Foucault News

News and resources on French thinker Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

New additions to Colin Gordon’s academia.edu site (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

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2 April 2015

Colin Gordon, New additions to academia.edu site, March 2015

« Le possible : alors et maintenant : The possible then and now. » A new publication in a special issue of the French journal Cultures & Conflits on the theme of the critique of criminological reason. My piece is an essay in the history of the possible, looking back at the moment of possibility in thinking about penal practices which was opened up by Foucault’s Discipline and Punish – what is was, what happened to it, and what today’s possible might look like.

The other recent piece is « Expelled questions: Foucault, the Left and the law », a chapter from a volume edited by Ben Golder and published in 2013. This challenges and corrects a widespread misconception that Foucault’s thought neglects and marginalises law.

« Interview with Michel Foucault. » A posthumously published interview from 1978, originally intended to form part of the Power/Knowledge volume. Foucault talks about his relations with Marxism, his early philosophical influences, and his dislike of the concept of power.

« Introduction to Pasquino and Procacci. » A brief piece from the journal Ideology & Consciousness in 1978, presenting some early examples of Foucault-inspired genealogy of power/knowledge and governmentality.

« Birth of the Subject. » My first long piece on Foucault, published in Radical Philosophy in 1977 – an extended, pre-translation overview of Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality 1.

« The Philosopher in the Classroom. » A 1977 report co-written with Jonathan Rée on how post-68 radicalism was challenging the way philosophy was being taught in schools.

The Heterotopia of Facebook (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

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1 April 2015

The Heterotopia of Facebook
Robin Rymarczuk is Michel Foucault’s ‘friend’, Philosophy Now, Apr/May 2015

Facebook was founded on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard University room-mates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. What started out as an on-campus online ‘hot or not’ tool resulted in the registration of a billion users by 2012. Its rapid growth and perpetually expanding corporate power, as well as its part in the ‘digital privacy’ controversy, has attracted many seeking to explain its remarkable popularity as well as peoples’ discontent with it. Although interesting and important, these studies focus predominantly on what users do on Facebook, leaving underexposed what Facebook does to the user.

Facebook possesses properties that can be construed not just in terms of globalized online networks, but also in terms of a type of space. In these terms, Facebook is a world within the world that attracts or repels people by its geography as much as by its social life. So what kind of space is Facebook? I claim that it’s what philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) ingeniously called “un espace autre” – “an other space”; better known as a heterotopia. As I will elaborate, understanding Facebook as a heterotopic space offers a style of critical thinking that invites moral reflection on digital culture and its relation to other spaces in our everyday lives.

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CFP: After Biopolitics conference (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

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31 March 2015

Call for Papers After Biopolitics

The Center for Critical and Cultural Theory at Rice University will be hosting the 29th Annual (SLSA) Society for Literature, Science and the Arts Conference.

November 12-15, 2015 at the BioScience Research Collaborative (BRC) located within the Houston Medical Center and Rice University.

Keynote Speakers:
Viciane Despret
Mark Dion

POTENTIAL TOPICS

  • The concept of “Life”
  • Immunitary and autoimmunitary paradigms of biopolitics
  • Race, species, and biopolitics
  • States of exception: theoretical and historical dimensions
  • Bioengineering life
  • Biomedia and bioart
  • Biopolitics and the Anthropocene
  • The politics of medicalization and the Medical Humanities
  • The biopolitics of foodways
  • “Letting die”: the biopolitics of extinction
  • Biopolitics and the ecological paradigm
  • Biopolitics and genocide
  • “Making live”: biopolitics, health, and hygiene
  • Neoliberalism and biopolitics
  • The concept of sovereignty in biopolitical thought
  • Biopolitical histories of race, gender, and sexuality
  • Genetics, epigenetics, and biopolitics
  • “Flesh”: concepts of the body and embodiment in biopoltics
  • Imagining affirmative biopolitical futures

These and other topics related to the theme will be welcome. As always, the conference of the Society for Literature, Society, and the Arts is open to wide range of related topics drawn from a broad array of scholarly and creative disciplines and practices that are relevant to the mission of the organization.

SUBMISSIONS

For individual paper contributions, submit a 250-word abstract with title. Pre-organized panel submissions, which might include three or four papers per panel, should include an additional paragraph describing the rubric and proposed title of the panel. Roundtables, alternative format panels, and the like are encouraged.

Paper/Panel Proposal Due Date: extended to April 15, 2015

Notification of Acceptance: June 1, 2015

Workshop “Actualités Foucault” (4th session 2015)

Clare O'Farrell

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30 March 2015

Workshop “Actualités Foucault” (4th session)
Thursday, 9 April 2015, 4-6 pm

Philippe Sabot (Université Lille 3)
“Critique et culture de soi. À propos de Michel Foucault, Qu’est-ce que la critique ? suivi de La culture de soi (Paris, Vrin, 2015)”

Discussants: Henri-Paul Fruchaud & Daniele Lorenzini, scientific editors of the volume
Université Paris-Est Créteil, Campus Centre, Bâtiment i, salle des thèses
61, avenue du Général de Gaulle, 94010 Créteil (métro Créteil-Université)

Michel Foucault, Qu’est-ce que la critique? Suivie de La culture de soi (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

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30 March 2015

vrin-15Michel Foucault, Qu’est-ce que la critique? Suivie de La culture de soi
 Édition établie par H.-P. Fruchaud et D. Lorenzini
Introduction et apparat critique par D. Lorenzini et A.I. Davidson

Vrin – Philosophie du présent
192 pages – 12,5 × 18 cm
ISBN 978-2-7116-2624-3 – mars 2015

PDF Table des matières

Le 27 mai 1978, Michel Foucault prononce devant la Société française de Philosophie une conférence où il inscrit sa démarche dans la perspective ouverte par l’article de Kant Qu’est-ce que les Lumières? (1784), et définit la critique, de manière frappante, comme une attitude éthico-politique consistant dans l’art de n’être pas tellement gouverné. Ce volume en présente pour la première fois l’édition critique.

On y trouvera également la traduction d’une conférence inédite intitulée La culture de soi, prononcée à l’Université de Californie à Berkeley le 12 avril 1983. C’est le seul moment où, définissant son travail comme une ontologie historique de nous-mêmes, Foucault fait le lien entre ses réflexions sur l’Aufklärung et ses analyses de l’Antiquité gréco-romaine. Au cours du même séjour en Californie, Foucault participe aussi à trois débats publics où il est amené à revenir sur plusieurs aspects de son parcours philosophique. On en trouvera le texte à la suite de la conférence.

Inculcating an appreciation of time pressure in the young: the training of children for working life in 18th-century England (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

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28 March 2015

Margaret Bird – Inculcating an appreciation of time pressure in the young: the training of children for working life in 18th-century England
Podcast at Backdoor broadcasting

Royal Holloway University of London Department of History

Departmental Research seminars 2014/2015
24 March 2015

The rearing of children has been a topic at the centre of academic debate since the Annales historian Philippe Ariès analysed le sentiment de l’enfance in 1960.
Margaret Bird’s exploration of the tensions between respecting children as individuals and the need to hurry them into maturity for working life relates to the mercantile and manufacturing class in England. Understanding time pressure, as in expecting six-year-olds to watch the clock, formed part of their moulding as useful members of society. Time-conscious capitalism and Calvinism lay behind much of the thinking. It draws in part on the newly published diary of Mary Hardy, wife of a farmer and manufacturer.

Richard Wolin, Biopolitics and Engagement: What Foucault Learned about Power from the Maoists (2012)

Clare O'Farrell

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27 March 2015

https://vimeo.com/49843119

Richard Wolin, Biopolitics and Engagement: What Foucault Learned about Power from the Maoists, Feb 28, 2012

[Update December 2025. This video is no longer publicly accessible. But a written open access journal publication can be found here]

Richard Wolin, Biopolitics and Engagement, theologie.geschichte 7 (2012)
https://doi.org/10.48603/tg-2012-art-02

Michel Foucault’s conception of “power-knowledge” has been one of the most influential political ideas to have arisen in recent decades. It reverses the age-old assumption that knowledge will set us free. Instead, it suggests that knowledge is more closely related to social control than it is to freedom. Foucault’s rethinking of the relationship between power and knowledge was not a purely theoretical discovery. Instead it derives from his concerted political involvement with the Prison Information Group (GIP) – an innovative group of renegade French Maoists active during the early 1970s. Richard Wolin (History, The Graduate Center, CUNY) will discuss this hitherto underresearched episode of Foucault’s past as a political activist.

CFP: Contrivers’ Review Call for Essays on Technology (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

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26 March 2015

Contrivers’ Review Call for Essays on Technology

Update October 2025: Links in this post are to the archived page on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine

Through 2015 and beyond, Contrivers’ Review will dedicate a series of articles and interviews examining technology and society from several complementary angles. Our goal is to bring together a broad range of topics and perspectives in order to build a common, interdisciplinary conversation. Broadly, we envision three themes: digital humanities, political and social theory, identity and recognition.

The issue on the social theory of technology will explore the ways in which technology exists on a continuum between an instrument or tool of subjects and societies and a seemingly autonomous historical force that shapes and determines subjects and societies.

The social theory of technology has gained momentum in recent years. Thinkers like Langdon Winner, Paul Virilio, Bruno Latour, and Bernard Stiegler—a non-exhaustive list—have contributed to our theoretical toolbox, generating new approaches out of the work of Weber, Marcuse, Foucault, and Heidegger. Nevertheless, there remains an urgent need to understand the changes driven by the pace of technological innovation. The social theory of technology seeks to place technics alongside economics, politics, and society as a major constitutive force in history.

There are many areas where a theoretical engagement of technology might be productive. Areas that we anticipate contributions include:

  • “Technology” as a theme in Marx, 18th century, etc. (biographical and historical studies)
  • “Technology” and Economics, Sociology, etc (intersectional studies or disciplinary overviews)
  • “Technology” and the Body, Gender, Morality, Autonomy, etc (conceptual studies)
  • “Technology” in Latour, Stiegler, etc (archaeological studies)
  • Post-Humanism, Social speed, Education, the Market, Media (topical studies)

Definitive answers to these questions are unlikely to be forthcoming. This issue of Contrivers’ Review is meant to spark a discussion.

Contributions on the topic of technology are not restricted to these questions. We invite and desire a wide range of perspectives. Essays should be between 1,500 and 3,000 words. Please send us a query letter at editors@contrivers.org. For more information, please refer to our masthead.

Fumi Sakata The Biosocial as a technology of Biopower (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

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25 March 2015

Fumi Sakata The Biosocial as a technology of Biopower (2015)

CFP: Resistance and Power beyond Foucault (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

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24 March 2015

Call for Abstracts

MANCEPT Workshops in Political Theory, 1-3 September 2015
‘Resistance and Power beyond Foucault’
Manchester Centre for Political Theory,
University of Manchester, UK

Convener: Guilel Treiber, Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven (Guilel.Treiber@hiw.kuleuven.be)

The nature of political power is changing. The state is no longer the only, or even the main player in the complex mechanisms of power structures at the beginning of the 21st century. Foucault’s oeuvre has a crucial role in analyzing these changes and emphasizing the productive element of power against the idea that power (and the state as its embodiment) fulfills a merely repressive function. Resistance, as a counter-part to power, is changing as well. However, the academic analysis of resistance has remained constrained within the framework of strike and protest, both essentially practices of resistance to repressive state power. What would be a resistance to a productive power, and what could the relation between the two be?

Resistance seems to refuse clear-cut conceptualization. This may be due to the plurality of possible ways in which one can conceive the term, but also to the contextual and practical character of resistance. In fact, resistance is always specific; it is, in other words, always resistance to something, within a certain historical framework. This has led to the development of a series of competing notions, from ‘deconstruction’ to ‘performativity’, from ‘counter-hegemony’ to ‘counter-conduct’, all of which aim at theorizing resistance and clarifying its relation to power. Additionally, empirical analysis of different forms of resistance remains painfully descriptive, avoiding a critical analysis and appraisal of its multiple new forms and practices.

Power and resistance are not two separate phenomena. If we accept Foucault’s analysis of power, even in its most basic intuition, that power is historically bound, then we will need to re-conceptualize resistance as a counter-power. This may mean that power and resistance do not stand in a merely ‘action-reaction’ relation to each other, whereby power is repressive and resistance liberating; or whereby power is predominant and resistance happens in the restrictive space that a totalizing form of power leaves. If we agree with Foucault, that resistance is as productive as power, what would be the implications on our understanding of politics, what forms would resistance then take?

This workshop aims at encouraging discussion between different perspectives on resistance and power (not exclusively limited to a Foucauldian perspective). Propositions engaged with one of the two following themes (or other related issue) are encouraged :

1) Resistance beyond the state: Protest and strike are heavily state-centered forms of resistance. They focus mainly on demands put to sovereign power. Can power be resisted in such a way? What would a resistance that does not focus on power as though it is emanating from one fixed point look like?

2) Different forms of resistance to power: Civil disobedience, whistle-blowing, ‘illegal’ forms of digital resistance such as Pirate Bay or Anonymous, veganism are all examples of contemporary resistance: are they inherently different from previous forms of resistance? Do they embody different ways to resist to different forms of power? What do they require from the individual or communities resisting?

Call for abstracts: Abstracts of about 400-600 words on all topics mentioned above for the MANCEPT workshops should be sent to Guilel.Treiber@hiw.kuleuven.be The deadline for submitting abstracts is MAY 15, 2015. Applicants will be informed about acceptance by the JUNE 01, 2015. Final papers should be sent by August 2015 (date to be specified later), so that they are circulated between the workshop’s participants.

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