Foucault News

Xinling Li, The Manufacturing of ‘Correct Collective Memory’ in Chinese Media and the Resistance of Chinese Netizens (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

20 August 2025

Xinling Li, The Manufacturing of ‘Correct Collective Memory’ in Chinese Media and the Resistance of Chinese Netizens, In Rawnsley, M.-Y.T., Ma, Y., & Rawnsley, G.D. (Eds.). (2025). Routledge Handbook of Chinese Media (2nd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003362500

Abstract
This chapter examines the concept of ‘correct collective memory’, articulated by China’s foreign affairs spokeswoman Hua Chunying during a press conference confirming the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan. It explores the construction of correct collective memory in Chinese media and the increasing challenges from rising civilian dissent enabled by new media. The Chinese government’s efforts to control negative perceptions of the zero-Covid policy through mass media propaganda ultimately failed, leading to a significant concession: the country’s reopening in response to the Blank White Paper movement. While mainstream analyses have attributed the movement’s temporary ‘success’ to the extreme inhumanity of China’s Covid restrictions, this chapter argues that new media platforms, particularly social media, have emerged as spaces for contesting memory, for example in the emergence of lockdown diaries. These platforms allow for a clash between citizen and official narratives of social events, preventing the government from easily imposing a unified correct collective memory through traditional methods like survivorship bias and collectivist storytelling.

Federico Jose T. Lagdameo, “Digital Governmentality: Technological Subjectivation and AI” (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

19 August 2025

Federico Jose T. Lagdameo, “Digital Governmentality: Technological Subjectivation and AI”, Kaabigan: Journal of the Panpacific University, Vol. 3:2, 1-17 (July 2025)

doi: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16786093

Abstract:
This article develops a Foucauldian analysis of artificial intelligence technologies, particularly large language models such as ChatGPT, as contemporary technologies of power. Building upon Michel Foucault’s genealogical critique of disciplinary and biopolitical regimes, it argues that AI systems instantiate new modes of subjectivation through algorithmic rationalities, predictive analytics, and interface designs that structure the conduct of users and the intelligibility of populations. These systems do not merely facilitate communication or automate tasks; they quietly shape behavior, organize possibilities for action, and determine what counts as truth or relevance in everyday life. AI thus functions as a digital apparatus of governmentality—disciplining individuals and regulating populations under the guise of neutrality and efficiency. By drawing out the continuities between modern technologies of power and today’s intelligent systems, this paper seeks to denaturalize the present configuration of the digital subject and open the possibility for a renewed exercise of critique and freedom.

Keywords: Foucault, artificial intelligence, subjectivation, ChatGPT, LLMs, digital governmentality

Weili Zhao, Epistemological flashpoints in China’s ‘person-making’ education with reinvoked cultural discourses: lideshuren as an example (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

19 August 2025

Weili Zhao, Epistemological flashpoints in China’s ‘person-making’ education with reinvoked cultural discourses: lideshuren as an example, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 59, Issue 3-4, June-August 2025, Pages 568–585
https://doi.org/10.1093/jopedu/qhae081

Abstract
As an imprint and reinvigoration of Confucian culture, China foregrounds its 21st-century state-run education as to make national(istic) citizens, reinvoking lideshuren (establishing personhood by cultivating moral excellence) as its signature discourse beyond Western frameworks. Drawing upon Foucault’s thinking, this article untangles China’s effort as being epistemologically vexed in three steps. First, I pick up Foucault’s interpellation on language, discourse, and episteme, evoking a possible language-episteme conflation and/or rupture which is crucial to understanding China’s lideshuren knowledge (re)production and translation within and across cultures. Second, I trace lideshuren to a Confucian prototype to make visible its possible historical–cultural murmurings along a correlative relationality episteme. This historical detour enables me to better problematize, in the third section, contemporary China’s remobilizing, transforming, and reinterpreting Confucian lideshuren discourses to both the Chinese and Western wor(l)d along a delimiting modern ‘trap of philology’. This historical–present epistemological comparison, albeit reductive, feeds into my analysis of China’s making of universal–national(istic) citizens at the nexus of nationalism and globalism. By focusing on China, this article provides implications for comparing national educations as making universal individuals in a globalized age.

Peter Shay, Grasshoppers and Goldfish: Literature, Subjectivation, and Ethical Democracy (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

18 August 2025

Peter Shay, Grasshoppers and Goldfish: Literature, Subjectivation, and Ethical Democracy, Review of Education Studies, Vol. 5, No. 3 (2025)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.71002/res.v5n3p10

Abstract
As western society descends into a state of pervasive attention-deficit, a profound ethical crisis unfolds. The erosion of sustained concentration – exacerbated by the manipulative attention economies of digital technologies and the infiltration of neoliberal logics into educational spaces – has fostered an increasingly fragmented and polarized social fabric. In this milieu, the self becomes mediated through the fleeting validation of social media metrics, giving rise to desires oriented toward fame and superficial influence, and engendering widespread anxiety and alienation. Students, increasingly isolated and driven by an uncritical need for recognition, seek refuge within the transient affirmations of digital platforms. Yet, through a Foucauldian conception of ‘care of the self,’ cultivated via a dialogic, reflective engagement with the aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual dimensions of Literature and the arts, individuals may recover the practices of deep self-reflection necessary for the emergence of a more ethical, inclusive, and resilient society.

Arūnas Mickevičius, Genealogical Critique of Social Practices: Nietzsche and Foucault versus Habermas (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

16 August 2025

Arūnas Mickevičius, Genealogical Critique of Social Practices: Nietzsche and Foucault versus Habermas, Topos, 1(54) 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.61095/815-0047-2025-1-45-65

Abstract
This article aims to elucidate Michel Foucault’s interpretive engagement with key concepts in Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy, to demonstrate their significance for the development of Foucault’s genealogical method, and to examine how, particularly in his polemic with Jürgen Habermas, genealogy becomes a question of the legitimacy of critique — namely, how critical interrogation of social practices remains possible. The central thesis is that Foucault’s genealogy, shaped through a selective appropriation of Nietzschean insights and positioned as an alternative to Habermas’s theory of communicative action, should not be understood as a search for universally valid normative structures. Rather, it constitutes a historically grounded framework for understanding subjectivity and social practices, enabling us to think and act differently, and thereby contributing to the ongoing task of freedom.

The article argues that Foucault, instrumentally relying on Nietzsche, developed genealogical hermeneutics as an interpretive practice that is oriented towards a critical understanding of social practices permeated by mechanisms of power. A key divergence from Nietzsche lies in Foucault’s de-psychologization of agency: whereas Nietzsche often grounds knowledge and morality in the subjective tactics of individuals, Foucault treats psychological motivation as an effect of impersonal power strategies without strategists. The article further contends that the core disagreement between Foucault and Habermas concerns the relation between power, truth, and subjectivity. Foucault reverses the traditional dependency: rather than power being conditioned by truth and the subject, it is truth and the subject that are constituted through power. He critiques Habermas’s model of ideal communication as ahistorical and utopian, arguing that no discourse is free from power. Consequently, critique should not aim to abolish power, but to engage it through legal norms, techniques of governance, and an ethos that minimizes domination.

Keywords:
hermeneutics, critical theory, social criticism, interpretation, genealogy, will to power

Navid Pourmokhtari, Toward a Paradigm Shift in International Relations Studies. (Re)Claiming World Peace (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

13 August 2025

Navid Pourmokhtari, Toward a Paradigm Shift in International Relations Studies. (Re)Claiming World Peace, Palgrave Macmillan, 2024

About this book
This book argues that not only has the present international relations (IR) paradigm failed to preserve global peace in our time, it has also proved to be an obstacle in this regard, and for this reason a paradigm shift is urgently required. With a view to demonstrating the IR paradigm’s failure to secure global peace, moreover, a Foucauldian-inspired discourse analysis is used here to flesh out an archaeology of what I call knowledge relations within IR studies.

This analysis reveals that within IR’s paradigmatic corridors of knowledge the theoretical/analytical category of war has been privileged, i.e., elevated to the level of chief subject and object of analysis vis-à-vis peace. In order to show how this is the case, moreover, this book examines the paradigm’s mainstream debates, e.g., those on human nature, power, and the state of nature, and by implication state sovereignty and nationalism, in addition to its authoritative subfields, in particular peace studies, international relations theory, global governance, and security studies. Each of these works reproduces, indeed glorifies, war to the exclusion of a lasting global peace, and in large part by promoting certain knowledges that are racial, colonial, gendered, and consequently bellicose.

All this connotes that the IR paradigm is grounded in a regime of knowledge that tells us everything about the dynamics of war and nothing substantive about realizing peace—hence the pressing need for a paradigm shift. Put differently, under the auspices of IR studies, contemplating peace is fruitless, a mere scholarly mirage, and precisely because achieving it under this paradigmatic status quo is not, and will never be, a condition of possibility. If anything, this book demonstrates that we have not even begun to speak truth to knowledge in the cause of global peace.

Johnson, J. M. The Biopolitics of Liberal War: Humanity, Temporality and Cosmology (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

10 August 2025

Johnson, J. M. (2024). The Biopolitics of Liberal War: Humanity, Temporality and Cosmology. Millennium, 53(1), 86-112.
https://doi.org/10.1177/03058298241288171

Abstract
What is the relationship between war and liberalism? Over the last two decades, an extensive and influential literature inspired by Michel Foucault’s conception of biopolitics has argued that the ‘war on terror’ is defined by distinctly liberal forms of government. Underpinning this approach is an assumption of the primacy of contingency to the contemporary biopolitical imaginary. Through this governing cosmology, the ‘war on terror’ is said to be motivated by a politics of fear and uncertainty. This article contests this account of liberal war by demonstrating the biopolitical significance of potentiality. By illustrating how a specific configuration of potentiality informs contemporary governing understandings of humanity and temporality, this article argues that liberal war is also waged according to a politics of hope and certainty. Adopting a cosmological approach allows this article to develop the case for a pluriversal conception of biopolitics which better reflects the complex and contradictory character of liberal war in the 21st century. Such a perspective invites us to see how the ‘war on terror’ is not only a reflection of our darkest fears but also of our highest hopes.

Tuominen, I. ‘The Truth of Oneself’: Governing Homosexual Asylum Seekers Through Confession (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

7 August 2025

Tuominen, I. (2025). ‘The Truth of Oneself’: Governing Homosexual Asylum Seekers Through Confession. Law, Culture and the Humanities, 0(0).
https://doi.org/10.1177/17438721251330732

Abstract
This article addresses the question of how the ‘truth’ about homosexual asylum seekers is constituted through legal proceedings, what kinds of subjectivities are produced in the asylum process and how these issues reflect the EU law as it relates to questions of asylum. The analysis is carried out through the Foucauldian concept of confession and case analysis of the Court of Justice of the European Union’s legal praxis. The article concludes that the credibility assessment of homosexual asylum seekers can be understood as a confessional practice where ‘truth-telling’ subjects are produced and linked to relationships of power and domination.

Simon Lemoine, Les voies étroites de l’émancipation. Pour une philosophie du cours des choses (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

5 August 2025

Simon Lemoine, Les voies étroites de l’émancipation. Pour une philosophie du cours des choses, Paris: Les éditions Hermann 2025

Also published in Canada by Presses de l’Université Laval

Cet ouvrage propose une cartographie inédite des rapports de pouvoir contemporains, ouvrant à de nouvelles voies d’émancipation. Un concept neuf est fondé, celui de cours des choses, qui désigne tout ce qui arrive aux individus, du déroulement routinier de la vie à ses événements les plus inattendus. La connaissance approfondie de ce cours des choses nous permet tout d’abord de remanier, pour l’optimiser, notre organisation quotidienne face à lui, en faisant un tri éclairé entre les sollicitations nombreuses qui nous aliènent. Elle nous apprend aussi à provoquer, à reconnaître et à saisir des instants décisifs (kairos) qui peuvent encore exister dans nos cours des choses contemporains, pourtant largement domestiqués. Enfin, elle contribue à développer un art de la rencontre, consistant à susciter et même produire des événements dans le cours des choses, afin de le faire dévier dans des directions libératrices anticipées.

Simon Lemoine (Auteur)

Simon Lemoine est philosophe, enseignant et docteur en philosophie de l’Université de Poitiers. Chercheur indépendant, il est l’auteur de cinq ouvrages : Responsabiliser pour dominer (PUL, 2024), Aux limites de la résistance (Éditions du Croquant, 2022), Découvrir Bourdieu (Éditions sociales, 2020), Micro-violences (CNRS éditions, 2017) et Le sujet dans les dispositifs de pouvoir (PUR, 2013). Ses recherches, engagées dans des voies ouvertes par les travaux de Michel Foucault et de Pierre Bourdieu, participent en profondeur au renouvellement des études sur le pouvoir et la subordination des sujets.

Sorace, C. Life First: Pandemic Biopolitics in China (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

4 August 2025

Sorace, C. (2025). Life First: Pandemic Biopolitics in China. Political Theory, 0(0).
https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917251323747

Abstract
China’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic could be described as a lesson directly from the pages of Foucault. For nearly three years, China’s vast state apparatus and society were mobilized around the goal of protecting life until November 2023, when people took to the streets calling for an end to lockdowns. In the West, the A4 protests, as they came to be called, are solidifying in public memory as a cautionary tale for Western governments who want to emulate China’s autocracy. However, China’s pandemic response was not always viewed as a negative instance of state power. In the first two years of the pandemic, China was viewed by many across the globe as a model of positive biopolitics. Consequently, China’s pandemic response divides biopolitical theory in two. Either state power was deployed to protect people’s lives, or the protection of life was used to justify the concentration of state power. China’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic dialectically contains both poles of biopolitics. If the pandemic was a lesson, it is uncertain what is to be learned. This essay argues that the biopolitical binary of state power and resistance might not be the most helpful conceptual framework for making sense of the pandemic. It concludes with a search for non-biopolitical forms of embodiment in abject works of art in China from before the pandemic.