Foucault News

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

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.

Etelka Lehoczky, Mirrors And Neck Ruffs: A Graphic Novel Takes On Velázquez. NPR Books, 30 August 2017
Review of graphic novel: The Ladies-In-Waiting by Santiago Garcia, Javier Olivares and Erica Mena

[…]

Even in this crowded field, Diego Velázquez’ 1656 Las Meninas (The Ladies-in-Waiting) maintains a special hold on viewers’ imaginations. The elaborately gowned girl at the center is weirdly poised for her age. The presence of the artist himself, standing to one side with brush in hand, gives the scene a jolt of unexpected modernity. Then there’s that mirror in the background. Framing two hazy faces, it makes it unclear who’s looking at whom.

For Santiago García and Javier Olivares, Velázquez’ painting is itself a kind of mirror, offering kaleidoscopic angles on history and culture. By telling the story of Las Meninas’creation and its subsequent influence over generations of artists, they hope to find insights into timeless aesthetic questions — even, with the graphic novel format, prompting the reader to muse on the relationship between comics and high art. It’s a heady — and heavy — mix.

Maybe too heavy; García even includes a bibliography of titles like Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things. As if determined to show off the effects of his reading, he jumps between historical periods in the best postmodern fashion, dropping in on artists who’ve been impacted by Las Meninas over the centuries: Goya, Picasso, Dalí. Maintaining a knowing, high-low tone, he casts some anecdotes in the vein of sensationalistic comics — “True Crime Stories: Murder In Main Street” — only to turn around and spout lines like “Maybe it’s time to give a name to the image that appears at the heart of a text and that the writer contemplates before his notebook.” Anyone who still doubts comics’ intellectual potential will find plenty of ideas here. But while García gestures in impressive directions, he never really digs into his themes.

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Speaking the language of change?
Nissim Mannathukkaren, The Hindu (newspaper), July 17,2017

The World Bank’s reports show that social movements may be shaping the bank’s language

Democratic Centralism entails popular participation in formulating the plan at the enterprise level. — World Bank Romania country report, 1979

The World Bank’s ‘World Development Report 2017’ is a remarkable document. Remarkable, because it does not seem that the World Bank authored this document titled “Governance and the Law.” When the report cites Michel Foucault, that incandescent French thinker, who showed us how supposedly free and rational institutions of modernity are indissolubly linked with power and social control, it is time to sit up and notice.

Politics and power

This is not an accident for the central focus of the report is politics and power in development policy, and the endeavor is to move politics and power “from the margins to the core of development thinking and action” and to “development practice… health and education… transportation and food…” (p.271).

How does then a rethinking of governance for development look like? The report stresses on three key principles which differ from traditional approaches: 1) Focus not only on the right form of institutions, but also about the functions of institutions. 2) Focus not only on building the capacity of institutions, but also about power asymmetries, and 3) Focus not only the rule of law, but also about the role of law (p.29).

Nissim Mannathukkaren is Chair, International Development Studies, Dalhousie University, Canada

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William Davies, What Is “Neo” About Neoliberalism?, New Republic, July 13, 2017

How to tell the difference between liberalism and something else.

In the buildup to the 2015 General Election, Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), reiterated his support for an “Australian-style points system” as a means of controlling immigration, the policy issue that his party had prioritized above all others. What was curious about Farage’s statement was not the policy commitment itself, which had been known for some time, but the liberal rhetoric that he used to justify it. Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Farage argued “what UKIP wants is not to do down migrants. It’s not to stigmatize, or discourage, or blame people for coming to this country and trying to make a better life for themselves” and that the “points system” is the only fair basis for managing immigration.

[…]

Firstly, neoliberalism has never pursued a weaker state; indeed it is a political philosophy and policy agenda that has always looked to the state to reshape society around its ideals. As Michel Foucault went to great lengths to stress, it is not another form of laissez-faire and, instead, grants the state a key role in shaping how economic freedom is to be defined and instantiated. So, in the case of immigration, the liberal notion that economic welfare will be maximized by simply throwing open the national labor market to all-comers would be resisted from a neoliberal perspective. It is entirely plausible, from a neoliberal perspective, that the state might seek to regulate something like labor flows, to serve certain strategic economic goals.

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Foucault in Warsaw, Durieux.eu blog, 31 August 2017.

 Le Soir spends ample space on an article by Maya Szymanowska about a new Polish publication by sociologist Remigiusz Ryzinski, ‘Foucault W Warszawie’ (Foucault in Warsaw – no translations yet).

In 1955 Michel Foucault arrives in Uppsala, Sweden, where he will work on his doctoral dissertation. But then in October 1958, he moves to Warsaw, Poland, where he is going to direct the Centre de civilisation française at the local university. There he continues working on the manuscript he will  eventually defend in 1961 in Paris as his so-called ‘principal thesis’. It is published originally as ‘Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique’.

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