Foucault News

Jeffrey T. Nealon, Fates of the Performative. From the Linguistic Turn to the New Materialism, University of Minnesota Press, 2021

From its humble origins in J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory of the 1950s, the performative has grown to permeate wildly diverse scholarly fields, ranging from deconstruction and feminism to legal theory and even theories about the structure of matter. Here Jeffrey T. Nealon discovers how the performative will remain vital in the twenty-first century, arguing that it was never merely concerned with linguistic meaning but rather constitutes an insight into the workings of immaterial force.

Fates of the Performative takes a deep dive into this “performative force” to think about the continued power and relevance of this wide-ranging concept. Offering both a history of the performative’s mutations and a diagnosis of its present state, Nealon traces how it has been deployed by key writers in the past sixty years, including foundational thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, and Judith Butler; contemporary theorists such as Thomas Piketty and Antonio Negri; and the “conceptual poetry” of Kenneth Goldsmith.

Ultimately, Nealon’s inquiry is animated by one powerful question: what’s living and what’s dead in performative theory? In deconstructing the reaction against the performative in current humanist thought, Fates of the Performative opens up important conversations about systems theory, animal studies, object-oriented ontology, and the digital humanities. Nealon’s stirring appeal makes a necessary declaration of the performative’s continued power and relevance at a time of neoliberal ascendancy.

Contents

Preface: Why the Performative?

Part I. Genealogy of the Performative

1. The Truth Is a Joke? Performatives in Austin and Derrida

2. Two Paths You Can Go By: Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

3. The Bodacious Era: Thoreau and New Materialism; or, What’s Wrong with the Anthropocene?

Part II. Performativity and/as/into Biopolitics

4. Biopolitics, Marxism and Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century

5. What Is a Lecturer? Performative, Parrhesia, and the Author-Function in Foucault’s Lecture Courses

6. Literary RealFeel: Banality, Fatality, and Meaning in Kenneth Goldsmith’s The Weather

Conclusion: On the Returns of Realism and the (Supposed) Exhaustion of Critique

Jeffrey T. Nealon is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Philosophy at Penn State University. His most recent books are I’m Not Like Everybody Else: Biopolitics, Neoliberalism, and American Popular Music; Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life; and Post-Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism.

Marta Faustino & Gianfranco Ferraro (eds.), The Late Foucault. Ethical and Political Questions, Bloomsbury, 2020

Description
Michel Foucault is one of the most important and controversial thinkers of the twentieth century and one of the leading figures in contemporary Western intellectual life and debate. The recent publication of his last lecture courses at the Collège de France (1981-1984), together with the short texts, essays, and interviews from the same period, have sparked new interest in his work, allowing for a new understanding of his philosophical trajectory and challenging several interpretations produced over the last few decades.

In this later phase of his thinking, Foucault deepens and expands the course of his preceding works on the genealogy of subjectivity, while at the same time adding a significant ethical and political dimension to it. His focus on the ancient ethics of care of the self and technologies of self-constitution during this period adds important nuances to his previous positions on power, truth, and subjectivity, shedding new light on his philosophical endeavour as a whole and situating his reflections at the centre of current moral debates.

Focusing on the last stage of Foucault’s thought, this book brings together international scholars to relaunch the critical debate on the significance of Foucault’s so-called “ethical turn” and to discuss the ways in which the perspectives offered by Foucault in this period might help us to unravel modernity, giving us the tools to understand and transform our present, ethically and politically.

Brendon Murphy, Regulating Undercover Law Enforcement: The Australian Experience, Springer, 2021

This book examines the way in which undercover police investigation has come to be regulated in Australia. Drawing on documentary and doctrinal legal analysis, this book investigates how, in the space of a single decade, Australian law makers set out to regulate one of the most difficult aspects of police: undercover investigation. In so doing, the Australian experience represents a paradigm model. And yet despite its success, it is a system of law and practice that has a dark side – a model of investigation to relies heavily on activities that are unlawful in the absence of authorisation. It is a model that is as much concerned with the surveillance and control of police as it is with suspected criminal conduct.

The book aims to locate the Australian experience in comparative perspective with other major common law jurisdictions (the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand), with a view to contrast strengths, similarities and weaknesses of these models. It is argued that the Australian model, at the pragmatic level, offers a highly successful model for regulatory structure and practice, providing a significant model for successful regulation. At the same time, the model that has been introduced raises important questions about how and why the Australian experience evolved in the way that it did, and the implications this has for the relationship between citizen and state, the judiciary and the executive, and broader questions about the protections offered by rights discourse and jurisprudence.

This book aims to document the law, policy and practices that shape undercover investigations. In so doing, it aims to not only articulate the way in which the law regulates these activities, but also to move on to consider some of the fundamental questions linked to undercover investigations: how did regulation happen? By what means of regulation? What are the driving policy issues that give this field of law its particular complexion? What are the implications? Who gains, and who loses, by which means of power?

The book offers unique insights into a largely unknown aspect of modern covert policing, identifying a range of practices, the legal framework, controversies and powers. By locating these practices in a rich theoretical context, informed by risk and governmentality scholarship, this book offers a legal and theoretical explanation of one of the most controversial forms of policing.

Brendon Murphy is Senior Lecturer in Law at the Thomas More Law School, Australian Catholic University. He has previously been appointed as Senior Lecturer at the University of Newcastle, and Associate Professor at the University of Canberra. As an academic, his doctoral research examined the regulation of covert investigation in Australia, with emphasis on the legal, policy and theoretical aspects of controlled operations. His PhD was given honourable mention by the Royal Society of New South Wales as an outstanding thesis in 2016. He has published widely in the field of criminal law and procedure, law and society, and legal theory. He was contributing author to National Security, Surveillance and Terror in Palgrave MacMillan’s Crime Prevention and Security Management Series, and Criminal Law Perspectives published by Cambridge University Press. He is the current serving academic member of the New South Wales Law Society’s Specialist Accreditation Board for Criminal Law.