Foucault News

Over the last 20 years, post-Foucauldian “governmentality studies” have come to growing prominence. These studies have been effective in critically analysing new types of liberal government, in particular by demonstrating ‘the active side of laissez faire’. They describe how the motto of ‘pulling back the state’ has been accompanied by a series of governmental strategies and technologies aimed at shaping institutions and subjects in particular ways. Perhaps most noticeably, they have presented a diagnosis of a proliferation of regimes of enterprise and accounting in new and surprising places. But a wide range of other domains have been subjected to governmentality analysis spanning from genetic screening and risk calculation, new crime prevention strategies, to health promotion by self-responsibilisation. To be sure, the concepts in governmentality studies continue to constitute effective tools for critical social analysis.

Nevertheless, in recent years critical objections have been raised against the governmentality approach. It has been noted by some observers that the Foucauldian and post-structuralist language, originally used for critical academic purposes, seems to be increasingly appropriated by ‘the powers’ that were the object of such critique. Most notably, this point has been voiced (although in different versions) by Zizek, Boltanski, and Hardt & Negri. These thinkers suggest that a post-structural ’politics of difference’ increasingly seems to be an integral part of the ways, in which institutions and companies organise themselves. If modern liberal government has begun to speak for the dissolution of binary essentials, the destabilisation of rigid power structures, the creation of space for the subject’s self-transforming work upon itself, and so on. In light of this development, we need to think of ways to revitalise the Foucauldian concepts of critique/criticism or to push a critical perspective beyond Foucault. A central theme of the PhD course is the search for effective analytical strategies for critique of power (some perhaps less noticed) in the works of Foucault and other writers within and outside the governmentality tradition.

The course gives importance to the need for contextualizing both the concepts that we use for making analysis, both in terms of being aware of how concepts emerge in a particular historical-political context that shape them. We shall hence discuss how to do intellectual history on recent thinkers, including Foucault himself. Foucault’s most intensive reflection on political questions was in the 1970s.  Given that the key source of his reflections here are lectures and interviews, we should attend to this reflection less as elaborated theory and more as a kind of performance in a definite context with specific interlocutors. A Foucault very different from his Anglo-American decontextualized reception as a theorist of omnipresent micropowers emerges if we do so. There are of contemporary events and political currents: European terrorism, state socialism, French Maoism, the Iranian Revolution, the prospects of a Socialist government in France, etc. But there are specific interlocutors including his assistants (Kreigel, Ewald), seminar participants (Pasquino, Procacci, Rosanvallon), colleagues (Donzelot, Castel, Deleuze), auditors, political fractions such as the Second Left and Italian autonomist Marxists.  If statements should be read in terms of what they do as much as what they mean, then the diverse trajectories of these thinkers are also relevant to reading Foucault’s political thought.

The course requires the submission of a paper that deals with conceptual problems or analytical designs in relation to Foucauldian inspired/governmentality studies. Furthermore, papers that apply Foucauldian concepts to empirical problems in a variety of domains are welcomed. It is also possible to participate on the basis of an abstract stating the theme of the PhD project. An abstract should be approximately 1 page, whereas a paper should be approx. 5 pages. In both cases, the PhD student should state his main analytical challenge/concern at his/her current stage in the project.

Papers/abstracts must be in English. Deadline for submission is 17 October 2014.