Foucault News

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

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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Marcelo Hoffman The FBI File on Foucault, Viewpoint Magazine, November 8, 2021 Open access Nearly a decade ago, two Brazilian researchers, Heliana de Barros Conde Rodrigues and Maria Izabel Pitanga, made a remarkable discovery. They requested materials on the French philosopher Michel Foucault from the National Archive of the Ministry of Justice in Brasília and …

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Blake Smith, An Unlikely Intellectual Convergence, City Journal, October 20, 2021 Christopher Lasch and Michel Foucault told a similar story about the modern obsession with identity—and its dangers. Christopher Lasch and Michel Foucault are rarely read side by side. Yet the two thinkers praised each other’s work, recognizing themselves as involved in a common project. …

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Michael C. Behrent, The True Foucault Dissent Magazine, September 30, 2021 The issues most important to Michel Foucault have moved from the margins to become major preoccupations of political life. But what did Foucault actually teach?, Suddenly, it seems, everyone has a lot to say about Michel Foucault. And much of it isn’t pretty. After …

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Five intellectual fashion statements from history that anticipated today’s dark academia trend, The Conversation, UK September 17, 2021 Writing with a quill pen dipped in ink, sitting in the flickering of candlelight in a book-lined study, and vintage tweed paired with knitted jumpers and brogues have all become the height of fashion for autumn 2021. …

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Richard Seymour, How postmodernism became the universal scapegoat of the era New Statesman, 24 June 2021 In the slew of rightist culture-war bogeymen, from “cultural Marxism” to “critical race theory”, one of the most surprising candidates for obloquy is postmodernism. In December 2020, the women and equalities minister Liz Truss bewailed “postmodernist philosophy – pioneered …

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Geoff Shullenberger, How We Forgot Foucault, American Affairs, Vol V no.2, Summer 2021 Late last year, British trade minister Liz Truss caused a stir with a speech that pinned the failures of the British education system on “postmodernist philosophy,” which, she said, “puts societal power structures and labels ahead of individuals and their endeavours.” Due …

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Julian Castronovo, Palantir’s Picture of Michel Foucault, or How to “Discipline and Punish” Brooklyn Rail, May 2021 The new all-seeing overlords have read the theory. There is a bewildering photograph in a recent New York Times Magazine article on the controversial and secretive tech company Palantir. The scene is this: four figures appear at the …

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