Foucault News

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

Abigail A. Dumes, What Long Covid Shows Us About the Limits of Medicine, The New York Times, March 17 2022 Long Covid symptoms, such as fatigue, shortness of breath, cognitive difficulties, erratic heart rate, headache and dizziness, can be debilitating and wide-ranging. There is uncertainty about what ultimately causes long Covid and how to adequately …

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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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Christopher Blackwell, Reading While Incarcerated Saved Me. So Why Are Prisons Banning Books?, The New York Times, 17 August 2022 SHELTON, Wash. — During my first decade in prison, I busied myself with exercising and hanging out in the big yard. I hardly grew as a person, aside from developing muscles that I really used …

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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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Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora, Today, the self is the battlefield of politics. Blame Michel Foucault, The Guardian, 15 June 2021 The rise of confessional politics has its origins in the left’s post-60s turn away from structures and towards the individual “We are perhaps living at the end of politics,” Michel Foucault wrote in the …

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Editor: UK Politician Liz Truss’s comments unexpectedly led to Foucault trending on twitter in the UK. Liz Truss doesn’t know about Foucault, but she also doesn’t care Charlotte Lydia Riley, The Guardian, 19 December 2020 Ironically, rightwing politicians have invented a zombie ‘postmodernism’ that cannot be killed by facts Academics in the UK have been …

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Lock down and punish by Blake Smith| Washington Examiner, June 11, 2020 The French philosopher Michel Foucault warned that public health threatens the principles of liberal democracy. Our political system, he argued, depends on us imagining each other as citizens working out collective rules to protect our rights. Our conception of public health, however, results …

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Problematic statues and ‘race war’ by Blake Smith, Washington Examiner, June 18, 2020 […] What we are in the habit of calling “identity politics,” and particularly political movements based on (somewhat contradictory) appeals to racial solidarity and anti-racism, depend on a “certain way of making historical knowledge work within political struggle.” So argued Foucault in …

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