Foucault News

News and resources on French thinker Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

La Scuola di filosofia di Trieste Speciale Coronavirus links (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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29 March 2020

Editor: Many thanks to Mauro Bertani for alerting me to this compendium of links on the La Scuola di filosofia di Trieste site.

Speciale Coronavirus

Segnaliamo qui una serie di articoli interessanti che riflettono sulla situazione che stiamo vivendo in questi giorni.

Interruptions: Cultivating Truth-Telling as Resistance with Pre-service Teachers (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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29 March 2020

Furman, C.E.
Interruptions: Cultivating Truth-Telling as Resistance with Pre-service Teachers
(2020) Studies in Philosophy and Education, 39 (1)

DOI: 10.1007/s11217-019-09681-0

Abstract
As ethical agents, teachers regularly must decide whether compliance to rules and norms is in the best interest of their students. Yet, teachers in the United States are educated to be passively obedient. In this paper, I argue that part of pre-service teacher education ought to learn ways of resisting. I describe one approach to verbal resistance, what Michel Foucault calls Truth-Telling. Building on a qualitative self-study with pre-service teachers, I explain how a form of team-teaching called Interruptions can promote Truth-Telling. © 2019, Springer Nature B.V.

Author Keywords
Foucault; Interruptions; Resistance; Teacher education; Truth-Telling

Geographers, sociologists, philosophers etc. on covid-19. List of references on the Progressive Geographies blog

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

28 March 2020

Editor: A very useful – and growing – list of references put together by Stuart Elden on the Progressive Geographies blog. I have now added a new “Pandemic” category to Foucault News.

Geographers, sociologists, philosophers etc. on covid-19

Several A few pieces by geographers, sociologists and philosophers – presented without commentary.

First posted 24 March 2020; last updated 27 March 2020. Thanks to those who have sent additional ones, especially Michael O’Rourke.

A much more extensive, chronologically ordered, and five-language list is available from The Thomas Project.

[…]

La mort sa mérite – Nicolas Drolc’s film of Serge Livrozet, now freely available (with English subtitles)

Clare O'Farrell

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27 March 2020

stuartelden's avatarProgressive Geographies

La mort sa mérite – Nicolas Drolc’s film of Serge Livrozet, is now freely available. Livrozet was involved in the Group d’information sur les prisons with Foucault, and then co-founded the Comité d’Action des Prisonniers. Nicolas previously directed the excellent Sur les toits.

LA MORT SE MÉRITE from LES FILMS FURAX on Vimeo.

Sur les toits is available on Youtube, and there is a symposium on it at the Antipode site, based on a screening and discussion at Warwick organised by Marijn Nieuwenhuis.

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Governance for global pandemics (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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27 March 2020

A. Chong, Governance for global pandemics, East Asia Forum: Economics, Politics and Public Policy in East Asia and the Pacific, 26 March 2020

Much of the public alarm triggered by the outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is greatly bound up with the management of cross-border security threats. COVID-19 resembles a 21st century medieval plague in terms of how little we understand its character and how vulnerable we are to its effects.
[…]

The general idea of observing the socially diseased from a central point is widely known in social science thanks to the work of Jeremy Bentham and Michel Foucault. The ‘panopticon’ is an idea that can be traced back to early modern prison surveillance architecture where prison cells are arrayed around a central towering guard post. This system was meant to instil fear in those prisoners being watched in their cells, while also ensuring that they develop self-vigilance.

Exile, Use, and Form-of-Life: On the Conclusion of Agamben’s Homo Sacer series (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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27 March 2020

Van der Heiden, G.-J.
Exile, Use, and Form-of-Life: On the Conclusion of Agamben’s Homo Sacer series
(2020) Theory, Culture and Society, 37 (2), pp. 61-78.

DOI: 10.1177/0263276419867749

Abstract
The last two volumes of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer series are concerned with developing a theory of use. This article offers a critical assessment of the two concepts, use and form-of-life, that form the heart of this theory: how do these two notions offer a solution to the problem of bare life that forms the core of the Homo Sacer series? First, the author describes how the original problem of bare life is taken up in The Use of Bodies and how the notion of use offers an important additional characteristic of bare life. Second, inspired by Foucault’s analysis of ancient Cynicism, the author discusses in which sense the type of ‘solution’ Agamben offers to the problem of bare life might be seen as an heir to ancient Cynicism and how this interpretation clarifies his connection of form-of-life and exile. Third, the author critically assesses the different usages of use that we can find in Agamben, by comparing how Franciscan usus, Pauline chrēsis and Platonic chrēsis are taken up in his analysis. Fourth, following Foucault, the author deepens the Platonic sense of use and its relation to taking care of justice. The article concludes with a critical assessment of Agamben’s reading of Plato’s myth of Er, in which the motifs of use, exile, and care are gathered. © The Author(s) 2019.

Author Keywords
Agamben; care; exile; form-of-life; Foucault; Homo Sacer; use

Competition: A Critical History of a Concept (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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26 March 2020

Gane, N.
Competition: A Critical History of a Concept
(2020) Theory, Culture and Society, 37 (2), pp. 31-59.

DOI: 10.1177/0263276419878247

Abstract
This article expands Michel Foucault’s genealogy of liberalism and neoliberalism by analysing the concept of competition. It addresses four key liberal conceptions of competition in turn: the idea of competition as a destructive but progressive and thus necessary force (roughly 1830–90); economic theories of market equilibrium that theorize competition mathematically (1870 onwards); socio-biological ideas of competition as something natural (1850–1900); and sociological arguments that see competition as adding value to the social (1900–20). From this starting point, the article considers the ways in which three main trajectories of neoliberal thought that emerged from the early 1920s onwards – Austrian, German and American – developed and responded to these conceptualizations of competition. In conclusion, it is argued that this history of the concept of competition leads to a new understanding of the tensions that lie at the heart of neoliberal thought, and which are largely missing from Foucault’s account. © The Author(s) 2019.

Author Keywords
competition; equality; equilibrium; evolution; liberalism; neoliberalism

The Early Foucault Update 31: IMEC, Paris, Uppsala and the impact of the coronavirus

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

25 March 2020

stuartelden's avatarProgressive Geographies

As an earlier post said, I’ve had to cancel two talks – in New York and Bologna – and some archival work because of the current medical situation. There is a bit more on that below, but as much as possible I’m trying to continue work on The Early Foucault manuscript, as concentration and other tasks allow, and with restrictions about what I can access. The responses to a post about what this blog should and shouldn’t do over the coming weeks were that I should continue to post things as and when appropriate, so I will continue to do that. Most of what is written below is about the work I did before everything started to change. I hope it is of interest and gives a sense of how I have been working on this book over the past few weeks.

The second half of my time in France…

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Elliot Grover, What Can Daniel Defoe’s “Plague Year” Teach Us About Coronavirus? (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

23 March 2020

Elliot Grover, What Can Daniel Defoe’s “Plague Year” Teach Us About Coronavirus?, InsideHook, 17 March 2020

A novel written in 1722 offers a surprisingly relevant blueprint to navigating a 2020 pandemic

The panic began the moment the earliest cases were confirmed. Those with means hurriedly packed their belongings and fled the city. Those who stayed had a range of reactions: many laid siege to the markets, stocking up on provisions before barricading themselves and their families in their homes; some congregated in churches while others consulted astronomers and fortune-tellers; many more, dismissive of the invisible disease or the visible fear it stoked in the masses, continued their lives unabated. These individuals were the first to die.

[…]
The city in question is not Wuhan or Milan or Manhattan. It is London and the year is 1665. Before the end of 1666, the Bubonic Plague will kill roughly one-quarter of the city’s population. As devastating as this figure is, it could have been much worse.

[…]
While other pestilential narratives dwell on the chaos that accompanies pandemics, Defoe’s book documents the rigid order that emerges in the plague city. Michel Foucault, the 20th-century philosopher whose ideas have greatly influenced modern conceptions of power, highlighted these divergent views in his seminal 1975 book Discipline and Punish.

“A whole literary fiction of the festival grew up around the plague: suspended laws, lifted prohibitions, the frenzy of passing time, bodies mingling together without respect,” Foucault writes. “But there was also a political dream of the plague, which was exactly its reverse: not the collective festival, but strict divisions; not laws transgressed, but the penetration of regulation into even the smallest details of everyday life.” What Foucault is suggesting, and what Defoe’s account supports, is that this political dream becomes a reality in the societies that combat pandemics most effectively.

[…]

Felipe Demetri, Biopolitics and Coronavirus, or don’t forget Foucault (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

22 March 2020

Felipe Demetri, Biopolitics and Coronavirus, or don’t forget Foucault, Naked Punch, 21 March 2020

[…]

What the coronavirus epidemic shows us is more the strength of Michel Foucault’s explanatory scheme than the current necro-thanatopolitical strain of interpretations. We all know that Foucault saw biopower as a series of events, from theoretical ones to concrete practices, which formed the basis of a new relationship between national states and the biological element of human life. No longer the exclusion of political life and the plundering of goods and rights that would characterize the Old Regime, but instead new techniques organized around the better extraction of the living forces. Thus, biopower is a descriptive index of the moment when States began to exercise the management of spheres of social life that today seem obvious to us, such as health care, birth and mortality rates, etc. Foucault does not suggest that this would be due to humanist concern of the State; it is, in fact, about meeting the demands of capitalism. Bruno Cava synthesized well in his recent text: the concept of biopolitics does not necessarily describe a “good” or “bad” situation: Foucault is limited to pointing out precisely the limits of our situation.

Faced with the coronavirus, the majority of States have exercised strong sanitary and population control in order to prevent its spread; strictly speaking, actions are being taken to prevent a greater death toll. Such biopolitics places us in the domain of how Foucault conceived the population management techniques, focused (primarily, but not exclusively) to better condition the living forces. It is increasingly evident, however, that even drastic actions have not been enough to contain the spread of the virus, and a sense of collective responsibility is growing towards those who cannot protect themselves: those who can’t work at home, those who are in unfavorable sanitary conditions, the elderly etc.

[…]

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