Foucault News

Deborah Cook, Adorno, Foucault and critique (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

14 February 2014

Deborah Cook, Adorno, Foucault and critique (2013) Philosophy and Social Criticism, 39 (10), pp. 965-981.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453713507016

Abstract
Adorno and Foucault are among the 20th century’s most renowned social critics but little work has been done to compare their ideas about the activity of critique. ‘Adorno, Foucault and Critique’ attempts to fill this lacuna. It takes as its starting point the Kantian legacy that informs Adorno’s and Foucault’s notions of critique, or their ‘ontologies of the present’, as Foucault calls them. Exploring the ontological foundations of critique, the article then addresses the principal objects of critique: domination and fascism. It ends with a comparative account of the central aims of Adorno’s and Foucault’s critiques of western societies.

Author Keywords
Critical theory; Critique; Immanuel Kant; Michel Foucault; Poststructuralism; Theodor Adorno

Resisting the seduction of “ethics creep”: Using Foucault to surface complexity and contradiction in research ethics review (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

13 February 2014

Guta, A., Nixon, S.A., Wilson, M.G.
Resisting the seduction of “ethics creep”: Using Foucault to surface complexity and contradiction in research ethics review (2013) Social Science and Medicine, 98, pp. 301-310.

Abstract
In this paper we examine “ethics creep”, a concept developed by Haggerty (2004) to account for the increasing bureaucratization of research ethics boards and institutional review boards (REB/IRBs) and the expanding reach of ethics review. We start with an overview of the recent surge of academic interest in ethics creep and similar arguments about the prohibitive effect of ethics review. We then introduce elements of Michel Foucault’s theoretical framework which are used to inform our analysis of empirical data drawn from a multi-phase study exploring the accessibility of community-engaged research within existing ethics review structures in Canada. First, we present how ethics creep emerged both explicitly and implicitly in our data. We then present data that demonstrate how REB/IRBs are experiencing their own form of regulation. Finally, we present data that situate ethics review alongside other trends affecting the academy. Our results show that ethics review is growing in some ways while simultaneously being constrained in others. Drawing on Foucauldian theory we reframe ethics creep as a repressive hypothesis which belies the complexity of the phenomenon it purports to explain. Our discussion complicates ethics creep by proposing an understanding of REB/IRBs that locates them at the intersection of various neoliberal discourses about the role of science, ethics, and knowledge production.

Author Keywords
Canada; Discourse; Ethics creep; Ethics review; Foucault; Interviews; Neoliberalism

DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2012.09.019

Bibliography of work on Foucault and education

Clare O'Farrell

6 comments

12 February 2014

I have just finished (more or less) compiling a list of English language works on Foucault and education for my M.Ed (Master of Education) students. I thought this might also be of use to others so I have set up a permanent page for it here at Foucault News.

Large as it is, the bibliography is by no means comprehensive, and you are invited to post any missing items, corrections or other additions in the comments section on the page for the bibliography for inclusion in the main document. As such, the bibliography will remain a work in progress.

With thanks to Megan Kimber for assistance in finding many of the journal articles.

Principal self-government and subjectification: the exercise of principal autonomy in the Western Australian Independent Public Schools programme (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

11 February 2014

Gobby, B.
Principal self-government and subjectification: the exercise of principal autonomy in the Western Australian Independent Public Schools programme (2013) Critical Studies in Education, 54 (3), pp. 273-285.

Abstract
The launch of the Independent Public Schools (IPS) programme in Western Australia (WA) in 2010 reflects the neoliberal policy discourse of decentralisation and school self-management sweeping across many of the world’s education systems. IPS provides WA state school principals with decision-making authority in a range of areas, including the employment of staff and managing school budgets. Using an analytical toolkit provided by Michel Foucault and Foucauldian scholarship, this article examines how the IPS programme functions as a regime of government and self-government. Data collected from two IPS principals is used to examine the subjective effects of power as it is exercised in the IPS regime. The article finds that the IPS initiative introduces new possibilities for principals to actively participate in practices of self-formation, through which these principals self-steer, exercise their freedom and govern themselves and their schools. It illustrates how governmental mechanisms depend on, harness and shape the autonomy of these principals, and how their individual practices of self-government align with neoliberal governmentalities.

Author Keywords
governmentality; Independent Public Schools; neoliberalism; school principals; self-management

DOI: 10.1080/17508487.2013.832338

Stuart Elden, Beyond Discipline and Punish: Is it time for a new translation of Foucault’s Surveiller et punir? (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

9 February 2014

Progressive Geographies

Alan Sheridan’s translation of Foucault’s Surveiller et punir as Discipline and Punish is almost forty years old, and it is sometimes said that great works of literature need to be retranslated each generation. (For some examples of this for works of theory, see my post here). Foucault scholarship has advanced quite dramatically in the last forty years. The collected shorter writings, and especially the lecture courses, have given us a new sense of what Foucault was doing. The debates in the secondary literature have moved on too – Sheridan’s Michel Foucault: The Will to Truth was the first book on Foucault in English in 1980. Compare that book to more recent secondary studies and you’ll get a sense of how debates have changed.

Sheridan deserves enormous credit for the work he did, translating several of Foucault’s books and writing that first, important, study of his work. A good many…

View original post 4,262 more words

The eye of power(-lessness): On the emergence of the panoptical and synoptical classroom (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

9 February 2014

Landahl, J.
The eye of power(-lessness): On the emergence of the panoptical and synoptical classroom (2013) History of Education, 42 (6), pp. 803-821.

Abstract
This article considers the emergence and meaning of a particular kind of surveillance in classrooms: the one represented by the gaze of the teacher. Drawing on teaching manuals and other normative material published between the 1820s and the 1960s, it is argued that the optical regime of the classroom underwent a decisive change during the second half of the nineteenth century, when monitorial teaching was superseded by teacher-led whole-class teaching. This new method of teaching implied a new kind of surveillance in which the teacher was expected to remain at his/her desk in order to see the class. The meaning of this optical regime is discussed in relation to Foucault’s concept of the panopticon and Mathiesen’s concept of the synopticon. While both concepts highlight important aspects, it is argued that they do not fully capture the essence of specific features of surveillance in the history of the classroom. © 2013 Taylor & Francis.

Author Keywords
history of the classroom; panopticon; school discipline; synopticon; whole-class teaching

DOI: 10.1080/0046760X.2013.832408

Cycle Foucault: psychiatrie et psychanalyse (I). Conférence exceptionnelle d’Elisabeth Roudinesco (14 mars 2014)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

9 February 2014

Cycle Foucault: psychiatrie et psychanalyse (I). Conférence exceptionnelle d’Elisabeth Roudinesco (14 mars 2014)
« Foucault à l’épreuve de l’historiographie de la psychanalyse »

Further info

Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Centre de philosophie contemporaine de la Sorbonne (PhiCo EA3562)

Date et horaires: 14 mars 2014, 16h-18h

Lieu: salle Lalande, UFR de philosophie – 17, rue de la Sorbonne, 75005 Paris, 1er étage, esc. C

Entrée libre dans la mesure des places disponibles

With thanks to Alexandre Klein for this link

Cycle Foucault: psychiatrie et psychanalyse (II). Journée d’étude internationale (15 mars 2014)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

8 February 2014

Cycle Foucault: psychiatrie et psychanalyse (II). Journée d’étude internationale (15 mars 2014)

31 janvier 2014

Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Centre de philosophie contemporaine de la Sorbonne (PhiCo EA3562)

Further info

Organisation: Judith Revel et Pascale Gillot

Date et horaires: 15 mars 2014, 9h15-18h

Lieu: salle Lalande, UFR de philosophie – 17, rue de la Sorbonne, 75005 Paris, 1er étage, esc. C

Entrée libre dans la mesure des places disponibles

Matinée :

9h15 : Accueil des participants et présentation

9h30 : Jean Allouch, (Ecole lacanienne de psychanalyse), « Ce que Foucault apprend à l’analyse »

10h30 : Elisabetta Basso (Technische Universität Berlin, Institut für Philosophie), « L’archéologie foucaldienne de la folie entre psychiatrie et psychanalyse »

11h30 : Pause

11h45 : Mario Colucci (psychiatre au département de santé mentale de Trieste, psychanalyste, rédacteur de la revue de philosophie aut aut) : « Foucault et Basaglia : une critique de la psychiatrie est-elle encore possible ? »

Après-midi :

15h : Michel Tort (psychanalyste, ancien professeur à l’université Paris VII, Sciences humaines cliniques) « Michel Foucault chez les psychanalystes »

16h : Eric Fassin, (département de science politique et Centre d’études féminines et de genre, Université Paris 8 LabTop/CRESPPA) : « ’La science s’inclina convaincue.’ Pouvoir médical et agency dans les ‘Souvenirs’ d’Herculine/Abel Barbin ».

Contacts : Judith Revel (judith.revel@univ-paris1.fr), Pascale Gillot (gillot.pascale@wanadoo.fr)

With thanks to Alexandre Klein for this link

Stuart Elden, Discipline, Punish, Examine and Produce: Foucault’s La société punitive (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

7 February 2014

Stuart Elden (2014), Discipline, Punish, Examine and Produce: Foucault’s La société punitive, Review of La société punitive: Cours au Collège de France 1972-1973, by Michel Foucault, edited by Bernard E. Harcourt, Seuil/Gallimard: Paris.

Update September 2025. This review originally appeared on the now defunct Berfrois site and is now held on Stuart Elden’s Progressive Geographies site

Delivered between January and March 1973, La société punitive was Foucault’s third annual course at the Collège de France. It is the eleventh of his thirteen courses there to be published, in what have been uniformly excellent editions under the general editorship of François Ewald and the recently deceased Alessandro Fontana. This course has been edited by Bernard E. Harcourt, Julius Krieger Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of Chicago. Harcourt previously co-edited Foucault’s lectures at the University of Louvain from 1981, Mal faire, dire vrai with Fabienne Brion; a course soon to be published as Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling.

With thanks to Daniele Lorenzini for this link

Repenser Foucault (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

6 February 2014

Angèle Kremer Marietti, Repenser Foucault, Propos recueillis par Bencherki Benmeziane et publiés dans la revue de l’Université d’Oran At-Tadwin de décembre 2012, Dogma : Revue de Philosophie et de Sciences Humaines, octobre 2013

Full PDF

Editor’s note: Angèle Kremer Marietti’s 1974 book Michel Foucault et l’archéologie du savoir, was amongst the very first books to be published on Foucault’s work.

Que reste-t-il aujourd’hui de la pensée de Foucault ? Pensez-vous que les problématiques discutées dans l’œuvre de Foucault soient toujours d’actualité ?

Je vous remercie de me permettre d’évaluer l’héritage Foucault dans sa réception actuelle. Sans doute, la richesse de l’œuvre de Foucault explique que soient abordés, sous son égide, des thèmes tels que « gouvernement et société », « les maladies du pouvoir », ou « le rôle de la vérité dans la généalogie foucaldienne », qui sont traités actuellement dans le séminaire de mon ami le professeur Jean-François Braunstein à la Sorbonne. Mais il reste que l’actualité historique pourrait bénéficier d’une œuvre particulièrement exigeante comme l’est celle de Foucault. Tout comme l’essence du pouvoir, l’essence des forces sociales en action est à la fois permanente et tacite, relevant à la fois d’une microphysique autant que d’une globalité transparente. Nous ne devons pas oublier qu’immanent et variable, le pouvoir lié au savoir a été la cible de Michel Foucault.

Suite

With thanks to Alexandre Klein for this info.