Foucault News

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

Clare O'Farrell

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.

Jonas Oßwald, Deleuze und Foucault. Ein Dialog (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

26 September 2024

Jonas Oßwald, Deleuze und Foucault. Ein Dialog, Campus, 2024

Über das Buch
Gilles Deleuze und Michel Foucault verband eine »philosophische Freundschaft«, so der Tenor. Doch trotz zahlreicher gegenseitiger Bezugnahmen, lobender Rezensionen und füreinander verfasster Vorworte gibt es bisher kaum Arbeiten, die sich mit dem philosophischen Gehalt dieser Beziehung befassen. Jonas Oßwald zeigt erstmals die grundlegende und durchgehende dialogische Verflechtung der Philosophien Deleuze’ und Foucaults, von den frühen transzendentalphilosophischen Überlegungen bis hin zur Frage der Macht, in der sich die Konturen von zwei komplex miteinander verwobenen Machtphilosophien abzeichnen, die sich trotz aller Differenzen und Spannungen letztlich in einem heterogenen Produktionsbegriff der Macht treffen.

Summary in English:
There is a general consensus that Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault were connected by a “philosophical friendship.” Nevertheless, despite numerous references, laudatory reviews, and forewords written for each other, there are few works that address the philosophical content of this relationship. In this study, Jonas Oßwald presents a comprehensive analysis of the intertwined and continuous dialogical relationship between Deleuze’s and Foucault’s philosophies. From their early transcendental-philosophical explorations to the problem of power, the study illuminates the intricate interweaving of two distinct yet interconnected philosophies, which, despite all their inherent differences and tensions, ultimately converge in a heterogeneous concept of productive power.

Aleksandar Sasha Dundjerovic & María José Martínez Sánchez, Placeness and the Performative Production of Space

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

24 September 2024

Aleksandar Sasha Dundjerovic & María José Martínez Sánchez, Placeness and the Performative Production of Space, Bloomsbury, 2024 (forthcoming)

Description
How can performance create and transform places of urban renewal and regeneration? What does performance contribute to the creation of community? These are some of the questions addressed in this study of the relationship of performance to urban space.

Marrying theory with a series of international case studies of performance practice and interviews with practitioners, this interdisciplinary study examines how space is performatively produced to create a sense of ‘placeness’.

Offering multiple perspectives on space and place, this book investigates the connections between space and the construction of social and cultural narratives. It focuses on the multiple ways performative actions produce space, including theatre, installations, site-specific work, visual arts and digital performance.

Combining interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary performance, architecture and digital media studies, this study builds on a clear theoretical framework that draws on the work of Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Henri Lefevre, Richard Schechner, Hans-Thies Lehmann, Lev Manovich and Slavoj Žižek. It offers themed sections comprising theory, studies of practice and interviews with practitioners. Case studies include site-specific work by Catalan collective La Fura Dels Baus, Barcelona, Spain, the Prague Quadrennial, community engagement in Praça Roosevelt in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the Portland Inn Project in Stoke-on-Trent, UK, Campo de la Cebada in Madrid, Spain, and digital spaces created by artists in India and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Gürsoy, Ö. Historical A Priori as Form of Life: The Rationality of Social Practices in Foucault’s Archaeology in terms of Wittgensteinian Criteria (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

21 September 2024

Gürsoy, Ö.
Historical A Priori as Form of Life: The Rationality of Social Practices in Foucault’s Archaeology in terms of Wittgensteinian Criteria (2024) Journal of the Philosophy of History

DOI: 10.1163/18722636-12341532

Abstract
The concept of rule permeates Foucault’s methodological formulations concerning the object of his investigation, but he offers few explicit discussions of the epistemological status of such rules. My claim is that the explication of Foucauldian rules in terms of Wittgensteinian criteria clarifies their epistemological status, and thereby enables one to formulate a novel conception of the historical a priori, one that is defensible against recurrent objections which charge that Foucault’s theoretical reflections confuse concepts that are distinct. Foucault and Wittgenstein are best seen as articulating a sense of intelligibility in which forms are integral to content and meaning is not abstracted from social practices. ‘Form of life’ increases the conceptual cogency of ‘historical a priori,’ whereas the latter delineates what it would be like to take the former’s historicity seriously. © 2024 Özgür Gürsoy.

Author Keywords
form of life; Foucault; historical a priori; justification; Wittgenstein

Malcolm Voyce, Foucault and Family Relations. Governing from a Distance in Australia (2019)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

19 September 2024

Malcolm Voyce, Foucault and Family Relations. Governing from a Distance in Australia, Lexington Books, 2019

Foucault and Family Relations: Governing from a Distance in Australia analyzes how notions of property ownership were instrumental in maintaining family stability and continuity in rural Australia, outlining how inheritance and divorce laws functioned to govern the internal relationships of families to assist the state to ‘rule from a distance’. Using a selection of Foucault’s ideas on the “family”, sexuality, race, space and economics this books shows how “property” operated as a disciplinary device, which was underpinned by “technical ideas”, such as surveying and cartography. This book uses legal judgments as a form of ethnography to show how property, as a socio-technical device, allowed a degree of local freedom for owners. This aspect of property allowed the state to stimulate ideas of local freedom to assist in “ruling from a distance,” demonstrating how the rural family as a domestic unit became a key field of intervention for the state as the family represented a bridge to larger relationships of power.

Villadsen, Kaspar Heidegger and Foucault on modern technology: does Gestell ‘correspond perfectly’ to dispositif? (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

18 September 2024

Villadsen, Kaspar
Heidegger and Foucault on modern technology: does Gestell ‘correspond perfectly’ to dispositif? (2024) Journal of Political Power

DOI: 10.1080/2158379X.2024.2390408

Abstract
This article compares Heidegger and Foucault on modern technology, taking its clue from Agamben’s claim that Gestell and dispositif are ‘perfectly corresponding’ concepts. So far, however, the task of a detailed comparison of Gestell and dispositif remains unresolved. At first glance, the two terms appear compatible, designating how we moderns began objectifying nature as well as ourselves as manipulatable raw material. Significant for the discussion is Heidegger’s and Foucault’s contrasting readings of Nietzsche – the ‘last metaphysician’ versus ‘the first genealogist’ which present modern technology as humanity’s nearly inescapable condition, or as ‘functionally indeterminant’, evolving in multiple, intersecting, and unexpected ways. © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
dispositif; Foucault; Gestell; Heidegger; modern technology

Jordi Collet-Sabé & Stephen J. Ball, The School Is Irredeemable: Proposing Discomfort for a Different Future for Education (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

17 September 2024

Jordi Collet-Sabé & Stephen J. Ball, (2024). The School Is Irredeemable: Proposing Discomfort for a Different Future for Education. In: Beasy, K., Maguire, M., te Riele, K., Towers, E. (eds) Innovative School Reforms. Education, Equity, Economy, vol 11. Springer, Cham.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-64900-4_11

Abstract
The chapter argues that the modern school is an ‘intolerable’ institution. Contrary to the sensibilities of educational research that look for more and/or better schooling as a way of making education more equal and more inclusive, our position is against the modern European school as an institution of normalisation and exclusion within which equality and inclusion are impossible. Using Foucault’s strategy of reversal and the commons approach as a critical mirror, we propose the urgency of creating times and spaces of discomfort as a commoning activity in education. We thus ask fundamental questions of both the modern episteme and prevailing truths of education; ourselves as modern educators; and schools as places of persistent failure and irredeemable injustices. The reversal strategy and the commons as critical tools are used to create discomforts and to re-politicise, question and unlearn the current ethics of extinction. This opens up new possibilities for the ethics of continuance; a new order of things that can allow for new grammars of living, new subjectivities, new forms of educating. Finally, the chapter offers some sketches of what a new education could look like. That is, an education understood as self-formation, as the care of the self, others and the world as a political activity more related to ethics than to truth.

Clare O’Farrell, Michel Foucault: The Unconscious of History and Culture (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

16 September 2024

Clare O’Farrell, Michel Foucault: The Unconscious of History and Culture. In Foot, S & Partner, N (Eds.) The SAGE handbook of historical theory. Sage Publications, 2013, pp. 162-182.

Open access at the link above

Extract
The French thinker, Michel Foucault (1926-84), is noted for his extensive and controversial forays into the historical disciplines. When his work first began to circulate in the 1950s and 1960s, historians did not quite know what to make of it and philosophers resented the appearance of what they saw as the importation of the tedium of concrete events into the pure untainted realm of ideas. If these responses to his work remain alive and well decades after Foucault’s death, the uptake of his work has become far more complex. To restrict ourselves to the discipline of history here: if one very visible and vocal camp of historians remains deeply ambivalent about his work, this merely disguises the fact that a far larger contingent of historians of all kinds – not just those located in history departments – use his ideas quite unremarkably as they go about their daily business. Further, in areas of specialist institutional history and the history of the professions, Foucault has had a wide-ranging impact. Indeed, he has made the very idea of a history possible in some of these domains – where previously they had existed in an ahistorical limbo. He has also done much to historicise the sciences and to throw into question their claim to an unchanging and superior truth which sets the benchmark for all other forms of knowledge.
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