Foucault Studies, Issue 38, Fall 2025 Open access Table of Contents Editorial Foucault’s Revision of Ideology Critique Johanna Oksala Waging War, Waging Peace: The Weimar Right and Michel Foucault’s Analysis of Power in the Mirror of the Archives Philipp Kender Genealogy Between Health and Illness: On the Ambiguity of the Historical Sense in Foucault’s 1969–1970 …
Leonard D’Cruz, What Demarcates Necropolitics from Biopolitics? A Foucauldian Critique of Mbembe, Theory, Culture & Society https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764251379790 Abstract: Achille Mbembe presents ‘necropolitics’ as a corrective to Foucault’s conception of biopolitics, which Mbembe argues is insufficient to account for the contemporary politics of death. However, it is not clear that Mbembe succeeds in (a) demonstrating the …
Federico Testa, On the Politics of the Living. Foucault and Canguilhem on Life and Norms, Bloomsbury, 2025 Description Bringing the philosophies of Michel Foucault and Georges Canguilhem into dialogue, Federico Testa examines the notions of life and norms underlying our modern experience of politics. Today’s global health crisis acts as a stark reminder that life …
Johnson, J. M. (2024). The Biopolitics of Liberal War: Humanity, Temporality and Cosmology. Millennium, 53(1), 86-112. https://doi.org/10.1177/03058298241288171 Abstract What is the relationship between war and liberalism? Over the last two decades, an extensive and influential literature inspired by Michel Foucault’s conception of biopolitics has argued that the ‘war on terror’ is defined by distinctly liberal …
Sorace, C. (2025). Life First: Pandemic Biopolitics in China. Political Theory, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917251323747 Abstract China’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic could be described as a lesson directly from the pages of Foucault. For nearly three years, China’s vast state apparatus and society were mobilized around the goal of protecting life until November 2023, when people …
Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, Encoding Plasticity: The Rise of Molecular Biopolitics and Human Capital, University of Toronto Quarterly 2025 94:2, 257-275 Abstract This article explores the fundamental concept of plasticity in living organisms and its complex relationship with capitalism and its datafication of life. Plasticity is presented as a crucial adaptive mechanism allowing organisms to respond …
Lindholm, S. (2025). Giovanni Botero’s biopolitical populationism: Rethinking the history of biopower. Philosophy & Social Criticism https://doi.org/10.1177/01914537251324164 Abstract The Italian political thinker and polymath Giovanni Botero (1544–1617) was a famous proponent of what is known today as populationism, the idea of maximizing the number of people within a political community. In this article, I claim …
Friedmann, V., & Marton, P. (2025). Operating by caesura: Medicalisation, geopolitical othering and biopolitical legitimacy in the (non-)approval of Sputnik V in the European Union Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/09557571.2024.2442433 Abstract The Covid-19 pandemic made biopolitical decisions, including on vaccine approval, a subject of public discussion, challenging governmental legitimacy at the level of …
Dent, C. (2025). Road deaths as problematisation: thanatopolitics and economised thoughts. Griffith Law Review, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/10383441.2025.2452029 ABSTRACT The persistence of the road toll suggests that a new perspective may be of value – either to consider new insights to reduce it, or to allow a greater acceptance of the relatively limited number of deaths. The …
Cudworth, E. Resisting Zoopolis: Bordering species relations as a response to COVID-19 (2024) Human-Animal Relationships in Times of Pandemic and Climate Crises: Multispecies Sociology for the New Normal, Edited By Josephine Browne, Zoei Sutton, Routledge, pp. 133-150. DOI: 10.4324/9781003257912-12 Abstract Human publics are now more aware than ever of the presence and threat of zoonotic …
Foucault News 