An “Art of living research group” event at the New University of Lisbon, focusing on a foucaultian perspective on the pandemic will take place at 18:00h on 6 May 2020.
The webinar” is free and available after registration at: art.of.living.researchgroup@gmail.com
Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group (1970–1980), edited by Kevin Thompson and Perry Zurn, University of Minnesota Press, December 2020
Founded by Michel Foucault and others in 1970–71, the Prisons Information Group (GIP) circulated information about the inhumane conditions within the French prison system. Intolerable makes available for the first time in English a fully annotated compilation of materials produced by the GIP during its brief but influential existence, including an exclusive new interview with GIP member Hélène Cixous and writings by Gilles Deleuze and Jean Genet.
These archival documents—public announcements, manifestos, reports, pamphlets, interventions, press conference statements, interviews, and round table discussions—trace the GIP’s establishment in post-1968 political turmoil, the new models of social activism it pioneered, the prison revolts it supported across France, and the retrospective assessments that followed its denouement. At the same time, Intolerable offers a rich, concrete exploration of Foucault’s…
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Anne Sauka (2020). The Nature of Our Becoming: Genealogical Perspectives. Le Foucaldien, 6(1), 4.
https://doi.org/10.16995/lefou.71 [Note: In 2022, Le foucaldien relaunched as Genealogy+Critique.]
Open access
Abstract
In the light of Philipp Sarasin’s work in Darwin und Foucault: Genealogie und Geschichte im Zeitalter der Biologie, the article delineates a genealogically articulated naturally produced culture and a cultured nature and discusses the genealogical implications of a carnal, becoming self in a world that could rightly be justified “as an aesthetical phenomenon.” The article demonstrates the historicity and processual materiality as a conceptual platform for a combination of the notions of experienced carnality and a socially constructed body, demonstrating such a historically embedded carnal body as a binding agent for the “social constructivist” and “biologist” approaches in sciences. Thus, the article builds a framework for the articulation of senseful, processual materiality on the backdrop of a nature-culture continuum via genealogy, suggesting the necessity for change of tone in the communication of human and life sciences via the understanding of a culturally endowed biology.
Keywords: genealogy, nature, culture, carnal body, becoming
The second part of my interview with Jonas Knatz and Anne Schult for the Journal of History of Ideas blog is now available – “Foucault Was Always Much More Circumspect”: Stuart Elden on Foucault’s Politics and the Rediscovery of His Early Years
In this part I discuss Foucault’s political activism, the relation of lecture courses and notes to his publications, his collaborative research projects, working with archives and how I use this blog. The final chapter discusses the research for The Early Foucault. Part 1 of the interview is here.
Daniele Lorenzini and Martina Tazzioli, Critique without ontology Genealogy, collective subjects and the deadlocks of evidence, Radical Philosophy, 2.07 (Spring 2020)
Open access
In the past few years, the number of migrant deaths in the Mediterranean Sea has dramatically increased due to the strengthening of border controls and a deliberate politics of migration containment put into place by the EU in cooperation with third countries. In 2018, according to UN Refugee Agency [UNHCR] estimations, an average of six migrants died at sea every day, trying to cross the Mediterranean from Libya. These figures do not take into account the so-called ‘ghost shipwrecks’, that is, the number of people who died in ships that simply sank without being detected by the authorities. During these years, the Mediterranean Sea as a space of governmentality has been the object of multiple readjustments.
[…]
Our aim in this paper is to defend, develop and redeploy this specific, Nietzschean-Foucauldian mode of critique. In fact, the idea that (debunking) critique is pointless and that it should be replaced by the task of bringing evidence, with a view to describing (and possibly denouncing) things as they are, risks, we argue, obscuring the crucial role that critique can still play in contemporary society as a movement of contestation of the regimes of truth that govern us – and of transformation of the truth-power-subjects nexus on which they rely.
[…]
Editor: I’m constantly surprised by the contexts in which Foucault’s name pops up.
Sailing as an essential activity
Published on April 30th, 2020
by Darrell Nicholson, Practical Sailor, Scuttlbutt Sailing news (Florida, USA)
Let’s take away all the boats. Not the ships engaged in essential commerce, not the barges hauling goods, not the net boats catching fish. Keep those. And the Navy, of course, keep that. But all the rest can go.
Now, imagine as we look out over the waterfront we see no skiffs on the bay, no dinghies along the shore, no sloops or schooners on a sunset sail. This arrangement, if it persists, could have dire consequences—at least if you believe French philosopher Michel Foucault:
“In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure and the police take the place of pirates.”
Some, like Pompey the Great (as quoted by Plutarch), put sailing above even life itself. “To sail is necessary; to live is not.”
[…]
As summer fast approaches and COVID-19 persists as a threat, coastal communities, sailing clubs, schools, and camps around the country are asking the same question: Must our boating activities be curtailed, and if they are to continue, what measures are necessary to ensure public health?
The situation is changing, but at the time of this writing, the boat ramps around our homeport in Sarasota, Florida were opening up again. All state municipalities have banned gatherings of boaters on sandbars and on-the-water events that might draw a crowd—although some impromptu two-boat “regattas” will likely spring up (as they tend to do whenever another sail appears on the horizon).
[…]
Philipp Sarasin, Understanding the Coronavirus Pandemic with Foucault?, G+C Blog, March 31, 2020
https://blog.genealogy-critique.net/essays/254/understanding-corona-with-foucault
Open access
It looks like a biopolitical dream: governments, advised by physicians, impose pandemic dictatorship on entire populations. Getting rid of all democratic obstacles under the pretext of “health,” even “survival,” they are finally able to govern the population as they have, more or less openly, always done in modernity: as pure “biomass,” as “bare life” to be exploited. It is no coincidence that such notions are increasingly invoked by high theoreticians like Giorgio Agamben (who introduced the concept of “bare life” in contemporary political theory), but also here and there on the web in the works of those critical critics who purport to explain what is happening with “Foucault” in their toolbox. The notions of “biopower” and “biopolitics” are too seductive, they appear as catchwords of the hour in whose bright light the truth of governing in pandemic times is revealed.
But the problem is that to assert this is particularly implausible given, for instance, the U.S. government’s spectacular failure in times of Covid-19—and it has very little, if at all, to do with Foucault and his thought. While Michel Foucault coined the concept of “biopolitics,” he not only dropped it fairly quickly but also developed three models of thought with regard to three infectious diseases, which help us better understand government in the face of a “pandemic” than the semantic cudgel that is “biopolitics.”
[…]
Joe Christopher, Sarath Ukwatte, Prem Yapa,
How do government policies influence the governance paradigm of Australian public universities?: An historical analysis
(2020) Journal of Management History, 26 (2), pp. 231-248.
Abstract
Purpose: This study aims to examine how government policies have influenced the governance paradigm of Australian public universities from a historical perspective. In doing so, it addresses current uncertainty on government-governance connectivity.
Design/methodology/approach: The study draws on Foucault’s concept of governmentality and governance and uses a developed framework of three constituents of governance to explore government–governance connectivity through a critical discourse analysis.
Findings: The findings reveal that government policies have influenced the three constituents of governance differently since 1823, resulting in three distinct governance discourses. In the third governance discourse, the findings reveal a deviation from policy directions towards corporate managerialism, resulting in a hybrid governance control environment. This scenario has arisen due to internal stakeholders continuing to be oriented towards the previous management cultures. Other factors include structural and legalistic obstacles to the implementation of corporate managerialism, validity of the underlying theory informing the policy directions towards corporate managerialism and doubts on the achievability of the market based reforms associated with corporate managerialism. The totality of these factors suggests a theory practice gap to be confirmed through further empirical research. There are also policy implications for policymakers to recognize the hybrid control environment and ascertain the risk the hybrid control environment poses towards the expected outcomes of corporate managerialism.
Research limitations/implications: The findings are limited to a critical discourse analysis of data from specific policies and journal publications on higher education and a developed framework of constituents of governance. Originality/value: The study is the first to examine government–governance connectivity in Australian public universities and also the first to introduce a three-constituent governance framework as a conduit to explore such studies. The findings contribute to the literature in identifying a theory-practice gap and offer opportunities for further research to confirm them.
Murphy, B. Regulating Undercover Policing: Subjects, Rights and Governmentality. Critical Criminology (2020). Published: 28 April 2020
Abstract
One of Foucault’s many unfinished projects was an analysis of the links between law, power and subjectivity. This article aims to make a contribution to Foucauldian jurisprudence by asking the question: in what ways does law construct identity? Using the regulation of undercover police investigation as an example, this article considers the intersection between three core rationalities within legal systems—rights, derogation and authorization—as critical moments in the governance of human beings, mobilized through legal architectures. Here, we find identities constructed, tested and applied in a multilateral relationship as intended and unintended consequences of the technologies of law. In this space, we not only see the mechanisms of law operating for the purpose of mobilizing power relations, but we also observe the myriad ways in which the architecture of law promoting rights operates as a system of governance that reveals rights claims as hollow, impeachable and ephemeral. The article concludes by considering rights, derogation and authorization as key components of Foucauldian jurisprudence—a distinct governmentality, where law articulates what rights are available and their associated mechanics, the mechanisms of adjudication and exception, and the formal modes of counter-conduct.
Foucault News 