Foucault News

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

Cristóbal Durán Rojas, Iván Torres Apablaza, El impasse de la resistencia. La intersección entre Foucault y Deleuze a propósito de la salida del poder, Hybris, Vol. 11, Núm. 2 (2020)

The impasse of resistance. The intersection between Foucault and Deleuze regarding the exit from power

Open access

RESUMEN
En este trabajo intentamos proponer una lectura centrada mayoritariamente en algunos de los trabajos tardíos de Michel Foucault, desarrollados desde el primer tomo de su Histoire de la sexualité, de 1976. En dicha lectura buscamos advertir que la distancia entre Foucault y Deleuze, y que se marca incluso en una ruptura explícita con posterioridad a la publicación de dicho libro, no obedece tanto a la “fascinación” de Foucault por el poder, a su recusación perentoria del deseo y de su potencia de fuga, o a su supuesto abandono del análisis detallado de los dispositivos. Según nuestra lectura, la distancia tomada por Deleuze advertirá en ese impasse la posibilidad de una resistencia que no se ejerce sobre los dispositivos y las formaciones de poder, y que proyecta el problema del poder hacia modos de vida, según la lógica de una modulación de la vida, muy semejante a aquella esbozada por Foucault en sus últimos años, creando una singular consonancia entre ambos proyectos de pensamiento.

PALABRAS CLAVE
Poder; placer; deseo; resistencia; subjetivación

stuartelden's avatarProgressive Geographies

In a fascinating interview about Foucault, ‘The Materiality of a Working Life‘ (open access; original French), Daniel Defert talks about his daily routines, and how these were similar year round:

No no, weekends didn’t exist! We would go to see art exhibitions on the Saturday afternoon, certainly, but the very notion of the weekend didn’t exist… Especially a public holiday, a Christmas day without writing, that was impossible! Foucault rarely put dates on his writings, but he would have been quitecapable of putting “December25th” on something, that being a daywhen, as he said,“nothing hashappened for several thousand years.”

I pick up on this story in The Early Foucault, but it’s not a model I try to follow. Although the winter sun and cycling won’t happen this year, I will be taking a few days off. Happy Christmas and I’ll be back before the New Year with…

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Patricia Ticineto Clough, Deleuze’s Foucault, Coils of the Serpent, issue 6 (2020): Control societies II: Philosophy, politics, economy, pp. 26-32

Open access

Extract
When in 2013, I taught a graduate seminar on Foucault at the Graduate Center, CUNY, my introductory lecture for the course was titled “Au Revoir to Deleuze’s Foucault.” Perhaps the lecture title was only a note to myself, a reminder that when earlier in 2006, I taught a graduate seminar on Foucault, I had ended the course with Deleuze’s Foucault, where Deleuze traced the movement in Foucault’s thought from focusing on the archive to focusing on the diagram (cf. Deleuze 1988). Arriving at my last lecture to discuss the book, I announced to the class with much enthusiasm that Deleuze’s Foucault touched exactly on all we had discussed that semester. The blank faces of the students suggested that they had not had the experience I had had reading Foucault. “Whatever could Deleuze be talking about?” students instead responded. If, in 2006, students found Deleuze’s Foucault a mystifying reading of Foucault’s works, the students of the 2013 seminar simply felt no urgency to read it at all. Perhaps I felt the same: Au Revoir to Deleuze’s Foucault.

With very best wishes for the festive season and for Christmas from Foucault News in this very different kind of year. Keep safe.

From Ceci n’est pas Michel Foucault, Popper’s Mag, 14 MARS 2017

Heather Brunskell-Evans. Interview with Julian Vigo, Savage Minds, October 25 2020. Podcast

Heather Brunskell-Evans discusses John Stuart Mill, Michel Foucault, identity politics, the current philosophical and legal discourses on sexual violence, and the politics of “kindness” with Julian Vigo. Focusing upon many of the misrepresentations of Foucault’s work in recent years, Brunskell-Evans offers ways in which we might better understand liberalism and how Foucault asks us to consider both the body and our presumed freedoms.

If you’ve been thinking about supporting Savage Minds, but have not yet done so, please consider taking out a subscription, by supporting our work on Patreon or through a one-off donation. We really can’t do this without you and we depend on financial support which means that we can cover the news unfettered by corporate pressure.

Editor: UK Politician Liz Truss’s comments unexpectedly led to Foucault trending on twitter in the UK.

Charlotte Lydia Riley, Liz Truss doesn’t know about Foucault, but she also doesn’t care, The Guardian, 19 December 2020

Ironically, rightwing politicians have invented a zombie ‘postmodernism’ that cannot be killed by facts

Academics in the UK have been known, in moments of weakness, to look wistfully across the Channel at European politicians, who seem so cultured, and so intellectual, compared to some of our Westminster grey suits. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, they think, to have politicians who really kept up to date with academic scholarship? Who enjoyed talking publicly about philosophy or history or art? Imagine if our political class read Foucault!

Be careful what you wish for. On Thursday, academics across the country were bemused to discover that Liz Truss was talking about their work, although not in the way they might have hoped. In a speech called The Fight for Fairness, the equalities minister talked about her own childhood in Leeds in the 1980s, where, apparently, schoolchildren in were taught about racism and sexism, but – inexplicably – not how to read and write. “These ideas,” Truss continued, “have their roots in postmodernist philosophy – pioneered by Foucault – that put societal power structures and labels ahead of individuals and their endeavours.” According to Truss, “in this school of thought” – postmodernist philosophy? – there is “no space for evidence”, because “truth and morality are all relative”.

It is surprising to hear that Leeds City council was such a hotbed of Foucauldianism, even in the 1980s. But then again, Truss speaks without any evidence: this is not a remotely accurate description of the French philosopher’s work. When Foucault writes about the relationship between “power” and “knowledge”, he is describing the ways that, historically, power has reinforced itself by shaping and controlling knowledge – which, he would say, is always produced within the context of power structures.

[…]

You can find a few Foucault iphone covers on Redbubble
Foucault – stylized iPhone Case & Cover

Designed by jaxxmc, Redbubble site, December 2020

Another case designed by nodeeperblue

Moore, Alison Downham (2019). The Historicity of Sexuality: Knowledge of the Past in the Emergence of Modern Sexual Science. Modern Intellectual History, 1-24.

DOI:10.1017/S147924431900026X

Open access

Abstract
From the very moment the concept of sexuality emerged in nineteenth-century European medical and psychiatric thought, it became a topic of historicization. This historicization formed a consistent habit of thought in many of the medical and psychiatric texts that first enunciated sexuality as a distinct field of meaning. Dialogue between doctors and the first historians of sexuality informed the emergence of both sexology and of the historiography of sexuality. This dialogue suggests a need to rethink the origins of sexual historiography, situating current historians within a continuous genealogy, rather than as transcendental observers marked by epistemological rupture from earlier biological theories of sexual evolution.

stuartelden's avatarProgressive Geographies

This was an exceptionally difficult term – probably the hardest I can remember in twenty-five years of working in universities. It was very hard to make any progress on this manuscript – the fourth and final book in this sequence of studies of Foucault’s career and writings, this time looking at 1962-69. 

As I mentioned in thelast updatesome of the work in Wales in the last days of summer was making a long list of things to check when home, back online, with my books and limited access to libraries. This gave a number of small things which I could tick off the list in relatively short periods of time, which does give some sense of progress, however small, when more consolidated periods of writing are harder to get. Warwick’s library was reopened for term, after a long period of closure, although you could order books late in…

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GLOBAL BIOPOWER MARKET RESEARCH REPORT WITH OPPORTUNITIES AND STRATEGIES TO BOOST GROWTH- COVID-19 IMPACT AND RECOVERY
Industry Research, 27-Oct-2020

Biopower is a term coined by French scholar, historian, and social theorist Michel Foucault. It relates to the practice of modern nation states and their regulation of their subjects through “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations”.

Based on the Biopower market development status, competitive landscape and development model in different regions of the world, this report is dedicated to providing niche markets, potential risks and comprehensive competitive strategy analysis in different fields. From the competitive advantages of different types of products and services, the development opportunities and consumption characteristics and structure analysis of the downstream application fields are all analyzed in detail. To Boost Growth during the epidemic era, this report analyzes in detail for the potential risks and opportunities which can be focused on.

In Chapter 2.4 of the report, we share our perspectives for the impact of COVID-19 from the long and short term.
In chapter 3.4, we provide the influence of the crisis on the industry chain, especially for marketing channels.
In chapters 8-13, we update the timely industry economic revitalization plan of the country-wise government.