Foucault News

Joseph, J. Authoritarianism, Governmentality and the COVID-19 Response (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

6 October 2024

Joseph, J.
Authoritarianism, Governmentality and the COVID-19 Response (2024) Global Society

DOI: 10.1080/13600826.2024.2383241

Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic raises important questions about biopolitics and governmentality, not least, what are the limitations of governing through not governing too much? Important questions concern the role of the state, citizenship, privacy, and concerns about populist movements and personal freedom. The pandemic challenges the idea that liberal government is the most effective way to care for populations while raising the spectre of an underlying authoritarianism. Indeed, the triangle of governance, sovereignty and discipline remains the most effective way to conceptualise the current situation. The article will explore how authoritarian elements underlie liberal governmentality while noting the paradox that this might not necessarily be such a bad thing if it enhances pastoral care for the population. © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
authoritarianism; COVID-19 pandemic; foucault; Governmentality

Michel Foucault, Entretiens radiophoniques 1961-1983 (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

4 October 2024

Michel Foucault, Entretiens radiophoniques 1961-1983, Flammarion/Vrin/INA, 2024

Édition de : Henri-Paul Fruchaud
Préface : Henri-Paul Fruchaud, Frédéric Gros

À paraître

De 1961, date de son retour en France après plusieurs années passées en Suède, en Pologne et en Allemagne, jusqu’à la fin de sa vie, Michel Foucault a été très régulièrement présent à la radio, d’abord sur la chaîne France III National, puis à partir de 1963 sur France Culture. La parution de ses ouvrages est l’occasion de débats : c’est le cas de l’Histoire de la folie, de Raymond Roussel et de Les Mots et les Choses. La radio accueille aussi d’importantes conférences comme « Langages de la folie », « Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques », « Les utopies réelles ou lieux et autres lieux » et « Le corps utopique ».
La diversité des émissions et des thèmes traités reflète l’insatiable curiosité d’esprit de Michel Foucault : philosophie, sciences humaines, médecine – en particulier la psychiatrie –, histoire, littérature, politique, théâtre… Vision panoramique d’un Foucault saisi sur le vif, dans la chaleur et la surprise de l’échange, ce volume fournit la meilleure des introductions à l’une des grandes oeuvres de la pensée.

Essais
À paraître le 23/10/2024
Genre : Essais
944 pages – 170 x 230 mm Broché EAN : 9782080460189 ISBN : 9782080460189

Pinto, P., Macleod, C.I., Jones, M. Regimes of truth regarding ‘sexual justice’ in academic literature from 2012 to 2022: a scoping review (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

3 October 2024

Pinto, P., Macleod, C.I., Jones, M.
Regimes of truth regarding ‘sexual justice’ in academic literature from 2012 to 2022: a scoping review (2024) Culture, Health and Sexuality

DOI: 10.1080/13691058.2024.2386051

Abstract
The notion of ‘sexual justice’ has gained traction in academic and policy arenas in recent years. This paper presents a scoping literature review of the regimes of truth, following Foucault, of ‘sexual justice’ appearing in the scientific literature from 2012 to 2022. Thirty-eight papers were coded using (1) content analysis of the studies’ central problematics, the programmes referred to, and institutional location(s); and (2) thematic analysis of how the notion was deployed. Central problematics centred on (1) critiques of, or alternatives to, dominant approaches to sexual and reproductive health; and (2) highlighting injustices. As such, ‘sexual justice’ is fighting for legitimacy in the truth stakes. There is a distinct paucity of papers tackling the translation of ‘sexual justice’ into practice. South Africa dominates as the site in which papers on ‘sexual justice’ have been produced, but there is a lack of South-South collaboration. Two themes were apparent around which conceptions of sexual justice cohere. Firstly, sexual justice is seen as a vital, yet politically ambivalent goal, with neoliberal co-optation of progressive rights agendas being warned against. Secondly, sexual justice is viewed as a means, in which sexual justice is described as having potential to repair established frameworks’ shortcomings and oppressive legacies. © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
decolonial praxis; human rights; neoliberal politics; Sexual (and reproductive) justice; sexual and gender diversity

Stuart Elden, Review of Hoffman, Foucault in Brazil (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

2 October 2024

Review of Marcelo Hoffman, Foucault in Brazil

Goldhill, S. Beyond Michel Foucault, Beyond Peter Brown: What Did Early Christianity Destroy? (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

30 September 2024

Goldhill, S.
Beyond Michel Foucault, Beyond Peter Brown: What Did Early Christianity Destroy? (2024) Arethusa, 57 (2), pp. 193-225.

DOI: 10.1353/are.2024.a934133

Abstract
This article argues that the focus on sexuality and the body in early Christianity, prompted by the seminal work of Peter Brown and Michel Foucault, has obscured a truly major and profound shift brought about by Christian thinking in late antiquity. This concerns the very construction and evaluation of the notion of nature and the natural world. It is well known that Greek and Roman thinking conceptualized man’s place in the order of things through a tripartite systematization of man, beast, and god, and that consequently through rituals such as sacrifice, epics such as the Odyssey, or normative texts of husbandry such as agricultural manuals, self-understanding of humanity is triangulated through a care for nature and a recognition of the divine. Similar structures are evident in early Jewish writing too. But in early Christianity, there is a turn away from care for nature and seeing man’s place as integrally embedded in an agricultural world. In contrast to the book of Jonah or the Talmud—where care for animals is expressly a source of divinely given regulation—St Paul can ask: “Surely God does not care for oxen?” There is a corollary absence of Christian agricultural manuals, and repeatedly Christian writing privileges the anchorite, the ascetic, the sage who, like the lily of the fields, do not work the land. Animals are present in parables and metaphors—but are absent from Christian care or regulation. This article considers how the normative discourses of nature are redrafted within Christianity and its subsequent impact on the ideas of ecology—and on the possibilities of eco-criticism for classics. © 2024 by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Author Keywords
Nonnus; Και φύσις αψ εγέλασε,; “And nature laughed again.”

Leonard D’Cruz, The Normative Stakes of Foucault’s Engagement with Neoliberalism: Seduction, Invention, and Normalization (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

29 September 2024

Leonard D’Cruz, The Normative Stakes of Foucault’s Engagement with Neoliberalism: Seduction, Invention, and Normalization, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 2024

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/sjp.12589

Open access

Abstract:
This article critically examines Foucault’s engagement with neoliberalism. While Foucault declares that his analysis of this tradition is primarily descriptive, I argue that he continually questions whether neoliberalism is less disciplinary and biopolitically normalizing than traditional forms of liberalism. Although Foucault does not endorse neoliberalism as a prescriptive solution to these problems of normalization, his interest in such problems is consistent with his tendency to privilege freedom over other values like justice and equality. This helps to clarify the normative stakes of Foucault’s analysis while rejecting any suggestion that he was invested in neoliberalism as a comprehensive political program. Indeed, I repudiate the claim that he was “seduced” by neoliberalism. Furthermore, I reject the idea that he was trying to “invent” a distinctively socialist governmentality through the prism of neoliberalism. Finally, I consider the broader significance of this discussion for normative political philosophy.

Patrick Boucheron, Of What Is History Capable? (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

28 September 2024

Boucheron, Patrick. Of What Is History Capable?. Translated by Liz Libbrecht, Collège de France, Open edition books, 2018
https://doi.org/10.4000/books.cdf.5852

Open access

Extracts
We need history because we need rest: a pause to rest our consciousness, so that the possibility of a consciousness may remain – as the seat not only of thought, but of practical reason, affording full latitude for action. Saving the past, saving time from the frenzy of the present: the poets devote themselves to this with exactitude. For this purpose we must work to weaken ourselves, to make ourselves idle, to make inoperative this endangering of temporality that wrecks experience and despises childhood. “Surprise the catastrophe”, said Victor Hugo. Or, as Walter Benjamin put it, throw oneself against the slow oncoming disaster that is more a continuation than a sudden rupture.

[…]

Not taking the floor, but preparing to become the one from whom speech emanates, allowing oneself to be enveloped, traversed, by it, “a slender gap – the point of its possible disappearance”.3 I read and reread these unforgettable pages from L’Ordre du discours (“The Order of Discourse”) by Michel Foucault, understanding that this order is all the more imperious insofar as it does not need to state its commandments. I read and reread them, feverishly, for I find in them an ever fiery warning that enables us to protect ourselves against the violence of the word, not to allow ourselves to be intoxicated by its unjust power. “What, then, is so perilous in the fact that people speak, and that their discourse proliferates to infinity? Where is the danger in that?”4 This is the only valid question today, for it demands an answer that may well surprise us, offend us, and be distasteful to us. For the greatest dangers are both those that announce themselves noisily, and those, less noticeable, that we could hasten in wanting to avoid them.

Elmore, M. Mysticism as Counter-Conduct: A Foucauldian Retrieval of Dante and St. Catherine of Siena (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

27 September 2024

Elmore, M.
Mysticism as Counter-Conduct: A Foucauldian Retrieval of Dante and St. Catherine of Siena (2024) Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, 44 (1), pp. 137-154.

DOI: 10.5840/jsce2024319100

Abstract
This essay draws upon Dante and St. Catherine of Siena to flesh out the Foucauldian concept of counter-conduct. Dante and Catherine occupy an important place in early modern history, challenging the designs of medieval pastoral power by embodying a new, secular mixture of the active and the contemplative life. This essay, with Foucault as a guide, suggests that they offer us another way to be modern, a path of self-cultivation surpassing modern norms for nature, the self, and the project of rational knowledge. © Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics.

Lars Erik Løvaas Gjerde, Antiracist welfarism: A governmentality study of Norwegian state antiracism (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

26 September 2024

Lars Erik Løvaas Gjerde, Antiracist welfarism: A governmentality study of Norwegian state antiracism, Nordic Journal of Social Research, 24 September 2024, pp 1–14

https://doi.org/10.18261/njsr.15.1.5

Open access

Abstract
This article analyses Norwegian state antiracism and how this relates to welfarism, the political rationality of the welfare state. Using a Foucauldian governmentality approach, the author studies governmental papers where the Norwegian state problematizes racism, rendering this phenomenon governable. While not reducing antiracism to welfarism, the author analyses the interweaving of welfarist and antiracist reasoning. The Norwegian state problematizes how the effects of racism contradict various typical welfarist objectives, related to equality, community, health and well-being. This way, welfarism in Norway manifests in antiracist reasoning, as racism must be countered for these welfarist objectives to be met. This article invites scholars, on the question of (anti)racism, to take the state’s complex and potentially contradictory stances to such questions seriously, in ways that include investigating the antiracist potential of welfarism as a political rationality, and the welfare state as a political institution.

Keywords
antiracism biopower biopolitics Foucault governmentality welfarism

Ege Selin Islekel, Nightmare Remains. The Politics of Mourning and Epistemologies of Disappearance (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

26 September 2024

Ege Selin Islekel, Nightmare Remains. The Politics of Mourning and Epistemologies of Disappearance, Northwestern University Press, 2024

Offering a political epistemology of collective mourning

Focusing on forms of improper burial in Turkey and Latin America, Ege Selin Islekel argues that a political technology of mourning is fundamental to contemporary politics. This technology of necrosovereignty shapes not only individuals’ and populations’ lives but also their epistemic and political afterlives. Local practices of mourning, however, contain resistant capacities, opening alternative ways of knowing, remembering, and assembling. “Nightmare knowledges,” Islekel posits, are resistant modes of knowing tied up with grief that challenge the contemporary politics of death and those politics’ archival boundaries. Seen in mothers’ movements across the globe, from the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo of Argentina to the Saturday Mothers of Turkey, nightmare knowledges produce counterarchives that mobilize traditionally ignored epistemic categories.

Nightmare Remains forges a new dialogue between post-Foucauldian political theory and decolonial thought and brings a fresh critical perspective to the theoretical discourse of enforced disappearances.