Foucault News

The Archaeology of Foucault update 3: Early versions of some texts, the Port-Royal Grammar, Foucault’s work on literature, Bataille and Nietzsche, and a writing break in Wales

Clare O'Farrell

9 October 2020

The view back from the Devil’s Staircase

The valley road to the Devil’s Staircase

A lot of the time recently has been spent revisingThe Early Foucault, but that is nowdone, and in the run-up to term I spent a bit of time onthis manuscript. Ordinarily I’d have had to spend this time preparing teaching, but this coming academic year is very different and so I’ve not been able to do this. It was only a few days before term started that I was definitively told what I’d be teaching, which is mainly to run seminars on one of our big undergraduate modules on the history of political thought. Some seminars are in person, and some online. I’ve taught on this module before, but not for almost twenty years… My own module on European Political Theory is being…

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From liberalism to biopolitics: investigating the Norwegian government’s two responses to Covid-19 (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

4 October 2020

Lars Erik Løvaas Gjerde (2020) From liberalism to biopolitics: investigating the Norwegian government’s two responses to Covid-19, European Societies, DOI:10.1080/14616696.2020.1824003

Open access

Abstract
In this text, I investigate the Norwegian government’s two responses to the Covid-19 pandemic, utilizing a Foucauldian discourse analysis. The pandemic forces us to ask questions about political leadership – about how successful political programmes appear to be, as well as the rationalities underpinning them. I will focus upon the latter and find the Norwegian government to have initially articulated a liberal rationality that was later replaced by a biopolitical one. The former entails perceiving the pandemic as a phenomenon to be handled through a laissez-faire approach, by leaving things free to run their natural course. The latter revolves around discarding this liberalism in favour of an interventionist approach that restricts freedoms and economic progress in favour of safeguarding the health of the population. I investigate the links between the laissez-faire discourse and the government’s initial hesitation, as well as the biopolitical discourse and the draconian measures and contradictions between these two approaches.

KEYWORDS:
Biopolitics, Covid-19, discourse analysis, liberalism

Foucault Studies: New issue (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

30 September 2020

Foucault Studies, Vol 1 No 28 (2020): Number 28, September 2020

The editors of Foucault Studies are pleased to publish this issue containing a review symposium of Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson’s “Genealogies of Terrorism” as well as four original articles and three book reviews.

Editorial
Sverre Raffnsøe et al.

Review Symposium
Preface to Symposium on Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson’s “Genealogies of Terrorism”
Colin Koopman

Examining Genealogy as Engaged Critique
Samir Haddad

Genealogy, Terrorism, and the “Relays” of Thought
Sarah K. Hansen

Situating Genealogies of Terrorism
Cressida J. Heyes

Genealogy as Multiplicity, Contestation, and Relay: Response to Samir Haddad, Sarah Hansen, and Cressida Heyes
Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson

Articles
The carceral existence of social work academics: a Foucauldian analysis of social work education in English universities
Diane Simpson, Sarah Amsler

On the Ways of Writing the History of the State
Eli B. Lichtenstein

Foucault On Psychoanalysis: Missed Encounter or Gordian Knot?
Mark G. E. Kelly

Parrhesia and the ethics of public service – towards a genealogy of the bureaucrat as frank counsellor
Edward Barratt

Review Essay
Foucault on Drugs: The Personal, the Ethical and the Political in Foucault in California
Kurt Borg

Book Reviews
Marcelo Hoffman (special ed.), Foucault and the Politics of Resistance in Brazil. The Carceral Notebooks 13. (2017-2018). pp. 230. http://www.thecarceral.org/journal-vol13.html.
Pedro Mauricio Garcia Dotto

C. Heike Schotten, Queer Terror: Life, Death, and Desire in the Settler Colony. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). 272 pp. ISBN: 9780231187473.
Yin-An Chen

Tom Bentley, Settler state apologies and the elusiveness of forgiveness: The purification ritual that does not purify (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

30 September 2020

Tom Bentley, Settler state apologies and the elusiveness of forgiveness: The purification ritual that does not purify (2020) Contemporary Political Theory, 19 (3), pp. 381-403.
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-019-00356-6

Open access

Abstract
Focusing on Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s 2008 apology to the Stolen Generations, this article asks: can colonial-settler states obtain forgiveness through political apologies? The article first defends Jacques Derrida’s observation that political apologies resemble the Christian practice of confession. In doing so, it subsequently draws on Michel Foucault’s (1979) detailed treatise on confession in order to assess the potential for absolution. For Foucault, the process of engaging in exhaustive truth-telling of sin before a demarcated authority provides a route to such atonement. By contrast, any potential unburdening of sin is lost when there is either no adequate authority to coax the confession or if the confession is less than full. The problem for the settler state is that it is predisposed to re-evoking the imaginary of the settler nation and Westphalian sovereignty in the very process of apologising. Consequently, there is no scope to submit before a higher sovereign body and any truth-telling is necessarily partial. As such, the central argument is that forgiveness for the settler state must remain elusive. The political opportunities arising from this for Indigenous peoples are discussed in the final section. © 2019, Springer Nature Limited.

Author Keywords
Australia; confession; forgiveness; political apology; settler colonialism; Stolen Generations

Kathryn Gomersall, Imposition to agonism: Voluntary poverty alleviation resettlement in rural China (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

28 September 2020

Kathryn Gomersall, Imposition to agonism: Voluntary poverty alleviation resettlement in rural China (2020) Political Geography, 82, art. no. 102250.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102250

Abstract
Implementation of voluntary Poverty Alleviation Resettlement (PAR) in Shanxi Province, rural China is a function of the democratic processes of village governance under the Organic Law of Villages Committees and Assemblies. Villages consult with their constituent households on the decision to resettle and aspects of the process of rebuilding homes and livelihood adaptations. This article analyses the participatory process through an analytic of government that exposes the contingency of local governance as liberal techniques are negotiated amongst historical illiberal governance norms. Processes of subjection during resettlement decision making and implementation defy a liberal/illiberal binary as the effects of power during governance can have a duel nature. These effects produce dialectical tensions that the local Party-state draws on to smooth consent for their political economic goals. Villagers in response draw on multiple political and economic subjectivities to reposition themselves and contest intersubjective norms that define relations between governor and governed. Contestation is most aptly defined as agonism which represents the permanent provocation (Foucault, 1982) between liberal and illiberal governance and the potential for equitable resettlement outcomes. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd

Author Keywords
Agonism; China; Democratic governance; Dialectics; Governmentality; Resettlement

Index Keywords
local government, political economy, poverty alleviation, rural area; China, Shanxi

François Ewald, The Birth of Solidarity. The History of the French Welfare State (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

26 September 2020

François Ewald, The Birth of Solidarity. The History of the French Welfare State, Duke University Press, Editor: Melinda Cooper, Translator: Timothy Scott Johnson, 2020

François Ewald’s landmark The Birth of Solidarity—first published in French in 1986, revised in 1996, with the revised edition appearing here in English for the first time—is one of the most important historical and philosophical studies of the rise of the welfare state. Theorizing the origins of social insurance, Ewald shows how the growing problem of industrial accidents in France throughout the nineteenth century tested the limits of classical liberalism and its notions of individual responsibility. As workers and capitalists confronted each other over the problem of workplace accidents, they transformed the older practice of commercial insurance into an instrument of state intervention, thereby creating an entirely new conception of law, the state, and social solidarity. What emerged was a new system of social insurance guaranteed by the state. The Birth of Solidarity is a classic work of social and political theory that will appeal to all those interested in labor power, the making and dismantling of the welfare state, and Foucauldian notions of governmentality, security, risk, and the limits of liberalism.

François Ewald is International Research Fellow at the University of Connecticut School of Law, chair of the Scientific Committee of the Université de l’Assurance, and the author and coeditor of several books in French.

Melinda Cooper is Professor of Sociology at the Australian National University.

Timothy Scott Johnson is Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi.

Michel Foucault, Political Spirituality as the Will for Alterity: An Interview with the Nouvel Observateur (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

25 September 2020

Michel Foucault, Political Spirituality as the Will for Alterity: An Interview with the Nouvel Observateur. Critical Inquiry Volume 47, Number 1, 2020. Translated and introduced by Sabina Vaccarino Bremner.

Abstract
An interview with Michel Foucault in 1979 that was never published during his lifetime and was recently rediscovered in the archives. The interview, appearing for the first time in English and in its complete form, marks one of Foucault’s final public discussions of the contentious topic of the Iranian Revolution. In particular, Foucault clarifies what he means by “political spirituality” and addresses the respective relations between religion, revolution, and self-transformation.

Biopolitical bordering: Enacting populations as intelligible objects of government (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

24 September 2020

Scheel, S.
Biopolitical bordering: Enacting populations as intelligible objects of government (2020) European Journal of Social Theory, 23 (4), pp. 571-590.

DOI: 10.1177/1368431019900096

Open access

Abstract
Since Foucault introduced the notion of biopolitics, it has been fiercely debated—usually in highly generalized terms—how to interpret and use this concept. This article argues that these discussions need to be situated, as biopolitics have features that do not travel from one site to the next. This becomes apparent if we attend to an aspect of biopolitics that has only received scant attention so far: the knowledge practices required to constitute populations as intelligible objects of government. To illustrate this point, the article focuses on processes of biopolitical bordering: the delineation of the target population that is to be known via statistical practices. Drawing on the example of Estonia I show that methodological decisions involved in this work have important biopolitical implications as they affect the size and composition of the population, thus shaping the design of programmes of government aiming at its regulation. © The Author(s) 2020.

Author Keywords
Biopolitics; governmentality; performativity; politics of method; statistics

“I’m all that stands between them and chaos:” A monstrous way of ruling in A Song of Ice and Fire (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

22 September 2020

Kovács, G.
“I’m all that stands between them and chaos:” A monstrous way of ruling in A Song of Ice and Fire (2020) Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 7 (1), art. no. 70.

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-020-00562-3

Open access

Abstract
The article explores Tyrion Lannister’s rule in King’s Landing in the second volume of A Song of Ice and Fire books, A Clash of Kings. In the reception of ASOIAF and the TV show Game of Thrones, Tyrion was considered one of the best rulers, and the TV show ended by making him Hand to a king who delegated the greatest part of ruling to him. The analysis is based on Foucault’s notion of monstrosity in power, which is characterized by a monstrous conduct and includes the excess and potential abuse of power. The article argues that monstrosity in his rule reveals deeper layers in Tyrion’s personality, which is initially suggested to be defined by morality. The article also comes to the conclusion that his morality limits the scope of his monstrous methods, which eventually leads to his fall from power. © 2020, The Author(s).

The ethical and epistemological pitfalls of translating phylogenetic HIV testing: from patient-centered care to surveillance (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

20 September 2020

Sandset, T.
The ethical and epistemological pitfalls of translating phylogenetic HIV testing: from patient-centered care to surveillance (2020) Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 7 (1), art. no. 19.

DOI: 10.1057/s41599-020-0522-4

Abstract
In both HIV science and public health policy, efforts to end the HIV epidemic are increasingly focusing on molecular HIV surveillance as a helpful tool for identifying, intervening in and controlling the disease. HIV surveillance is meant to identify clusters of genetically similar viral strains in near real-time in communities and areas where transmissions occur, and then to intervene by means of enhanced public health approaches. This article critically engages with how molecular HIV surveillance—a practice and technology portrayed as a benign public health intervention—empties and purifies many of the social and political contexts of HIV transmissions. McClelland et al. (Crit Public Health 1–7, 2019) see the rise of molecular HIV surveillance as a form of “repurposing” of clinical phylogenetic testing done in the context of HIV care. In this article, I argue that this so-called repurposing can be understood as a form of “translation”. Looking at how phylogenetic HIV testing has been translated from clinical, patient-centered use to a form of molecular HIV surveillance, I seek to map some of the potential ethical and epistemological pitfalls of such a translational process. More specifically, I look at the unintended consequences of translating a particular evidence-based practice—phylogenetic HIV testing—from one usage to another. To this end, I engage with Michel Foucault and his work on the biopower of medicine, exploring how such power disciplines subjects into undergoing a form of medical surveillance that influences norms and behaviors. Ultimately, I argue that the translation of phylogenetic testing from patient-centered care in the clinic to a form of epidemiological surveillance needs to be critically examined in order to avoid ethical and potentially detrimental consequences for HIV-affected communities. © 2020, The Author(s).