Foucault News

Pariseau-Legault, P., Holmes, D., Murray, S.J. Understanding human enhancement technologies through critical phenomenology (2019) Nursing Philosophy, 20 (1), art. no. e12229

DOI: 10.1111/nup.12229

Abstract
Human enhancement technologies raise serious ethical questions about health practices no longer content simply to treat disease, but which now also propose to “optimize” human beings’ physical, cognitive and psychological abilities. These technologies call for a reassessment of our relationship to health, the human body and the body’s organic, identity and social functions. In nursing, such considerations are in their infancy. In this paper, we argue for the relevance of critical phenomenology as a way to better understand the ethical issues related to human enhancement technologies (HET). In so doing, we seek to problematize HET and assess their influence on the future development of nursing science and practice. It is difficult to anticipate the concrete effects of HET, we suggest, because these practices reconfigure the meaning of normativity and disorient our conventional ethical landscape. In this context, we argue that the later work of Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault invites a critical perspective into how techno-scientific discourses modify our relationship to care, to health and to our own social and corporeal identities. Despite the traditional philosophical opposition between phenomenology and critical theory, we maintain that a hybrid critical phenomenological approach opens new ways to assess the integration of technology and practice. Our analysis understands HET as a process of “hybridization” between technological objects and human subjects. Critical phenomenology thus effectively questions anthropocentric definitions of technology, challenges the dichotomy between curative treatment and enhancement and, finally, prompts valuable reflection on the implications of HET for nursing theory and practice. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Author Keywords
Foucault; Heidegger; phenomenology; technology; the self

Michel Agier, Camps, Encampments, and Occupations: From the Heterotopia to the Urban Subject (2019) Ethnos, 84 (1), pp. 14-26.
https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2018.1549578

Abstract
This article aims to understand the main principles that design a worldwide landscape of precarious spaces. I argue that the increasing and more constraining policies of exclusion provoke the repeated creation of limits and ‘outsides’ and that this represents a major aspect of contemporary urban and world governance. Contemporary ‘out-places’ [‘hors-lieux’] or concrete ‘heterotopias’ (Foucault) are linked to one another by policies of exclusion, organisation and control, subjective experiences, and routes. The formation and proliferation of heterotopias as an ensemble of margins and precarious spaces, turn visible as a global political fact the question of (in)equality. © 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
Camps; encampments; favelas; places; urban margins

Gunawan, M. Navigating human and non-human animal relations: Okja, foucault and animal welfare laws (2018) Alternative Law Journal, 43 (4), pp. 263-268.

DOI: 10.1177/1037969X18802459

Abstract
This article draws upon a Foucauldian analysis of power to conceptualise the human and non-human animal relations throughout the Netflix film Okja. The article examines how ‘super-pig’ Okja’s experiences (and subjectivities) are deeply shaped by the ‘apparatuses’ within which Okja is situated. As the power relationships and practices of ‘domination’ portrayed in Okja highlight, the legal categorisation of animals and their foundations within mainstream discourses reflect, and perpetuate, society’s understanding of the moral significance of animals. Okja’s transformation throughout the film, as well as her very existence as a hybrid ‘super-pig’, confuses the legal categorisation of non-human animals and highlights a double standard in the law. © The Author(s) 2018.

Author Keywords
Animal law; Animal rights; Art; Arts and entertainment; Arts and law; Critical legal theory

Bennett, C. Drugs, moral panics and the dispositive (2018) Journal of Sociology, 54 (4), pp. 538-556.

DOI: 10.1177/1440783317727877

Abstract
The concept of ‘moral panics’ continues to be used as a framework for analysing the causes, structures and functions of social and political crises. Nonetheless, as an analytical tool, such a framework is limited in its capacity to explain the ongoing and interconnected relationships between drugs and society. Drawing first on an interdiscursive and intertextual framework, the field of analysis is broadened to consider how recent drug panics in Australia depend upon, signify and condense wider social and historical anxieties around drugs and other social problems. However, such an approach also has its limitations given that the play of intertextuality is conditioned by relations of power at the level of what Foucault calls a ‘dispositive’, a historically contingent configuration that strategically orientates our responses to the problem. Three dispositional drug-related prototypes are considered and how they work together to shape, reinforce and condition the drug problem and our responses to it. © The Author(s) 2017.

Author Keywords
convergence; dispositive; drugs; Foucault; interdiscursivity; intertextuality; moral panic

Hutta, J.S.
From sovereignty to technologies of dependency: Rethinking the power relations supporting violence in Brazil
(2019) Political Geography, 69, pp. 65-76.

DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2018.11.008

Abstract
Discussions in geography and cognate disciplines have considered how contemporary formations of power and politics support and give rise to violence in a range of contexts. Often, these discussions have invoked Foucault’s and Agamben’s analyses of sovereignty as well as governmentality to show how violence is legitimized by state and non-state actors. Focusing on the Brazilian context, the paper argues that this strand of research, though opening up productive analytic pathways, has largely eclipsed a set of powerful technologies that are structured around dependencies. Such issues of dependency have been particularly pronounced in writings that have proposed an ‘embedded’ approach to violence in Latin American urban contexts. Importantly, whereas Foucault- and Agamben-inspired writings have focused largely on how violence is justified and legitimized, studies emphasizing its embeddedness have brought into relief how violence is concealed and removed from systems of accountability. To describe the dependencies enabling such concealment, though, studies of embedded violence have often relied on the notion of ‘political clientelism’. Interrogating the epistemological assumptions associated with this notion, the paper suggests re-framing relations of dependency as constituted through situated technologies that operate, for instance, through performances of benevolence, racialized and gendered discourses or practices of concealment. This, it is argued, opens the view towards other combinations of power than those of sovereignty, discipline and biopolitics that have commonly been focused in the wake of Agamben and Foucault. © 2018 Elsevier Ltd

Author Keywords
Agamben; Brazil; Clientelism; Dependency; Foucault; Sovereignty; Violence

Gamez, P.
The place of the Iranian Revolution in the history of truth: Foucault on neoliberalism, spirituality and enlightenment
(2019) Philosophy and Social Criticism, 45 (1), pp. 96-124.

DOI: 10.1177/0191453718794751

Abstract
In this article I want to argue that Foucault’s engagement with the Iranian Revolution was neither romantic fascist atavism nor does it presage any sort of transformation of his thought. Indeed, Foucault’s investigations of neoliberalism and subsequent work on spirituality, truth-telling and ethics are fully continuous with his critical genealogy of power. This is an important point, as we shall see, insofar as Foucault’s journalism on the Iranian Revolution occurs in the midst of his Collège de France lectures on biopolitics and governmentality. Foucault’s enthusiasm for the Revolution might indicate, albeit very indirectly, directions for thought that might resist neoliberalism. I will argue that Foucault was engaged in a very specific telling of the ‘history of truth’, emphasizing a partisan and agonistic form of truth-telling and transformation through struggle and ordeal, as opposed to the pacifying, neutralizing and normalizing forms of modern Western power. The ‘political spirituality’ Foucault witnessed on the streets of Tehran was a reactivation of this agonism, and– I will claim – a literal embodiment of what Foucault calls the ‘ethos of critique’. © The Author(s) 2018.

Author Keywords
biopolitics; critique; genealogy; liberal governmentality; politics of truth

Whelan, G.
Born Political: A Dispositive Analysis of Google and Copyright
(2019) Business and Society, 58 (1), pp. 42-73.

DOI: 10.1177/0007650317717701

Abstract
Google is a complex and complicated political beast with a significant, and often confusing, interest, in copyright matters. On one hand, for example, Google is widely accused of profiting from piracy. On the other, Google routinely complies with what is rapidly approaching a billion copyright takedown requests annually. In the present article, Foucault, neo-Gramscians, and Deleuze and Guattari are utilized to help construct a 32 dispositive analysis framework that overlaps three dispositive modalities (law, ethical, utilitarian) and perspectives (apparatus, articulation, assemblage). In applying the framework to the Google–copyright relationship, the article shows how Google was “born political”: in that it was, and still is, disposed by an apparatus comprised of copyright laws, Silicon Valley culture, and broad advances in digitization. Moreover, the article shows how Google continuously acts where “politics is born”: as it significantly shapes copyright considerations by disposing of (non-)human and organizational phenomena through articulations and assemblages. © The Author(s) 2017.

Author Keywords
copyright; dispositive; Foucault; Google; politics