Foucault News

Willmott, Kyle. 2020. From self-government to government of the self: Fiscal subjectivity, Indigenous governance and the politics of transparency. Critical Social Policy, 40(3): 471-491.

DOI: 10.1177/0261018319857169

Abstract
In 2013 the Canadian Parliament passed the First Nations Financial Transparency Act (FNFTA). Subject to immediate controversy, the law generated legal and political resistance from Indigenous leaders and scholars. The law requires First Nations governments to post audited consolidated financial statements and the salaries of chiefs and councillors online for public consumption. The article traces the use of transparency as a technology of government to examine how disclosure acts as an organizing mechanism of commensuration and moral scrutiny. The article then shows how transparency and disclosure was directed to rescale critique of the state away from the Canadian government, and toward First Nations governments. The article concludes by examining how bureaucrats envisioned how Indigenous peoples would use transparency and disclosure to reform their political conducts into that of a calculating taxpayer citizenship.

Keywords
audit, settler colonialism, First Nations, governmentality, indigeneity

Jordan Jochim, Aristotle, Tyranny, and the Small-Souled Subject (2020) Political Theory, 48 (2), pp. 169-191.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591719851802

Abstract
Political theorists converge in identifying modern techniques of domination as habit-formative and psychologically invasive, in contrast to earlier, more blatantly coercive forms of repression. Putting Aristotle on tyranny in conversation with Michel Foucault on subject formation, this article argues for continuity across the pre- and postmodern divide. Through a close reading of the “three heads of tyranny” in Politics 5.11 (1314a13-29)—those being the tyrant’s efforts to form subjects who (1) have small thoughts (2) are distrustful of one another, and (3) are incapable of action—I argue that central to Aristotle’s account of tyrannical domination is how tyrants cultivate the ethical vice of “small-souledness” (Nicomachean Ethics 1123b7), thus producing subjects with humbled desires for a proportionate distribution of political power. This article deepens our appreciation of the social and psychological registers of Aristotle’s theorization of domination and gives reasons for continuing to take Aristotle’s insights into tyranny seriously today. © The Author(s) 2019.

Author Keywords
Aristotle; desire; domination; Foucault; justice; tyranny

Laughlin, C.
Transcendental meditation’s tipping point: the allure of celebrity on the American spiritual marketplace
(2020) Popular Communication, 18 (2), pp. 108-120.

DOI: 10.1080/15405702.2019.1634810

Abstract
Since 2005, the film director David Lynch has been the most visible and vocal proponent for the spread of Transcendental Meditation (TM), a practice brought to the United States by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the late 1950s. This paper analyzes the public-facing operations: website, books, and celebrity benefit concerts, through which the David Lynch Foundation interacts with its American audience and charts two moves that the David Lynch Foundation has made in order to market TM. First, I assert that they have positioned TM as a technique rather than a spiritual practice and I understand this through Foucault’s theory of techné. Second, I argue that they have leveraged the auracular quality of celebrity as a modality through which to brand TM for the spiritual consumer. Ultimately, I made claims on how these moves represent a shift in how American spiritual seekers are understood and marketed to in popular culture. © 2019, © 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Author Keywords
branding; celebrity; marketing; religion; spirituality; Transcendental meditation

Meneses, K.C.
L’Arche, a Radical Reversal: Fearless Dialogue between Foucault and Vanier with the New Testament
(2020) Journal of Disability and Religion, 24 (2), pp. 151-173.

DOI: 10.1080/23312521.2020.1718571

Abstract
Today many of us are unaware and perhaps even deny the fact that our ideas, decisions, and choices are driven by fear whether obvious or subtle. In his seminal book, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in an Age of Reason, Michel Foucault examines the archeology of madness wherein he illuminates how fear of the other has come to shape society’s moral compass toward persons adjudged as lamentable, engendering certain social constructs that have given shape to what he called the mutation of confinement. In other words, Foucault highlights the historical and cultural turning points that gave rise to the societal belief that necessitates the establishment of confinement. To “cage” people who are different from the composite identity position held by those unmarked by stigmatized identifiers—those who fall outside the “norm”—is perceived as a meaningful exercise toward the greater good and security of society. Juxtaposed with society’s “civilized” attitude toward persons regarded as lamentable and thus worthy of confinement is Jean Vanier’s understanding of the value and dignity of each person—a radical conviction that gave rise to L’Arche, a revolutionary attempt to dismantle the walls of fear within, between, and among us.

In what follows, Jean Vanier’s understanding of fear will be comparatively analyzed in relation to the dominant societal notion of fear in order to draw attention to the practical ways in which these ideas have consequences in L’Arche and society as a whole. Underlying this attempt is the contention that Vanier’s notion of fear entails a radical reversal of the “civilized norm” of confinement. This article proceeds in three parts and will offer a theological reflection which could serve as a catalyst for a world that remains enveloped with fear of the other, particularly those deemed different and deviant. © 2020, © 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Author Keywords
Deafness; disability; new testament; social inclusion; vulnerability