Foucault News

Eric C. Smith, Foucault’s Heterotopia in Christian Catacombs: Constructing Spaces and Symbols in Ancient Rome. Palgrave Macmillan, October 2014

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Ringing the city like pearls on a necklace and plunging beneath the earth into darkness, the Christian catacombs of Rome have inspired and captivated people for centuries. This book takes a new approach to the study of the catacombs, using spatial theory to understand the way the catacombs were constructed, decorated, and used. Relying on the theoretical work of Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre, this book moves beyond traditional forms of analysis to turn a new lens to the work of understanding these monuments of early Christianity. The location and form of the Callistus Catacomb, the art found inside, the texts referenced in that art, and the community practices performed and referenced deep underground form the heart of this innovative take on the grand burial sites of the early church.

Robert Nichols, The World of Freedom. Heidegger, Foucault, and the Politics of Historical Ontology, Stanford University Press, September 2014

Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault are two of the most important and influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Each has spawned volumes of secondary literature and sparked fierce, polarizing debates, particularly about the relationship between philosophy and politics. And yet, to date there exists almost no work that presents a systematic and comprehensive engagement of the two in relation to one another. The World of Freedom addresses this lacuna.

Neither apology nor polemic, the book demonstrates that it is not merely interesting but necessary to read Heidegger and Foucault alongside one another if we are to properly understand the shape of twentieth-century Continental thought. Through close, scholarly engagement with primary texts, Robert Nichols develops original and demanding insights into the relationship between fundamental and historical ontology, modes of objectification and subjectification, and an ethopoetic conception of freedom. In the process, his book also reveals the role that Heidegger’s reception in France played in Foucault’s intellectual development—the first major work to do so while taking full advantage of the recent publication of Foucault’s last Collège de France lectures of the 1980s, which mark a return to classical Greek and Roman philosophy, and thus to familiar Heideggerian loci of concern.

Mark D. Jordan, Convulsing Bodies. Religion and Resistance in Foucault, Stanford University Press, October 2014

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By using religion to get at the core concepts of Michel Foucault’s thinking, this book offers a strong alternative to the way that the philosopher’s work is read across the humanities. Foucault was famously interested in Christianity as both the rival to ancient ethics and the parent of modern discipline and was always alert to the hypocrisy and the violence in churches. Yet many readers have ignored how central religion is to his thought, particularly with regard to human bodies and how they are shaped. The point is not to turn Foucault into some sort of believer or to extract from him a fixed thesis about religion as such. Rather, it is to see how Foucault engages religious rhetoric page after page—even when religion is not his main topic. When readers follow his allusions, they can see why he finds in religion not only an object of critique, but a perennial provocation to think about how speech works on bodies—and how bodies resist.

Arguing that Foucault conducts experiments in writing to frustrate academic expectations about history and theory, Mark Jordan gives equal weight to the performative and theatrical aspects of Foucault’s writing or lecturing. How does Foucault stage possibilities of self-transformation? How are his books or lectures akin to the rituals and liturgies that he dissects in them? Convulsing Bodies follows its own game of hide-and-seek with the agents of totalizing systems (not least in the academy) and gives us a Foucault who plays with his audiences as he plays for them—or teaches them.