Foucault News

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

The Biopolitics of Punishment, Derrida and Foucault Edited by Rick Elmore and Ege Selin Islekel, Northwestern University Press, 2022 This volume marks a new chapter in the long-standing debate between Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault regarding argumentative methods and their political implications. The essays chart the undertheorized dialogue between the two philosophers on questions of …

Continue reading

Collier, Stephen J, and Andrew Lakoff. “Vital Systems Security: Reflexive Biopolitics and the Government of Emergency.” Theory, Culture & Society 32, no. 2 (March 2015): 19–51. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276413510050. Abstract This article describes the historical emergence of vital systems security, analyzing it as a significant mutation in biopolitical modernity. The story begins in the early 20th century, …

Continue reading

Victor Marchezini, The Biopolitics of Disaster: Power, Discourses, and Practices, Human Organization, Vol. 74, Iss. 4, (Winter 2015): 362-371. https://doi.org/10.17730/0018-7259-74.4.362 Abstract With the increase in frequency and visibility of disasters in contemporary state societies, national governments have developed a collection of agencies to manage catastrophic events. These institutions invariably deal with human populations as a …

Continue reading

Tim Christiaens (2021), “Against the Republican Foucault: How to Establish an Affirmative Biopolitics of Care”, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 83 (4), 683-709. DOI: 10.2143/TVF.83.4.0000000 Open access link Abstract: In The Republic of the Living, Miguel Vatter argues that, at the end of the 1970s, Michel Foucault did not convert to but criticized neoliberalism from a republican …

Continue reading

Karsten Schubert, Biopolitics of COVID-19: Capitalist Continuities and Democratic Openings, Interalia. A Journal of Queer Studies, Issue 16 2021 https://doi.org/10.51897/interalia/OAGM9733 Open access Abstract “Biopolitics” has become a popular concept for interpreting the COVID-19 pandemic, yet the term is often used vaguely, as a buzzword, and therefore loses its specificity and relevance. This article systematically explains …

Continue reading

Daniele Lorenzini, The Normativity of Biopolitics Working draft of a talk delivered at the Dutch-Belgian Foucault Circle on 24 February 2021. As was predictable, the coronavirus pandemic has contributed to the emergence of a new series of analyses centered on Michel Foucault’s notions of biopower or biopolitics. In this talk, I won’t draw any distinctions …

Continue reading

Robert Mitchell, Infectious Liberty: Biopolitics between Romanticism and Liberalism, Fordham University Press, 2021 Open access Review in Foucault Studies Abstract Infectious Liberty traces the origins of our contemporary concerns about public health, world population, climate change, global trade, and government regulation to a series of Romantic-era debates and their literary consequences. Through a series of …

Continue reading

Povinelli, Elizabeth A., Mathew Coleman, and Kathryn Yusoff. “An Interview with Elizabeth Povinelli: Geontopower, Biopolitics and the Anthropocene.” Theory, Culture & Society 34, no. 2–3 (May 2017): 169–85. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276417689900. Open access Abstract This article is an interview with Elizabeth Povinelli, by Mathew Coleman and Kathryn Yusoff. It addresses Povinelli’s approaches to ‘geontologies’ and ‘geontopower’, and …

Continue reading

Alexander J. Means (2021) Foucault, biopolitics, and the critique of state reason, Educational Philosophy and Theory DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2021.1871895 The concept of biopolitics was first outlined by Michel Foucault (2003, 2007, 2009) in his lectures at the Collège de France in the late 1970s in order to name and analyze emergent logics of power in the …

Continue reading

Meloni, M. The politics of environments before the environment: Biopolitics in the longue durée (2021) Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 88, pp. 334-344. DOI: 10.1016/j.shpsa.2021.06.011 Abstract Our understanding of body–world relations is caught in a curious contradiction. On one side, it is well established that many concepts that describe interaction with the outer …

Continue reading