Foucault News

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

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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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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 …

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Alphin, C., Debrix, F. Biopolitics in the ‘Psychic Realm’: Han, Foucault and neoliberal psychopolitics, Philosophy and Social Criticism, (2021). DOI: 10.1177/01914537211033011 Abstract This article explores German Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s notion of psychopolitics and his concept of the neoliberal subject. For Han, mental processes are now the primary target of power. This means that, according …

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Joseph Pugliese, Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human. Forensic Ecologies of Violence, Duke University Press, 2020 In Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human Joseph Pugliese examines the concept of the biopolitical through a nonanthropocentric lens, arguing that more-than-human entities—from soil and orchards to animals and water—are actors and agents in their own right with legitimate claims to justice. Examining …

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Tudor, R. Facing adversity together: the biopolitics of the community-focussed recovery policies in post-earthquake Canterbury, New Zealand (2020) Critical Policy Studies DOI: 10.1080/19460171.2020.1842221 Abstract Community building was a feature of the recovery policies implemented to respond to the 2010 and 2011 Canterbury earthquakes in New Zealand. This strategy aimed for survivors to manage the disruption …

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Jeffrey T. Nealon, I’m Not Like Everybody Else. Biopolitics, Neoliberalism, and American Popular Music, University of Nebraska Press, 2018 About the Book Despite the presence of the Flaming Lips in a commercial for a copier and Iggy Pop’s music in luxury cruise advertisements, Jeffrey T. Nealon argues that popular music has not exactly been co-opted …

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Lee, H. The Empiricist Origin of Biopolitics: Freedom and Potentiality in John Locke (2021) Philosophia (United States). DOI: 10.1007/s11406-020-00306-2 Abstract This article examines John Locke’s theory of subjectivity to challenge the recent critical tendency to associate biopolitics and empiricism. Michel Foucault, most notably among modern theorists of biopolitics, proposes that the Lockean man, or an …

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