Foucault News

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.

Demazeux, S.
Philosopher contre la psychiatrie, tout contre
(2016) Revue de Synthese, 137 (1-2), pp. 11-34.

DOI: 10.1007/s11873-016-0290-x

Résumé
Depuis le début des années 1990, les recherches interdisciplinaires au croisement entre philosophie et psychiatrie ont connu un formidable regain d’intérêt sur le plan international. Elles ont été stimulées par la mise en place d’une association, d’un journal, et même d’une collection spécifiquement dédiée. Cet article cherche à reconstituer, à travers la profusion et la grande diversité des travaux individuels, la dynamique intellectuelle de ce qu’il est désormais convenu d’appeler « la nouvelle philosophie de la psychiatrie ». Il s’agit là de cerner les lignes de force, mais aussi les rejets silencieux qui structurent de l’intérieur ce champ d’études devenu très prolifique depuis 25 ans.

Mots-clés
Philosophie de la psychiatrie psychiatrie critique Foucault Jaspers

Philosophy against psychiatry, right up against it

Abstract
Since the early 1990s, there has been a tremendous new interest at the international level for researches at the crossroad between philosophy and psychiatry. This interest has been supported and quite stimulated by the foundation of a dedicated association, as well as by the establishment of a journal and the promotion of a new collection. My aim in this paper is to trace the origins of the so-called “new philosophy of psychiatry” field and to reconstruct its global intellectual dynamics during the past two decades. I try to identify, through the big diversity of the individual contributions, its dominant theoretical orientations but also what may appear as some of its philosophical blind spots. © 2016, Springer-Verlag France.

Author Keywords
Critical Psychiatry; Foucault; Jaspers; Philosophy of psychiatry

Heller, M.
Foucault, Discourse, and the Birth of British Public Relations
(2016) Enterprise and Society, 17 (3), pp. 651-677.

DOI: 10.1017/eso.2015.101

Abstract
This article analyzes the emergence of public relations among corporations in interwar Britain. It adopts a discursive approach and applies the philosophy of Michel Foucault. It argues that public relations was a result of state propaganda during World War I, the emergence of a mass-media society, and criticism from a range of groups toward corporations during the period. It acted as an emergent institutional text, which taught corporations how to create corporate identities so as to garner public good will and institutional legitimacy. This was achieved by a range of strategies, including social programs and the creation of corporate narratives. © The Author 2016.

Fernández-Morales, M., Menéndez-Menéndez, M.I.
“When in Rome, Use What You’ve Got” : A Discussion of Female Agency through Orange Is the New Black
(2016) Television and New Media, 17 (6), pp. 534-546.

DOI: 10.1177/1527476416647493

Abstract
Drawing on the work of Lois McNay as a feminist extender of Foucault’s ideas about power and the possibility of resistance, this article offers a discussion of her theories of female agency as transferred onto Jenji Kohan’s TV adaptation of Piper Kerman’s prison autobiographical narrative Orange Is the New Black (2010). Situated within feminist epistemology, our approach is interdisciplinary, and we argue that the series is an instance of McNay’s neo-Foucauldian framework in practice, with her three dimensions of agency integrated in a critical discourse about life in women’s prisons. We contend that Kohan presents the protagonists as active subjects with potential for transformation. In our view, her narratives of resistance against the disciplinary practices of the institution can be read as political statements that promote consciousness-raising among viewers. © The Author(s) 2016.

Author Keywords
agency; Foucauldian feminism; resistance; TV series; women in prison