Foucault News

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

Gerasimos Kakoliris, A Foucauldian enquiry in the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic management (Critique in Times of Coronavirus) Critical Legal Thinking— Law and the Political — • 11 May 2020 Is the substantially global management of the coronavirus pandemic a novelty or would it be possible to trace its origin in an earlier order of …

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Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Penser l’après : Sciences, pouvoir et opinions dans l’après Covid-19, The Conversation, May 3, 2020 […] Michel Foucault souligne le contraste entre ce modèle archaïque de la quarantaine où un pouvoir souverain autoritaire régit depuis un état central la vie des populations, et les dispositifs stratégiques de contrôle diffus de la vie mis …

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The city in a time of plague By PEPE ESCOBAR, Asia Times, APRIL 17, 2020 See also How to think post-Planet Lockdown By PEPE ESCOBAR. Asia Times, APRIL 28, 2020 History teaches us that epidemics are more like revelatory moments than social transformers The plague-stricken town, traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town …

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From Citizens to Patients: A Threat to Resist. Pandemic Lectures at the the International University College of Turin- Ugo Mattei & Federico Soldani, May 4, 2020 The decline of law as a tool for social control and its supplanting by technological, mental, and medical management aimed at preventing deviant behavior, with nary a concern for …

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Matthew G. Hannah, Jan Simon Hutta and Christoph Schemann, Thinking Through Covid-19 Responses With Foucault – An Initial Overview, Antipode online, 5 May 2020 (Department of Geography, University of Bayreuth) Open access This intervention originally appeared as the second half of a longer essay intended as a basis for discussion in a Masters seminar at …

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Editor: I’m constantly surprised by the contexts in which Foucault’s name pops up. Sailing as an essential activity Published on April 30th, 2020 by Darrell Nicholson, Practical Sailor, Scuttlbutt Sailing news (Florida, USA) Let’s take away all the boats. Not the ships engaged in essential commerce, not the barges hauling goods, not the net boats …

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Philipp Sarasin, Understanding the Coronavirus Pandemic with Foucault?, G+C Blog, March 31, 2020 https://blog.genealogy-critique.net/essays/254/understanding-corona-with-foucault Open access It looks like a biopolitical dream: governments, advised by physicians, impose pandemic dictatorship on entire populations. Getting rid of all democratic obstacles under the pretext of “health,” even “survival,” they are finally able to govern the population as they …

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