Foucault News

Anne Sauka, The Nature of Our Becoming: Genealogical Perspectives (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

4 May 2020

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

“Foucault Was Always Much More Circumspect”: Stuart Elden on Foucault’s Politics and the Rediscovery of His Early Years – 2nd part of Journal of the History of Ideas interview

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

3 May 2020

Progressive Geographies

Elden-10 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.

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Daniele Lorenzini and Martina Tazzioli, Critique without ontology Genealogy, collective subjects and the deadlocks of evidence (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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3 May 2020

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.

[…]

Sailing as an essential activity (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

2 May 2020

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? (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

2 May 2020

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.”

[…]

How do government policies influence the governance paradigm of Australian public universities?: An historical analysis (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

2 May 2020

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.

DOI: 10.1108/JMH-04-2019-0029

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.

B. Murphy, Regulating Undercover Policing: Subjects, Rights and Governmentality (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

1 May 2020

Murphy, B. Regulating Undercover Policing: Subjects, Rights and Governmentality. Critical Criminology (2020). Published: 28 April 2020

10.1007/s10612-020-09504-6

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.

Sibylle Erle & Helen Hendry, Monsters: interdisciplinary explorations in monstrosity (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

30 April 2020

Sibylle Erle & Helen Hendry, Monsters: interdisciplinary explorations in monstrosity(2020) Palgrave Communications, 6 (1), art. no. 53
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-020-0428-1

Open access
Abstract
There is a continued fascination with all things monster. This is partly due to the popular reception of Mary Shelley’s Monster, termed a ‘new species’ by its overreaching but admiringly determined maker Victor Frankenstein in the eponymous novel first published in 1818. The enduring impact of Shelley’s novel, which spans a plethora of subjects and genres in imagery and themes, raises questions of origin and identity, death, birth and family relationships, as well as the contradictory qualities of the monster. Monsters serve as metaphors for anxieties of aberration and innovation (Punter and Byron, 2004). Stephen Asma (2009) notes that monsters represent evil or moral transgression and each epoch, to speak with Michel Foucault (Abnormal: lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–75, 2003, p. 66), evidences a ‘particular type of monster’. Academic debates tend to explore how social and cultural threats come to be embodied in the figure of a monster and their actions literalise our deepest fears (Gilmore, 2009; Scott, 2007).

Monsters in contemporary culture, however, have become more humane than ever before. Monsters are strong, resilient, creative and sly creatures. Through their playful and invigorating energy they can be seen to disrupt and unsettle. They still cater to the appetite for horror, but they also encourage us to feel empathy. The encounter with a monster can enable us to stop, wonder and change our attitudes towards technology, our body and each other. This commentary article considers the use of the concepts of ‘monsters’ or ‘monstrosity’ in literature, contemporary research, culture and teaching contexts at the intersection of the Humanities and the Social Sciences. © 2020, The Author(s).

Coronavirus articles on the Disorder of Things blog (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

29 April 2020

Editor: An ongoing series of articles and blog posts by scholars working at Australian, British and Norwegian universities is being posted on The Disorder of Things blog. The first article was posted 24 March 2020

An Essay on Pandemic Borders: From ‘Immunitary Dispositif’ to Affirmative Ethics

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

29 April 2020

The Disorder Of Things

An eighth entry in our coronacrisis series, from Umut Ozguc. Umut is postdoctoral research fellow in International Ethics at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of New South Wales, Australia. She is a critical IR scholar working on critical security and border studies, settler colonialism, spatial theory, resistance and posthumanism. Currently, she is working on a research project on the ecological impacts of border walls. Her current research aims to challenge the overly anthropocentric focus of the contemporary debates over borders and mobility.

Those applying for temporary or permanent residency in Australia know well that you can only be granted a visa if you meet the health requirements set by the Australian Government. That is to mean, you should not pose a threat to the public health of the nation. The Department of Home Affairs website states that it says, if you have any health condition…

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