Special issue: The Politics of Life, European Journal of Social Theory, Volume 22 Issue 3, August 2019 Editorial Introduction: This introduction to the special issue focuses on the messiness of biopolitics. The biopolitical is a composite mixture of heterogeneous, and sometimes conflicting, forces, discourses, institutions, laws, and practices that are embedded in and animated by …
Vatter, M. “Only a God Can Resist a God.” Political Theology between Polytheism and Gnosticism (2019) Political Theology, 20 (6), pp. 472-497. DOI: 10.1080/1462317X.2019.1618597 Abstract Sovereignty – based on a claim to irresistible authority – and “speaking truth to power” (or parrhesia) are evidently opposed and yet they seem to have a strange affinity with …
Maher, R., Valenzuela, F., Böhm, S. The Enduring State: An analysis of governance-making in three mining conflicts (2019) Organization Studies, 40 (8), pp. 1169-1191. DOI: 10.1177/0170840619847724 Abstract This article investigates the profound ambiguity of the state in the organization of contemporary business–society relations. On the one hand, there has been a decisive shift from government …
Stimilli, E. Religion and the spontaneous order of the market: Law, freedom, and power over lives (2019) European Journal of Social Theory, 22 (3), pp. 399-415. DOI: 10.1177/1368431018803705 Abstract This article focuses on a religious structure that is intrinsic to the contemporary mechanisms that have enabled the global domination of economic power: faith in the …
Weili Zhao (2019) China’s making and governing of educational subjects as ‘talent’: A dialogue with Michel Foucault, Educational Philosophy and Theory DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2019.1646640 Abstract As an imprint of Confucian culture, China’s education intersects state governance in making and governing educational subjects as ‘talent’, an official translation of the Chinese term ‘rencai’ (literally, human-talent). Whereas the …
Tim Christiaens, The entrepreneur of the self beyond Foucault’s neoliberal homo oeconomicus, European Journal of Social Theory 23(4), 2019, 493-511. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431019857998 Abstract In his lectures on neoliberalism, Michel Foucault argues that neoliberalism produces subjects as ‘entrepreneurs of themselves’. He bases this claim on Gary Becker’s conception of the utility-maximizing agent who solely acts upon cost/benefit-calculations. …
Siew Fung Lee (2019) Governing ‘disadvantage’ through readiness: A Foucauldian policy genealogy of funded nursery places for two-year-olds. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood. DOI: 10.1177/1463949119864200 ABSTRACT This article critically examines how the policy of funded nursery places for ‘disadvantaged’ two-year-olds in England opens up economic and political spaces in readiness for increased governance. The government …
Yongchun Cai, Borges and Ge Fei: Transfiguring the poetics of atemporal labyrinth (2019) Neohelicon, 46 (1), pp. 303-329. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-019-00480-7 Abstract This article examines, from a comparative perspective, how Jorge Louis Borges configures his archetypal textual labyrinth in “The Garden of Forking Paths” and to what extent the Chinese avant-gardist Ge Fei is inspired to absorb, …
Thiel, J. The UK National Student Survey: An amalgam of discipline and neo-liberal governmentality (2019) British Educational Research Journal, 45 (3), pp. 538-553. DOI: 10.1002/berj.3512 Abstract The UK National Student Survey (NSS) has high status on the agenda of UK universities. Its rise in status is linked to its influence on national rankings and associated …
Elizabeth Mary Grierson, Calling for change: A feminist approach to women in art, politics, philosophy and education (2019) Educational Philosophy and Theory, 51 (7), pp. 731-743. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1488215 Abstract Michel Foucault showed by his genealogical method that history is random. It comprises sites of disarray and dispersal. In those sites, Simone de Beauvoir wrote philosophy through …
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