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.
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