Foucault News

Line Joranger,
Individual perception and cultural development: Foucault’s 1954 Approach to Mental Illness and Its History
(2016) History of Psychology, 19 (1), pp. 40-51.
https://doi.org/10.1037/hop0000014

Abstract
In his 1954 book Mental Illness and Personality Foucault combines the subjective experience of the mentally ill person with a sociocultural historical approach to mental illness and suggests that there exists a reciprocal connection between individual perception and sociocultural development. This article examines the ramifications of these connections in Foucault’s 1954 works and the connection with his later historical works. The article also examines the similarities between Foucault’s 1954 thoughts and contemporary intellectual thought, such as those outlined in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology and in Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem’s historical epistemology. In sum, my study shows that Foucault’s historical analysis began long before his 1961 dissertation History of Madness. It also shows that, more than announcing the “death” of the subject, Foucault’s historical analysis may have contributed to saving it.

Author Keywords
Environment; Epistemology; Experience; Mental illness; Phenomenology

Fathallah, J.
Statements and silence: Fanfic paratexts for ASOIAF/Game of Thrones
(2016) Continuum, 30 (1), pp. 75-88.

DOI: 10.1080/10304312.2015.1099150

Abstract
Today, most media authors acknowledge and to some degree integrate the user-generated content of their fandom. Some, however, still perform authoritarian positions of prohibition. George R. R. Martin, the creator of A Song of Ice and Fire, attempts to ban fanfiction, whilst acknowledging he cannot control use of the characters licensed to the TV adaptation (Game of Thrones). Building on the work of Jonathan Gray and Alexandra Herzog on paratexts in fandom studies, this article performs a critical discourse analysis on a systematic sample of the paratexts fanfic authors attach to fanfic from a cross section of online forums. These statements discursively reconfigure constructions of authorship and ownership, strongly inflected by the factors of site, audience and category. However, these paratexts evidence a paradox, legitimating their work by reference to the authority of what is already legitimate. The more radical gesture may be the absence of paratextual justification, and refusal of the incitement to discourse which Foucault recognised as a technique of modern power. © 2015 Taylor and Francis.

Renkin, H.Z.
Biopolitical mythologies: Róheim, Freud, (homo)phobia, and the sexual science of Eastern European Otherness
(2016) Sexualities, 19 (1-2), pp. 168-189.

DOI: 10.1177/1363460714550908

Abstract
A vast body of research has, following Foucault, shown the scientific study of sexuality to be central to the construction of modernity and its Others, and to biopolitical categories of personhood and citizenship. Similarly, much historical work has acknowledged the critical role of the Eastern European Other in imagining the modern European West. Yet while representations of sexuality were critical to Eastern Europe’s invention, and have been increasingly visible elements of re-emerging European “neo-orientalisms,” there has been little scholarly concern with how such symbolic and political hierarchies were constructed through the historical intersections of ethnographic and sexual scientific practice, or with this history’s biopolitical implications. This paper examines the intersection of several such sexual-scientific imaginings. Focusing on the conjuncture between Hungarian scholar Géza Róheim’s psychoanalytic interpretations of European folklore and non-European ethnography, Sigmund Freud’s orientalizing construction of the key psychoanalytic concept of “phobia,” and scholarly analyses of postsocialist sexual politics, I argue that these intersecting scientific works joined evolutionist understandings of culture to theories of universal psychic development to read Eastern Europe as a site of psycho-sexual and civilizational immaturity, producing mutually-reinforcing narratives that fabricated Eastern European sexuality as a biopolitical marker of European difference. These overlapping sexual geotemporalities, I suggest, continue to inform current scholarly interpretations of postsocialist homophobia, (re)producing both Hungary and Eastern Europe as naturalized sites of homophobia, primitivity, and failed sexual citizenship, and rendering hegemonic the status of the region and its inhabitants as sexual Others of “European” modernity. By fabricating postsocialist homophobia as a scientific “fact,” such layered discourses sustain the biopolitical boundaries of modern European citizenship. © 2016, The Author(s) 2016.

Author Keywords
Eastern Europe; history of science; homophobia; postsocialism; sexual citizenship; sexual geography; sexual science

Turan, G.
‘Responsibility to Prosecute’ in an age of global governmentality: The International Criminal Court
(2016) Cooperation and Conflict, 51 (1), pp. 20-37.

DOI: 10.1177/0010836715597946

Abstract
This paper critically examines the discursive power of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which was established in 2002 with unprecedented jurisdiction in terms of both crimes being prosecuted and territorial scope. What evokes a critical engagement is not only the criminalization of certain acts in international law, but also the evolution of a permanent international criminal court with forms of power enabling the sanctioning, prosecution and punishment of these acts. Analysing how current international criminal law developed and is being shaped brings to the surface particular power structures embedded in legal texts and practices. By subjecting the discourse of the ICC to a Foucauldian analysis and arguing for the utility of Foucault’s concepts in analysing contemporary international criminal legal discourse, the paper contributes to our understanding of novel techniques and procedures of contemporary global governmentality, and how the ‘international community’ is constituted as both a subject and an object within this recent power modality. © 2015, © The Author(s) 2015.

Author Keywords
Discursive power; global governmentality; international criminal court; international criminal prosecutions

McMillan, K.
Politics of change: the discourses that inform organizational change and their capacity to silence
(2016) Nursing Inquiry, 23 (3), pp. 223-231.

DOI: 10.1111/nin.12133

Abstract
Changes in healthcare organizations are inevitable and occurring at unprecedented rates. Such changes greatly impact nurses and their work, yet these experiences are rarely explored. Organizational change discourses remain grounded in perspectives that explore and explain systems, often not the people within them. Change processes in healthcare organizations informed by such organizational discourses validate only certain perspectives and forms of knowledge. This fosters exclusionary practices, limiting the capacity of certain individuals or groups of individuals to effectively contribute to change discourses and processes. The reliance on mainstream organizational discourses in healthcare organizations has left little room for the exploration of diverse perspectives on the subject of organizational change, particularly those of nurses. Michel Foucault’s work challenges dominant discourse and suggest that strong reliance’s on specific discourses effectively disqualify certain forms of knowledge. Foucault’s writings on disqualified knowledge and parrhesia (truth telling and frank speech) facilitate the critical exploration of discourses that inform change in healthcare organizations and nurses capacities to contribute to organizational discourses. This paper explores the capacity of nurses to speak their truths within rapidly and continuously changing healthcare organizations when such changes are often driven by discourses not derived from nursing knowledge or experience. © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Author Keywords
Michel Foucault; nursing; organizational change; parrhesia; philosophy; professional knowledge; voice

Index Keywords
doctor patient relation, health care organization, human, human experiment, nurse, nursing knowledge, philosophy, politics, professional knowledge, speech, voice, writing

Andre Duarte, Michel Foucault : Autour des nouvelles communautés politiquesChimères 2015/3 (N° 87), 61-8

Premières lignes
Je voudrais proposer l’hypothèse que la notion foucaldienne de subjectivation permet de saisir comment agissent les nouveaux acteurs politiques engagés dans des collectifs politiques autonomes, surtout ceux qui agissent autour des mouvements de minorités d’inspiration queer, écartés des partis politiques et des structures institutionnelles courantes de la représentation politique.Sous quelles conditions…

Mads Peter Karlsen and Kaspar Villadsen, Health Promotion, Governmentality and the Challenges of Theorizing Pleasure and Desire (2016) Body and Society, 22 (3), pp. 3-30.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X15616465

Abstract
The relationship between pleasure and asceticism has been at the core of debates on western subjectivity at least since Nietzsche. Addressing this theme, this article explores the emergence of ‘non-authoritarian’ health campaigns, which do not propagate abstention from harmful substances but intend to foster a ‘well-balanced subject’ straddling pleasure and asceticism. The article seeks to develop the Foucauldian analytical framework by foregrounding a strategy of subjectivation that integrates desire, pleasure and enjoyment into health promotion. The point of departure is the overwhelming emphasis in the governmentality literature on ‘prudence’, ‘self-responsibility’ or ‘risk calculation’, such that pleasure and desire remain largely absent from the framework. Some insights from Žižek’s work are introduced to help us obtain a firmer grasp on the problematic of ‘the well-balanced subject’. The article argues that, in order to analyse the transformation of interpellation in recent health promotion, we must recognize the mechanism of self-distance or dis-identification as an integral part of the procedure of subjectification. © 2015, © The Author(s) 2015.

Author Keywords
asceticism; Foucault; governmentality; health promotion; pleasure; subjectification; Žižek

Sébastien Roman Hétérotopie et utopie pratique : comparaison entre Foucault et Ricœur, Le Philosophoire 2015/2 (n° 44)

Résumé

Français
L’utopie, aujourd’hui, a mauvaise presse. Elle est réduite, très souvent, à sa forme littéraire – le rêve ou la fiction – qui pourrait paraître inoffensive ou prêter à sourire, si le xxe siècle ne l’avait pas discréditée par les expériences totalitaires. L’utopie serait une notion désuète dont il conviendrait de se débarrasser, pour accepter une restriction du champ des possibles. Contre ces préjugés, le présent article insiste sur la figure de l’utopie pratique, et sur sa force critique pour contester un ordre social donné, dans les sociétés contemporaines, à partir d’une étude comparative des travaux de Michel Foucault et de Paul Ricœur, qu’il est intéressant de faire pour souligner l’importance d’espaces autres – des hétérotopies – en démocratie.

English
Utopia, today, has a bad reputation. It is reduced to its literary form – a dream or a fiction – which may seem insignificant or make us smile, if it had not been discredited by the totalitarian experiments of the twentieth century. Utopia would be an obsolete notion that should no longer be used, and it would be better to accept a restriction to the field of possibilities. To combat such prejudices, the present paper focuses on the idea of practical utopia, and its critical strength to contest a social order, in contemporary societies, based on a interesting comparison between Michel Foucault’s and Paul Ricœur’s thoughts, in order to underline the importance of other spaces – heterotopias – in democracy.