Matthew Hannah with Jan Simon Hutta and Christoph Schemann, Thinking Corona measures with Foucault, University of Bayreuth, 2020 The thoughts to follow have been formulated as a spur to discussion about some of the power relations manifested in state responses to the Covid-19 pandemic up to early April, 2020. While it touches themes covered by …
Originally posted on In the Moment:
Daniele Lorenzini ? In a recent blog post, Joshua Clover rightly notices the swift emergence of a new panoply of “genres of the quarantine.” It should not come as a surprise that one of them centers on Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, asking whether or not it is still…
Elliot Grover, What Can Daniel Defoe’s “Plague Year” Teach Us About Coronavirus?, InsideHook, 17 March 2020 A novel written in 1722 offers a surprisingly relevant blueprint to navigating a 2020 pandemic The panic began the moment the earliest cases were confirmed. Those with means hurriedly packed their belongings and fled the city. Those who stayed …
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 …
Eric Schliesser, Foucault on the Idea of Europe (and Adam Smith, Hume & Kant), Digressions and Impressions, blog, 4 December 2019 [Editor Update 9 March 2026. Link above is to the page archived on the Wayback Machine] […] Foucault correctly discern the significance of Kant’s Perpetual Peace to Ordoliberal thought. (He mentions Kant’s essay on …
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 …
Megan N. Fontenot, A Weapon With a Will of Its Own: How Tolkien Wrote the One Ring as a Character, Reactor, 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. It’s easy to imagine that he was rather …
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 …
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 …
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 …
