Foucault News

Radford, G. P., Radford, M. L., & Lingel, J. (2015). The library as heterotopia: Michel Foucault and the experience of library space. Journal of Documentation, 71(4), 733-751.

doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/JD-01-2014-0006

Abstract
Purpose
Using Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia as a guide, the purpose of this paper is to explore the implications of considering the library as place, and specifically as a place that has the “curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invent the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect” (Foucault, 1986a, p. 24).

Design/methodology/approach
The paper draws upon a range of literary examples and from biographical accounts of authors such as Alan Bennett, Michel Foucault, and Umberto Eco to show how the library space operates as a heterotopia.

Findings
The paper finds that drawing together the constructs of heterotopia and serendipity can enrich the understanding of how libraries are experienced as sites of play, creativity, and adventure.

Originality/value
Foucault’s concept of heterotopia is offered as an original and useful frame that can account for the range of experiences and associations uniquely attached to the library.

Deering, B. (2015). In the Dead of Night: A Nocturnal Exploration of Heterotopia in the Graveyard. In M.-J. Blanco & R. Vidal (Eds.), The Power of Death: Contemporary Reflections on Death in Western Society (1st ed., pp. 183–197). Berghahn Books.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qd3qf.19

The photograph below shows a visitor to a Hallowe’en graveyard event.¹ Hundreds of flickering tealights lit up the tombstones, while storytellers enthralled the crowds with ghostly and ghastly tales. Having attended this annual event for several years I noticed that it attracted people from all over the city and beyond. On a night when there are myriad pop-up cultural events on offer, what could possibly be the lure of a dark and gloomy graveyard? This chapter explores the phenomenon of nocturnal graveyard visits and interrogates the motivations and experiences of the visitors. The study forms part of a larger PhD…

Taşkale, Ali Rıza. “Thanatopolitics and Colonial Logics in Blade Runner 2049.” Thesis Eleven 166, no. 1 (October 2021): 109–17.
https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136211043944.

Abstract
This article critically engages with Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, focusing on the relationship between colonial logics and biological engineering that understands the natural world as property. First, it discusses the connections between the film and the shifting status of biopolitics becoming thanatopolitics, prompted by advances in synthetic biology. It argues that the film’s preoccupation with the reproductive capacity of its replicants retraces a racialized (post) colonialism and reconfigured slavery, or the voluntary labour of the occupied – as normalized in synthetic biology and the ongoing processes of devaluing of some lives over others for socioeconomic reasons. Second, and relatedly, the film reveals how deeply the thanatopolitics of a biopolitical economy is rooted in an intensification of racialized and colonial logics. The film thus doubles as a medium in which to grasp the centrality of colonial and racial logics to the ongoing real subsumption of life by capital, and the ways in which it continues to shape the present.

Keywords
bioeconomy, biopolitics, Blade Runner 2049, synthetic biology, thanatopolitics
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Guilel Treiber, From Monster to Child. Ariès, Foucault, and the Constitution of Normality, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, issue 2, vol 83, 2021, 323-354

Abstract :
This paper aims to destabilize the obvious, intrinsic value of childhood as one of the most morally potent values of our times and to trace its historical rise to dominance. I argue that a clear path to such a problematization of the value of childhood should pass through Foucauldian genealogy. Though rarely considered, I show how Foucault has actually already laid the foundations, following Ariès’ work, for such a genealogy of childhood. I reject feminist critiques arguing that whatever Foucault has to say of children or sexual abuse is tainted by an unconfessed machismo. I trace a possible history of how childhood gained its current value through Ariès and Foucault’s works. Through Ariès, I highlight that childhood did not have such an important value until quite recently. His formulation of the process of infantilization, of turning children solely into objects of sentimental value, attaching inherent vulnerability and innocence to their condition is the tacit beginnings of a process Foucault will end tracing. I reconstruct Foucault’s arguments in his lectures during the early seventies and demonstrate that, according to him, the increase in the value of childhood is related to the child becoming the condition of the healthy normalized adult through the generalization of psychiatry and the constitution of normality.