Foucault News

Tivadar Vervoort, “Nous Sommes Tous Néokantiens”: Foucault, Lukács, and the Critique of Social Forms, HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 2025 15:1, 209-241

Abstract
In his introduction to Canguilhem’s Le normal et le pathologique, Michel Foucault claims that the “question of Enlightenment” has been taken up differently in the German and French philosophical traditions. Nevertheless, Foucault signals a “correspondence” between the works of Georg Lukács and the Frankfurt School, on the one hand, and the French epistemologists (including himself), on the other. In this article, I deepen this correspondence by assessing Foucault’s and Lukács’s respective relations to the neo-Kantian problem of the form and content of knowledge. In theorizing the problem of reification, Lukács mobilizes Emil Lask’s understanding of the concept “form of objectivity.” He starts from Lask’s unification of the form and content of knowledge by suggesting that the commodity form emerges as the form of objectivity that constitutes both objects and subjects of knowledge in capitalist societies. I show that Foucault’s use of the notions episteme, historical a priori, and regime of truth shares the neo-Kantian concern with of the content of knowledge. By arguing that Foucault’s critique of the philosophical anthropology underlying Marxism does not apply to Lukács’s neo-Kantianism, I make room for considering both of their philosophical strategies as a “critique of social forms.”

Winsky, N. and Onusseit, C. (2025), The Rickshaw as In-Between: Heterotopias and Social Participation in Aging. Population, Space and Place, 31: e70068.
https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.70068

ABSTRACT
As the population aged 65 and older significantly increases, understanding the dynamics within nursing homes becomes crucial. Residents often face loneliness upon entering these facilities, experiencing a disconnection from their previous lives and parts of society. The initiative “Cycling Without Age” fosters reconnection through volunteer-led rickshaw rides. This study conceptualizes the rickshaw as an in-between space, expanding on Foucault’s notion of heterotopia. By examining the interplay between nursing homes as heterotopic sites and the rickshaw as an intermediary space, this study draws on 24 qualitative interviews with volunteers, highlighting how the interactions between pilots and passengers enhance social engagement and challenge existing societal structures such as spatial exclusion. Our theoretical-conceptual contribution engages in a ludic dialogue between Foucault’s concept of heterotopias and our empirical material, speculating on the role that the rickshaw, as a mobile, micro-scale in-between space, can play between the heterotopic nursing home and the non-heterotopic rest of space.

Allsobrook, C. (2025). The Structural Violence of Imperial Trusteeship in Postcolonial Governmentality. African Studies, 1–20.
https://doi.org/10.1080/00020184.2025.2536036

ABSTRACT
The article considers how structural violence in African polities has displaced sovereign agency and responsibility for its harmful effects by extending imperial practices of trusteeship in postcolonial governmentality. It explains how, with liberation, decolonisation and political independence, imperial practices of indirect rule and informal empire – legitimised with reference to trusteeship – have resulted in practices of domination, which are instantiated in structural violence. Trusteeship formally displaces the direct agency of coercive imperial colonisation, first, by disguising it as protection and development assistance, and second, by setting up proxy domestic political agents to stand in for absent imperial sovereignty. I analyse these dynamics with reference to Foucault’s account of governmentality and his theories of power to explain African complicity with empire. I then review and critique Mbembe’s analysis of necropolitics in the postcolony to explain a weakness in his account, which leads him to misconstrue these conflicts in terms of sovereign power, thereby misrepresenting the agency of the consequent African victims of postcolonial structural violence, without pointing to any way out. To correct this misunderstanding, and to identify a basis for emancipatory agency in Africa, I turn to Biko’s critical analysis of Black governmentality under apartheid, which points forward to postcolonial empowerment.

KEYWORDS:
structural violence, postcolonial governmentality, necropolitics, biopower, disciplinary power, trusteeship

Mu, Y., & Vásquez, C. (2025). “Waste-sorting is the new fashion”: waste, power, and the semiotic landscape. Social Semiotics, 1–22.
https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2025.2543085

ABSTRACT
This study examines how the Chinese government uses multiple semiotic resources, in both online and offline contexts, to (re)shape citizens’ behaviors and construct knowledge about wastesorting under the recent national waste-sorting policy. Informed by Foucault’s notion of governmentality, we show how governmental strategies operate at the level of both material artifacts (e.g. rubbish bins in one city) as well as in national media reports (i.e. news articles from state-sponsored news websites). By integrating geosemiotics with multimodal critical discourse analysis, we demonstrate how rubbish bins visually, interactively, and spatially construct wastesorting as “fashionable” public behavior. At the same time, online news media reports complement these artifacts by highlighting certain elements of the new bins (e.g. CCTV cameras and card-swiping systems) and by capturing strategic moments of residents using the bins, thus supporting and promoting actions that are aligned with national policy.

KEYWORDS:
Semiotic landscape, Foucauldian power, multimodality, waste