Foucault News

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

Ana Sofia Elias and Rosalind Gill, Beauty surveillance: The digital self-monitoring cultures of neoliberalism (2018) European Journal of Cultural Studies, 21 (1), pp. 59-77. https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549417705604 Abstract This article argues that ‘beauty apps’ are transforming the arena of appearance politics and foregrounds a theoretical architecture for critically understanding them. Informed by a feminist-Foucaultian framework, it argues …

Continue reading

Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics. Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. Translated by Erik Butler, Verso 2017 See also Review in The Guardian Exploring how neoliberalism has discovered the productive force of the psyche Byung-Chul Han, a star of German philosophy, continues his passionate critique of neoliberalism, trenchantly describing a regime of technological domination that, in contrast …

Continue reading

The Birth of Austerity. German Ordoliberalism and Contemporary Neoliberalism Edited by Thomas Biebricher and Frieder Vogelmann, Imprint: Rowman & Littlefield, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017 Description Ordoliberalism and the ‘Freiburg School’ have gained traction in contemporary political economy in response to two factors: a rising interest in governmentality studies and the banking, financial and sovereign debt crisis …

Continue reading

La pensée politique de Foucault sous la direction d’Orazio IRRERA et Salvo VACCARO, Paris, Editions Kimé (coll. “Philosophie en cours”), 2017, p. 248. Loin d’être considérée comme une simple notion appartenant au vocabulaire de la théorie politique, l’idée foucaldienne de la politique renvoie plutôt à une attitude généalogique fournissant un diagnostic du présent et restituant …

Continue reading

“What Do You Want Me to Regret?”: An Interview with François Ewald Johannes Boehme interviews François Ewald, Los Angeles Review of Books, 3 November 2017 NOBODY COULD HAVE PREDICTED, in 1968, that François Ewald would one day receive the French state’s highest order for civil merit. At the time he was a young, ambitious, and …

Continue reading

Catherine Manathunga, Mark Selkrig, Kirsten Sadler, and (Ron) Kim Keamy, Rendering the paradoxes and pleasures of academic life: using images, poetry and drama to speak back to the measured university (2017) Higher Education Research and Development, 36 (3), pp. 526-540. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2017.1289157 Abstract Measurement of academic work has become more significant than the intellectual, pedagogical, cultural, …

Continue reading

Teresa Lloro-Bidart, Neoliberal and disciplinary environmentality and ‘sustainable seafood’ consumption: storying environmentally responsible action (2017) Environmental Education Research, 23 (8), pp. 1182-1199. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504622.2015.1105198 Abstract This article invokes a neoliberal and disciplinary governmentality lens in a political ecology of education framework to analyze educational programming at Long Beach, California’s Aquarium of the Pacific. I begin by …

Continue reading

Luca Mavelli, Governing the resilience of neoliberalism through biopolitics (2017) European Journal of International Relations, 23 (3), pp. 489-512. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066116676321 Abstract Neoliberalism is widely regarded as the main culprit for the 2007/2008 global financial crisis. However, despite this abysmal failure, neoliberalism has not merely survived the crisis, but actually ‘thrived’. How is it possible to …

Continue reading

Lev Marder, Rethinking homo economicus in the political sphere. Constellations, 31 August 2017 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12295 Abstract: Homo-economicus, this rational cost-benefit calculating interest-pursuing subject, in political analysis usually stands for the ordinary citizen little interested in unprofitable political knowledge. This subject appears as an obstacle to democratic governance, but it does not have to appear as such. …

Continue reading

William Davies, What Is “Neo” About Neoliberalism?, New Republic, July 13, 2017 How to tell the difference between liberalism and something else. In the buildup to the 2015 General Election, Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), reiterated his support for an “Australian-style points system” as a means of controlling immigration, the policy …

Continue reading