Foucault News

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

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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Geoff Shullenberger,The Violence of Institutions, or Girard avec Foucault, Outsider Theory, June 2, 2021 René Girard and Michel Foucault, two of the most ambitious interdisciplinary thinkers of the twentieth century, shared an abiding interest in the violence embedded in institutions, but their names are rarely mentioned together. My modest goal here is to outline a …

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Jean Zaganiaris, Michel Foucault, le Covid-19 et le «combat immense et multiple des savoirs», iPhilo, 20/05/2021 COMMENTAIRE : La pandémie est l’objet de vives disputes sur ce qui serait médicalement vrai et ce qui relèverait de fakenews. Le philosophe et historien de la littérature Jean Zaganiaris a exhumé pour l’occasion un texte de Michel Foucault …

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Why the Left Needs Foucault BY ROBERT A. KIPPES, CounterPunch, APRIL 30, 2021 The relationship between the philosophy of Michel Foucault and Marxism has been contentious since the 1970s. Notably, Jean-Paul Sartre accused Foucault’s thought as being “the last barricade the bourgeoisie can still erect against Marx.” The reason is simple: he rejects the onto-teleological …

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Gordon Hull, Foucault, Marx and Prophecy: the 11th “Thesis on Feuerbach”, New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science, 22 April 2021 Foucault thinks Marxism is bossy. In Society must be Defended, he lays down the gauntlet clearly enough: totalizing theories get in the way of useful things at the local level. As he notes, one should …

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Maximilian Brichta, Juxtaposing Foucault: Towards an incorporation of the phenomenological subject in prison analysis To Sense. 28 Mar 2021 If one wishes to analyze prisons from the communication perspective, they will inevitably grapple with Foucault. His 1975 book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison has become a canonical assessment of power relations in …

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Federico Soldani, ‘Psyspeak’ on PsyPolitics and ‘therapy-speak’ on The New Yorker (2021) – 30th Mar 2021 […] Among others, Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, in a volume written by 37 contributors titled “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump” (2nd Edition, 2019), asserted explicitly: “Those who pretend that we are in the realm of politics when …

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Carlo Salzani COVID-19 and State of Exception: Medicine, Politics, and the Epidemic State, Paris Institute for Critical Thinking, 12 March 2021 Open access The article analyzes the paradigm of the state of exception which has been evoked in relation to the exceptional measures adopted against the COVID-19 pandemic around the world, with particular reference to …

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Marios Emmanouilidis, The Parasitic Folding. Humans-as-Animals, States and Machines that Come from the Outside: Homologies between a Virus and Finance, Translated from the Greek by Barbara Santos, Transversal (European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies, Vienna) , December 2020 Open access The text approaches the Covid-19 epidemic from two points of view: (a) as a war …

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Giorgi Vachnadze, Displacing the Confessional: Resistance to Orthodox Christian Governmentality, Giorgi Vachnadze blog, 16 January 2021 The following text will provide a critical reflection on the social and political context of the Georgian Orthodox Christian Church as an extension of the state-apparatus. Looking briefly at the history, the global/local political climate and the role of …

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