Foucault News

Emerson, R.G.
Critique of biopolitical violence
(2021) Critical Studies on Security

DOI: 10.1080/21624887.2021.2012395

Abstract
Written 100 years ago, Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of violence’ offers an escape from the biopolitical spiral into death. It confronts the violent underside to a politics of life by refusing to justify force on set political-legal grounds, and, by offering readings that continually undermine any official position. First, critique is mindful of the spurious ends and means of biopower: the violence deployed to protect life that requires evermore force against anything threatening, and, the violence said to optimise life that eliminates anything debilitating. Second, critique moves beyond such justifications. It does so in reference to Benjamin’s concept of the divine that appreciates violence through criteria irreducible to official foundations. An understanding of violence is not mediated by government, but continually extended in how individuals live such violence in novel ways. A critique of biopolitical violence accordingly moves from a deadly productivity coincident with political-legal authority (the violence of bio-power), to how such violence generates new ways of thinking and acting (a bio-politics of violence). © 2021 York University.

Author Keywords
Biopolitics; Michel Foucault; necropolitics; violence; Walter Benjamin

Dobkowski, P.
Technological exercises
(2021) Eidos: A Journal for Philosophy of Culture, 5 (2), pp. 78-87.

DOI: 10.14394/eidos.jpc.2021.0018

Abstract
The paper aims at setting the problem of the relation between technology, and the individual within the framework of Pierre Hadot’s idea of spiritual exercises. It compares two rivaling views of technology that originated in the Weimar Republic in order to outline a problematic field for examining the present position of the individual and technology. As the approaches of Weimar philosophers call for an actualization, the conception of Michel Foucault’s technologies of the self is brought forth. In the conclusion of the paper, the need for contradistinction within the very notion of technology is stressed, in an attempt to incorporate the topical issue into Hadot’s theory of philosophy as a way of life. © 2021, University of Warsaw. All rights reserved.

Author Keywords
Foucault; Hadot; Spiritual exercises; Technology; Weimar Republic

Morgana, M.S.
Trajectories of resistance and Shifting forms of workers’ Activism in Iran
(2021) International Labor and Working-Class History

DOI: 10.1017/S0147547921000077

Abstract
This article navigates ruptures and transformations in the processes of resistance performed by Iranian workers between two key events of the history of contemporary Iran: the 1979 Revolution and the 2009 Green Movement. It explores how labor activism emerged in the Islamic Republic, and illustrates how it managed to survive. Drawing from the concepts of resistance, collective awareness and counter-conduct as its theoretical basis – between Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault – the article details the changing strategies that workers adopted over time and space to cope with the absence of trade unions, monitoring activities, and repression in the workplace. It demonstrates that workers’ agency was never fully blocked by the Islamic Republic. However, it tests the limits imposed by the social context to discourage activism, beyond state coercive measures and policies. Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc., 2021.

Devitt, R.
Toward a foucauldian literary criticism
(2021) Poetics Today, 42 (4), pp. 471-498.

DOI: 10.1215/03335372-9356809

Abstract
The article argues for the renewed relevance of Foucault’s early essays on literature, written throughout the 1960s, given a return to anthropological reflection in so much literary theory today (especially through affect theory and “new” phenomenologies—both of which rely on older categories supplied by psychoanalysis). On one hand, Foucault reminds us of all the “warped and twisted forms of reflection” that arise from anthropological thought, with its assumptions regarding the “unthought” and the hidden structures of sense and perception. This same Foucault, on the other hand, is deeply engaged with literature; his writings on a range of authors—from Homer and Cervantes, to Friedrich Hölderlin and the Marquis de Sade, to Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot—constitute nothing less than an oeuvre. And yet, despite proposals to move beyond Foucauldian critique and its orthodoxy in literary studies today, hardly anything has been thought or said about this body of work in which Foucault, as David Carroll points out, “has the most to say about literature and language.” This lacuna is all the more surprising, since Foucault’s early essays offer a rich and fruitful understanding of the being of literature as more than a limpid reflection of the body. In his reading of Bataille and Blanchot in particular, Foucault offers a unique vision of literature that is neither suspicious nor negative but that, in connection with his well-known critique of finitude, culminates in a hopeful call for openness. © 2021 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

Author Keywords
Analytic of finitude; Anthropological reflection; Being of literature; Michel Foucault; Return to the body

Pȩkala, T.
Discourse and “something more”
(2021) Art Inquiry, 23, pp. 11-28.

DOI: 10.26485/AI/2021/23/1
Open access

Abstract
The starting point and pivot holding the article together is an attempt to explain what the enigmatic “something more” means as an expression of theorists’ expectations of discourse. The words that constitute the leitmotif, taken from Michel Foucault’s theory and repeated by Mieke Bal, perform the role of “miniature theory” in the text, in the meaning assigned to the concepts by the Dutch scholar. The author of the article tries to interpret their meanings in the context of the foregoing conceptions, and compares semiotic and phenomenological approaches. The research tool that she uses is Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of art rules and the art field as well as the proposals of contemporary German theorists: Andreas Reckwitz, Dieter Mersch and Stephanie Schmidt. Following Grzegorz Sztabinski, she recalls the problem of distinguishing theory from discourse and ponders the validity of this distinction, and the consequences of the proposition that discourses are only forms of expression for theory. Changes taking place in discourses are analyzed as the result of transformations in the late modern society, defined by Reckwitz as singularism. Guiding discourses towards “something more” than denoting the states of things changes their function and allows speaking of the “effect of truth”, “effect of meaning”, current “use of work”, performative power of concepts and embodiment of the language of art. Expectations of “something more” have always focused on the problem of identity and disproportion of heterogenic discourses. In the conclusion, the “something more” of discourse is shown as the contemporary form of metaphysical questions asked from the perspective of philosophy of finiteness. © 2021 Lodzkie Towarzystwo Naukowe. All rights reserved.

Author Keywords
Discourse; Effect of meaning; Effect of truth; Esthetics of “something more”; Figurality; Metaphor; Phenomenology; Semiotics; Singularism; Theory