Foucault News

Stuart Elden, Foucault: The Birth of Power, Polity, 2017

Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge was published in March 1969; Discipline and Punish in February 1975. Although only six years apart, the difference in tone is stark: the former is a methodological treatise, the latter a call to arms. What accounts for the radical shift in Foucault’s approach?

Foucault’s time in Tunisia had been a political awakening for him, and he returned to a France much changed by the turmoil of 1968. He taught at the experimental University of Vincennes and then moved to a prestigious position at the Collège de France. He quickly became involved in activist work concerning prisons and health issues such as abortion rights, and in his seminars he built research teams to conduct collaborative work, often around issues related to his lectures and activism.

Foucault: The Birth of Power makes use of a range of archival material, including newly available documents at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, to provide a detailed intellectual history of Foucault as writer, researcher, lecturer and activist. Through a careful reconstruction of Foucault’s work and preoccupations, Elden shows that, while Discipline and Punish may be the major published output of this period, it rests on a much wider range of concerns and projects.

Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction: Out of the 1960s
1. Measure: Greece, Nietzsche, Oedipus
2. Inquiry: Revolt, Ordeal, Proof
3. Examination: Punishment, War, Economy
4. Madness: Power, Psychiatry and the Asylum
5. Discipline: Surveillance, Punishment and the Prison
6. Illness: Medicine, Disease and Health
Conclusion: Towards Foucault’s Last Decade
Notes
Index

About the Author
Stuart Elden is Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick and Monash Warwick Professor in the Faculty of Arts, Monash University.

Randell-Moon, Holly, Tippet, Ryan (Eds.) Security, Race, Biopower. Essays on Technology and Corporeality, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

This book explores how technologies of media, medicine, law and governance enable and constrain the mobility of bodies within geographies of space and race. Each chapter describes and critiques the ways in which contemporary technologies produce citizens according to their statistical risk or value in an atmosphere of generalised security, both in relation to categories of race, and within the new possibilities for locating and managing bodies in space. The topics covered include: drone warfare, the global distribution of HIV-prevention drugs, racial profiling in airports, Indigenous sovereignty, consumer lifestyle apps and their ecological and labour costs, and anti-aging therapies.

Security, Race, Biopower makes innovative contributions to multiple disciplines and identifies emerging social and political concerns with security, race and risk that invite further scholarly attention. It will be of great interest to scholars and students in disciplinary fields including Media and Communication, Geography, Science and Technology Studies, Political Science and Sociology.

Table of contents (10 chapters)

Death by Metadata: The Bioinformationalisation of Life and the Transliteration of Algorithms to Flesh
Pugliese, Joseph

Of Bodies, Borders, and Barebacking: The Geocorpographies of HIV
Pocius, Joshua

Body, Crown, Territory: Geocorpographies of the British Monarchy and White Settler Sovereignty
Randell-Moon, Holly

What Are You Doing Here? The Politics of Race and Belonging at the Airport
Kamaloni, Sunshine M.

Corporate Geocorpographies: Surveillance and Social Media Expansion
Tippet, Ryan

Everyday Modulation: Dataism, Health Apps, and the Production of Self-Knowledge
Nicholls, Brett

Invisible Bodies and Forgotten Spaces: Materiality, Toxicity, and Labour in Digital Ecologies
Taffel, Sy

Domesticating Drone Technologies: Commercialisation, Banalisation, and Reconfiguring ‘Ways of Seeing’
Phan, Thao (et al.)

The Somatechnics of Desire and the Biopolitics of Ageing
Fletcher, David-Jack

Securing Sovereignty: Private Property, Indigenous Resistance, and the Rhetoric of Housing
Kramer, Jillian