Foucault News

Vasiliou, Elena (2025). Self-destruction in prison: A queer view on pain through decolonial and psychoanalytic theory. Theoretical Criminology.

https://doi.org/10.1177/13624806251350622

Abstract
Much research on suicide or self-harm in prison settings draws on medical and psychological preventive discourses, rather than engaging with broader social or structural approaches. Such perspectives have been critiqued for leaning toward individualizing, pathologizing, and punitive interpretations. This article advocates for queer, decolonial, and psychoanalytic perspectives to revisit interventions against self-destruction in prison. In doing so, it explores how former prisoners’ narratives of self-harm and suicide reveal a negotiation of pain, acts of resistance, sabotage of futurity, and how they are fueled by desire/pleasure. The data is based on 20 interviews with former prisoners and the author’s experience as an educator and researcher at Nicosia Central Prison in Cyprus. The article contributes to political and non-pathologizing ethics of care in penological analyses.

Howell, P. (2025). Foucault, Parrhesia and the politics of presence: on not speaking truth to power. Cultural Geographies, 0(0).
https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740241310238

Abstract
This paper considers the take-up by geographers and others of Foucault’s late work on parrhesia, the ancient Greek concept of frank or fearless speech. While there has been productive work on its genealogy and geographies, parrhesia has been commonly translated as ‘speaking truth to power’ and discussion has centred around resistance. This paper argues that ‘speaking truth to power’ selects and simplifies the range of practices considered in Foucault’s history of truth and subjectivity. But Foucault’s genealogy of parrhesia suffers from the same problem that besets the idea of ‘speaking truth to power’. This is the privileging of the immediate presence of the speaking subject. The phonocentric ideal distorts our understanding of the geographies of parrhesia, particularly in the modern period, where political speech is never unmediated. This leaves the normative significance of parrhesia vulnerable to liberal academic self-congratulation as well as hampering the exploration of frank speech in our own day.

Vaccarino Bremner, S. (2025), The Relativized A Priori, the Historical A Priori, and the Symbolic Form. Philosophy Compass, 20: e70044.
https://doi.org/10.1111/phc3.70044

ABSTRACT
Recent work in philosophy of science has suggested that scientific paradigms in the wake of revolutions can be conceived as relativized a priori frameworks. In this paper, I put these accounts in dialog with two accounts of broadly “cultural” accounts of the relativized a priori in the history of philosophy: Ernst Cassirer’s account of symbolic forms, on which, I show, the general “categories” stay the same but their expressions change, and Michel Foucault’s account of the historical a priori, which is more thoroughly relativized than Cassirer’s. I conclude that Foucault can offer helpful resources for philosophy of science insofar as the historical a priori admits of internal tensions that account for the possibility of a transition to a new a priori, and Foucault makes a similar, but more fully developed, appeal to social power than contemporary philosophy of science does in order to make sense of the changes between frameworks. Cassirer, on the other hand, helpfully puts emphasis on the cognitive activity of the subject, I rather than on the constitutive a priori principles themselves.

Gavin Rae (2025). From reason to madness and back: Critiquing reason through the Derrida–Foucault debate. History of the Human Sciences
https://doi.org/10.1177/09526951251337677

Abstract
There has recently been something of a resurgence of interest in the Derrida–Foucault debate, with this leading to a reassessment of its aims, content, and outcome. This article contributes to that endeavor by following Amy Allen’s claim that the debate was not concerned with madness per se, but with a critique of reason. However, I depart from Allen’s conclusion in two ways: First, Allen does not actually engage with the debate per se but sets out to offer arguments for why we should side with Foucault’s approach. As such, second, Allen not only falls into the logic of binary opposition of winner and loser, but also returns us to and so restricts critique to the parameters of Foucault’s thinking. In contrast, I argue that it is the disagreement itself that provides the ‘positive’ moment in the debate, insofar as it brings us to critique reason itself without necessarily restricting us to the parameters of either thinker. In short, the Derrida–Foucault debate continues to be of interest, not because of what it divulges about Foucault’s History of Madness per se, but because the differences that are revealed between Derrida and Foucault stimulate a critique—understood in terms of a questioning of the conditions of possibility—of reason itself, including its composition and limit, as well as its relationship to its other, including the question of that other.

Koncz, L., Boas, A. V., & Candiotto, C. (2025). Spiritual Integration of Migrants: A Lisbon Case Study Within the Common Home Agenda and Polyhedron of Intelligibility Framework. Religions, 16(6), 711.

https://doi.org/10.3390/rel16060711

Abstract
Migration is a multidimensional process that reshapes identities and communities. This article adopts a polyhedral framework inspired by Pope Francis’s Laudato si’ and Michel Foucault’s concepts of “subjectivation” and the “polyhedron of intelligibility”. Both emphasize spirituality as a transformative force in individuals’ lives and a concept that connects philosophy and theology to support resilience among migrant populations. Using Portugal as a case study, the research examines migration’s historical and contextual landscape and its discursive framework. Through a Lisbon-based research project of interviews with migrants, the study explores the concept of spiritual integration by presenting how spirituality functions to preserve cultural identity while facilitating integration without full assimilation into the host community. Spirituality includes many rules and choices regarding ways of life; therefore, the interview projects’ migrants interpret the concept of spiritual integration in a subjective and polyhedron manner. Creating strong ties to their homes, traditions, cultures, spirituality, sports, and culinary practices, as well as practicing, sharing, and teaching these practices, protects them from total subjection, while learning the host society’s customs and rituals helps them to fit in. The findings show that spirituality serves as an integrational tool, a coping mechanism, and a form of resistance, providing a space for migrants to address and overcome challenges. The article emphasizes the importance of integration policies to create a “safe place” of inclusivity within host communities.

Keywords:
common home agenda; migration; integration; Lisbon; spirituality; polyhedron; subjectivation; Michel Foucault