Foucault News

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

Ege Selin Islekel Ubu-esque sovereign, monstrous individual: Death in biopolitics (2016) Philosophy Today, 60 (1), pp. 175-191. https://doi.org/10.5840/philtoday2016113103 Abstract Foucault characterizes the defining feature of modern politics in terms of a new form of power concerned with maximizing life, biopolitics, as opposed to the sovereign right to kill. This characterization becomes problematic, especially when the …

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Lars Thorup Larsen (2015): “The problematization of fertility treatment: biopolitics and IVF policy in Denmark”, Distinktion 16(3): 318-36. https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2015.1089520 Abstract: With the demographic challenges facing many European states, one would perhaps expect the state to invoke a biopolitical imperative to ‘faire vivre’, as Foucault termed it, and attempt to regulate birth rates. This expectation is …

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Vernon W. Cisney and Nicolae Morar (Eds), Biopower: Foucault and Beyond, University of Chicago Press, 2015 Michel Foucault’s notion of “biopower” has been a highly fertile concept in recent theory, influencing thinkers worldwide across a variety of disciplines and concerns. In The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Foucault famously employed the term to describe “a …

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Jemima Repo (2015) The Biopolitics of Gender. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press Introduces a new theoretical and methodological approach to gender Conducts a genealogy of gender similar to Foucault’s mid-twentieth century genealogy of sexuality Argues that gender is an apparatus of biopower invented in the postwar period in order to regulate the reproduction …

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Miguelángel Verde Garrido, Contesting a biopolitics of information and communications: The importance of truth and sousveillance after Snowden, Surveillance and society, Vol 13, No 2 (2015) https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v13i2.5331 Abstract This article aims to provide a novel conceptual understanding of the nature of the global mass surveillance policies and practices revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden in collaboration …

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Julian Vigo, Biopower and Security, Counterpunch, May 05, 2015 Full text online In The History of Sexuality: The Will to Knowledge (L’histoire de la sexualité, La volonté de savoir), Michel Foucault defines biopower as the practices engaged by the modern state to effect an “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations …

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Call for Papers After Biopolitics The Center for Critical and Cultural Theory at Rice University will be hosting the 29th Annual (SLSA) Society for Literature, Science and the Arts Conference. November 12-15, 2015 at the BioScience Research Collaborative (BRC) located within the Houston Medical Center and Rice University. Keynote Speakers: Viciane Despret Mark Dion POTENTIAL …

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https://vimeo.com/49843119 Richard Wolin, Biopolitics and Engagement: What Foucault Learned about Power from the Maoists, Feb 28, 2012 [Update December 2025. This video is no longer publicly accessible. But a written open access journal publication can be found here] Richard Wolin, Biopolitics and Engagement, theologie.geschichte 7 (2012) https://doi.org/10.48603/tg-2012-art-02 Michel Foucault’s conception of “power-knowledge” has been one …

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Connor J. Cavanagh Biopolitics, Environmental Change, and Development Studies, Forum for Development Studies, Vol. 41, Iss. 2, 2014, 273-294 https://doi.org/10.1080/08039410.2014.901243 Abstract This article proposes a Foucaultian, yet more-than-human, conceptual framework for scholars of both international development and biopolitics in our current historical–geographical conjuncture: the ostensibly nascent Anthropocene. Under these conditions, it is argued that biopower …

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Thomas Lemke, Biopolitics and Beyond: Vibrant Matter and the Political Economy of Life Published on Jul 1, 2013 CELAB presents a public lecture by Professor Thomas Lemke, Goethe University, Frankfurt/Main in Germany. With opening remarks by Professor Judit Sandor, Director of CELAB. With thanks to Dirk Felleman for this link