Foucault News

Newman, S. (2024). Fugitive Truth: Renewing the Public Sphere in the Age of Post-Truth. Javnost – The Public, 31(3), 327–342.

https://doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2024.2383904

Abstract
In the sixty years since the publication of Jürgen Habermas’ magnum opus, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, the public sphere now faces a new threat in the era of “post-truth” politics. The preponderance of lies, mis/disinformation, “fake news”, “alternative facts”, conspiracy theories, and the general breakdown of trust in established sources of knowledge and information has led to the fragmentation and deepening polarisation of the public sphere – a situation deliberately promoted by right wing populist forces intent on fighting the “culture wars”. At the same time, the political space is being disrupted, in a different way, through new social movements and radical activism particularly around issues of climate change, inequality, racial injustice, and police violence. My aim is to show how these contemporary forms of dissent are engendering a new “structural” transformation of the public sphere. They create autonomous and critical spaces of collective engagement that call into question the legitimacy of dominant power structures. Understanding this process requires an alternative rendering of the relationship between truth and politics – something I develop through Michel Foucault’s rethinking of the critical impulse of the Kantian Enlightenment and his later work on parrhesia. © 2024 The Author(s).

Author Keywords
democracy; new social movements; parrhesia; populism; post-truth; Public sphere

Tavani, E. (2025). The Selfie and the Low-Resolution Self: Beyond Foucault’s Technologies of the Self. Itinera, (28).

https://doi.org/10.54103/2039-9251/27832

Abstract
The article discusses Foucault’s «technologies of the self» by reconsidering the link between ethics and aesthetics in this paradigm, with a view to its possible application to selfie technology as a «gestural image» (Frosh). This reconsideration stems from a close examination of the self as understood by the concept of technologies of the self, emphasizing also the aesthetic aspects of its rationality and of its phenomenological dimension.

The article also highlights how technologies of the self fail to overturn the logic of domination, which is still present in Foucault’s formulation and is likewise evident in «performative» interpretations of both Foucault’s technologies of the self and of the techno-social phenomenon of the selfie. From this perspective, the article proposes not to consider the «self of the selfie» as a mere support for self-narrative or as a product of performative action, but rather to view it as a «low-resolution self». In displaying itself through an act of outward projection within often complex situations and environments, this «low-resolution self» embodies a new ethos of coexistence and connectivity. On this basis, the question of interpreting the selfie phenomenon as a technology of the self shifts into a broader inquiry, where the focus moves from a technology of the self to an ecology of the self.