Foucault News

H. Unnathi S. Samaraweera, Is resilience a unique extension rather than a rejection of neoliberalism? A critical reading of David Chandler’s writings on resilience (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

19 January 2021

H. Unnathi S. Samaraweera (2020). Is resilience a unique extension rather than a rejection of neoliberalism? A critical reading of David Chandler’s writings on resilience. International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment.
https://doi.org/10.1108/IJDRBE-05-2020-0050

Abstract
Purpose: This paper aims to engage with the concept of resilience as theorized by David Chandler in his book Resilience: The Governance of Complexity by drawing from the theory of governmentality presented by Michel Foucault and Jonathan Joseph.

Design/methodology/approach: Evolving from classical liberalism to neoliberalism and from natural sciences to social sciences, the term “resilience” raises many questions about its sustainability in terms of its meaning and complexity. While most scholars tend to underscore the significance and practicality of the term, a few scholars argue that it is a failed dogma with neoliberal characteristics. As this is a theory-based study, its methodology involves close readings of academic texts produced mainly by David Chandler, Michel Foucault and Jonathan Joseph.

Findings: The central argument in this paper is though Chandler convincingly explains the paradigm shift of the term resilience from classical to neoliberal, his theorizing lacks the understanding that the type of power and governmentality involved in individual freedom, autonomy and complexity are actually parts of the neoliberal state. Hence, the buzzword resilience today is actually an extension of the same neoliberal thought.

Originality/value: First, the author attempts to critically engage with the term resilience from a sociological point of view using purposively selected academic literature. Second, the paper attempts to bring Chandler’s conceptualization on resilience into the disaster context and evaluates its practicality within the tenets of neoliberalism by drawing on Joseph’s and Foucault’s theorizations.

Author keywords
Complexity David Chandler Disaster Governance Neoliberalism Resilience

Displacing the Confessional (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

18 January 2021

Giorgi Vachnadze, Displacing the Confessional: Resistance to Orthodox Christian Governmentality, Giorgi Vachnadze blog, 16 January 2021

The following text will provide a critical reflection on the social and political context of the Georgian Orthodox Christian Church as an extension of the state-apparatus. Looking briefly at the history, the global/local political climate and the role of the Church in Russia-Georgia relations, we will continue to discuss internal state politics and the problem of religious-nationalistic and xenophobic propaganda by bearing in mind the specific social practice of confession within the institution of the Church. In order to perform this short analysis, we will draw most prominently on the works of the French theorist Michel Foucault. The goal is to provide an institutional critique, a type of genealogy and offer possible horizons for resistance. The parresiastic practices of truth-telling, self-care and alternative lifestyles offered by the later works of Michel Foucault should prove especially conducive to suggesting a way of reversing the power-relationships inherent to confessional practices. The question in short, will consist in trying to understand what type of governmental technique (or governmentality) is presented by the discursive practice of confession within a very particular context of Georgian identity-formation and the vastly complex power-relationships that bind, construct and subjugate the Georgian identity to external institutional forces. How are Georgians made into religious Subjects and how are they subjected to themselves through the practice of confession and the internalization of pseudo-spiritual values by the Orthodox Christian Church?

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Christian Möller, Discipline and Feed: Food Banks, Pastoral Power, and the Medicalisation of Poverty in the UK (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

17 January 2021

Christian Möller, Discipline and Feed: Food Banks, Pastoral Power, and the Medicalisation of Poverty in the UK, Sociological Research Online, Published January 5, 2021
DOI: 10.1177/1360780420982625

Open access

Abstract
Food banks across the UK are offering basic food supplies and a range of support services to people who have been affected by years of welfare cuts and the ongoing COVID-19 health crisis. Despite a growing research interest in the drivers and experiences of food bank use, their own role in constructing and managing poverty as a social problem has been neglected. Adopting a Foucauldian approach, this study critically explored how power is exercised and subjects are formed inside three UK food banks. The localised care for the poor is shown to work through a pastoral power, which requires confessions of crises and obedience to an expert regime in the diagnosis and treatment of poverty as an individual condition. By making food aid conditional on active engagement with other support agencies, volunteers negotiate and translate neoliberal discourses of personal responsibility and active citizenship. Findings are linked to a wider critique of neoliberal government, which works through therapeutic discourses and retains disciplinary and paternalistic elements in managing poverty at a distance.

Keywords
charity, food banks, governmentality, neoliberalism, pastoral power, poverty

Eric Schliesser, 28 March 1979: Foucault on Locke’s World Historical Conceptual Shift (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

17 January 2021

Eric Schliesser, 28 March 1979: Foucault on Locke’s World Historical Conceptual Shift (XXXVII),Digressions & Impressions, 5 January 2021

[Editor: 11 March 2026. Link above is to the page archived on The Wayback Machine.]

[…]
Because most of lecture 11 is a brilliant analysis of the history of criminology and the (sometimes overlapping) significance of Gary Becker’s redefinition of homo oeconomicus, it is easy to miss how Foucault embeds his analysis in a narrative in which the least genius of the tradition, Locke, is a world-historical — “one of the most important mutations, one of the most important theoretical transformations in Western thought since the Middle Ages”* — figure (in Nietzsche’s sense). In my last post (episode 36), I had already observed that lecture 11 is tied by Foucault to the start of the lecture series and Locke’s conception of the liberal art of government.

As an aside, it is striking how conventional Foucault’s philosophical categories (e.g., ‘Western thought;’ ‘British Empiricism;’ ‘Middle Ages’ etc.”) can be sometimes. But as we know, artistic genius in this convention is characterized by the virtuosity of playing with the given constraints. And as Foucault teaches in this very lecture (recall), that fits the definition of rational agency.
[…]

Archive: Foucault/Derrida Fifty Years Later. The Futures of Genealogy, Deconstruction, and Politics (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

16 January 2021

Foucault/Derrida Fifty Years Later. The Futures of Genealogy, Deconstruction, and Politics, Edited by Olivia Custer, Penelope Deutscher, and Samir Haddad. Columbia University Press, 2016

Early in their careers, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida argued over madness, reason, and history in an exchange that profoundly influenced continental philosophy and critical theory. In this collection, Amy Allen, Geoffrey Bennington, Lynne Huffer, Colin Koopman, Pierre Macherey, Michael Naas, and Judith Revel, among others, trace this exchange in debates over the possibilities of genealogy and deconstruction, immanent and transcendent approaches to philosophy, and the practical and theoretical role of the archive.

ABOUT THE EDITORS
Olivia Custer is a Paris-based scholar and the author of L’Exemple de Kant (2012).

Penelope Deutscher is professor of philosophy at Northwestern University.

Samir Haddad is associate professor of philosophy at Fordham University.

Di Gesu, A. The Cynic Scandal: Parrhesia, Community, and Democracy (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

16 January 2021

Di Gesu A. The Cynic Scandal: Parrhesia, Community, and Democracy. Theory, Culture & Society. January 2021.
doi:10.1177/0263276420979036

Abstract
The aim of this article is to study parrhesia as a form of political performativity. The study of parrhesia as a speech act has been inaugurated by the researches of Lorenzini, who has proposed an in-depth analysis of the parrhesiastic speech act: we nonetheless believe that some features of parrhesiastic performativity urge us to broaden some aspects of his theory. In the first section of this article we will study the nature of parrhesiastic utterance, where Lorenzini’s theses will be discussed through the use of Butler’s approach. In the second section, we will examine the characteristics of Cynic performativity through our theoretical framework, in order to give an example of its effectiveness. We will put forward, then, an overall interpretation of parrhesia, which will be redefined as a communitarian performativity and, furthermore, as an innovative model of radical democracy.

Keywords
Butler, community, Foucault, performativity, radical democracy

Archive: Penelope Deutscher, Foucault’s Futures. A Critique of Reproductive Reason (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

15 January 2021

Penelope Deutscher, Foucault’s Futures. A Critique of Reproductive Reason, Columbia University Press, 2017

In Foucault’s Futures, Penelope Deutscher reconsiders the role of procreation in Foucault’s thought, especially its proximity to risk, mortality, and death. She brings together his work on sexuality and biopolitics to challenge our understanding of the politicization of reproduction. By analyzing Foucault’s contribution to the politics of maternity and its influence on the work of thinkers such as Roberto Esposito, Giorgio Agamben, and Judith Butler, Deutscher provides new insights into the conflicted political status of reproductive conduct and what it means for feminism and critical theory.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Penelope Deutscher is Joan and Sarepta Harrison Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University. She is the author or editor of a number of books, including Foucault/Derrida Fifty Years Later (2016) and Critical Theory in Critical Times: Transforming the Global Political and Economic Order (2017), both from Columbia University Press.

Sylvain Garniel, Michel Foucault: un philosophe des attitudes (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

15 January 2021

Sylvain Garniel, Michel Foucault: un philosophe des attitudes Collection : Ateliers populaires de philosophie, Editions Apogée, (2021)

« La vie de tout individu ne pourrait-elle pas être une œuvre d’art ? Pourquoi une lampe ou une maison sont-ils des objets d’art et non pas notre vie ? » C’est sur cette interrogation que se clôt l’œuvre de Michel Foucault, mort prématurément en 1984. Il ne s’agit pas seulement d’une ultime conversion esthétique, qui nous enjoindrait de devenir tous des artistes, mais bien d’une question éthique adressée à chacun. C’est une invitation à modifier nos comportements et nos manières d’être pour nous inventer nous-mêmes librement.

Francesca Peruzzo, The Model Of Becoming Aware: disabled subjectivities, policy enactment and new exclusions in higher education (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

14 January 2021

Francesca Peruzzo (2020) The Model Of Becoming Aware: disabled subjectivities, policy enactment and new exclusions in higher education, Journal of Education Policy
DOI: 10.1080/02680939.2020.1856415

ABSTRACT
This paper aims to present an analytical tool called Model of Becoming Aware, to explore the production of the subjectivities of disabled students and new forms of exclusions during the enactment of disability policies in the Italian higher education context. It deploys Foucault’s governmentality studies to frame the changing historical conditions from a welfarist to neoliberal governance, of the university and it draws upon qualitative data collected in an Italian university. The Model is the product of situational analysis of the enactment of inclusive policies and explores the mobilisation of authority, resources, practices, subjects, opportunities and knowledge by two technologies of power – autonomy and sensitivity. Findings illustrate how medical and economic truths in times of austerity are producing new forms of performative neoliberal subjectivities in higher education while subordinating forms of subjection based on expensive welfarist provisions. Through the Model of Becoming Aware, the article aims to supply a contingent tool to analyse current ableist and exclusionary practices in the enactment of disability higher education policies, providing an evidence-based space to rethink policies to support disabled students educational access and attainment in higher education.

KEYWORDS: Disability, Foucault, higher education, subjectivity, inclusion, ableism

Foucault Studies. New series on Foucault’s lectures (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

12 January 2021

Vol III, No 1: Governmentality, Liberalism, Biopower, Genealogy of the Modern Subject.

Foucault’s Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-80 Security, Territory and Population; The Birth of Biopolitics; On the Government of the Living.
Volume III of the Foucault Lecture Series.
Published: 2020-12-16

Open access

EDITORIAL [extract]
Sverre Raffnsøe, Alain Beaulieu, Barbara Cruikshank, Knut Ove Eliassen, Marius Gudmand-Høyer, Thomas Götselius, Daniele Lorenzini, Hernan Camilo Pulido Martinez, Johanna Oksala, Clare O’Farrell, Rodrigo Castro Orellana, Eva Bendix Petersen, Alan Rosenberg, Dianna Taylor, Signe Macholm Müller & Asker Bryld Staunæs.

The editors of Foucault Studies are pleased to publish this volume of Foucault Lectures containing three articles, each devoted to discussing one of Foucault’s yearly series of lectures at the Collège de France.

In “The Beginning of a Study of Biopower,” Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson (Syracuse University) centers the attention on Foucault’s 1978 lecture course at the Collège de France entitled Security, Territory, Population. The article “The Appearance of an Interminable Natural History and its Ends” by Sverre Raffnsøe (Copenhagen Business School) and Knut Ove Eliassen (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) examines Foucault’s Lectures on The Birth of Biopolitics at the Collège de France in 1979. Written by Daniele Lorenzini (Warwick University), “Anarcheology and the Emergence of the Alethurgic Subject” discusses Foucault’s 1980 lecture course entitled On the Government of the Living.

A NOVELTY
Rather than just a new publication continuing the row of previous issues of Foucault Studies, the present issue is to be regarded as a novelty in a more radical sense. It is a new kind of publication that broadens the scope or the range of Foucault Studies; and it is a new kind of publication that initiates a new series of publications in addition to Foucault Studies’ already existing programme.

Since the quite recently accomplished full publication of Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France, completed in French in 2015 and in English in 2019, the editors of Foucault Studies have considered it timely to publish a series of articles introducing each year’s lectures in the context of and as a contribution to Foucault’s work while also highlighting crucial problems still of relevance in the discussed sequence of lectures. The present issue is the first volume to appear in the context of this series. The series is intended to be of value to the reader wanting to make her- or himself acquainted with the lecture series as well as to the more experienced scholar.

Provisionally, the series is envisaged to consist of four volumes.
[…]