Foucault News

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

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.

Le possible : alors et maintenant. Comment penser avec et sans Foucault autour du droit pénal et du droit public (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

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23 March 2015

Colin Gordon, « Le possible : alors et maintenant. Comment penser avec et sans Foucault autour du droit pénal etdu droit public », Cultures & Conflits [En ligne], 94-95-96 | été-automne-hiver 2014, mis en ligne le 20 février 2016. URL : http://conflits.revues.org/18899

See academia.edu site for full text

Résumé
En essayant de contextualiser les enjeux des interventions de Michel Foucault à propos du droit pénal et de retrouver leur logique à l’intérieur du déroulement de son travail, ce texte tente de dégager en quoi Foucault a pu alors aider, d’un façon singulière, à ouvrir au moins pour un moment de nouvelles conceptions du possible. Pour faire ceci, il faut repérer à la fois les constantes et les éléments de déplacement dans le point de vue de Foucault sur le droit. Sous son refus notoire d’une juridification de l’analyse politique, il faut remarquer et prendre en acte une analyse historique positive, riche et complexe des engrenages entre droit, pouvoir et vérité. En reprenant en même temps les analyses (dites « prémonitoires ») de Foucault sur le néolibéralisme et ses travaux des années 1980 sur les jeux de vérité, on essaie enfin de dégager quelques pistes pour réouvrir, en notre présent à nous, une conception du possible en matière juridico-pénale.

Abstract
Seeking to contextualise the issues of Michel Foucault’s interventions relating to penal law, and to trace the logic of their development through the course of his work, this paper tries to recapture how Foucault was able in a singular way to open up for his time a new sense of the possible. This involves identifying both the invariants and the areas of displacement in Foucault’s viewpoint on law. Alongside his well-known rejection of a juridified mode of political analysis, one needs to notice and retrieve a positive, rich and complex historical analysis of the intermeshing of law, power and truth. Taking up side by side Foucault’s “premonitory” analyses of neoliberalism and his research in the 1980s on games of truth, the paper concludes by seeking to elicit some heuristics to help open up, in our own, altered present, a sense of the possible in juridico-penal practice.

Plan

« Ce qui était possible alors… »
Le possible, maintenant ?
Foucault et le droit en général
Constantes et négations
La Justice est servie
Foucault et le droit en général : plaies et accusations
Foucault et le droit en général : confusions, positivités
Positivité historique et généalogique du droit
Le droit public
Les séquelles de Surveiller et Punir : les mutations du droit et de l’histoire de la gouvernementalité
Foucault en 1980-84 : droit et pénalité dans le « trip gréco-latin »
Néolibéralisme et pénalité : la prescience de Foucault ?
Penser l’actualité, avec et sans Foucault : propositions
Néolibéralismes et illégalismes
Aveu et parrhésia des intellectuels spécifiques
Foucault et Badinter : jeu des conduites, cadre du droit ?
Conclusion : le possible alors et maintenant
Douter
Indocilité et inquiétude

Presentation by Matteo Pasquinelli and discussion – Devices of Affective Surveillance (2015

Clare O'Farrell

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22 March 2015

Presentation by Matteo Pasquinelli and discussion – Devices of Affective Surveillance (2015)

Michael Bibby, Foucault’s Lectures on ‘Security, Territory, Population’ at the College de France. 1977-78 (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

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20 March 2015

Michael Bibby, Selections from Foucault’s Lectures on ‘Security, Territory, Population’ at the College de France (1977-78)

“Michel Foucault’s art consisted in using history to cut diagonally through contemporary reality. He could speak of Nietzsche or Aristotle, of expert psychiatric opinion or the Christian pastoral, but those who attended his lectures always took from what he said a perspective on the present and contemporary events.”

A selection from Foucault’s lectures at the College de France between 1977-78 titled Security, Territory, Population.

…if I had wanted to give the lectures I am giving this year a more exact title, I certainly would not have chosen “security, territory, population.” What I would really like to undertake is something that I would call a history of “governmentality.”

[WORK IN PROGRESS]

11 January 1978

In the seventeenth century, and at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the town still had a particular legal and administrative definition that isolated it and marked it out quite specifically in comparison with other areas and spaces of the territory. Second, the town was typically confined within a tight, walled space, which had much more than just a military function. Finally, it was much more
economically and socially mixed than the countryside.

…the growth of trade, and then, in the eighteenth century, urban demography, raised the problem of the town’s compression and enclosure within its walls. […] Broadly speaking, what was at issue in the eighteenth century was the question of the spatial, juridical, administrative, and economic opening up of the town: resituating the town in a space of circulation.

Take a text from the middle of the seventeenth century, La Metropolitee, written by someone called Alexandre Le Maitre. […] The problem of La Metropolitee is: Must a country have a capital city, and in what should it consists? Le Maitre’s analysis is the following: The state, he says, actually comprises three elements…; the peasants, the artisans, and what he calls the third order, or third estate, which is, oddly, the sovereign and the officers in his service. The state must be like an edifice in relation to these three elements. The peasants, of course, are the foundations of the edifice, in the ground, under the ground, unseen but ensuring the solidity of the whole. […] The foundations will be the countryside… . Le Maitre sees the relationship between the capital and the rest of the territory in different ways. It must be a geometrical relationship in the sense that a good country is one that, in short, must have the form of the circle, and the capital must be right at the centre of the circle. […] The capital must be the ornament of the territory. […] The capital must give the example of good morals. The capital must be the place where the holy orators are the best and are best heard, and it must also be the site of academics, since they must give birth to the sciences and truth that is to be disseminated in the rest of the country. Finally, there is an economic role: the capital must be the site of luxury so that it is a point of attraction for products coming from other countries, and at the same time, through trade, it must be the distribution point of manufactured articles and products, etcetera.

…the interesting thing is that Le Maitre dreams of connecting the political effectiveness of sovereignty to a spatial distribution. […] In short, Le Maitre’s problem is how to ensure a well “capitalized” state, that is to say, a state well organized around a capital as the seat of sovereignty and the central point of political and commercial circulation.

Lectures on Foucault at University of Belgrade (youtube) (2014 and onwards)

Clare O'Farrell

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16 March 2015

Videos on youtube of lectures referring to Foucault

Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, [Institut za filozofiju i društvenu teoriju] University of Belgrade is the only scientific research institutions in Serbia which deals with research in the field of philosophy and social theory in a systematic and long-term way. As part of its scientific activities, the Institute combines fundamental philosophical research with a multi-disciplinary (sociology, political science, legal, anthropological) study of the society problems.

The Center for Ethics, Law and Applied Philosophy (CELAP) is a think-tank based in Belgrade, Serbia. CELAP’s founders are philosophers, lawyers, political scientists and anthropologists, but also architects and urban theoreticians.

Performing Struggle: Parrhēsia in Ferguson (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

15 March 2015

Sokhi-Bulley, B.
Performing Struggle: Parrhēsia in Ferguson
(2015) Law and Critique, 4 p. Article in Press.

DOI: 10.1007/s10978-015-9152-1

Abstract
‘The enigma of revolts.’ You can almost hear the sigh at the end of this sentence. Foucault is making a statement here, published under the title ‘Useless to Revolt’, on that ‘impulse by which a single individual, a group, a minority, or an entire people says, “I will no longer obey”’. In this short piece, I question the two sides of the enigma—how to label the revolt—is the act of rioting, such as what we witnessed in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014 ‘proper resistance’—and, how to understand the ēthos of the rioter. The label of counter-conduct, I argue clarifies the enigma as it allows us, challenges us even, to see the event as political. Counter-conduct provides a new framework for reading spontaneous and improvised forms of political expression. The rioter can then be seen as political and rational, as demonstrating ethical behavior. The ēthos of this behavior is represented as an ethics of the self, a form of parrhēsia where the rioter risks herself and shows courage to tell the truth, the story of her community.

Keywords
Counter-conduct; Ferguson; Parrhēsia; Resistance; Riots

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