Foucault News

Gross, D.M.
Rhetoric and the origins of the human sciences: A Foucauldian tale untold
(2016) Quarterly Journal of Speech, 102 (3), pp. 225-244.

DOI: 10.1080/00335630.2016.1190858

Abstract
Michel Foucault’s famous history of the human sciences focused on “the order of things” and in doing so it overwhelmed a rhetorical perspective that can track the arts of moving souls: pedagogy, politics, and psychology. If we revisit Foucault from a rhetorical perspective there are consequences: (1) at the level of architectonic, we rediscover rhetoric’s role at the inception of the human sciences, and (2) at the level of thematic, we can make better sense of rhetorical phenomena such as the sixteenth-/ seventeenth-century sacred arts of listening, which feature a “public ear.” Foucault’s late interest in the pastoral picks up this rhetorical thread, although he never was able to revise the disciplinary and biopolitical history implicated therein. This article initiates just such a revision, paying particular attention to historiographic questions, and to recent discussions of biopower that wind up looking very different from this rhetorical perspective. © 2016 National Communication Association.

Author Keywords
Biopower; Foucault; Human sciences; Listening; Sacred rhetoric

Pløger, J.
The evental city: Moment, situation, presence
(2016) Space and Culture, 19 (3), pp. 260-274.

DOI: 10.1177/1206331215595729

Abstract
Events are part of everyday life and cities, and cities’ experience economy. Affect and emotions – real or imagined, collective or subjective, lived or dreamed – are crucial issues to events, including being insecure on what one experiences is part of the attraction of events. Events are most often seen as situated encounters in planned spaces, where the mode of social exchange is significant to people’s experience (both as Erlebnis and Erfahrung) and identification with place. Emphasizing the eventness or eventful experiences of city life highlight the importance of forces of moments and situations as presence forces. Experiencing events happens in between sense-body-mind effects. Presence is a wirkungs-kraft. This article discusses presence effects exploring some “types” of urban experiences – presence-culture, presence-meaning, present-presence – using street art, everyday experiences, and community art events as examples. It is an exploration inspired by Hans Ulrich Gumbrect’s writings on presence and Michel Foucault on event and eventalization. © SAGE Publications.

Author Keywords
event; eventalization; Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht; Michel Foucault; presence

Toby Seddon, Inventing Drugs: A Genealogy of a Regulatory Concept, Journal of Law and Society, 11 August 2016

doi: 10.1111/j.1467-6478.2016.00760.x

Open access: Full PDF available

Abstract
The trade in, and consumption of, illicit drugs is perhaps the archetypal ‘wicked problem’ of our time – complex, globalized, and seemingly intractable – and presents us with one of the very hardest legal and policy challenges of the twenty-first century. The central concept of a ‘drug’ remains under-theorized and largely neglected by critical socio-legal and criminological scholars. Drawing on a range of primary archival material and secondary sources, this article sets out a genealogy of the concept, assembled a little over a century ago out of diverse lines of development. It is argued that the drug label is an invented legal-regulatory construct closely bound up with the global drug prohibition system. Many contemporary features of the ‘war on drugs’ bear traces of this genealogy, notably how drug law enforcement often contributes to racial and social injustice. To move beyond prohibition, radical law and policy reform may require us to abandon the drug concept entirely.

Thanks to Philip Burton, Philippa Carrington, and Nishat Hyder for assistance with some of the archival research. Embryonic versions were given in Oxford and Sheffield and I thank Ian Loader and Layla Skinns, respectively, for the invitations. Later versions were presented at a ‘Global Humanities’ workshop in Warwick and at a plenary panel at the annual SLSA conference in Lancaster, at the invitations of Susannah Wilson and Suzanne Ost. Virginia Berridge and Robin Room read and commented on a draft. The usual disclaimer applies.

Hannah, M.G.
State knowledge and recurring patterns of state phobia: From fascism to post-politics
(2016) Progress in Human Geography, 40 (4), pp. 476-494.

DOI: 10.1177/0309132515596875

Abstract
This paper identifies some key underlying assumptions of critical political analysis by examining two moments that have brought these assumptions to the fore: the Klaus Croissant affair in West Germany and France in the late 1970s, and Edward Snowden’s revelations in the 21st century regarding the activities of the US National Security Agency. Interesting parallels can be identified between ‘distinction-collapsing discourses’ prominent in the two contexts. The core argument of the paper is that understanding Michel Foucault’s critical stance toward the description of West Germany as ‘fascist’ in 1977 and 1978, and more broadly, toward what he called ‘state phobia’, can help us resist undifferentiated condemnation of state representations under the sign of ‘post-politics’ today. An account of the 1977 Croissant affair, the critical discourses prominent at the time, and Foucault’s critical stance toward the notion of fascism provides an historical parallel for a critical reading of Badiou’s discussion of the state in Being and Event and other works. The final section briefly surveys a number of recent forms of epistemic activism that illustrate the shortcomings of a one-sided reading of state knowledge such as that offered by Badiou and seemingly confirmed by the NSA scandal. © 2015, © The Author(s) 2015.

Author Keywords
Badiou; fascism; Foucault; post-politics; state phobia

Jan Christoph Suntrup, Michel Foucault and the Competing Alethurgies of Law, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies (2016)
doi: 10.1093/ojls/gqw019
First published online: August 9, 2016

Abstract

Law has an epistemic dimension, contributing to the social construction of reality. Legal trials stage the constitution of knowledge, facts and other kinds of truth in accordance with specified rules of procedure and evidence. As legal cultures differ in their conceptions of fairness, of justice, and especially of the nature and depth of the truth envisaged at trial, there is a demand for analytical means that can contribute to a sophisticated comparison of legal procedures of truth production. Some new categories can be found in lectures published in part very recently by Michel Foucault, whose genealogical sketches of juridical forms of truth making have not received the attention they deserve. Foucault distinguishes between three basic forms of legal truth constitution: the test, the inquiry and the examination. As all of these practices are performed in a ritual, liturgical manner, Foucault refers to them as ‘alethurgies’. The critical reconstruction of his foray into the historical stages and transformations of legal truth manifestation not only enables a reassessment of Foucault’s legal thinking, but, more importantly, provides us with categorical devices that might be useful for the comparison of contemporary legal, especially procedural cultures.

Keywords
Michel Foucault truth evidence legal procedures comparative law