Foucault’s major works – his sole-authored books, plus some articles – will appear in a two-volume collection in 2015 as a prestigious Pléiade edition. Thanks to Colin Gordon for alerting me to the news. Frédéric Gros is interviewed about this here (in French). Among other things the interview says that the final Collège de France course, Théories et institutions pénales (1971-1972), is due out in 2015, and that, in common with other volumes, the Pléiade volumes will be a critical edition.
Hear Michel Foucault’s Lecture “The Culture of the Self,” Presented in English at UC Berkeley (1983), Open Culture, August 6th, 2014
Michel Foucault’s time in the United States in the last years of his life, particularly his time as a lecturer at UC Berkeley, proved to be extraordinarily productive in the development of his theoretical understanding of what he saw as the central question facing the contemporary West: the question of the self. In his 1983 Berkeley lectures in English on “The Culture of the Self,” Foucault stated and restated the question in a variety of ways—“What are we in our actuality?,” “What are we today?”—and his investigations amount to “an alternative to the traditional philosophical questions: What is the world? What is man? What is truth? What is knowledge? How can we know something? And so on.” So write the editors of the posthumously published 1988 essay collection Technologies of the Self, titled after a lecture Foucault delivered at the University of Vermont in 1982.
Jacobs, F., Claringbould, I., Knoppers, A.
Becoming a ‘good coach’
(2014) Sport, Education and Society, . Article in Press.
Abstract
The purpose of this paper was to gain insight into how coaches problematized their coaching practices and the process in which they engaged to become what they perceived to be better coaches using a course based on critical reflective practice. We assumed that constant critical self-reflection would enable coaches to move closer to their individual idea of a ‘good coach.’ Scholars and coaches collaborated to develop course content. The course was built on principles of rational-emotive education. We drew on Foucault’s conceptualization of self-constitution or modes of subjectivation and confessional practice and Knaus’ approach to teaching for our analytical framework. Thirty-five coaches participated in this study. The data consisted of semistructured interviews, field notes, open-ended questionnaires and focus group. The results are presented per mode of change or transformation. We explored how coaches wanted to transform their coaching practice (ethical substance), how they defined a good coach (mode of subjection), how they worked on change (ethical work) and how they transformed themselves (telos). To gain further insight into this process, we also examined narratives of three coaches as they described why and how they changed. The practice of critical reflection seemed to meet the needs of the coaches involved in the study. They used it to continually examine their behavior and their normalized taken-for-granted beliefs and to transform themselves in the direction of their idea of a ‘good coach.’ Ontological reflection was seen as a tool and a process that requires continual practice.
Author Keywords
Coach education; Evaluation; Good coach; Reflection; Transformation
Chloë Taylor, Birth of the Suicidal Subject: Nelly Arcan, Michel Foucault, and Voluntary Death, Culture, Theory and Critique, Published online: 23 Jul 2014
https://doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2014.937820
Abstract
Michel Foucault argues that it is not sex but death that is the true taboo in the modern, biopolitical era. The result is that regular death has been privatised and institutionalised, wars are waged in the name of life, capital punishment has become a scandal, and suicide has become a problem for sociological and psychiatric analysis rather than law. In contrast to the dominant view, Foucault portrays suicide not as a mark of pathology but as a form of resistance (tragic or pleasurable) to disciplinary power, and argues for an aestheticisation of voluntary death as part of a beautiful life. Through a reading of the writings of Québecoise author Nelly Arcan, this essay presents but also critiques and expands upon Foucault’s accounts of suicide, exploring the thesis that the pathological model of suicide produces the subjects that it intends to treat.
Michelle Murphy, The economization of life, parts 1 and 2 (2014)
Conversation recorded with Michelle Murphy in Toronto on June 21, 2014
Link to audio and further info
Update October 2025: The link above is to the archived page on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine
This conversation with Michelle Murphy is divided into two parts:
BIOPOLITICAL FEMINISM: The first part introduces Foucault’s concept of biopolitics and applies it to forms of economization of life particularly in relation to female bodies. Paraphrasing Foucault, Michelle affirms that governmental capitalism needs for “some must not to be born so that future others will live more consumptibly, productively in the logic of macro-economy .” She thus unfolds the political history of regulation and ‘marketing’ of reproduction and contraception that organizes such an economization of life at a scale of a population. Further, we discuss of Michelle’s concept, “The Girl” as the problematic current vessel of financial investment in the context of imperial humanitarianism.
CHEMICAL INFRASTRUCTURES: The second part considers the body as topological, blurring the limits between inside and outside and, following Peter Sloterdijk think of it as a “being-in-the-breathable.” Michelle has been working on the elaboration of the concept of “chemical infrastructures” to think of our era as the Anthropocene: a time when all atmospheres are fundamentally manufactured (deliberately or not) by human activity. Following Spinoza and his approach of the Genesis’s apple, we talk of our ignorance, as humans, of what ecologies really are, and how we can start thinking of them as ethical systems rather than moralistic ones.
Michelle Murphy is a Professor in the History Department and Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, with graduate appointments in Science and Technology Studies at York University and the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at U of T. She is an organizer of the Toronto Technoscience Salon. I am also coordinator of the Technoscience Research Unit. She is the author of Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Entanglements of Feminism, Health, and Technoscience (Duke UP, 2012) and Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers (Duke UP, 2006), as well as the co-editor of Landscapes of Exposure: Knowledge and Exposure in Modern Environments, Osiris v. 19 (University of Chicago Press, 2004).
Foucault’s freedom, Johanna Oksala interviewed by Richard Marshall, 3:AM Magazine, Friday, August 1st, 2014.
Update October 2025: Link above to archived page on the Internet archive Wayback Machine
Johanna Oksala is a political philosopher who broods on Foucault, thinks that it’s time people stopped thinking in terms of continental vs analytic, thinks about Foucault and freedom, on Foucault, politics and violence, on Chantal Mouffe’s compelling ideas,on state violence, on why neoliberal rationality must be resisted, and on political spirituality. She’s out there making windows where there were once walls…
3:AM: What made you become a philosopher?
Johanna Oksala: I initially started to study philosophy because it seemed like an easy subject that wouldn’t consume too much of my precious time – I was young so my primary interest at the time was to study life! I was involved in various forms of anarchist politics such as squatting and organizing illegal parties and events in different European cities. While that was exciting and eye opening in many ways, it also taught me that genuine political change requires that people fundamentally alter the way they think. I believe that good philosophy can sometimes do that: it can make possible completely new ways of seeing the world around us. (I have also discovered since that philosophy is not easy at all and nowadays it consumes practically all my time!)
Michelle Foucault: Full House child star by day, French philosopher by night
tumblr blog created by artist Buzz Slutzky.
A sample…
Courtney Szto & Sarah Gray
Forgive me Father for I have Thinned: surveilling the bio-citizen through Twitter
(2014) Qualitiative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, . Article in Press.
https://doi.org/10.1080/2159676X.2014.938245
Abstract
The Biggest Loser (TBL) is a reality weight-loss television show that aims to address the notion of an ‘obesity epidemic’ by instructing viewers about how to be responsible for their own health. The popular American show, produced by the National Broadcasting Company, has become a televised confessional for contestants, whereby participants are asked to reflect on their health struggles and express general disgust, disappointment and/or hope about their changing physical state. This study observes that many viewers take their cue from the contestants and use social media to confess their own health sins and ask for redemption. The goal of this study was to provide insight into how viewers of TBL make sense of and interact with the information (re)produced by the television show by analysing viewer engagement through Twitter. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, the authors argue that Twitter facilitates the ability to create a public record of personal transgressions, obedience and transformation, which are necessary confessional processes for the production of ‘good’ bio-citizens. Viewers of TBL were observed to facilitate their own captivity and regulation in the Obesity Clinic, an invisible structure that invites individuals to adhere to normative concepts of behaviour. This analysis concludes by arguing for the cancellation of TBL due to the dangerous precedent it creates for both its contestants and viewers.
Author Keywords
Biggest Loser; confession; obesity; surveillance; Twitter
Society of the Query #2
Session 4: Reflections on Search
Antoinette Rouvroy (BE): Algorithmic Governmentality and the End(s) of Critique
Conference Day 2 (8 November 2013)
Algorithmic personalization is characterised primarily by the two following movements: a) dissipation of all forms of transcendent ‘scale’, ‘benchmark’, or hierarchy, in favour of an immanent normativity evolving in real time; b) avoidance of any confrontation with individuals (meaning-making subjects) whose opportunities for subjectivation have become increasingly scarce. This dual movement is the consequence of the focus on relations rather than substances in contemporary statistics or data mining. To what extent are these two aspects of the ‘algorithmic personalization’ – emancipatory as they may appear with regard to ‘old’ hierarchies and with regard to ‘old’ conceptions of the subject as a stable, unitary entity – conducive to new processes of individuation? Simondon and Deleuze-Guattari show that the possibility of becoming and of processes of individuation through relations necessarily require disparities – a heterogeneity of scales, a multiplicity of regimes of existence that algorithmic personalization is continuously stifling. Algorithmic personalization, folding up individuation processes on the individual monad, tends to foreclose the emancipatory perspectives of these philosophers. In the ‘big data era’, the goal of individual and collective individuation is inseparable from an epistemic and semiotic critique of the algorithmic production of what counts as real.
Engin Isin, Citizens without frontiers, Open Democracy: Free thinking for the world, 15 October 2012
Movements without frontiers are neither commercial nor protected. In fact, state, corporate and religious authorities often do not endorse or support their movements and attempt to inhibit their activities. It is in this sense that the founding aspect of these movements is traversing frontiers.
[…]
International citizenship
Let me then return to the movements ‘without frontiers’ again. These can only be traced back to the 1970s. There were doubtless many originary moments for these movements without frontiers and the founding of MSF was certainly an important one. I want to briefly focus on a speech Michel Foucault gave at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva in 1981 on ‘confronting government’. It signals something different. Foucault said ‘There exists an international citizenship that has its rights and its duties, and that obliges one to speak out against every abuse of power, whoever its author, whoever its victims.’ Then he added as if it was self-evident: ‘After all, we are all members of the community of the governed, and thereby obliged to show mutual solidarity.’ Calling this ‘international citizenship’ Foucault defines its duty ‘… to always bring the testimony of people’s suffering to the eyes and ears of governments, sufferings for which it’s untrue that they are not responsible. The suffering of men must never be a silent residue of policy.’
Foucault claims that the suffering of other men, or rather witnessing thereof, ‘grounds an absolute right to stand up and speak to those who hold power.’ Insisting that we must refuse a division of labour between those who act (governments) and those who talk (citizens), Foucault emphasizes that ‘Amnesty International, Terre des Hommes, and Médecins du monde are initiatives that have created this new right—that of private individuals to effectively intervene in the sphere of international policy and strategy.’ What does Foucault mean by ‘private individuals’? Obviously, he cannot use ‘citizens’ because that would mean ‘nationals’. The kind of right that he is claiming as new cannot be confined to citizens as nationals. Yet, ‘private individuals’ is a problematic phrase for a statement of solidarity that traverses frontiers. The themes in this short and succinct statement are nonetheless quite significant. The declaration that although we might reside under different jurisdictions we share the same condition of being governed and claim that we have a right to responsibility were ambitious declarations.
With thanks to Colin Gordon for this news.
Foucault News 