Foucault News

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

Clare O’Farrell, Foucault, Radio Interview 1: The phenomenon of madness, Refracted Input blog, 18 February 2025 Citation from Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie a l’âge classique. Entretien de Michel Foucault avec Nicole Brice. Diffusion le 31 mai 1961 sur France III National. In Michel Foucault, Entretiens radiophoniques, 1961-1983, Flammarion / VRIN / INA, 2024, …

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David Langwallner, The Relevance of Jurisprudence to Law Part 3, Cassandra Voices, 12 September 2024 Extract […] Foucault makes very relevant contributions to Jurisprudence and the practice of law. First, the transplantation of Jeremy Bentham’s idea of the panopticon – the all-seeing surveillance prison such as Kilmainham in Dublin – is in Foucault’s view a …

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François Cusset (French) Theory: An Anti-American American Invention, Paris Institute for Critical Thinking, June 8 2022 If French Theory is American, it is so in the sense of being an errant concept, caught up in a continuous process of blurring, relocation, and deconstruction. The story of my own book, French Theory, bears witness to this …

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Christopher Blackwell, Reading While Incarcerated Saved Me. So Why Are Prisons Banning Books?, The New York Times, 17 August 2022 SHELTON, Wash. — During my first decade in prison, I busied myself with exercising and hanging out in the big yard. I hardly grew as a person, aside from developing muscles that I really used …

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Krzysztof Tyszka-Drozdowski, The failure of May 1968, Unherd, May 24, 2022 “What defines our public life today is boredom”. That was a Le Monde front-page headline in March 1968. Two months later, a revolution would erupt that would shake the foundations of the Fifth Republic, divide France, and alter its history forever. […] In June, …

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Mitchell Dean, What does ‘Left’ mean?, Verso Blog, 13 April 2022 Mitchell Dean responds to the review of his book The Last Man Takes LSD: Foucault and the End of Revolution (co-written with Daniel Zamora) published in the journal Foucault Studies. One is always grateful when a reader has taken the time to review a scholarly work in the …

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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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Shahzada Rahim, Debunking the Sovereignty: From Foucault to Agamben, Modern Diplomacy, October 25, 2021 “Citing the end of Volume I of The History of Sexuality, Agamben notes that for Foucault, the “threshold of modernity” is reached when politics becomes bio-politics—when power exercises control not simply over the bodies of living beings, but, in fact, regulates, …

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Bernard-Henri Lévy, Journal d’Amérique, La Règle du Jeu – Littérature, Philosophie, Politique, Art, novembre 2021 Présentant outre-Atlantique son film «Une autre idée du monde» («The Will to See»), Bernard-Henri Lévy confie ses impressions d’Amérique. Ici, aux États-Unis, mon livre et mon film s’intitulent The Will to See. J’aime cette tonalité nietzschéenne, ou foucaldienne, dans un …

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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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