Foucault News

Eli B. Lichtenstein, Partisan Genealogy. Foucault’s Critique of Penal Power, SUNY Press, November 2026

Description
Presents a partisan model of genealogy by reinterpreting Foucault in the context of anti-prison struggles and his engagement with Marxism.

Michel Foucault has exerted enormous influence on our understanding of power and penal systems, above all with his work Discipline and Punish. However, the latter is often read as a pessimistic text that resigns us to accepting the unshakeable hold of power and the futility of resistance. Eli B. Lichtenstein challenges such pessimism by reconstructing the radical critique of penal power that Foucault developed prior to the publication of Discipline and Punish. He argues that in the early 1970s, Foucault employed a distinct genealogical method designed to further struggles against penal systems, and that he expanded critiques of repression and the prison to encompass broader social structures. This book also reconsiders Foucault’s much-debated relationship to Marxism. It argues that Foucault extensively engaged Marxist theory in order to more adequately theorize the links between capitalism and other modes of domination. Through its major reinterpretation of Foucault’s political thought, Partisan Genealogy offers a timely examination of the capitalist foundations of penal power and explains how genealogy crafts tools for use in the urgent struggles of the present.

Eli B. Lichtenstein is a philosopher and writer based in London.

With thanks to Progressive Geographies for this news

Jon Douglas Solomon, Foucault and Genocide. A Genealogy of the Fantasy of the West, Palgrave Macmillan, 2026

About this book
Michel Foucault’s seminal realization that security is a species concept opens a new path for understanding how genocide is fundamentally related to aesthetic ideology. Fueled by the settler colonial imaginary, the logic of “speciation” inevitably acquires a fictional aspect that is an enduring site of potentially catastrophic instability for transitional modernity. The genealogical source of this catastrophic instability is nothing other than the West, the template for the apparatus of area and anthropological difference. The West’s quest to control political transitions throughout the world is an essential part of a larger project to control “speciation.” Inasmuch as “speciation” is tied, says Foucault, to security, and genocide is tied, according to A. Dirk Moses, to the search for permanent security, the attempt to seek permanent security through control over “speciation,” i.e., transition, lies at the root of modern genocide.

Jon Douglas Solomon, Born in the United States and trained at Cornell University, Solomon has lived in east Asia for 25 years, Europe for 15, and North America for 23. He is competent in Chinese, Japanese, French and English, enjoys backpacking and cooking, and is a devoted practitioner and student of Vajrayana Buddhism. Recent publications include: The Taiwan Consensus and the Ethos of Area Studies in Pax Americana: Spectral Transitions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023); The Genealogy of Defeat of the Left: Translation, Transition, and Bordering in the Hong Kong Anti-ELAB Movement (Taipei, 2022; in Chinese); and “Wynter is Coming: Black Communism, Translation, and Technics” in the exhibition catalogue Ceremony: Burial of an Undead World, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2022).

With thanks to Progressive Geographies for this news

Susana Caló and Godofredo Enes Pereira, CERFI – Analysis Everywhere. Militancy, Research, Architecture and Psychiatry, Minor Compositions, 2026

Between the radical energies of the 1960s and the shifting terrains of the 1980s, a group in France quietly detonated the boundaries of politics, psychiatry, and collective life. CERFI – the Centre for Institutional Study, Research, and Training – wasn’t your typical think tank. Co-founded by Félix Guattari, it set out to bring the disruptive insights of institutional psychotherapy into the heart of militant and professional organizing. Their wager? That every collective needs a form of analytic militancy: a way to navigate the unconscious forces that shape power, desire, and resistance from within.

This was the birth of schizoanalysis outside of the clinical setting: a practice that shifts focus from the individual psyche
to the collective assemblages that compose our lives. What are the deeper machinic drives shaping our actions? What forms of desire power our institutions? CERFI’s work took these questions seriously, designing communal infrastructures, building popular research teams, and launching Recherches, a journal that amplified voices from revolutionary struggles, childcare centres, classrooms, psychiatric wards, and beyond. Analysis Everywhere dives into the rich archive of CERFI’s radical experiments: conceptual, editorial, and lived. It invites us to imagine a practice where the unconscious isn’t repressed but mobilized. Where analysis isn’t an afterthought but a vital tool for political transformation.

[…]
Despite the acclaim that CERFI enjoyed during its existence, having published 46 issues of the journal Recherches and relying on a wide network of contributors to its research and publication, the work of CERFI is little known today. In scholarship, references to CERFI tend to occur as notes to the biographical itineraries of prominent individual figures associated with it, such as Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, who occasionally collaborated with the group, and to its founder, Félix Guattari. (p.20)
[…]
See also Liane Mozère, « Foucault et le CERFI : instantanés et actualité », Le Portique, 13-14 | 2004.
https://doi.org/10.4000/leportique.642

Reviews
“‘Only Desire Can Read Desire,’ wrote Félix Guattari, and this quote, which Caló and Pereira use as the title of their introduction, expresses the precious specificity of this book. Caló and Pereira’s desire to revive the passionate adventure of CERFI testifies to the fact that this adventure has become contemporary again, something like a resurgence, the reappearance of what had been eradicated and which is returning, transformed but alive.” – Isabelle Stengers

“Very important work has been done by Susana Caló and Godofredo Pereira on the historical and visual reconstruction of a cultural experiment whose practical and theoretical effects have not yet been fully evaluated. – Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi

Bios:
Susana Caló is an independent researcher and lecturer at the Open University. Her research focuses on neglected radical histories of psychiatry, exploring their intersections with wider social, political and urban struggles, as well concepts’ social and political lives.

Godofredo Enes Pereira is an architect, theorist and environmental activist. He is a senior researcher at the Royal College of Art. His work investigates architecture’s role in the composition of existential territories.

Frédéric Chauvaud, Irène Le Roy Ladurie, Jean-Luc Terradillos,
Henri-Paul Fruchaud (préface), Benoît Hamet (illustration-photographie), Les trois maisons de Michel Foucault, Presses Universitaires de Rennes (2026)

Né à Poitiers, Michel Foucault, philosophe de la folie, de l’archéologie des sciences humaines, du crime, du pouvoir, de la sexualité et de bien d’autres domaines, est l’auteur d’une oeuvre foisonnante qui ne cesse de résonner aussi bien au Brésil qu’en Corée ou au Maroc. Ses livres sont diffusés dans le monde entier. S’il s’est intéressé aux lieux utopiques, il a porté une grande attention aux lieux réels et aux dispositifs spatiaux. Très attaché aux espaces où il est né, où il a rédigé la dernière version de ses livres et écrits, où il a fait l’acquisition, à la fin de sa vie, d’une maison, il a toujours cherché à maintenir un fort ancrage territorial dans le Poitou où se trouvent, à Poitiers, à Vendeuvre et à Verrue, les trois maisons de Michel Foucault.