Foucault News

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

Stephane J Baele, Live and let die: did Michel Foucault predict Europe’s refugee crisis?, The Conversation, February 25, 2016 Translation into French Translation into Turkish In March 1976, philosopher Michel Foucault described the advent of a new logic of government, specific to Western liberal societies. He called it biopolitics. States were becoming obsessed with the health …

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Delphine Merx, S’écrire soi-même, Implications philosophiques Open access article Résumé Résumé : La notion de « subjectivation » interroge ce processus qui, d’un sujet malléable et à déterminer, fait surgir une certaine constitution du soi, et les moyens de cette formation. Paul Ricœur et Michel Foucault se sont chacun à leur tour penchés sur cette …

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Ben Golder, Human rights without humanism. Why does Foucault—an avowed anti-humanist—turn to “rights” in his later works?, Originally on the Stanford University Press blog, 27 October 2015. Currently on The Australian Public Law site (October 2025) […] As human rights rise in popularity throughout the 1960s and 1970s so too does the work of thinkers …

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Kaveh L. Afrasiabi, Iran: The ‘Spirit Of A Spiritless World’ – OpEd (2016), Eurasia Review: A Journal of Analysis and News 13 February 2016 On the occasion of the thirty seventh anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, we are compelled to revisit the unique insights of Michel Foucault, the late French philosopher, who observed …

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Mitchell Dean, Rebel, Rebel? Revisiting the radical legacy of Michel Foucault via David Bowie, Stanford University Press blog, 19 Feb 2016 In order to understand any major thinker and their legacy, it is important to consider their context—a truism that is very hard to put into practice, especially when the thinker in question belongs both …

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Gordon Hull, Foucault, Descartes and Monastic Subjectivity, New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science, 07 January 2016 Extracts [,,,] So Descartes is an Augustinian, at least on this point. What I’d like to do here is point out that Foucault further situates Descartes in a traditional Catholic framework of confession. Recall that, in general, On the …

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Michel Foucault: The rights and duties of international citizenship (2015) The front page of the Open Democracy Site, 14 November 2015 Also includes links to the following items: Michel Foucault “The refugee problem is a presage of the great migrations of the twenty first century”, 1979. Translated by Colin Gordon. Colin Gordon, The drowned and …

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Bernard E. Harcourt, Foucault 3/13 The Punitive Society: Didier Fassin, Axel Honneth, Nadia Urbinati, and the Question of the Political and Moral Economies of Punishment [This article draws on a longer essay titled “The ’73 Graft: Punishment, Political Economy, and the Genealogy of Morals”] In their fascinating and provocative articles on The Punitive Society, Didier Fassin, …

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