmures de la maison familiale rue Arthur-Ranc, nous arpentons les couloirs de la clinique de Pont-Achard où travaille son père, les salles feutrées de l’Institut Larnay, école pour enfants sourds-muets-aveugles, les pierres silencieuses de l’abbaye de Ligugé qui abrite un vaste réseau de Résistance. Ces lieux originels sont plus qu’un simple décor, ils contiennent en germe une pensée qui connaîtra un retentissement mondial.

David Puaud marche dans les pas de Foucault et feuillette la ville comme un livre : institutions, rituels et rencontres, autant de traces et de fantômes qui éclairent la genèse d’une pensée appelée à irriguer durablement les sciences humaines et sociales.

With thanks to Progressive Geographies for this news

David Gauntlett, Creativity: Seven Keys to Unlock your Creative Self, Polity, 2023

This is a lively and thought-provoking book about how to do creativity, unlock your potential, and make a difference.

The artists, musicians, and writers we think of as ’very creative’ are just like us, except that they have spent time developing and realizing ideas, and have found the confidence to share them with the world. None of this comes naturally. This wide-ranging book offers research, advice, and philosophy to fuel your understanding and passion for creativity.

David Gauntlett draws on his own experiences of making music and experimenting with digital media alongside 25 years of researching creativity. Including insights from a diverse array of creators, the book highlights the vitality of the individual creative voice in a world where social media offers a weird mix of inspiration and suffocation, and our struggles for social justice are equally hopeful and upsetting.

Creativity shows how vulnerability, experimentation, and courage can enable us to become bold and engaging creators.

Also available as an audiobook narrated by the author.

[…]
Because Foucault’s ideas evolved and developed over time, small-minded critics would seek to humiliate him by pointing out that in an earlier work he had argued one thing and now, in more recent writing, seemed to be saying something different.
[…]
But as Foucault recalled in a 1982 interview, ‘When people say, “Well, you thought this a few years ago and now you say something else,” my answer is… [laughs] “Well, do you think I have worked like that all those years to say the same thing and not to be changed?” This is the perfect response. We have to be allowed to grow and change, without this being judged as shamefully contradictory. […] It’s highly desirable. It is, really, the whole point.
(pp.180-1)

Emma Ingala, Cillian Ó Fathaigh, Gavin Rae (eds.), Transformation in Contemporary French Philosophy, Edinburgh University Press

Traces the articulation of the concept of transformation across twentieth-century French philosophy, from Bergson to Malabou

• Engages contemporary French philosophy through the notion of transformation
• Reveals that the notion of transformation is heterogeneous and itself subject to transformation
• Offers innovative readings of individual thinkers within this periodisation
  Includes chapters on thinkers – such as Cornelius Castoriadis, Paul Ricoeur, Raymond Ruyer, Gilbert Simondon, Michel Serres – that are often ignored in discussions of contemporary French philosophy

This collection brings together an international range of specialists to explore the multi-faceted ways in which twentieth-century French philosophy affirms the fundamental importance of transformation. The essays enhance our understanding of how various individual French philosophers have conceived the term, including the innovative implications of their respective conceptions. They show that although emphasis is often placed on its heterogeneity and the differences between its proponents, twentieth-century French philosophy is fundamentally, if implicitly, shaped around a common focus on the primordial importance of transformation.

By engaging with the thinking of Bergson, Sartre, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Fanon, Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Ricœur, Ruyer, Simondon, Serres, Castoriadis and Malabou, the contributors also rethink a range of issues, including ethics, information, ontology and politics.

With thanks to Progressive Geographies for this news

Diana Obeid and Sonia Lamrani (eds), Gender and Identity in Arab Women’s Literature: Ink and Identity, Bloomsbury, 2026

Description
Gender and Identity in Arab Women’s Literature: Ink and Identity follows the journey of Arab women from being silenced in male-authored texts to finding their voices in fiction, memoir, and theater. Whether writing from the streets, prisons, or within the broader socio-political world, Arab women have carved out spaces for themselves in areas once thought off-limits.
The contributors analyze how these women challenge stereotypes, take back control of their stories, and push back against restrictive gender roles. Through the work of scholars like Foucault and Butler, the book looks at the dynamics of power, identity, and body politics in their writings. It offers a new understanding of how women’s voices continue to challenge and transform the narratives around them. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the powerful, ongoing role women play in shaping their own stories in the Middle East.

Michael Ardoline, Interiority Against Control. The Metaphysics, Ethics, and Politics of Information Technologies through Deleuze and Confucianism, Springer, 2026.

About this book
This monograph synthesizes Deleuze and Confucianism for a novel account of the good life at the dawn of a new epoch of power: control. It engages in both a broad survey of work on the current techno-political situation, while providing a response through an in depth analysis of Deleuze and Xunzi. It builds on and enters into debates in the secondary literature on both figures as well as on Foucault, Levinas, and Mozi, along with contemporary scholars of philosophy of technology, such as Shannon Vallor, Shoshana Zuboff, Bernard Stiegler, and Patrick Gamez. It appeals to students and researchers working with these thinkers as well as on the ethics and politics of technology, Confucianism, Mohism, and comparative philosophy generally.

Hilary Bergen, Dance Anima: Techniques of Vitality Oxford University Press, 2026

Description
This introduction explores the etymology of the word “anima” (Latin for soul or breath) and the contradictions inherent in thinking about dance: a force which cannot be fully controlled or contained but which is also an extractable energetic capital with humanist value. A media-historical approach reveals the various cultural techniques that stem from the practice of dance (notation systems, mocap data, screendance) and positions the idea of dance itself as a cultural technique (following Michel Foucault and Bernhard Siegert) and as a mechanically reproducible force (Walter Benjamin) used to ensoul non-organic figures, cartoons, and robots. Citing non-dance scholars such as Susanne Langer, Anne Anlin Cheng, and Sianne Ngai to foreground the biopolitics of dance as it relates to race and “vital gesture,” the introduction to this book suggests that dancing bodies have been instrumental in the development of photography, film, and digital choreographic tools and that dance therefore facilitates an exploration of two interrelated realms: emergent technologies and the ontology of the human.