Foucault News

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

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stuartelden's avatarProgressive Geographies

Workshop: Genealogy and Political Theory, 29 September 2017, 10.00 hrs. – 17.00 hrs.
Campus Roeterseiland, building J/K, room B22 (Valckenierstraat 65-67, 1018 XE Amsterdam)

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of works of and on genealogy by political theorists and historians of political thought. However, with this proliferation comes questions about what exactly genealogy is, how to understand past work on and of genealogy (in particular by Nietzsche and Foucault), how it is connected to other forms of critical inquiry (such as ideology critique), and what its role can and should be in political theorising more broadly.

This workshop brings together scholars working on genealogy to discuss and begin to answer these questions, with a particular focus on the growing contribution of genealogy for helping us to make sense of contemporary political theory and practice.

Programme

  • 10:00 – Professor Bernard Reginster (Brown University), “Nietzsche on Truth and Genealogy”.
  • 11:10 – Coffee…

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Il “campo”, il razzismo di stato, Archeologia Filosofica

Open access journal

Politiche di morte e governo della vita, II
Paolo Vernaglione Berardi

The last decrees imposed by national governments in EU (Italy, East Europe countries) represent the limit of governmentality. The adopted paradigm of the restrictive laws against the migrants coming from Libia, in facts breaks the international right about the rescue of the shipwreck victims. This “state of emergency” is implementing all the measures to maintain “public order” inside the cities, with evictions, ID checks, and generally production of fear. In this respect, the “racism of State” that Foucault had investigated in the mid Seventies has actually assumed the form of the “concentration camp”.

Nelle lezioni del Corso al College de France del 1976, dedicate al potere e alla guerra come matrice dei rapporti di potere, Michel Foucault introduce una nuova analitica che diverge dalle interpretazioni filosofico-politiche del potere. Mentre la teoria politica interpreta la sovranità come paradigma unico del potere, la genealogia storico-politica dei dispositivi disciplinari ci permette di vedere che non è tanto “il principe”, il sovrano, il re ad essere il luogo di costituzione e mantenimento del potere, quanto i rapporti tra gruppi classi, popolazioni nella storia dei conflitti e delle guerre. E ci fa comprendere che l’esercizio della sovranità è possibile a partire dalle distinzioni tra potere sovrano e governo. Il re regna ma non governa come il filosofo Giorgio Agamben ha dimostrato indicando la derivazione teologico-economica e non teologico-politica del potere sovrano[1].

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La metafisica del boia
recensione: Kyle Harper, From Shame to Sin: the Christiane Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity

Alessandro Baccarin

Nell’Atene e nella Corinto del IV secolo d.C., quando il cristianesimo è ormai religione di stato e degli imperatori, gli opifici delle due città greche producevano alacremente lucerne decorate con esplicite immagini erotiche. Queste immagini appartenevano ad un repertorio iconografico secolare, parte integrante di un ornamentale talmente abituale e tradizionale da risultare invisibile agli occhi dei pii abitanti del tardo impero romano… (pdf)

Il pensiero ad oriente
recensione: François Jullien, Entrare in un pensiero. Sui “possibili” dello spirito

Giuseppe D’Acunto

Giunto a una fase avanzata del suo lavoro di filosofo e di sinologo, Jullien con questo libro ritiene sia arrivato, per lui, il momento per porsi la questione in cui si riassume la motivazione che ha animato la sua intera impresa scientifica: questione il cui ricorso è giustificato anche in sede speculativa, se è vero che il problema del cominciamento può essere accostato solo a cammino già iniziato e retrospettivamente. La strategia che egli intende seguire non è, però, quella di partire – cartesianamente – dal dubbio.

Denise Mifsud, Foucault and School Leadership Research. Bridging Theory and Method, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017

Foucault and School Leadership Research illustrates the application of Foucauldian theory to an educational leadership research context, thus staging the ways a researcher negotiates the methodological tensions and contradictions in the conduct of qualitative inquiry within education research.

The book draws on an empirical study of a multi-site school collaborative that investigates relations of power within the unfolding network among the various leadership hierarchies in school governance. The book is anchored around a narrative dramatization that the author, Denise Mifsud, crafts from her data, using the dramatic play as a medium to present her research findings so as to show rather than just tell readers about network leadership dynamics. Mifsud’s innovative use of dramatization to communicate her findings and analysis serves to problematize the representation of qualitative research, as well as to incorporate researcher interpretation and explicate the intertwining nature of theory and methodology. Through the use of Foucauldian theory, mainly his notions of webs of power, discipline, governmentality, discourse, and subjectification, the research narrative critiques and problematizes traditional understandings of educational leadership.

The book focuses on and demonstrates the challenging enterprise of the art of theory application in method by outlining the epistemological, operational and analytical challenges encountered: the application of Foucauldian concepts in education research contexts; the adaptation of methodological and theoretical concerns; in addition to showing how the quality of research outcomes is shaped by social theory.

Table of contents

1. Introduction: Setting the Stage for the Research Narrative
2. Foucauldian Props for Data Interpretation and Representation I
3. Foucauldian Props for Data Interpretation and Representation II
4. Data Analysis Choices and the Crisis of Representation
5. Data Analysis Choices and the Fictional Representation of Narrative
6. Raising the Curtain on Sunnyside College
7. The Performance of Collegiality
8. The Fluidity in the Emerging Relations of Power
9. The Unfolding of Leadership Distribution
10. Bringing Down the Curtain?
11. Presenting Conclusions and Theorisations: The Quasi-Final Stage
References
Index

Reviews

“There are now many books about Foucault. This book uses Foucault and takes on the spirit and style of his method to explore the practice of institutional leadership. Drawing on Foucault’s interest in absurdist drama, Mifsud’s study examines some of the dramas of institutional life. In doing so she throws down a challenge to the orthodoxes of qualitative method.” 
–  Stephen J. Ball FBA, Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology of Education, UCL Institute of Education, UK

Le foucaldien. Open access journal along Foucauldian lines

Update November 2025. Le foucaldien is now GENEALOGY+CRITIQUE (G+C)

The peer-reviewed open access journal Le foucaldien publishes interdisciplinary research along the lines of the philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1926–1984) in English, German, and French. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy credits Foucault with being “the author most frequently cited in the humanities” at the beginning of the 21st century, but his concepts are challenged in emerging fields such as media studies, digital humanities, post-colonialism, new materialism, and science and technology studies. Hence the main focus of Le foucaldien lies on updating and operationalizing Foucauldian approaches in preferably plain language.

materiali foucaultiani
volume V, number 9-10 (January-December 2016)

Open access

Essays by Domingo Fernández Agis, Gianvito Brindisi, Mathieu Corteel, Giulia Guadagni, Manlio Iofrida, Valentina Moro, Maria Muhle

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Soggettivazione e assoggettamento: tra le maglie del soggetto (pp. 3-7)
Laura Cremonesi, Orazio Irrera, Daniele Lorenzini, Martina Tazzioli

Biopolitical Life and Its Milieu. Between Self-Preservation and Self-Transgression (pp. 9-26)
Maria Muhle

La normalisation médicale dans Surveiller et punir (pp. 27-40)
Domingo Fernández Agis

Le nominalisme de la médecine contemporaine. Éléments d’archéologie du big data en médecine (pp. 41-68)
Mathieu Corteel

Foucault e il governo del giudiziario (pp. 69-84)
Gianvito Brindisi

Verità e discorso: il “politico” nel linguaggio tragico (pp. 85-105)
Valentina Moro

Regimi di verità in Michel Foucault (pp. 107-126)
Giulia Guadagni

“Annali franco-tedeschi”: i testi di Foucault sull’Illuminismo alla luce del confronto fra Francia e Germania (pp. 127-142)
Manlio Iofrida

stuartelden's avatarProgressive Geographies

After a too-short holiday, I’ve been back working on the Foucault book. Although I’d drafted some of this material before, my focus has been on the translations of Binswanger and von Weizsäcker. With Binswanger’s ‘Dream and Existence’, Foucault was not listed as a translator, which was credited to Jacqueline Verdeaux alone, but all the accounts point to his significant role.

I’m working with the German text, Verdeaux and Foucault’s translation, the English translation by Forrest Williams and, to a lesser extent, the 2012 French translation by Françoise Dastur. Foucault was brought into the project because of his knowledge of German philosophy, especially Heidegger. Binswanger makes extensive use of Heideggerian terminology. In the early 1950s almost none of Heidegger’s work was translated into French, and so there are some choices about core terminology which are interesting. In as much as anyone has looked at this before, the one thing remarked…

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An interesting and comprehensive collection of Foucault related teeshirts at Redbubble

One example below.