Foucault News

News and resources on French thinker Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

Eberl, J.T., Bishop, J.P. Battlestar Galactica as Philosophy: Breaking the Biopolitical Cycle (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

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26 February 2025

Eberl, J.T., Bishop, J.P. Battlestar Galactica as Philosophy: Breaking the Biopolitical Cycle (2024) The Palgrave Handbook of Popular Culture as Philosophy Editors: David Kyle Johnson (Editor-in-Chief), Dean A. Kowalski, Chris Lay, Kimberly S. Engels, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 93-112.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-24685-2_4

Abstract
The reimagined Battlestar Galactica series (2003–2009) and its prequel series Caprica (2009–2010) provoked viewers to consider anew perennial philosophical questions regarding, among others, the nature of personhood and the role of religion in culture and politics. While no single philosophical viewpoint encapsulates the creators’ vision as a whole, the theory of biopolitics, as formulated by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and others, is a fruitful lens through which various points of story and character development may be analyzed. Two noteworthy areas of attention are, first, whether a race of intelligent, self-aware beings, who have been artificially created, should be considered “persons” with attendant moral and legal status, and second, whether the purported ontological division between the “biological” and the “artificial” has moral import concerning the degree of control one class of beings may legitimately exercise over another. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024.

Author Keywords
Apotheosis; Bare life; Battlestar Galactica; Biopolitics; Biopower; Caprica; Caprica Six; Cylons; Embodiment; Gaius Baltar; Giorgio Agamben; Hannah Arendt; Homo sacer; Justice; Laura Roslin; Lee Adama; Michel Foucault; Personhood; Procreation; Religion; Roberto Esposito; Technologies of the self; Totalitarianism; Transhumanism; Zoe Graystone

Daniele Lorenzini: The Force of Truth – video (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

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25 February 2025

The Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, Feb 21, 2025

Many blame Michel Foucault for our post-truth and conspiracy-laden society. In this provocative work, Daniele Lorenzini argues that such criticism fundamentally misunderstands the philosopher’s project. Foucault did not question truth itself but what Lorenzini calls “the force of truth,” or how some truth claims are given the power to govern our conduct while others are not. This interest, Lorenzini shows, drove Foucault to articulate a new ethics and politics of truth-telling precisely in order to evade the threat of relativism. The Force of Truth: Critique, Genealogy, and Truth-Telling in Michel Foucault (University of Chicago Press, 2023) explores this neglected dimension of Foucault’s project by putting his writings on regimes of truth and parrhesia in conversation with early analytic philosophy and by drawing out the “possibilizing” elements of Foucault’s genealogies that remain vital for practicing critique today.

Daniele Lorenzini discussed his book in conversation with 3CT fellow Linda Zerilli.

Brake, M. The Joker as Philosopher: Killing Jokes (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

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23 February 2025

Brake, M.
The Joker as Philosopher: Killing Jokes (2024) The Palgrave Handbook of Popular Culture as Philosophy Editors: David Kyle Johnson (Editor-in-Chief), Dean A. Kowalski, Chris Lay, Kimberly S. Engels, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1987-2001.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-24685-2_92

Abstract
Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s Batman: The Killing Joke is one of the most popular Batman comic stories, and it is considered one of the greatest Joker stories of all time. The story finds the Joker kidnapping Commissioner Jim Gordon and psychologically torturing him. He does so in order to prove that the world is an absurd and unjust place, and in response to the injustices of the world, one should reject reason and order in favor of irrationality, chaos, and madness. The graphic novel asks readers to consider whether or not the Joker is right – that the only way to live in an absurd world is to be absurd and “go mad” – and whether people like Batman and Gordon are in denial, not only about the world, but about their own ability to remain rational in an absurd world. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024.

Author Keywords
Absurd; Alan Moore; Albert Camus; Batman; Brian Bolland; Friedrich Nietzsche; Joker; Madness; Michel Foucault; Reason

Michel Foucault en Latinoamérica: 40 años de ontologías del presente (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

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23 February 2025

Presentación de la edición especial de Cuadernos de Filosofía Latinoamericana, Vol. 45 Núm. 131 (2024): Michel Foucault en Latinoamérica: 40 años de ontologías del presente

En el marco del World Congress Foucault: 40 years after los coeditores invitados Nelson F. Roberto-Alba y Luis F. Blengino se complacen en presentar a la comunidad académica la edición especial del dossier “Michel Foucault en Latinoamérica: 40 años de ontologías del presente” publicado en la revista Cuadernos de Filosofía Latinoamericana, adscrita a la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad Santo Tomás, Colombia.

El dossier cuenta con dieciséis artículos escritos por investigadores de Latinoamérica (Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, Colombia, México) y Europa (Francia, España). De estos artículos cuatro fueron publicados en edición bilingüe inglés y español:

  • Crítica, historia y política: notas para una lectura en clave foucaultiana de la denominada Conquista del Desierto de Argentina
  • ¿Partisanos latinofoucaultinos? Elementos para una historia del saber crítico al poder securitario-punitivo en Argentina
  • Poderes del saber económico y saberes del poder popular: la configuración posible de una gubernamentalidad alternativa al neoliberalismo en tanto gobierno de la desigualdad
  • Testimonio, memoria y confesión: La tecnología de la Comisión de la Verdad en Colombia

Además, el dossier cuenta con una entrevista al filósofo Rodrigo Castro Orellana y tres reseñas de libros en torno a Foucault publicados durante 2023 y 2024 en Iberoamérica.

Este es el vínculo para acceder al número completo:

https://revistas.usantotomas.edu.co/index.php/cfla/issue/view/726

 

Presentation of the special issue of Cuadernos de Filosofía Latinoamericana, Vol. 45 No. 131 (2024): Michel Foucault in Latin America: 40 years of ontologies of the present

Within the framework of the “World Congress Foucault: 40 years after”, guest co-editors Nelson F. Roberto-Alba and Luis F. Blengino are pleased to present to the academic community the special edition of the dossier “Michel Foucault en Latinoamérica: 40 años de ontologías del presente” published in the journal Cuadernos de Filosofía Latinoamericana, affiliated to the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the Universidad Santo Tomás, Colombia.

The dossier contains sixteen articles written by researchers from Latin America (Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, Colombia, Mexico) and Europe (France, Spain). Four of these articles were published in a bilingual edition in English and Spanish:

– Critique, History and Politics : Notes for a Foucauldian Reading of the So-called Conquest of the Desert in Argentina

-Latin-Foucauldian Partisans ? Elements for a History of Critical Knowledge of Security-punitive Power in Argentina

-Powers of Economic Knowledge and Knowledge of Popular Power : The Possible Configuration of an Alternative Governmentality to Neoliberalism as a Government of Inequality

-Testimony, Memory and Confession : The Technology of the Truth Commission in Colombia

In addition, the dossier features an interview with philosopher Rodrigo Castro Orellana and three reviews of books around Foucault published during 2023 and 2024 in Ibero-America.

This is the link to access the complete issue :

https://revistas.usantotomas.edu.co/index.php/cfla/issue/view/726

Eli B. Lichtenstein, Biopolitics, Carcerality, and Capital in Foucault’s Unfinished Account of the Racial State (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

23 February 2025

Eli B. Lichtenstein, “Biopolitics, Carcerality, and Capital in Foucault’s Unfinished Account of the Racial State,” Critical Philosophy of Race (2025) 13, no. 1, 75-94,
DOI: doi.org/10.5325/critphilrace.13.1.0075.

Abstract:
Michel Foucault argued that a key modality of state racism is biopower, through which the life of populations is differentially supported, shaped, and neglected. However, Foucault’s account of state racism is unfinished, because it fails to identify the modalities of power that persist when states withdraw life-supporting technologies from racialized populations, thereby committing “indirect murder.” This article develops Foucault’s account of racism and the racial state by describing the carceral technologies that expand with the withdrawal of biopower. To do so, it draws on Foucault’s theorization of carcerality in Discipline and Punish. It argues that biopolitical withdrawal is doubled by a simultaneous carceral investment, such that the state’s denial of life-supporting technologies occurs in tandem with the racially structured policing of the poor. Additionally, this article explains how Foucault’s concept of the management of illegalisms identifies a key vehicle of racialization, and illuminates the utility of carceral systems to racial capitalism.

Luca Paltrinieri, « « Nombre des hommes » et « populatio » à la fin de la Renaissance : notes sur la généalogie des savoirs démographiques » (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

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22 February 2025

Luca Paltrinieri, « « Nombre des hommes » et « populatio » à la fin de la Renaissance : notes sur la généalogie des savoirs démographiques », Astérion [En ligne], 31 | 2024, mis en ligne le 30 janvier 2025.

URL : http://journals.openedition.org/asterion/11452 ;
DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/138qv

Open access

Résumé
Dans un passage de ses cours au Collège de France, Foucault affirme que, avant le XVIIIe siècle, la « population » est un objet « présent-absent » dans les théories et les pratiques de gouvernement. Nous avons essayé de reconstruire l’histoire généalogique des savoirs proto-démographiques du gouvernement chez trois grands théoriciens politiques de la Renaissance : Nicolas Machiavel, Jean Bodin, Giovanni Botero, à partir de cette affirmation énigmatique. Si la problématique de savoir comment avoir une population nombreuse et florissante est bien présente chez les trois penseurs, le vrai obstacle à la naissance d’une conception moderne de la population est représenté par l’impossibilité d’agir directement sur la reproduction humaine, domaine qui relève directement de la volonté divine.

Émerge alors, notamment chez Botero, la possibilité d’une politique « incitative », favorisant les mariages et l’éducation des enfants, qui annonce le populationnisme des mercantilistes. L’exemple de la « population » « présente-absente », à travers l’hypothèse foucaldienne, permet de revenir plus largement sur les objets de l’histoire des sciences qui ne sont ni « découverts » ni inventés de toutes pièces ; il faudrait plutôt affirmer que ce sont des objets « en train de se faire », qui acquièrent une réalité graduelle à travers le débat politique et savant.

‘Number of people’ and ‘populatio’ in the late Renaissance: some remarks on the genealogy of demographic knowledge

Abstract
In one of his lectures at the Collège de France, Foucault observed that, prior to the eighteenth century, ‘population’ was a ‘present-absent’ object in the theories and practices of government. In this paper, I have attempted to reconstruct the genealogical history of proto-demographic thought as reflected in the works of three major Renaissance political theorists: Niccolò Machiavelli, Jean Bodin, and Giovanni Botero. While all three thinkers address the question of how to cultivate a large and flourishing population, the primary obstacle to the emergence of a modern conception of population lies in the inability to influence human reproduction directly, an area traditionally regarded as subject to divine will.

Botero, however, introduced the possibility of an ‘incentive’ policy, promoting marriage and child-rearing, which foreshadowed the natalist policies later advocated by Mercantilists. The case of ‘population’ and its peculiar ‘presence-absence’ in Renaissance political theories, as interpreted through Foucault’s hypothesis, sheds light on the broader history of scientific objects —objects that are neither ‘discovered’ nor ‘invented’, but rather acquire their reality gradually over centuries through political and scholarly debate.

Grenier, J.-Y. Michel Foucault and Money (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

21 February 2025

Grenier, J.-Y.
Michel Foucault and Money (2024) In The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Money: Volume 2: Modern Thought, Ed. Joseph J. Tinguely, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 701-720.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-54140-7_35
Abstract
Michel Foucault broached the question of political economy on many occasions without ever offering a comprehensive study of it in its own right. Money in particular holds a special place in his thinking, even if it too is not considered as a separate theme. Rather money is treated as a component within broader systems whose scope goes beyond political economy alone. Money is part of the elaboration of what Foucault calls knowledge, a notion that is essential in his work. As it relates to money, knowledge takes two forms. The first form is the representation that contemporaries have of money and its inclusion in a more general system of knowledge. This is the approach taken in The Order of Things, a vast reflection on the constitution of knowledge between the Renaissance and the nineteenth century, and a linking of the domains of life science, law, and political economics to the philosophical discourse of their time. The second form is the elaboration of a social and political knowledge produced by the introduction of money and its uses within the societies of antiquity (e.g., the ability to measure value). This is the approach he pursued in the lectures he gave at the Collège de France in 1970-1971.

Author Keywords
Episteme; Exchange; Knowledge; Labor; Measure; Political economy; Representation; Sign; Truth

Clare O’Farrell, Commentary on Interview 1 in Foucault, Entretiens radiophoniques (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

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18 February 2025

Clare O’Farrell, Foucault, Radio Interview 1: The phenomenon of madness, Refracted Input blog, 18 February 2025

Citation from Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie a l’âge classique. Entretien de Michel Foucault avec Nicole Brice. Diffusion le 31 mai 1961 sur France III National. In Michel Foucault, Entretiens radiophoniques, 1961-1983, Flammarion / VRIN / INA, 2024, pp. 13-16.

“It seemed to me that madness was a somewhat variable phenomenon in civilisation, It fluctuated just as much as any other cultural phenomenon. Basically, when reading American books about how some primitive civilisations reacted to the phenomenon of madness, I wondered whether it might be interesting to look at the way in which our own culture reacted to this phenomenon. […] There are civilisations which celebrated the mad, others that kept them separate, others that cared for them. But what I really wanted to emphasise was that caring for the mad was not the only possible reaction to the phenomenon of madness.” (p. 13)

See commentary on Refracted Input blog

Nainani, D. The spatio-legality of corporate sovereignty in AppleTV+‘s Severance (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

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18 February 2025

Nainani, D.
The spatio-legality of corporate sovereignty in AppleTV+‘s Severance
(2025) Science Fiction as Legal Imaginary. Edited By Alex Green, Mitchell Travis, Kieran Tranter, Routledge, pp. 293-314.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003412274-17

Abstract
In the Apple TV+ drama Severance, both the corporate and the human body are reimagined in terms of its legal personhood and identity. Using a critical legal geography approach, this chapter studies both Lumon Industries (the corporation depicted in the show) and the real-life ‘everything store’ of Amazon to explore how corporate sovereignty is spatio-legally imagined and portrayed in fiction and in reality. It does so by ‘reading’ the show alongside numerous legal challenges initiated by Amazon warehouse workers against Michel Foucault’s work on power and Hans Lindahl’s theory on the legal ordering of space. The chapter therefore traces the spatio-legal aspects of how power is exercised by both fictional (Lumon Industries) and real (Amazon) modern corporate sovereigns in three ways: (1) how they render employee bodies as disposable while tethering them to the corporate bodily assemblage; (2) how they use corporate goods as objects to regulate employee behaviour; and (3) how they use corporate property to govern the spatial practices of employees. It then looks at how the formation of a corporate code that enables these forms of power is made possible through the creation of a corporate legal order, and how Lumon imagines a world where such an order cannot be challenged.

materiali foucaultiani, gennaio-dicembre 2022 (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

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16 February 2025

materiali foucaultiani
volume XI, numero 21-22 (gennaio-dicembre 2022) Published January 2025

SOMMARIO
L’impulsion Nietzsche.
sous la direction de Michèle Cohen-Halimi et Orazio Irrera

Introduction. « L’impulsion Nietzsche » chez Michel Foucault (pp. 5-10)
Michèle Cohen-Halimi et Orazio Irrera

Repenser l’espace, pluraliser le temps. La pensée de Nietzsche entre Foucault et l’École des Annales (pp. 11-46)
Gabriel Pochapski

Aux sources d’une mésentente. Michel Foucault entre la « méthode Nietzsche » et les géographies françaises (pp. 47-73)
Alessandro Falconieri

La généalogie et les animaux. Une lecture croisée des pensées de Nietzsche et Foucault (pp. 75-109)
Josué Imanol Lopez Barrios

« Übung, Übung, Übung ! ». Ἄσκησις et idéaux ascétiques chez Nietzsche : réponse à une critique de Foucault (pp. 111-144)
Gennaro Boccolino

Les ruses de l’intelligence et le partage philosophie-rhétorique chez Foucault et Nietzsche (pp. 145-198)
Camila Ginés

Un nietzschianesimo senza riserve. La volontà di potenza nel dispositivo del potere pastorale (pp. 199-224)
Roberto Nigro

Saggi

Variations foucaldiennes sur le thème du travail, entre assujettissement et subjectivation (pp. 227-244)
Tiziana Faitini

Foucault et le projet d’une « Histoire de l’amitié ». Enjeux, problèmes, ruines (pp. 245-265)
Lorenzo Petrachi

Vies queer. De la théâtralité cynique à la théâtralité queer (pp. 267-284)
Antoine Alario

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