Foucault News

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

Patrick Gamez,
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.
https://doi.org/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

O’Toole, J.
Crafting weight stigma in slimming classes: A case study in Ireland
(2019) Fat Studies, 8 (1), pp. 10-24.

DOI: 10.1080/21604851.2019.1534463

Abstract
The persistence of dominant social and cultural representations of weight loss renders it as normative and necessary, especially for women. One setting in which the goal of weight loss is relentlessly pursued is the slimming class. Drawn from the analysis of the ethnographic data from a larger one-year narrative inquiry study in four slimming classes in Ireland, this article demonstrates that while slimming is narrated as a positive intervention in the “care of the self,” the crafting of weight stigma is central to the dominant weight loss storyline constituted in the classes. Theoretically, the study weaves insights from the feminist expansion of Foucault’s work on disciplinary power and governmentality, Goffman’s concept of stigma, and narrative inquiry. Three main findings are discussed: the construction of slimming as a quest, slimmer identity, and the overt stigmatizing of fatness. The quest narrative produces a limited set of narrative resources (stories/characters/temporality) that make it very difficult to speak outside the narrative of weight loss. In an Irish context, where the historical circumscription of women’s bodies was pervasive, the findings illustrate aspects of the contemporary mechanisms through which such bodily circumscription endures. © 2018, © 2018 Taylor & Francis.

Author Keywords
Critical weight studies; dieting; fat phobia; Irish women; narrative inquiry; slimming classes; stigma