Foucault News

Vicente L. Rafael (2019), The Sovereign Trickster, The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 78, No. 1 (February) 2019: 141–166.
doi:10.1017/S0021911818002656

Abstract
In our current moment, authoritarian figures loom large. One of them is Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. He seems to embody two notions of sovereignty. One is related to law, the other to norms: on the one hand, the power of taking exception to the former, deciding who will live and who will die; on the other hand, the freedom from the limits of the latter by way of dissipation, irresponsibility, and excess. This article explores the double sources of his power with reference to the works of Michel Foucault and Achille Mbembe. While most of Foucault’s work has focused on Europe, Mbembe has written about postcolonial conditions in ways that make critical use of Foucault. Drawing from their writings, this article situates Duterte as a “sovereign trickster” who seeks to dominate death while monopolizing laughter. Finally, this article speculates on the comparative usefulness of this figure of the sovereign trickster with regard to President Donald Trump, whose form of tricksterism derives, the author argues, from the tradition of blackface minstrelsy.

Keywords: death, drug war, Duterte, Foucault, Mbembe, Philippines, sovereignty, trickster, Trump

Susan L. Johnson, Workplace bullying, biased behaviours and performance review in the nursing profession: A qualitative study (2019) Journal of Clinical Nursing, 28 (9-10), pp. 1528-1537.
https://doi.org/10.1111/jocn.14758

Abstract
Aims and objectives: To explore staff nurses’ discourses of workplace bullying, to critically examine how these discourses affect their responses to bullying. Background: Workplace bullying has been identified as a pervasive problem within the nursing profession. Efforts to eradicate workplace bullying need to involve staff—targets as well as bystanders. By understanding how this population conceptualises workplace bullying, more effective and targeted solutions to the problem can be devised. Design: This qualitative study used a critical discourse analysis method which was based on the work of Foucault.

Methods: Thirteen staff nurses who worked in a variety of settings in the USA were interviewed. COREQ checklist was used for this article.

Results: Three interrelated discursive strands were identified: “biased behaviour manifested as workplace bullying, workplace bullying disguised as performance review and workplace bullying as entrenched behaviour in nursing”. Actions in response to bullying varied according to which discursive strand was invoked.

Conclusions: The central theme at the intersection of the discursive strands was that workplace bullying is a mechanism for driving out nurses who are different. Relevance to clinical practice: Efforts to address workplace bullying among nurses need to include training on legitimate methods of performance review, workshops on how to interact with diverse co-workers, and examination of how practices with nursing education contribute to the perpetuation of bullying in clinical settings. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Author Keywords
bias; critical discourse analysis; harassment; nursing education; performance review; staff nurses; workplace bullying

Index Keywords
article, bullying, checklist, clinical practice, coworker, discourse analysis, harassment, human, human experiment, nursing education, occupation, qualitative research, staff nurse, workplace

Marlon Salomon, “Eso no es un libro de historia”: Michel Foucault y la publicación de documentos de archivos, Topoi (Rio de Janeiro). vol.20 no.40 Rio de Janeiro Jan./Apr. 2019
DOI: 10.1590/2237-101×020040011

Open access

RESUMO
Entre 1973 e 1982, Michel Foucault dedicou-se à publicação de documentos de arquivo. Em 1973, publicou o memorial de Rivière; em 1977, os extratos do livro de um libertino inglês; em 1978, as lembranças de uma jovem hermafrodita; e em 1982 uma seleta de documentos judiciários. Dividido em duas partes, este artigo busca compreender o que esteve em jogo nesse gesto arquivístico-editorial. Na primeira parte, analisarei as relações existentes entre os textos que compõem esse corpus e como se inserem no quadro, então, de suas pesquisas. Depois, estudarei os deslocamentos existentes entre o projeto de publicação de uma coletânea de arquivos da infâmia e a publicação do livro com documentos da Bastilha. Na segunda parte, apresentarei duas hipóteses sobre os problemas ligados a esse projeto editorial: 1) Mostrarei que se tratava de um estudo das condições extraliterárias da constituição da literatura como saber; 2) Mostrarei como seu empenho em publicar documentos não pretendia apenas dar a palavra aos sem-história, mas assinalar que havia um pensamento em suas falas. Esse empenho chocava-se com um dos principais dogmas historiográficos contemporâneos.

Palavras-chave: historiografia francesa; teoria da história; arquivologia; biblioteconomia; saberes literários

“It is not a history book”: Michel Foucault and the publication of archival documents

ABSTRACT
Between 1973 and 1982, M. Foucault dedicated himself to editing and publishing archival texts. He published Pierre Rivière’s memorial in 1972, extracts from an English libertine’s book in 1978, and the memoirs of a young hermaphrodite in 1979. In 1982, he published a selection of documents from court archives. This article, organized in two parts, aims to understand what was at play in that archivistic-editorial endeavor. In the first part, I analyze the relations among the texts that make up that corpus and their insertion in Foucault’s overall research work of that period. Then, I address the contrasts between the project to publish a collection of archives of infamy, as it was announced in 1977, and the book actually published in 1982 with documents of the Bastille. In the second part, I put forward two hypotheses I consider to be connected to that editorial project: 1) it was a study of extra-literary conditions of the constitution of literature as knowledge; and 2) his effort to publish archival documents sought not only to “give voice” to those with no history, but also to show that a thought was embedded in their pronouncements. Foucault’s performance swam against the main currents of historiographical dogmas at the time.

Keywords: French historiography; theory of history; archive science; library science; literary knowledge forms

Petri, O. Discipline and Discretionary Power in Policing Homosexuality in Late Imperial St. Petersburg (2019) Journal of Homosexuality, 66 (7), pp. 937-969.

DOI: 10.1080/00918369.2018.1485302

Abstract
This article explores queer sexual policing in late Imperial St. Petersburg (c.1900–1917). The focus is on the street-level constables who bore the principal responsibility for policing male homosexual offenses in the city’s public and semi-public spaces. This emphasis on the street-level policing of homosexuality contrasts with other discussions of gay urban history and the oppression of queer men by the authorities. The article draws on new evidence from precinct-level police archives to complement and challenge previous discussions of queer sexual policing in the Imperial capital. By taking the fate of queer men in an autocratic city, this article refines our understanding of the ways in which homosexual practices and identities emerged in modern times. Specifically, it builds on Michel Foucault’s descriptions of constables as “arbiters of illegalities,” where the term arbiter suggests rule-based and yet discretionary coercion. Here, the influential model of disciplinary policing of sexuality is complemented by an emphasis on the role of discretionary power in the history of homosexuality. © 2019, © 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Author Keywords
administrative history; disciplinary society; late imperial St. Petersburg; Queer sexual policing; queer urban history; selective control of urban space

Behrendt, S. This Is Not an Improvisation: Letitia Landon and the Slipperiness of Taxonomy (2019) European Legacy, 24 (3-4), pp. 283-300.

DOI: 10.1080/10848770.2018.1562667

Abstract
Writing in 2007, in The Wordsworth Circle, Jeffrey Robinson remarked on the “ephemerality” of improvisational poetry, its fundamental resistance to being “preserved.” Printed poetry is typically regarded as “fixed” and static: what any poem represents as improvisation is, at best, only a record, executed in a fixed medium, of a performance whose infinite variability is inherent in the nature of improvisation itself. Partly an homage to Rene Magritte’s This is Not a Pipe (1928–29) and to Michel Foucault’s 1973 essay on that painting, and using as a test case The Improvisatrice (1825), the long poem by Letitia Elizabeth Landon, herself a devotee of interdisciplinary and multimedia performance, this essay considers the physical, structural, and methodological challenges and limitations posed to printed “word art” by works that purport to be, or aspire to the condition of, “improvisations.” The improvisatrice who is the poem’s narrator claims to be both a painter and a songstress, but her “speech,” captured and rendered in printed words by Landon (who ventriloquizes that speech), can neither “be” nor even “represent” a work produced (“performed”) in visual art or vocal song. In her long poem Landon effectively creates a literary trompe l’oeil, an illusion that depends for its “completion” upon the reader’s implied participation in that performative act of completion. In the process, Landon’s poem reveals the fundamental incompatibility of improvisational literary production with the performative nature of improvisation. © 2019, © 2019 International Society for the Study of European Ideas.

Author Keywords
British Romanticism; illusion; Improvisation; interdisciplinary; Letitia Elizabeth Landon; multistability; narrative/narrativity; performance/performativity; poetic voice; poetry; women writers