Foucault News

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

Janosik Herder, The Power of Platforms. How biopolitical companies threaten democracy, Public Seminar, January 25, 2019 The 2010s will likely be remembered as the decade of the rise of platforms. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber — all of these companies have become more than just billion-dollar businesses. Over the last ten years they have started …

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Eric Schliesser, Foucault on the Idea of Europe (and Adam Smith, Hume & Kant), Digressions and Impressions, blog, 4 December 2019 […] Foucault correctly discern the significance of Kant’s Perpetual Peace to Ordoliberal thought (recall here; here; here). (He mentions Kant’s essay on the following page, and he begins to develops his idea about the Ordos in the subsequent lecture on 31 …

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Matt McManus, Marx vs Foucault: Reflections on History and Power, Areo, August 29, 2019 Update September 2025: Areo Magazine appears to no longer be available. The link above is to the archived article on the Wayback Machine Karl Marx and Michel Foucault are two of the most cited critical theorists in the world today, simultaneously …

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Megan N. Fontenot, A Weapon With a Will of Its Own: How Tolkien Wrote the One Ring as a Character, Tor.Com, Science fiction. Fantasy. The universe. And related subjects, Jan 1, 2020 In September 1963, Tolkien drafted yet another of a number of letters responding to questions about Frodo’s “failure” at the Cracks of Doom. …

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David Langwallner, Public Intellectual Series: Michel Foucault, Cassandra Voices, December 7 2019 […] Alone among Post-Modernists, Foucault’s methodology was empiricist and historicist. Rather than relying on incomprehensible prose and bizarre generalisations he adopted inductive reasoning. As an historian of ideas, we don’t simply find him inventing absurd abstractions, but analysing real existing data. […] For …

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Gordon Hull, On the Authorship of Law: Copyright, Foucault, and Hobbes, New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science, 12 Nivember 2019 There is an interesting copyright case before the Supreme Court this term, Georgia v. Public Resource.org. It is settled law that official edicts of the government – statutory texts, judicial opinions, agency rules – are not copyrightable. More …

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Guillaume Le Blanc, Why read Foucault’s Confessions of the Flesh today? (french version), Critique 13/13, Seminars at Columbia, Nov 30 2019 Que pouvons-nous trouver dans un texte sur la sexualité chrétienne qui aurait dû paraître en 1982 voire en 1984 et qui finalement ne le sera qu’en 2018 ? Étrange situation puisque nous lisons ce livre …

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Biagio Carrano, Balkanism, the European image of the Balkans, Serbian Monitor, 13/08/2019 An analysis of the Balkanist mentality, which, in a way, we all take with us when we think about the Balkans. A premise that is almost a spoiler: if you want to read something lighter, go immediately to the related article dedicated to Balkanology. And …

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Francesco Bellusci, Michel Foucault: “Cosa importa chi parla?” Doppiozero, 15 Ottobre 2019 Doppiozero is a cultural magazine, with editions in Italian and English , and a publishing house, online since February 14, 2011. More than 900 writers, critics, journalists, researchers, scholars of different disciplines collaborate in doppiozero, in an ecosystem that brings together renowned intellectuals, young authors and …

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William B. Ashworth, Jr, Scientist of the Day – Michel Foucault, Linda Hall Library, October 15 2019 Editor: The Linda Hall library is an independent research library located in Kansas devoted to science, engineering, and technology. This short tribute to Foucault’s work on science in The Order of Things, was published on his birthday October …

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