Foucault News

Karen Vintges, A New Dawn for the Second Sex Women’s Freedom Practices in World Perspective,, Routledge, 2017.

To what extent is Simone de Beauvoir’s study The Second Sex still relevant? From her work it emerges that patriarchy is a many-headed monster. Over the past decades, various heads of this monster have been slayed: important breakthroughs have been achieved by and for women in law, politics, and economics. Today, however, we witness movements in the opposite direction, such as a masculinist political revival in different parts of the world, the spread of the neoliberal myth of the Super Woman, the rise of transnational networks of trafficking in women and children, and a new international ‘Jihadism’. This suggests that patriarchy is indeed a Hydra: a multi-headed monster that grows several new heads every time one head is cut off. Since different – often hybrid – heads of patriarchy dominate in different settings, feminism requires a variety of strategies. Women’s movements all over the world today are critically creating new models of self and society in their own contexts. Drawing on notions of Beauvoir, as well as Michel Foucault, this book outlines a ‘feminism in a new key’ which consists of women’s various freedom practices, each hunting the Hydra in their own key – but with mutual support.

Karen Vintges teaches Political and Social Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Amsterdam. She has published inter alia Philosophy as Passion. The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996 [originally in Dutch, 1992]); Feminism and the Final Foucault, ed. by D. Taylor & K.Vintges (Illinois University Press, 2004), and several other books in Dutch.

Elidio La Torre Lagares, Hyperglossia and the Novel The Production of (Non) Space, Routledge, 2026

Description
Hyperglossia and the Novel: The Production of (Non) Space theorizes hyperglossia as a critical threshold in literary, philosophical, and media discourse— an excessive, recursive textual force that resists closure, coherence, and containment. Drawing from Bakhtin, Derrida, Foucault, Glissant, and Morton, this work constructs an interdisciplinary topology where narrative is displaced by semiotic proliferation. Through readings of Tokarczuk, Bolaño, Braschi, Paz Soldán, and Condé, the book explores how post- narrative texts perform ontological saturation, linguistic instability, and hauntological displacement. Hyperglossia is not a mere excess of language; it is a dispositif, a mechanism of epistemic drift and resistance that destabilizes the relation between text, space, and subject. Engaging literary maximalism, posthumanism, colonial hauntings, and digital textuality, this book maps a poetics of rupture— a world where language spills into non- space and refuses the end. Rather than offering synthesis, it proposes a drift: a movement toward meaning that cannot be finalized, only continually reinscribed.

Elidio La Torre Lagares is a writer, scholar, and professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Puerto Rico. He holds a PhD in Puerto Rican and Hispanic- American literature and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Texas at El Paso. His research explores hyperglossia, dispositif theory, and post- narrative textualities, with a focus on Latin American, Caribbean, and World Literature. A prolific author, his publications span poetry, fiction, and academic essays, including Wonderful Wasteland and Other Natural Disasters (2019) and Aguacerando (2025). He has presented widely at international conferences and has served as a mentor and thesis advisor in multiple graduate programs. His work bridges literary experimentation and critical theory, engaging with questions of identity, space, and excess in contemporary literature. He is also the founder of the MFA in creative writing at the University of Puerto Rico.

Michaela Fišerová, Jakub Mácha (eds.), Metaphysics and Aesthetics of Decoration Ornamental Thinking, Routledge, 2026.

This volume offers a fresh and timely contribution to current discussions of ornamentation, repetition, and affect in aesthetics and philosophy. It provides new insights into how ornamentation shapes artistic, philosophical, and social practices, positioning it as a dynamic force in contemporary thought.

Through interdisciplinary essays by leading scholars, the volume interrogates ornamentation’s role in structuring metaphysics, aesthetics, and interspecies relations. It challenges the traditional notion that ornament is mere decoration and reframes it as a vital philosophical and cultural concept. Drawing on thinkers like Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, and Foucault, the contributors explore how ornamentation operates as a parergon, a site of affective repetition, or a marker of epistemological shifts. From critiques of Kantian hierarchies in craft to analyses of Baroque aesthetics and animal territoriality, the chapters reveal ornamentation as both a boundary and a bridge – simultaneously peripheral and essential to meaning-making. This volume offers new and unique perspectives on ornamentation’s universal and culturally specific dimensions.

Metaphysics and Aesthetics of Decoration will appeal to scholars and advanced students interested in aesthetics, metaphysics, continental philosophy, and art theory.

Table of Contents
1 Introduction: What is ornament?
Michaela Fišerová and Jakub Mácha

2 Truth in ornament: Aesthetics of repetition between Derrida and Kierkegaard
Michaela Fišerová

3 Crafting an ornament: On the craft emancipation myth
Tereza Sluková

4 Ornamental play in Deleuze’s aesthetics
Corry Shores

5 Decorum in interspecies cohabitation: Hume, Deleuze, and becoming-ornament
Michaela Fišerová

6 Ornamental representations: Exploring the interplay between aesthetics and politics
Lenka Lee

7 Foucault’s Baroque
Barry Stocker

8 Languages of ornament and art: Repetition, norm, and deviation
Peter Michalovič

9 Ornaments as frozen music
Vanda Božičević Metzger

10 Framing metaphysics: Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the ornamentation of philosophical grounding
Jakub Mácha

Mark K. George, How Deuteronomy Created “Israel” Technologies of the Self, Government, and Writing, Routledge, 2026

Description
In this book, Mark K. George argues that the goal of Deuteronomy is not merely to provide ancient Judah with another set of laws but to write “Israel” itself into existence. He reads Deuteronomy as a manual for self‑definition with two key aspects: being an Israelite means recognizing oneself as a subject under Yahweh’s control, and Deuteronomy is the handbook of techniques by which one monitors oneself to become Israel.

Scholars have acknowledged the influence of certain literary features of ancient Assyrian imperial treaties on Deuteronomy. In this book, George argues that the key to both Deuteronomy and Assyrian rituals of control is their monitoring mechanism, not only speaking to their audiences but also providing them with new ways to understand themselves and behave. He suggests that Deuteronomy redefines not only Israel but also Yahweh himself according to an Assyrian imperial model—with Israel as the subject, God as a distant imperial ruler, and the text itself as a local monitor. In showing this, he extends the insights of Michel Foucault, who urged us to view power not merely as something imposed from above by force, but as something that can entwine and shape us from below.

This book provides an invaluable exploration of Deuteronomy, of interest to scholars and students working on Deuteronomy itself and biblical studies more generally, as well as on questions of ancient politics and governmentality, Foucault studies, and the history and material culture of the Ancient Near East.

Mark K. George, Professor of Bible and Ancient Systems of Thought, taught for nearly 30 years at the Iliff School of Theology. His research focuses on the Torah and how to think differently about it. His publications include Israel’s Tabernacle as Social Space and numerous articles, essays, and other materials.