Foucault News

Shannon Winnubst, The many lives of fungibility: anti-blackness in neoliberal times (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

29 May 2020

Shannon Winnubst, The many lives of fungibility: anti-blackness in neoliberal times
(2020) Journal of Gender Studies, 29 (1), pp. 102-112.
https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2019.1692193

Abstract
This article maps the many lives of the concept of fungibility in contemporary theories of both blackness and neoliberalism. Framed by the 2018 political chants across the US against ‘white supremacy’, the article unravels how neoliberalism obfuscates the singular vector of anti-blackness that grounds the colonial ontology of liberalism, modernity, and global capitalism. By tracing the concept of fungibility through the work of Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, and C. Riley Snorton, the article shows how fungibility works both ontologically and semiotically. The article then tracks fungibility through the neoliberal episteme, as derived from Michel Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics, to expose how the neoliberal episteme bastardizes the concepts of social difference into clever accoutrement, thereby eroding the capacity of neoliberal subjects to grasp the persistent ontology of anti-blackness. While the article does not track these dynamics strictly along the trajectories of bio/necropolitics, the foundational role of black death in the colonial ontology of liberalism, modernity, and global capitalism is precisely what the neoliberal episteme obfuscates; by approaching neoliberalism, through Foucault, as the birthing of biopolitics, we see how the division and tensions between biopolitics and necropolitics are racialized. Put more stridently, neoliberalism enables the biopolitical celebration of both life and diversity as values in and of themselves, without any concern for the histories of specific forms of life and specific forms of difference. In this vein, necropolitics calls out the foundational and persistent role of anti-blackness in the colonial ontology of liberalism that neoliberalism intensifies. This leads to the article’s concluding demand that white subjects must countenance fungibility in its ontological and semiotic iterations, speculating that we may be entering a historical moment when this might occur. © 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
Anti-blackness; colonial ontology; diversity; feminist; fungibility; gender; neoliberalism; racialization; radical black studies

Reflections on writing and hopes for a post Covid-19 world

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

28 May 2020

Editor: A few of my thoughts from lockdown in Australia.

Refracted Input

This post was originally intended as a bare-bones response to Bruno Latour’s challenge to list hopes for change emerging out of the coronavirus crisis, but ended up being prefaced by a preamble on my difficulties with writing and a reflection on my current context.

For quite some time, I have suffered (and I use the word advisedly) from the realisation that anything I have to say has already been said – and often far better by someone else. As an academic trained in the best traditions of high modernism, this incapacity to maintain a position at the forefront of the bleeding edge avant-garde has a stifling effect, muzzling one into a helpless silence. It is a recipe for endless disappointment, as one finds, in an overpopulated public forum, that one seemingly brilliant idea after another has already been articulated by someone else. Added to this is that other Enlightenment ideal…

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A Foucauldian enquiry in the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic management (Critique in Times of Coronavirus) (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

28 May 2020

Gerasimos Kakoliris, A Foucauldian enquiry in the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic management (Critique in Times of Coronavirus)
Critical Legal Thinking— Law and the Political — • 11 May 2020

Is the substantially global management of the coronavirus pandemic a novelty or would it be possible to trace its origin in an earlier order of things? Could the specific model selected for the governance of the ongoing pandemic be subjected to a certain genealogy? According to the text on “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (1971), Michel Foucault defines genealogy, or otherwise “effective” history, as a method of analysis of the descent, or the emergence of a specific practice. Referring to descent in the context of Foucauldian genealogy entails analysing the nexus of complex, multiple and multiform relations of power and knowledge at the origin of a given practice.

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Karsten Schubert, Freedom as critique: Foucault beyond anarchism (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

27 May 2020

Schubert, Karsten (2020): Freedom as critique: Foucault beyond anarchism. Philosophy & Social Criticism. First Published May 7, 2020
DOI: 10.1177/0191453720917733

Authors note: This contains some of the core arguments of my German book Freiheit als Kritik and makes them finally available in English.

Heliana de Barros Conde Rodrigues, Michel Foucault au Brésil: Présence, effets, résonances – Harmattan, 2020

23 May 2020

Progressive Geographies

Heliana de Barros Conde Rodrigues, Michel Foucault au Brésil: Présence, effets, résonances – Harmattan, 2020 This is a translation of a Portguese study which I’ve mentioned here before – Ensaios sobre Michel Foucault no Brasil: Presença, efeitos, ressonâncias (Lamparina 2016).

Thanks to Adalbert Saurma for the link.

L’ouvrage enquête sur les cinq visites de Michel Foucault au Brésil, entre 1965 et 1976. Le philosophe visita alors São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Salvador, Recife et Belém. Michel Foucault a laissé une trace profonde dans le Brésil de la dictature militaire. Les objectifs de cette recherche comprennent une audiographie de la présence du Foucault-corps au Brésil, ainsi qu’une analyse critique de la primauté conférée à quelques procédures, catégories, problématiques et concepts foucaldiens par les intellectuels et militants brésiliens.

The original book was reviewed by Marcelo Hoffman as In the Shadow of Dictatorship: Foucault in Brazil at the Theory, Culture &…

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Christopher Collstedt, Towards a biopolitics of the victimised body: Creating assault as a crime against health and life, c. 1945–1965 (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

21 May 2020

Christopher Collstedt, Towards a biopolitics of the victimised body: Creating assault as a crime against health and life, c. 1945–1965 (2020) Scandinavian Journal of History, 45 (1), pp. 1-24.
https://doi.org/10.1080/03468755.2019.1596833

Open access

Abstract
This article discusses the creation of assault as a crime against health and life as this discursive process is expressed through Swedish laws, legislative discussions, and legal practice from 1945 to 1965. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s theoretical reflections on biopolitics and sociologist Thomas Lemke’s outline to a analytics of biopolitics, the article argues that a most central component in the genealogy of assault as a crime against health and life was a shift in the first post-war decades, from a predominant legal idealistic paradigm within Swedish jurisprudence, by which assault was defined as a crime against bodily integrity, to a legal realistic epistemology, imbued with the scientific knowledge and empirical ‘truth’-producing practices of modern medicine. As an effect, new discourses around the victimized body emerged, through which prevailing knowledges and ‘truths’ around violent crime and its effects were challenged and marginalized. In this discursive process, the 19th-century legal-moral category of violent crimes finally collapsed into the overarching legal category prescribed by Brottsbalken (1965) as ‘crimes against health and life’. Consequently, the victimized body was deprived of all meaning but ‘life’ and thus created as a biopolitical space, available to series of life-governing interventions and regulatory practices. © 2019, © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
biopolitics; body; victims of violence

Anna Krakus and Cristina Vatulescu, “Foucault in Poland: A Secret Archive”, Diacritics, 2020 (open access at present)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

20 May 2020

Progressive Geographies

front_cover Anna Krakus and Cristina Vatulescu, “Foucault in Poland: A Secret Archive“, Diacritics, Vol 47 No 2, 2020.

It seems to be open access at present. It’s a great piece on an important year in Foucault’s life – I was lucky enough to see a version before publication.

Michel Foucault relished telling a Cold War story: in 1959, the Polish secret police “trapped him by using a young translator” and then “demanded his departure” from Poland, where he had arrived less than a year before as director of the French Cultural Center. This article investigates the archival traces surrounding this honey trap story, as well as the many baffling and instructive archival silences. Our research in French and Polish archives, including the former secret police archives, tracks the vertiginous relationships between documents, events, non-events, rumors, and ellipses. We use the Foucault in (and especially out of) Poland story…

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Fella Benabed, Marine heterotopia and odyssean nomadism in Malika Mokeddem’s N’zid (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

20 May 2020

Fella Benabed, Marine heterotopia and odyssean nomadism in Malika Mokeddem’s N’zid (2020) Journal of North African Studies, 25 (1), pp. 100-115.
https://doi.org/10.1080/13629387.2018.1528151

Abstract
Malika Mokeddem’s N’zid is a Mediterranean odyssey in which the ship is a heterotopia of emancipation from patriarchal society and dogmatic sedentariness. For Michel Foucault, ‘heterotopia’ is a real place that subverts ‘normalized cultural sites’; the ship is the heterotopia par excellence for being an immense storehouse of imagination and adventure. The autofictional novel N’zid can be read from the lens of blue ecocriticism because the Mediterranean Sea and the ship constitute the protagonist’s place of liminal nomadism between the different spaces of her belonging wherein she abolishes frontier territoriality. When she wakes up in the middle of the sea, she discovers a facial hematoma but cannot remember what happened. It fades away as she pieces together fragments of her memory, learning that she was attacked by terrorists and that her lover disappeared. Sailing and drawing become her tools to nomadise literally and metaphorically, freeing herself from her shackles and become whole again. N’zid is hence a ‘scriptotherapy’ through which writing has a healing function. It is an internal odyssey for psychological reconstruction, whence the meaning of the title in Algerian Arabic: ‘I am born’ and ‘I go on’. The richness of this novel lies in the wealth of literary theories and intertextual references from which Mokeddem draws. © 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
deteriterrorialisation; Heterotopia; nomadism; rhizome; scriptotherapy; third space

Index Keywords
nomadic people, rhizome, territoriality

Erica Millar, Abortion stigma as a social process (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

19 May 2020

Erica Millar, Abortion stigma as a social process (2020) Women’s Studies International Forum, 78, art. no. 102328.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2019.102328

Open access

Abstract
‘Abortion stigma’ has become a critical concept in abortion scholarship, activism, policy and broader discourse. The concept of abortion stigma is, however, poorly defined and scholarship tends to use the concept in ways that reaffirm the individual as its source and location. The majority of research frames abortion stigma as a set of values, beliefs and judgements that flow from stigmatisers to the stigmatised, who are then believed to possess a negatively-valued identity. This article reorients abortion stigma scholarship away from Goffman to Foucault, arguing that abortion stigma should be reframed as a classificatory form of power that works through designating relations of difference. Stigma is one of many processes through which abortion is made intelligible and is contingent and contested. This reframing has implications for the type of questions that scholars can and must ask when examining abortion stigma. © 2019 Elsevier Ltd

Author Keywords
Abortion; Identity; Power; Stigma

Index Keywords
abortion, conceptual framework, research, womens status

Michel Foucault, Confessions of the Flesh: History of Sexuality Volume IV, translated by Robert Hurley – Penguin January 2021

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

18 May 2020

Progressive Geographies

9781524748036 Michel Foucault, Confessions of the Flesh: History of Sexuality Volume IV, translated by Robert Hurley, edited by Frédéric Gros – Penguin January 2021

Long awaited news of the English translation of this text, first published in French in early 2018.

Brought to light at last–the fourth volume in the famous History of Sexuality series by one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, his final work, which he had completed, but not yet published, upon his death in 1984
Michel Foucault’s philosophy has made an indelible impact on Western thought, and his History of Sexuality series–which traces cultural and intellectual notions of sexuality, arguing that it is profoundly shaped by the power structures applied to it–is one of his most influential works. At the time of his death in 1984, he had completed–but not yet edited or published–the fourth volume, which posits that the origins of totalitarian…

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