Foucault News

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

Bonnie Evans, Beyond neurodiversity: The dangers of ‘reducing diversity to brain-based distinctions’ Genetic Literacy Project, March 30, 2022 The concept of ‘neurodiversity’ has gained enormous cultural influence in recent years. Computer scientists and ‘techies’ wear the ‘neurodiverse’ label with pride; businesses are building ‘neurodiverse’ workforces; scriptwriters strive to represent and cast ‘neurodivergent’ people. Those framed …

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Lisa Duggan, Ayn Rand and the Cruel Heart of Neoliberalism, Dissent Magazine, May 20, 2019 Excerpted from Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the Culture of Greed by Lisa Duggan, published by the University of California Press. © 2019 by the Regents of the University of California.) […] Neoliberal influence has been culturally deep as well as geographically …

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Eric Sergent, Les cimetières sont aussi des lieux de vie, The Conversation, October 22, 2021 S’il est évidemment le lieu où l’on inhume les morts, le cimetière est aussi un espace fort ambigu, que chacun investit de significations diverses, sans parvenir toujours à les formuler clairement. En témoignent les mots d’Edmond Texier qui, dans son …

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Goran Gaber, Small Words, Big Consequences. On Michel Foucault’s Genealogy of the Critical Attitude, The Philosophical Salon, 8 November 2021 Michel Foucault has been called many things, from a young conservative to a faux radical, from a neo-liberal to an infantile leftist. Whatever the hermeneutical value of these epithets may be, there is a term …

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Steven Ogden, Political Theology as Transformative Opposition, Political Theology network, October 7, 2021 The idea of opposition then is not about establishing a negative position for its own sake. Instead, to embody opposition here is to draw a line, and this line constitutes a limit-experience. It as if to say, ‘enough is enough.’ So, this …

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Giorgi Vachnadze, Fighting Bodies: A Genealogy of the Ring, Epoché Philosophy Monthly, Issue #44 September 2021 Open access The following essay will attempt to trace a genealogy for the institution of professional boxing. Applying Michel Foucault’s method of Archeology and Biopolitical critique, the aim will be to demonstrate several things. First, that boxing has not …

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Gordon Hull, Foucault, Marx and Prophecy Part 3: On Bureaucrats, New Apps, 12 July 2021 In a previous post, I noted that Foucault strongly implies in a 1978 interview that his communist detractors are bureaucrats, and tied that to an earlier interview with Maoists in which he suggests that structuring populist tribunals on the model …

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Oxana Timofeeva Rathole: Beyond the Rituals of Handwashing, e-flux, #119 – June 2021 In the spring of 2020, when the World Health Organization formally announced the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic and governments began introducing new restrictions, some philosophers looked to Michel Foucault, who created tools for analyzing mass disease in relation to discourses and …

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Antoine Idier, Michel Foucault before the Commission for Penal Code Review, Lundimatin, 16 mai 2021 These past few weeks I’ve often been asked about the subject which has taken the name of the “Michel Foucault affair” (even though there was no “affair” to speak of), following the delirious accusations of a right-wing essayist and their …

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Crispin Sartwell, Michel Foucault Switches Sides, Splice Today, 7 June 2021 Neither the left nor the right can deal with an anti-authoritarian. The French philosophe Michel Foucault (1926-1984) is currently up for re-assessment. In The New York Times, Ross Douthat writes that Foucault, usually thought of as a notorious postmodern neo-Marxist leftist relativist, has lately been associated with the Trumpian right. And an essay in The Point surveys the …

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