Foucault News

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

The West’s leading pseudo-intellectual by Ammar Ahmad The Michigan Daily, November 30, 2022 Jordan Peterson is a popular Canadian personality psychologist who has made quite a name for himself by preaching against the use of pronouns, arguing that they violate freedom of speech. In a CBC interview, he uses his spotlight moment to say “I …

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Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski, The failure of May 1968, Unherd, May 24, 2022 “What defines our public life today is boredom”. That was a Le Monde front-page headline in March 1968. Two months later, a revolution would erupt that would shake the foundations of the Fifth Republic, divide France, and alter its history forever. […] In June, …

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Peter Salmon, Since Derrida, Aeon, 6 May 2022 A golden generation of French philosophers dismantled truth and other traditional ideas. What next for their successors? […] Ricœur was part of a generation that Hélène Cixous, one of its members, called ‘the incorruptibles’. Their numbers included such thinkers as Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Jean Luc-Nancy, …

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Why Critics of Angry Woke College Kids Are Missing the Point Wendy Brown interviewed by David Marchese, New York Times Magazine, 1 May 2022 The halls of academia may appear to be overrun by battles over academic freedom, free speech, identity politics, cancel culture and overreaching wokeness. But why does it look that way? And …

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Philip Mirowski, The Death of Neoliberalism Has Been Greatly Exaggerated. Jacobin. 04.27.2022 Despite predictions of its demise, the neoliberal power bloc of think tanks and lobby groups is still deeply entrenched and pushing into new territory, from health care to space exploration. Neoliberalism won’t be over until the Left can challenge that power. It is …

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Neha Patel, The Function of Train Travel in Books, Book Riot, Jan 14, 2022 […] Trains are incredible because its passengers either forget about them entirely or have a moment or two immortalized in their memories. But trains themselves are liminal. The term’s Latin roots come from “limen,” which roughly translates to “threshold.” As such, …

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Jarryd Bartle, In defence of Michel Foucault, Unherd, January 27, 2022 Blaming French theory for the extremes of the American Left has been a popular line for that last few years. Public intellectual Jordan Peterson has blamed “postmodern neo-Marxism” for the rise of a hypersensitive yet coercive activism, connecting the term to everything from safe …

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