Foucault News

News and resources on French thinker Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

Daniele Lorenzini reviews Critique and Praxis
Bernard E. Harcourt. Critique and Praxis: A Radical Critical Philosophy of Illusions, Values, and Actions. New York: Columbia University Press. 696 pp.

Review by Daniele Lorenzini, Critical Inquiry, 16 December 2020
Open access

If there is one dogma that most political philosophers and critical thinkers alike have shared in the past two centuries, it is the idea that we need a road map if we want to understand how to change the world and make it a better, more just place to live. This road map need not take the form of a perfectly worked-out theory relying on unshakable normative foundations—we could also figure it out “as we go along.”[1] But this is only possible, we are told, once critique has successfully liberated us from our cognitive dependence on a given (misguided and/or oppressive) representation of the world. Thus, critical theory—broadly construed to encompass ideology and genealogy critique as well as discourse ethics—invariably falls prey to the idea that theory must precede practice, either because one needs to know what exactly to change before beginning to change it, or because one cannot possibly transform the world into a better place without first emancipating oneself from a certain (false or restricted) representation of it.

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stuartelden's avatarProgressive Geographies

Stuart Elden, ‘Foucault as Translator of Binswanger and von Weizsäcker‘ –

The video abstract for this open access article is now available:

Foucault’s Introduction to a translation of Ludwig Binswanger’s essay ‘Dream and Existence’ was published in late 1954. The translation was credited to Jacqueline Verdeaux, with Foucault acknowledged for the notes. Yet Verdeaux herself indicates the intensely collaborative nature of their working process and the translation. In 1958, Victor von Weizsäcker’s Der Gestaltkreis was published in French as Le Cycle de la structure, translated by Foucault and Daniel Rocher. Foucault went on to translate and introduce Immanuel Kant’s Anthropology as his secondary doctoral thesis. His engagement with Kant and Binswanger’s ideas has been discussed in the literature, but his role as translator has generally been neglected. His engagement with von Weizsäcker is almost never mentioned. This article critically discusses Foucault’s role in the Binswanger and von…

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Ableism in Academia, Theorising experiences of disabilities and chronic illnesses in higher education
Edited by Nicole Brown and Jennifer Leigh

Open access

Rather than embracing difference as a reflection of wider society, academic ecosystems seek to normalise and homogenise ways of working and of being a researcher. As a consequence, ableism in academia is endemic. However, to date no attempt has been made to theorise experiences of ableism in academia.

Ableism in Academia provides an interdisciplinary outlook on ableism that is currently missing. Through reporting research data and exploring personal experiences, the contributors theorise and conceptualise what it means to be/work outside the stereotypical norm. The volume brings together a range of perspectives, including feminism, post-structuralism, such as Derridean and Foucauldian theory, crip theory and disability theory, and draw on the width and breadth of a number of related disciplines. Contributors use technicism, leadership, social justice theories and theories of embodiment to raise awareness and increase understanding of the marginalised; that is those academics who are not perfect. These theories are placed in the context of neoliberal academia, which is distant from the privileged and romanticised versions that exist in the public and internalised imaginations of academics, and used to interrogate aspects of identity, aspects of how disability is performed, and to argue that ableism is not just a disability issue.

This timely collection of chapters will be of interest to researchers in Disability Studies, Higher Education Studies and Sociology, and to those researching the relationship between theory and personal experience across the Social Sciences.

Contents
Preface
Nicole Brown and Jennifer Leigh

Introduction: Theorising ableism in academia
Nicole Brown
1. The significance of crashing past gatekeepers of knowledge: Towards full participation of disabled scholars in ableist academic structures
Claudia Gillberg
2. I am not disabled: Difference, ethics, critique and refusal of neoliberal academic selves
Francesca Peruzzo
3. Disclosure in academia: A sensitive issue
Nicole Brown
4. Fibromyalgia and me
Divya Jindal-Snape
5. A practical response to ableism in leadership in UK higher education
Nicola Martin
6. Autoimmune actions in the ableist academy: A crip response
Alice Andrews
7. ‘But you don’t look disabled’: Non-visible disabilities, disclosure and being an ‘insider’ in disability research and ‘other’ in the disability movement and academia
Elisabeth Griffiths
8. Invisible disability, unacknowledged diversity
Carla Finesilver, Jennifer Leigh and Nicole Brown
9. Imposter
Jennifer Rode
10. Internalised ableism: Of the political and the personal
Jennifer Leigh and Nicole Brown
11. From the personal to the political: Ableism, activism and academia
Kirstein Rummery
12. The violence of technicism: Ableism as humiliation and degrading treatment
Fiona Kumari Campbell
13. A little bit extra
El Spaeth

Concluding thoughts: Moving forward
Nicole Brown and Jennifer Leigh
Afterword
Jennifer Leigh and Nicole Brown
Index

Nicole Brown is Lecturer in Education and Academic Head of Learning and Teaching at UCL Institute of Education. Nicole’s research interests relate to identity and body work, physical and material representations and metaphors, the generation of knowledge, and advancing learning and teaching within higher education. @ncjbrown @FibroIdentity @AbleismAcademia

Jennifer Leigh is Senior Lecturer at the Centre for the Study of Higher Education, University of Kent. She initially trained as a chemist, teacher, and somatic movement therapist. Her research interests include embodiment, phenomenological and creative research methods, academic practice, educational development, and ableism in higher education. @drschniff @AbleismAcademia

Lee, S. F. (2020) Governing ‘disadvantage’ through funded early years places and reconfigured spaces. Journal of Early Childhood Research, Online December 11

DOI: 10.1177/1476718X20971322

Abstract:
This article examines how the policy of funded early years places for ‘disadvantaged’ 2-year-olds (FNP) in England reconfigures spaces within early childhood and care (ECEC) in new ways of working with young children. Using practitioners’ interview data from early years settings in London, this article uses Foucauldian technologies of governmentality to shed light on how FNP responds to the problem of ‘disadvantage’ as new mobile modes of governance. The paper explores how practitioners reconfigure their established spaces to incorporate provision and practice suitable for 2-year-olds and the challenges practitioners face in implementing the policy. The analysis considers ‘space as assemblage’ by focusing on three key themes: dividing spaces through split rationality, dividing practices through othering and the reconfiguration of established ways of working. The themes trace how policy-driven technologies re-interpret ECEC in narrow and alternative ways by making a set of practices possible, engendering new pedagogical relationships. This article highlights the complex conditions of (im)possibility for ‘doing’ ECEC under austerity. When viewed in the broader context, policy reforms are increasingly reaching into ECEC as strategic spaces for new modes of governing, sustained by a global agenda in neoliberal education reforms.

Keywords
2-year-olds, early childhood education and care, educational disadvantage, Foucault, funded nursery places, governmentality, policy, technology

Moore, Alison Downham (2020), Foucault’s Scholarly Virtues and Sexuality Historiography. History, 105: 446-469.

DOI: 10.1111/1468-229X.13015

Abstract
This article looks at why many historians of sexuality appear dissatisfied with the level of theoretical precision in the field by considering the reception of Foucault’s approach and why some parts of it have been more difficult to assimilate within the historical discipline than others. It proposes that Foucault has been only partially understood by most historians of sexuality, with the result that the properties of his unique disciplined ascesis have been under‐considered. The article argues that Foucault shared many of the critical and ethical goals that are inherent to certain types of historical writing, noting where he diverged from them in ways that have problematised his reception among sexuality historians. It argues that Foucault’s own ascesis or ‘transformation of self’ as an intellectual might be better appreciated as a unique set of scholarly virtues expressed in his concerns about teleology, presentism, and the critical practice of ‘history of the present’ that characterise his work on sexuality.

Michel Foucault, Interview with Madeleine Chapsal, The Journal of Continental Philosophy Translated by Mark G. E. Kelly, Volume 1, Issue 1, 2020, Pages 29-35
https://doi.org/10.5840/jcp2020876

Open access

Abstract
In this 1966 interview, published here in English translation for the first time, Michel Foucault positions himself as a representative of a ‘generation’ of French thinkers who turned towards the analysis of ‘structures’ and away from the phenomenological approaches that had previously dominated French philosophy. In this, Foucault claims inspiration not only from older French scholars—namely Georges Dumézil, Jacques Lacan, and Claude Lévi-Strauss—but also from the science of genetics.

Asl, M.P.
Spaces of change: Arab women’s reconfigurations of selfhood through heterotopias in Manal Al-Sharif’s daring to drive
(2020) Kemanusiaan, 27 (2), pp. 123-143.

DOI: 10.21315/KAJH2020.27.2.7

Open access

Abstract
Stereotypically depicted as unresisting and passive victims of oppressive power, Saudi women are generally considered as unable to effect changes to the patriarchal sociopolitical status quo. This article studies the Saudi woman life writer Manal al-Sharif’s Daring to Drive (2017) to demonstrate the various ways in which the subjugated women instigate social transformations by resisting against the prevailing male dominated system. To this end, Michel Foucault’s theories on “other spaces” are employed to examine the function of spatial modalities in the workings of the dynamics of power. It is argued that the portrayed female subjects re-construct, re-experience and re-utilise different spaces to re-invent new identities and galvanise alternative ways of life. The analysis reveals that within the emancipatory space of the Internet, Saudi women produce heterotopias of transgressions, resistance and utopianism to unsettle the prescribed boundaries of male-female relations, protest against the impositions of gender performance in public spheres and creatively re-imagine an alternative, desirable order of things. Hence, the study arrives at two conclusions: first, Saudi women’s individual urgency for self-transformation have generated major social changes and ideological reconfigurations, resulting in many of the recent democratic developments in the country; second, space is not merely a normalised and rationalised construct, but can function as a normalising and transformative force at the same time. © 2020 Penerbit Universiti Sains Malaysia. All rights reserved.

Author Keywords
Heterotopia; Manal al-Sharif; Michel Foucault; Saudi women; Transformation

Abtahi, Y., Barwell, R.
Who are the actors and who are the acted-ons? An analysis of news media reporting on mathematics education (2020) Mathematics Education Research Journal

DOI: 10.1007/s13394-020-00358-3

Open access

Abstract
While there are several studies analysing how mathematics education is portrayed in news media discourses, there has been little examination of the construction of different stakeholders (e.g. teachers, parents, curricula). In this paper, we report our analysis of a corpus of Canadian newspaper reports on mathematics education, focusing on the underlying construction of different stakeholders. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of regimes of truth, we show how news media construct a “truth” that portrays different stakeholders as either actors or acted-ons working for or against individual or national mathematical performance. We explain these findings with reference to the general media framing of mathematics education in the corpus. © 2020, The Author(s).

Author Keywords
Acted-ons; Actors; Foucault; Mathematics education; News media

Eloise Govier, Power and all its guises. Environmental determinism and locating ‘the crux of the matter’ (2020) Archaeological Dialogues, 27 (2), pp. 173-176.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203820000215

Abstract
Can we theorize the relationship between discourses that antagonize each other? In a recent article, Arponen et al. demonstrate the tension between two different research models, and spotlight the compelling impact these methods have on archaeological interpretation. In response to their observations, this paper theorizes how we can understand the position of the researcher in relation to the events they analyse. Using Michel Foucault’s approach to the ‘discursive formation’ and Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism, in this reaction I argue that focusing on a single and most important point (the crux) is problematic, and theoretically outline how creating conceptual space for polymorphous causality can aid the analysis of a ‘dispersion of events’. © 2020 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press.

Author Keywords
agential realism; Causality; discourse; discursive formation; environmental determinism; rupture

Index Keywords
archaeology, conceptual framework, power relations, research work, theoretical study

Lepe-Carrión, P.; Martínez Andrade, L.; Meneses, José M. (2020). “Chichitlahuiliztli, racialización y cacería humana. Ensayos sobre necropolíticas en América Latina”. Ediciones Ufro-CLACSO, 2020

Open access

Prológo
Cuando iniciamos el proyecto de este libro, nos dimos cuenta de que en los países con un pasado colonial la violencia se dice de muchas formas, las cuales como carne y cicatriz han quedado inscritas tanto en el registro histórico como en el pulso del presente. Ocultas en la lejanía del pasado, e inscritas en la naturalidad del presente, suelen presentarse como independientes de toda causalidad histórica y de toda articulación sistemática, carentes de unidad y sin posibilidad de encontrar la lógica y la racionalidad que las promueve. Como si se tratara de acontecimientos aislados, propios de las condiciones económicas y sociales que determinan a nuestros países y fueran resultado del comportamiento y las acciones, siempre insuficientes, de nuestra gente. Ya pasado un tiempo, y luego de una serie de eventos sociales, políticos, pero también personales que ralentizaron el proceso editorial, hemos sido testigos en América Latina (y en el mundo entero) de los procesos históricos más intensos de las últimas décadas. Paradójicamente, donde las políticas de la muerte han hecho su aparición de la forma más grotesca. Nos entristece, en cierta forma, dar curso a un trabajo académico como este, en un contexto donde las condiciones vitales de gran parte de la humanidad están siendo vulneradas; pero, por otro lado, sentimos cada vez más necesario que el trabajo intelectual sea un fiscalizador y denunciante permanente de las prácticas de gobierno que establecen los marcos de la excepcionalidad.

Consideramos que podemos rastrear —en parte— la complejidad de las causas que provocan las mil formas de la muerte, a través de un pensamiento crítico, que indaga y cuestiona, desde su núcleo, a la modernidad/colonialidad y sus consecuencias.

Para denunciar la vigencia de la necropolítica, nos dimos a la tarea de reunir diversas lecturas acerca de la obra del pensador camerunés Achille Mbembe, como punto de partida para emprender un trabajo de esta naturaleza. Así pues, el ejercicio que nos ocupa lleva al aparato conceptual del filósofo a confrontarse con diversas latitudes; su fuerza nos permitirá analizar —como insinúa el título de este libro—desde el mordisco histórico de los perros en el México de la conquista (chichitlalhuiliztli = aperreamiento) y los asesinatos de mujeres olvidadas en el desierto hasta las desapariciones y el terrorismo de Estado, las masacres y los genocidios, pasando por la omisión política, el olvido, el silencio y el abandono. A pesar de todo, nuestro trabajo no se limita a una simple ubicación geográfica, sino que responde a una voluntad sistemática de dar la muerte que se hizo y se sigue haciendo concreta, en múltiples territorios y en innumerables víctimas.
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Palabras clave:
Governmentality, Race and Racism, Necropolitics, Colonialism, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Feminism, Racism, Michel Foucault, Biopolitics, Racialization, Feminismo, State of exception, Biopolitica, Biopolítica, State sovereignty, Achille Mbembe, Governmentality Studies, Latin American feminisms, Necropolítica, Biopolitics/Necropolitics