Foucault News

The Archaeology of Foucault update 11: A new term, work on Nietzsche and planning another archive trip

Clare O'Farrell

30 October 2021

While the start of term was as busy as ever, I have managed to keep a bit of time each week to work onthis project. So far at least this term seems more manageable than the equivalent last year, and teaching is mainly in-person, with only one seminar on Teams for those students unable to come to campus for medical or travel reasons.

With the writing, some of the initial work was picking up on a few things left over from Paris, where I’d made notes to check things when back home. Although these were generally small things, ticking each of them off helped with a sense of making little, incremental progress.

One task was stitching the different sections of the chapter onThe Order of Thingstogether. While I usually work on chapter drafts as a whole, with this one I felt fairly happy with some sections…

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Corey McCall, Oedipal Fragments: Reconsidering the Significance of Oedipus for James Bernauer and Michel Foucault (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

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30 October 2021

McCall, Corey. “Oedipal Fragments: Reconsidering the Significance of Oedipus for James Bernauer and Michel Foucault.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 47, no. 8 (October 2021): 947–59. https://doi.org/10.1177/01914537211042610.

Abstract
This essay reconstructs James Bernauer’s reading of Foucault’s critique of psychoanalysis in his essay “Oedipus, Freud, Foucault” in order to assess the role that Foucault’s critique of psychoanalysis and his reading of Oedipus play in Bernauer’s account of Foucault’s ethics. Along the way, it traces a shift in Foucault’s reading of Oedipus in terms of power and knowledge in Lectures on the Will to Know to rituals of truth or alethurgy in On the Government of the Living. Finally, based on this reading it argues that this shift is relevant for understanding Foucault’s turn toward ethics and practices of the self in his final writings.

Keywords
James Bernauer, Michel Foucault, psychoanalysis, ethics, Oedipus, tragedy

Michel Foucault, Phénoménologie et Psychologie 1953-1954, edited by Philippe Sabot, Gallimard/Seuil/EHESS, November 2021

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

29 October 2021

Progressive Geographies

Michel Foucault, Phénoménologie et Psychologie 1953-1954, edited by Philippe Sabot, Gallimard/Seuil/EHESS, November 2021

The next volume of the courses and manuscripts before the Collège de France is a really interesting one. I discuss this in The Early Foucault, but it will be interesting to see how the manuscript has been edited and contextualised. Philippe Sabot’s forthcoming paper in the Theory, Culture and Society special issue also discusses this manuscript.

En octobre 1954, Michel Foucault, alors assistant en psychologie à Lille, écrit à son ami Jean-Paul Aron au sujet d’un texte qu’il est en train de rédiger : « La thèse est passée en deux mois du néant à la 150e page. Je suis moi-même fort surpris de ce livre-champignon : non seulement de sa croissance, qui exige bien des retouches, mais aussi de sa tournure ; il a pris tout de suite l’allure d’une interrogation sur la…

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Marcelo Otero, Foucault sociologue. Critique de la raison impure (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

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29 October 2021

Marcelo Otero, Foucault sociologue. Critique de la raison impure, Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2021

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Résumé
L’oeuvre de Michel Foucault est inclassable, car elle traverse des domaines très variés (philosophie, sociologie, histoire, anthropologie, criminologie, médecine, psychologie, linguistique, droit, etc.). Foucault n’est pas un sociologue au sens classique du terme, mais il existe une sociologie puissante et novatrice chez lui. Laquelle ? À quoi peut-elle servir aujourd’hui ? En quoi est-elle utile pour théoriser les problèmes sociaux ? Quels sont ses avantages, ses limites et ses inconvénients ? Quel style de « raisonnement sociologique » se dégage de son oeuvre vaste et complexe ? Voilà les interrogations qui guident l’analyse de l’ensemble des travaux de Foucault dans cet ouvrage. En suivant la chronologie historique de ses recherches ainsi que les retournements stimulants de sa pensée, Foucault sociologue s’adresse principalement à un lectorat universitaire et problématise la riche évolution théorique et méthodologique des thématiques foucaldiennes.

Casero, J.L., El aeropuerto como dispositivo disciplinar para el control de la movilidad (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

28 October 2021

Casero, J.L.
The airport as a disciplinary device for mobility control [El aeropuerto como dispositivo disciplinar para el control de la movilidad]
(2021) Kepes, 18 (24), pp. 11-45.
In Spanish
Open access
DOI: 10.17151/kepes.2021.18.24.2

Abstract
Since the 9/11 attacks, airports have become control and surveillance devices only comparable to maximum security prisons. For this reason, most of the studies dedicated to airports have experienced a progressive affinity with the works of Michel Foucault and Paul Virilio in which architecture is characterized as a paradigmatic technique to organize space (compartmentalization) and time (distribution of sequences) in order to achieve the individualization, classification, ordering and normalization of the users. This article aims at identifying the main spatial strategies through which airports implement disciplinary control of passengers independently of their formal-compositional style, their sociophenomenological aesthetics and/or the introduction of electronic surveillance devices. To do this, a methodology based on the graphic analysis (ground plan and section) of five small airports projected in the same territorial area (State) and in a homogeneous time period was developed with the double objective of not having substantial changes in the legislation applicable or in the development of new building, control and surveillance technologies that may affect the basic design of their spatial organization. The results obtained show the constant presence of a linear and hierarchical spatial organization consisting of the succession “entrycheck- in-control of people-shopping-boarding” independently of any other possible aesthetic, phenomenological or social consideration of the designed space. This is opposed to those analyzes carried out in the last two decades that prioritize the rhizomatic, connective and non-hierarchical character of the airport space over its segmentation and disciplinary hierarchy. The article concludes by highlighting the totalitarian character that control of (air) mobility has acquired in the 21st century. © 2021 Universidad de Caldas. All rights reserved.

Author Keywords
Airport architecture; Control of people; Michel Foucault; Paul Virilio; Surveillance

Foucault, biopolitics, and the critique of state reason (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

27 October 2021

Alexander J. Means (2021) Foucault, biopolitics, and the critique of state reason, Educational Philosophy and Theory

DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2021.1871895

The concept of biopolitics was first outlined by Michel Foucault (2003, 2007, 2009) in his lectures at the Collège de France in the late 1970s in order to name and analyze emergent logics of power in the 18th and 19th centuries. According to Foucault, biopolitics refers to the processes by which human life, at the level of the population, emerged as a distinct political problem in Western societies. Foucault’s early formulation of biopolitics was part of a broader attempt in his genealogical studies to think beyond Marxist theories of power and the State.

Influencing Foucault at the time were a number of historical factors including longstanding frustration with intellectual orthodoxy in the French academy particularly the dominance of structural Marxism; the need for new political theory in light of the eruptions of 1968; the arrival of former eastern bloc dissidents in France fueling growing disillusionment with the Soviet Union; the defeat of the French Socialist and Communist Parties in 1978; and the emergence neoliberal thought—Thatcher in the United Kingdom, Giscard in France, Schmidt in Germany—that foretold a looming crisis of the left. Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics can be read as emerging from this historical milieu and as part of his unique approach to formulating a post-Marxist theory of political rule.

Michel Foucault, Literature and Madness: Madness in the Baroque Theatre and the Theatre of Artaud (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

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26 October 2021

Foucault, Michel. “Literature and Madness: Madness in the Baroque Theatre and the Theatre of Artaud.” Theory, Culture & Society, (October 2021). https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764211032717.

Abstract
Literature and madness dominate Michel Foucault’s early writings in the 1960s, and indeed much of his career. In this text, Foucault considers the relation between madness, language, and silence; the difficult frontier between language and literary convention; and the experience of madness within language. He moves from a meditation on madness, to a rare commentary on theatre, stagecraft, and Artaud, and finishes by considering literature’s capacity for rupture. ‘Literature and Madness’ is a translation of a text written by Foucault in the 1960s, and recently published in Folie, langage, littérature, ed. Henri-Paul Fruchaud, Daniele Lorenzini and Judith Revel (Paris: Vrin, 2019, 89–109). This version includes a translator’s introduction by Nancy Luxon and was given a distinct subtitle to distinguish it from a similar lecture with the same title in that volume.

Keywords
Artaud, Foucault, literature, madness, theatre

Blake Smith, An Unlikely Intellectual Convergence [Christopher Lasch and Michel Foucault] (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

25 October 2021

Blake Smith, An Unlikely Intellectual Convergence, City Journal, October 20, 2021

Christopher Lasch and Michel Foucault told a similar story about the modern obsession with identity—and its dangers.

Christopher Lasch and Michel Foucault are rarely read side by side. Yet the two thinkers praised each other’s work, recognizing themselves as involved in a common project. Both assessed, on the one hand, the ways elites use networks of expertise and injunctions to moral “liberation” to strengthen their domination—and, on the other, the ways that modern people have come to look for knowledge of themselves from such experts. They shared a sense that beneath progressive policies for public welfare, demands for sexual freedom and identity-based affirmation, and therapeutic practices of self-discovery lies a dangerous potential for authoritarianism and alienation.

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Brown, M.S. Heterophotographies: play, power, privilege and spaces of otherness in Chinese tourist photography (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

25 October 2021

Brown, M.S.
Heterophotographies: play, power, privilege and spaces of otherness in Chinese tourist photography
(2021) Culture, Theory and Critique

DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2021.1943698

Abstract
This article explores Han Chinese tourists’ practice of self-photography in ‘ethnic’ ‘costume’ at tourist sites in China and Japan. Drawing on ethnography and interviews with young Han women, it aims to problematise the innocence of such play. Contextualising this analysis with the visualisation of identity within China, this article explores how the playful mode itself allows for Han individuals to position themselves as ‘sophisticated’ in their consumption of traditional cultures, while tacitly separating them from the supposed ‘traditionality’ of other groups. Drawing on Huizinga’s ‘magic circle’ and Foucault’s concept of ‘heterotopias’, it is argued that the imaginative space that is created is not at the tourist location, but rather within the confines of the images themselves. Analysing the ways in which tourists play out their ideas of ‘ethnic others’, it explores the tropes within the photographs, and how these link to wider practices of ‘othering’. The article explores the ways in which ‘play’ renders cultural difference ‘safe’-because-‘not serious’–but also positions those in a privileged position to safely play with different cultures supposedly superior in their ability to do so. © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
Chinese tourism; ethnic othering; Foucault’s heterotopias; Hanfu; playful tourism; tourist photography

Laes, E., Bombaerts, G. Political Mediation in Nuclear Waste Management: a Foucauldian Perspective (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

24 October 2021

Laes, E., Bombaerts, G.
Political Mediation in Nuclear Waste Management: a Foucauldian Perspective
(2021) Philosophy and Technology

DOI: 10.1007/s13347-021-00455-6
Open access

Abstract
This paper aims to open up high-level waste management practices to a political philosophical questioning, beyond the enclosure implied by the normative ethics approaches that prevail in the literature. Building on previous insights derived from mediation theory (in particular the work of Verbeek and Dorrestijn), Foucault and science and technology studies (in particular Jasanoff’s work on socio-technical imaginaries), mediation theory’s appropriation of Foucauldian insights is shown to be in need of modification and further extension. In particular, we modify Dorrestijn’s figure of “technical determination of power relations” to better take into account the (literal and figurative) aspects of imagination, and complement Dorrestijn’s work with the figures of techno-scientific mediation, and the inherently political figures of socio-technical and state-technical mediation, both based on Foucault’s notion of governmentality. Our analysis implies that the practical implementation of a high-level nuclear waste (HLW) management strategy will require the “stitching together” of these different mediations, which is an inherently political task. © 2021, The Author(s).

Author Keywords
Foucault; Mediation theory; Nuclear waste; Power