Foucault News

Feldman, A.J. Power, labour power and productive force in Foucault’s reading of capital
(2019) Philosophy and Social Criticism, 45 (3), pp. 307-333.

DOI: 10.1177/0191453718798416

Abstract
This article uses Foucault’s lecture courses to illuminate his reading of Marx’s Capital in Discipline and Punish. Foucault finds in Marx’s account of cooperation a precedent for his own approach to power. In turn, Foucault helps us rethink the concepts of productive force and labour power in Marx. Foucault is shown to be particularly interested in one of Marx’s major themes in Capital, parts III–IV: the subsumption of labour under capital. In Discipline and Punish and The Punitive Society, Foucault offers a genealogy of the forms of labour power (Arbeitskraft) and productive force (Produktivkraft). One of his central problems is to understand how labour power is converted in productive force and how, prior to that, productive subjects who can properly bear and dispose of their labour power are formed. Foucault’s reading of Capital resonates with those currents of Marx interpretation today that seek to repoliticize the concept of productive force and to offer a materialist account of subject formation. © The Author(s) 2019.

Author Keywords
Capital; Discipline and Punish; Foucault; Illegalisms; Labour power; Marx; Productive force; The Punitive Society

Norbert Schaffeld, A Fictionalized Representation of Scientific Counter-Discourse: Jo Lendle’s Historical Science Novel Alles Land (2011)
(2019) German Quarterly, 92 (1), pp. 35-50.
https://doi.org/10.1111/gequ.12093

Abstract
This paper explores a fictionalized series of past events in which a process of scientific discovery clearly contradicts the dominant academic discourse and is therefore bound to meet with powerful opposition. Based on an analysis of Jo Lendle’s novel Alles Land (2011), the literary representation of the life of Alfred Wegener (1880–1930) and his theory of continental drift is studied against the backdrop of Thomas S. Kuhn’s conceptualization of the processual character of science, as well as a modified reading of Foucault’s discursive formations. The novel identifies Wegener’s scientific plight as the fatal outcome of a nexus between modalities that predefine the object of research and those that regulate the institutional right to speak. In Lendle’s context-dependent narrativization, which provides the reader with a clear epistemic advantage, these two modalities fatefully converge in order to effectively, if falsely, claim that as a young astronomer and atmospheric physicist, Wegener allegedly lacks authority to speak on geological subject matters. © 2019, American Association of Teachers of German

Author Keywords
Alfred Wegener; epistemic change; geology; historical novel; Jo Lendle; narrative

Deborah N. Brewis, Duality and Fallibility in Practices of the Self: The ‘inclusive subject’ in diversity training (2019) Organization Studies, 40 (1), pp. 93-114.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840618765554

Abstract
The concept of ‘inclusion’ has been gaining ground in a field known as equality and diversity work. Scholars have begun to both theorise what this concept means as a normative goal and to critically examine how it is mobilised in organisational practice. This paper contributes to the latter conversation by asking what comes to count as ‘doing inclusion’ at the level of the individual. I examine the practices of diversity training in United Kingdom organisations, in which diversity practitioners seek to transform their trainees into people who will act inclusively toward others, asking: Who is the ‘inclusive subject’ that is being constructed – imagined, sought and legitimised – through diversity training? What are the conditions of possibility that shape the emergence of this subject? And what are the possibilities that this subject affords to marginalised groups struggling for recognition within organisations? The analysis mobilises Foucault’s notions of power/knowledge, discipline, and practices of the self to describe and discuss the performance of inclusive subjectivity in the context of diversity training in the UK. The practices described are found to be facilitated by two key forms of knowledge about how the subject is characterised: duality and fallibility. The discussion of these two forms of knowledge leads us to consider the relations of both discipline and freedom that take place in diversity training. © The Author(s) 2018.

Author Keywords
diversity; equality; Foucault; inclusion; organisational change; subjectivity

Daniel J. Schultz, “Elephants, Dreams, and Sex: Reading Religion in Foucault’s Ethics,” The Journal of Religion 99, no. 2 (April 2019): 173-193.
DOI: 10.1086/701870

Giltner, T.A. The power unto glory: A Bonaventurean critique of Foucault’s critique of power
(2019) Scottish Journal of Theology, 72 (1), pp. 82-97.

DOI: 10.1017/S0036930618000686

Abstract
This article puts Michel Foucault’s conception of power into critical engagement with that of Bonaventure. For Foucault power is manifested in wills to knowledge or meaning-making in a senseless universe in order to legitimate the drama of dominations. Bonaventure, however, roots his notion of power in the essence of God, so that any act of power from God cannot be classified as domination, but rather donation-a free-willed gift. This is especially evident in Bonaventure’s theology of creation and sacrament. As such, Bonaventure provides a way to deal with Foucault’s critique theologically without dispensing with it altogether.

Author Keywords
Bonaventure; gift; infinity; Michel Foucault; power; sacrament