Foucault News

Schliehe, A., Philo, C., et al, Lockdown under lockdown? Pandemic, the carceral and COVID-19 in British prisons (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

22 August 2022

Schliehe, A., Philo, C., Carlin, B., Fallon, C., Penna, G.
Lockdown under lockdown? Pandemic, the carceral and COVID-19 in British prisons
(2022) Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

DOI: 10.1111/tran.12557

Abstract
The relationship between pandemic, or chronic infectious diseases, and the carceral, meaning set-apart spaces of enforced confinement for “wrong-doers,” has a long, tangled history. It features in Foucault’s inquiries into disciplinary power and its associated spatial formations, not least in the shape of the modern prison. Drawing lightly from Foucault’s claims about disciplinary and biopolitical power, as well as on his anti-prison activism, this paper explores three possibilities for penal transformation arising during the early months of COVID-19 in UK prisons (circa March to August 2020). Consulting primary source material, these possibilities are respectively identified as “retrenching,” “reworking” or “reducing” the carceral. A chief finding is that under the press of pandemic “emergency,” the tilt of emphasis has been towards a retrenched or reworked “carceral state,” disappointing any promise of abolition, let alone more humble reduction in carceral conditions. The “biological sub-citizens” of prisons are hence being left especially vulnerable to the press of pandemic, in part precisely because of how carceral spatialities are being intensified.

Tsiakiri, L., Euthanasia: Promoter of Autonomy or Supporter of Biopower? (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

21 August 2022

Tsiakiri, L.
Euthanasia: Promoter of Autonomy or Supporter of Biopower?
(2022) Conatus – Journal of Philosophy, 7 (1), pp. 123-133.

DOI: 10.12681/cjp.25088

Abstract
The medical developments and their subsequent influence on the duration of human life have brought in the limelight various moral questions. The pathological conditions do not constitute anymore the decisive causes of death, whereas an ascending number of people suffer more by being maintained in life. In this reality, the euthanasia debate seems more apropos than ever. The following article examines the aforementioned issue through the supportive argument of autonomy in contrast to a Foucauldian approach. In essence, based on the Kantian concept of autonomy, several scholars have advocated in favor of the legalization of euthanasia in order that our ability to define not only the course of our life and its duration, but also the way of our death is ensured. However, on the other side, a Foucauldian approach of the issue seems to be equally worth cited and taken into consideration. In accordance with that, the domination of Foucault’s concept of biopower would deterministically imply that our choices are totally determined by a form of power that targets at the absolute control over our lives through medicine and legislation. In such a context, euthanasia could not constitute a promoter of autonomy. On the contrary, it would contribute to the absolute escalation of the governmental power that would be imposed on every inch of our lives being exclusively interested in its own prosperity!. © 2022, Lydia Tsiakiri.

Author Keywords
autonomy; biopower; euthanasia; Foucault; heterodetermination; life

Special Issue: Foucault’s Method Today. Continental Thought and Theory (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

20 August 2022

CT&T: Continental Thought and Theory: A Journal of Intellectual Freedom
Volume 3, Issue 4, 2022 Foucault’s Method Today

Open access

“Foucault’s Method: Introduction to Issue”, Cindy Zeiher and Mike Grimshaw
“Notes on the Concept of Hyper-subjectivity—Foucault, Lacan, Illouz”, Rey Chow and Austin Sarfan
“Foucault v Freud: Unthought, Unconscious, and Kant’s ‘Rhapsody of Perceptions’”, Henry Krips
“Contemporary Implications of Michel Foucault”, Jean Allouch
“Post-Truth and the Controversy over Postmodernism. Or, was Trump Reading Foucault?”, Saul Newman
“Reassessing the Productive Hypothesis: How Foucault Taught us to Think About Sex and Self”, Christopher Breu
“Foucault after Baudrillard”, Rex Butler
“Flayed Bodies and the Re-turn of the Flesh: Foucault and Contemporary Gendered Bodies”, Talyor Adams and Rosemary Overell
“Lacan avec Foucault: Reflections on Monstrosity”, Leilane Andreoni, Manuella Mucury, Jorge e Adeodato, Rodrigo Gonsalves (former members of ‘Monstrosity’)
“The Glory of Nicocles: Foucault’s Greeks and the Inegalitarian Underside of the Professional-Managerial Class”, Matthew Sharpe
“Caesar’s Tear; or, Paedagogia Interruptus: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Neoliberal University”, Phillip Wegner
“Epistème la gris: Foucault and Psychedelic Neoliberalism”, Nathan Gorelick
“Postmodern Ressentiment, or the Virtue of ‘Voluntary Inservitude’ in the Age of Identity Politics”, Zahi Zalloua
“Foucault’s Apophasis: Beyond Modernity, the Real”, Mark G. E. Kelly
“The Foucault Fiasco Plague: Frugality, the Gaze, and the Return of Postmodernism”, Clint Burnham
“Foucault’s Marxism”, David Pavón-Cuéllar

Dossier

“On Some Questions Prior to any Possible Treatment of Lacan’s Theory of Discourses as Political”, Lorenzo Chiesa
“’Kant with Sade’: on the Relationship between the Moral Law and Jouissance in the Ethics of Psychoanalysis”, Christian Ingo Lenz Dunker and Patricia de Campos Moura
“Farewell”, Saitya Brata Das
“Tricks with Transference: Naming in a Post-Truth World”, Warwick Tie

Notes on Contributors

Nadarajan, D., “The Zombification Crisis in a Crisis: Neoliberal Battles and Teacher Survivors in the Pandemic” (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

19 August 2022

Nadarajan, D. (2022), “The Zombification Crisis in a Crisis: Neoliberal Battles and Teacher Survivors in the Pandemic”, Wiseman, A.W. (Ed.) Annual Review of Comparative and International Education 2021 (International Perspectives on Education and Society, Vol. 42A), Emerald Publishing Limited, Bingley, pp. 149-157.

https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-36792022000042A013

Abstract
In this piece, the author invokes Beck’s (1997) conception of “zombie categories” to discuss how the virus of neoliberalism has infected ideas and key actors within a highly stratified teaching community in Malaysia. Drawing from the recent COVID-19 pandemic, the author employs a zombie metaphor as a heuristic to trace the stages of a neoliberal apocalypse. The author first considers how neoliberal ideologies have mutated into a new strain of virus that have infiltrated the teaching landscape by comparing teachers employed by the Ministry of Education against teachers who have been recruited by Teach For Malaysia in the public schooling system. The author then explores how sources of zombification have contaminated actors using governmentality (Foucault, 1991) through intensification, corporatization, marketization, metricization, and performativity. This is followed by an attempt to construct a survival response to the apocalypse by suggesting how specific neoliberal competencies are coveted and the implications behind it. Finally, the author outlines how the forces of neoliberalism engender a crisis in education that mirrors a zombie culture of breeding a contagion that could widen existing educational inequalities and inequities. The author concludes by offering a tentative containment plan that considers existing alongside this neoliberal virus that refuses to die. © 2022 by Emerald Publishing Limited.

Author Keywords
governmentality; Malaysia; Neoliberalism; pandemic; teaching; zombie

Normalization. A Discussion with Gëzim Visoka and Nicolas Lemay (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

18 August 2022

Normalization.
A Discussion with Gëzim Visoka and Nicolas Lemay
New Books Network, Aug 16, 2022

In this episode of High Theory, Gëzim Visoka and Nicolas Lemay-Hebert tell us about normalization in international relations. Their research applies Foucault’s social theories of the normal and abnormal to the objects of political science: states, international organizations, and practices of intervention.

In the episode (and in their book) Gëzim and Nicolas reference Foucault’s Lectures at the College de France on the Abnormal (printed in English by Verso and Macmillan). They discuss three exemplary figures from Foucault’s work on the abnormal: the monster, the incorrigible, and the onanist. Each one has a corresponding figure in international politics.

Their new book Normalization in World Politics is available as an open access text from Michigan University Press. That means you can read it for free! Check it out, and learn all about the ways we produce, impose, and maintain normal and abnormal affairs in the international order.

Gëzim Visoka and Nicolas Lemay-Hébert, Normalization in World Politics (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

18 August 2022

Gëzim Visoka and Nicolas Lemay-Hébert, Normalization in World Politics, University of Michigan Press, 2022
Open access

As we face new challenges from climate change and the rise of populism in Western politics and beyond, there is little doubt that we are entering a new configuration of world politics. Driven by nostalgia for past certainties or fear of what is coming next, references to normalcy have been creeping into political discourse, with people either vying for a return to a past normalcy or coping with the new normal.

This book traces main discourses and practices associated with normalcy in world politics. Visoka and Lemay-Hébert mostly focus on how dominant states and international organizations try to manage global affairs through imposing normalcy over fragile states, restoring normalcy over disaster-affected states, and accepting normalcy over suppressive states. They show how discourses and practices come together in constituting normalization interventions and how in turn they play in shaping the dynamics of continuity and change in world politics.

Repo, J., Richter, H. An evental pandemic: thinking the COVID-19 ‘Event’ with Deleuze and Foucault (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

17 August 2022

Repo, J., Richter, H.
An evental pandemic: thinking the COVID-19 ‘Event’ with Deleuze and Foucault
(2022) Distinktion

DOI: 10.1080/1600910X.2022.2086595

Abstract
As COVID-19 swept the world it also became the subject of a quickly growing body of theoretical scholarship aimed at understanding the social, political and economic implications of the ‘pandemic event’. Taking a step back, this paper draws on Deleuze and Foucault to interrogate whether, and in what way, the COVID-19 pandemic can and should in fact be understood as an event. We first offer a structured overview of existing ‘pandemic theory’ where we highlight that the productivity unfolded by the pandemic event is here either politically or ontologically fixed. Against this background, we show that, in distinct ways, Deleuze’s and Foucault’s concepts of the event caution against reifying a pandemic event. Any political force the pandemic can unfold is always made after the fact, and is contingent on what is (counter-)effectuated from the pandemic, or which discursive dispersions intersect with and unfold from it. We argue for considering the pandemic as evental rather than an event–it is made up of events, and holds the potential to produce events. For critical theory, the significance of the pandemic event is thus in the first place methodological: it gives insight to how (post-)pandemic societies are produced, and where openings for the actualization of alternatives might lie. © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
counter-effectuation; COVID-19; eventualisation; Gilles Deleuze; Michel Foucault

Roche, G., Leibold, J. State Racism and Surveillance in Xinjiang (People’s Republic of China) (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

16 August 2022

Roche, G., Leibold, J.
State Racism and Surveillance in Xinjiang (People’s Republic of China)
(2022) Political Quarterly

DOI: 10.1111/1467-923X.13149

Abstract
Racism, as a truly global phenomenon, requires a comparative approach that can account for its diverse forms and their commonalities. Despite the prevalence and relevance of racism throughout Asia, much scholarship on the topic remains parochially focussed on the north Atlantic world. This article aims to help address this issue in two ways. First, it discusses surveillance and racialisation practices in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in China, based on an examination of leaked police files from the city of Urumqi. It examines how racialisation processes are carried out through surveillance, who these impact, and how. Second, these empirical materials are put in a broader comparative framework, drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of state racism, which sees racism as a technique of governance common to all contemporary states. The conclusions reflect on what it means to undertake anti-racist scholarship in a world of racist states. © 2022 The Authors. The Political Quarterly published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Political Quarterly Publishing Co (PQPC).

Author Keywords
anti-racism; China; state racism; surveillance; Xinjiang

Muniz da Conceição, L.H. Social Media, Politics, and Law: The Role of Data in the Brazilian Constitutional Democracy (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

15 August 2022

Muniz da Conceição, L.H.
Social Media, Politics, and Law: The Role of Data in the Brazilian Constitutional Democracy
(2022) Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research

DOI: 10.1080/13260219.2022.2097296

Abstract
Contemporary manifestations of power that exceed the traditional nation-state paradigm undermine Western constitutional democracies’ foundational principles. The Cambridge Analytica scandal demonstrates how non-state actors can exercise control and bypass individual political autonomy by exploring personal data and through manipulative practices. In Brazil, similar electoral practices occurred during the 2018 election period, in which political propaganda transcended traditional media outlets through social media platforms, such as WhatsApp and Facebook. This arose as one of the consequences of the political reform established in through Legislative Act no. 13.488/2017. This article proposes an investigation into the intersection between knowledge and power in the mechanism of manipulation of political subjects, considering Michel Foucault’s critique of sovereignty, and conflating this under- standing with Bernard Harcourt’s consideration of “digital power.” The aim is to evaluate the intricacies between digital media, politics, and law, addressing the complexity of power structures in the material and cybernetic space. © 2022 Association of Iberian and Latin American Studies of Australasia (AILASA).

Author Keywords
Brazil; Constitutional Politics; Digital Power; Social Media

Fleming, P., Godfrey, R., Lilley, S. Conceptualizing business logistics as an ‘apparatus of security’ and its implications for management and organizational inquiry (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

14 August 2022

Fleming, P., Godfrey, R., Lilley, S.
Conceptualizing business logistics as an ‘apparatus of security’ and its implications for management and organizational inquiry
(2022) Human Relations

DOI: 10.1177/00187267221110458

Abstract
Global commodity capitalism necessitates the fast and efficient movement of all manner of entities across the globe. Importantly, this commercial flow needs to be secured against the undocumented and unregulated flow of illegitimate people, finance and information, counterfeits, drugs, terror and other undesirables. The organizational practices of business logistics are central for achieving this objective. Yet they have received little attention in management and organization studies to date. We suggest a fruitful avenue is via Foucault’s notion of ‘biopower’ – particularly his less discussed concept (in management studies, at least) of an apparatus of security. This is useful for understanding the emergent organizational/management practices of security in the border spaces in which business logistics operate. If ‘Society Must Be Defended’, as Foucault ironically notes in his famous lecture series that introduces biopower, then so too must contemporary organizations and their net-like activities within the global economy. © The Author(s) 2022.

Author Keywords
apparatus of security; biopower; business logistics; Foucault; supply chains