Foucault News

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

Mitchell Dean, What does ‘Left’ mean?, Verso Blog, 13 April 2022 Mitchell Dean responds to the review of his book The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution (co-written with Daniel Zamora) published in the journal Foucault Studies. One is always grateful when a reader has taken the time to review a scholarly work in the …

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Federico Soldani, The Lancet’s Editor-in-Chief: “We will be transformed into biopolitical citizens” Psypolitics blog 3 August 2021 Topics that readers of PsyPolitics might already be familiar with such as the concepts of power, for instance as discussed by Michel Foucault, the transformation “from citizens to patients” – formulated for the first time in 2019 – …

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Federico Soldani, ‘Psyspeak’ on PsyPolitics and ‘therapy-speak’ on The New Yorker (2021) – 30th Mar 2021 […] Among others, Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, in a volume written by 37 contributors titled “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” (2nd Edition, 2019), asserted explicitly: “Those who pretend that we are in the realm of politics when …

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Eric Schliesser, 28 March 1979: Foucault on Locke’s World Historical Conceptual Shift (XXXVII),Digressions & Impressions, 5 January 2021 […] Because most of lecture 11 is a brilliant analysis of the history of criminology and the (sometimes overlapping) significance of Gary Becker’s redefinition of homo oeconomicus, it is easy to miss how Foucault embeds his analysis …

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A new global psychiatric power? Intro (2020), Psypolitics blog by Federico Soldani – 6th Nov 2020 More than one year ago I presented the talk “Are we witnessing the emergence of a new global psychiatric power?” at the Royal College of Psychiatrists in London, in the summer of 2019. The overdue transcript, with this introduction and brief comments, subdivided in thirteen parts will …

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Eric Schliesser, On Foucault on 10 January 1979 On the Art of Governing and the Origin of Liberalism, Digressions and Impressions blog, 26 May 2020 […] Foucault subtly draws a contrast between [I] (a) the ancient and traditional conception of governing and (b) a modern one; the modern one involves political sovereignty. He presents this …

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Foucault on Liberal Democracy, Historicism and Philosophy Blake Smith. Tocqueville 21, 9 May 2020 Liberal democracy is an oxymoron. Or rather, it’s a site of confrontation between contradictory discourses, between the universalist aspirations of philosophy and the partisanship of historiography. So insinuates Michel Foucault in the lecture series “Society Must be Defended,” delivered at the Collège de …

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