Foucault News

Laufer, L.
Michel Foucault: The Queer Gender for Psychoanalysis?
(2020) Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 40 (8), pp. 579-590.

DOI: 10.1080/07351690.2020.1826214

Abstract
Why should a practitioner of psychoanalysis read Foucault? Is Foucault still a “hot topic” for psychoanalysts in 2019? To prevent psychoanalysis from becoming a dead language, reading and re-reading Michel Foucault proves highly relevant, as it also implies reading queer, gay, lesbian, and gender studies. This article draws on queer authors such as Gayle Rubin, Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick, and Judith Butler, as well as Freud, Lacan, and Allouch to reflect on how sexuality and gender identity can possibly be conceived in the Freudian field and beyond a hetero-normative gender binary perspective. Both with and after Foucault, as the genealogist of Freudian psychoanalysis, what would psychoanalysis be without discourses on heterosexual families, Oedipus, sexuality, sexual etiology, and infantile sexuality? Reading Foucault sets forth a new erotology and thus amounts to rediscovering “the political honor of psychoanalysis.”. ©, Copyright © Melvin Bornstein, Joseph Lichtenberg, Donald Silver.

Index Keywords
article, female, gender identity, heterosexuality, homosexual female, human, human experiment, infant, language, male, physician, psychoanalysis, reading

Danielle Guizzo (2021) Reassessing Foucault: Power in the History of Political Economy, International Journal of Political Economy, 50:1, 60-74.
DOI: 10.1080/08911916.2021.1894828

Abstract
This article examines Michel Foucault’s contributions to the study of power in the history of political economy. It employs Foucault’s readings on economic thought to investigate two moments in the history of political economy: classical political economy and Keynesian economics, in which economic reasoning and practice affected the creation and dissemination of power relations in the social realm. By reconsidering the ontological dynamics that encompass the modern role of the state, economic policies and civil society, the article explores how power displays a changing face in light of different discursive and non-discursive elements throughout the history of political economy, in which “economic knowledge” and “scientific discourses” are reconceived as political apparatuses. The article concludes how a closer look into Foucault’s historical ontology allows for a reassessment of the field of action of political economy, showing its consequences in the political field, in the interpretation of historical facts and in the analysis of power/truth. More specifically, how moments in the history of political economy can be reconsidered not simply as systems of economic ideas, but as political apparatuses that create power.

Keywords:
Genealogy, history of political economy, Michel Foucault, ontology, power

Listik Y. (2021) A Biopolitical Account of Social Pathology: Viewing Pathology as a Political-Ontological Issue. In: Harris N. (eds) Pathology Diagnosis and Social Research. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70582-4_7

Open access

Abstract
This chapter will argue that the study of social pathologies is not solely a sociological concern. It is crucial to offer an assessment of the ontological implications of this distinctive approach. In arguing for this shift to a more pronounced ontological analysis, the chapter will employ a biopolitical framework. Considering that the social pathologies manifest within capitalism are entwined within its ontological conditions and assumptions, it is apparent that what one frames as “the pathological” cannot be described as merely contingent or isolated from broader discourses. It is thus not merely theoretically inadequate, but politically problematic to frame capitalist rationality as a pathological intrusion on to what would otherwise be a “healthy” subject.

Christiaens, T.
The entrepreneur of the self beyond Foucault’s neoliberal homo oeconomicus
(2020) European Journal of Social Theory, 23 (4), pp. 493-511.

DOI: 10.1177/1368431019857998

Abstract
In his lectures on neoliberalism, Michel Foucault argues that neoliberalism produces subjects as ‘entrepreneurs of themselves’. He bases this claim on Gary Becker’s conception of the utility-maximizing agent who solely acts upon cost/benefit-calculations. Not all neoliberalized subjects, however, are encouraged to maximize their utility through mere calculation. This article argues that Foucault’s description of neoliberal subjectivity obscures a non-calculative, more audacious side to neoliberal subjectivity. Precarious workers in the creative industries, for example, are encouraged not merely to rationally manage their human capital, but also to take a leap of faith to acquire unpredictable successes. It is this latter risk-loving, extra-calculative side to neoliberal subjectivity that economists usually designate as ‘entrepreneurial’. By confronting Foucault with the theories of entrepreneurship of the Austrian School of Economics, Frank Knight, and Joseph Schumpeter, the Foucauldian analytical framework is enriched. Neoliberal subjectivation is not the monolithic promotion of utility-maximizing agents, but the generation of a multiplicity of modes for entrepreneurs to relate to oneself and the market. © The Author(s) 2019.

Author Keywords
creative industries; entrepreneurship; Foucault; neoliberalism; subjectivity