Foucault News

News and resources on French thinker Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

Paul B. Preciado, Learning from the virus, ArtForum, May/June 2020 Open access IF MICHEL FOUCAULT had survived AIDS in 1984 and had stayed alive until the invention of effective antiretroviral therapy, he would be ninety-three years old today. Would he have agreed to confine himself in his apartment on rue de Vaugirard in Paris? The …

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Shannon Winnubst, The many lives of fungibility: anti-blackness in neoliberal times (2020) Journal of Gender Studies, 29 (1), pp. 102-112. https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2019.1692193 Abstract This article maps the many lives of the concept of fungibility in contemporary theories of both blackness and neoliberalism. Framed by the 2018 political chants across the US against ‘white supremacy’, the article …

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Christopher Collstedt, Towards a biopolitics of the victimised body: Creating assault as a crime against health and life, c. 1945–1965 (2020) Scandinavian Journal of History, 45 (1), pp. 1-24. https://doi.org/10.1080/03468755.2019.1596833 Open access Abstract This article discusses the creation of assault as a crime against health and life as this discursive process is expressed through Swedish …

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Anne Sauka (2020). The Nature of Our Becoming: Genealogical Perspectives. Le Foucaldien, 6(1), 4. https://doi.org/10.16995/lefou.71 [Note: In 2022, Le foucaldien relaunched as Genealogy+Critique.] Open access Abstract In the light of Philipp Sarasin’s work in Darwin und Foucault: Genealogie und Geschichte im Zeitalter der Biologie, the article delineates a genealogically articulated naturally produced culture and a …

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Philipp Sarasin, Understanding the Coronavirus Pandemic with Foucault?, G+C Blog, March 31, 2020 https://blog.genealogy-critique.net/essays/254/understanding-corona-with-foucault Open access It looks like a biopolitical dream: governments, advised by physicians, impose pandemic dictatorship on entire populations. Getting rid of all democratic obstacles under the pretext of “health,” even “survival,” they are finally able to govern the population as they …

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COVID-19 Essays TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, March 23, 2020 Editorial Introduction: Writing in the Midst of the COVID-19 Pandemic: From Vulnerability to Solidarity This is a rapid response collection of essays. In the evening on Sunday, March 15 we began contacting Canadian-based scholars working in the field of biopolitics to write a short, …

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Felipe Demetri, Biopolitics and Coronavirus, or don’t forget Foucault, Naked Punch, 21 March 2020 […] What the coronavirus epidemic shows us is more the strength of Michel Foucault’s explanatory scheme than the current necro-thanatopolitical strain of interpretations. We all know that Foucault saw biopower as a series of events, from theoretical ones to concrete practices, …

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Andrew Dobson, Kezia Barker, Sarah L. Taylor (eds) Biosecurity: The Socio-Politics of Invasive Species and Infectious Diseases, Routledge, 2013 Description Biosecurity is the assessment and management of potentially dangerous infectious diseases, quarantined pests, invasive (alien) species, living modified organisms, and biological weapons. It is a holistic concept of direct relevance to the sustainability of agriculture, …

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Janosik Herder, The Power of Platforms. How biopolitical companies threaten democracy, Public Seminar, January 25, 2019 The 2010s will likely be remembered as the decade of the rise of platforms. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber — all of these companies have become more than just billion-dollar businesses. Over the last ten years they have started …

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