Foucault News

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.

Alessandro Baccarin, Archeologia dell’erotismo. Ascesa ed oblio dell’ars erotica greco-romana. Edizioni Efesto (2020)

Descrizione
Nel grande naufragio della letteratura greco-romana uno spazio particolare occupa la manualistica erotica. Si trattava di un genere letterario importante, che solo una lettura distorsiva e anacronistica può ascrivere alla pornografia. L’autorialità che rese celebre questo genere era composta per lo più da figure femminili, donne come Filenide di Samo, la più antica autrice di un manuale erotico greco, o l’egiziana Elefantide, autrice amata dall’imperatore Tiberio. Autrici la cui dimestichezza con la filosofia rendeva possibile scrivere un libro di “tecnica erotica”.

Scopo di questo libro non è solo ricostruire questo genere letterario perduto, ma anche recuperare quella koiné culturale e artistica che possiamo definire come “ars erotica” greco-romana. Si tratta di riprendere la prospettiva e l’archivio genealogico del Foucault della Storia della sessualità, e di recuperare ad una storia dello sguardo e della quotidianità un’esperienza dell’erotico altra. Una storia dell’erotismo capace di fornire al lettore esperto e a quello meno esperto uno sguardo d’insieme sull’erotismo nel mondo antico, venendo così a colmare un vuoto che da troppo tempo caratterizza il mondo degli studi classici e filosofici.

Alessandro Baccarin vive e lavora a Roma. I suoi campi di studio interessano la storia, l’antropologia e la filosofia antica. Si è interessato anche di studi di genere, del pensiero di Michel Foucault, e nell’ambito degli studi classici di geografia antica. Attualmente sta conducendo ricerche di ampio respiro sul sogno e sull’oniromantica pre-moderna. E’ autore di Il sottile discrimine. I corpi tra dominio e tecnica di sé, Ombre Corte, Verona 2015, e coautore con Paolo Vernaglione Berardi di Quaderni di archeologia filosofica, Volume primo, Edizioni Efesto, Roma 2019). I suoi saggi e interventi sono presenti in riviste scientifiche e in Laboratorio di Archeologia Filosofica, sito web di discussione pubblica di cui ha contribuito alla fondazione.