Foucault News

Michael McCahill and Rachel L Finn, The surveillance of ‘prolific’ offenders: Beyond ‘docile bodies’ (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

19 August 2013

Michael McCahill and Rachel L Finn, The surveillance of ‘prolific’ offenders: Beyond ‘docile bodies’ (2013) Punishment and Society, 15 (1), pp. 23-42.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1462474512466198

Abstract
This article uses ethnographic research to explore how a sample of state-defined ‘prolific’ offenders living in Northern City (a small city in the North of England) experience and respond to a surveillance regime which includes ‘appointments’, ‘tracking’, ‘interviews’, ‘drug testing’, ‘electronic monitoring’, ‘home visits’ and ‘intelligence-led policing’. While some writers have argued that the experience of ‘house arrest’ and electronic monitoring is consistent with ‘disciplinary power’ and the ‘self-governing capabilities’ identified by Foucault, our article interweaves surveillance theory with the work of Pierre Bourdieu to argue that the ‘surveilled’ are a group of creative ‘social actors’ who may negotiate, modify, evade or contest surveillance practices. © The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav.

Author Keywords
‘prolific’ offenders; capital; resistance; surveillance

Jacques Chancel s’entretient avec Foucault (audio 1975)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

18 August 2013

10 mars 1975

Jacques CHANCEL s’entretient avec le philosophe, professeur au Collège de France, Michel FOUCAULT.
Emission diffusée le 10 mars 1975 sur France Inter.

[Editor: Update 14 March 2026. No longer available online. You may be able to find a transcription in Michel Foucault, Entretiens radiophoniques 1961-1983, Flammarion/Vrin/INA, 2024]

– Générique début

– A 00’57 : sur le savoir, a toujours été dans le savoir. Mai 1968 a été une révolte contre l’interdiction d’un certain savoir, Mai 68 a été une ouverture et invasion d’un nouveau type de savoir, ses diplômes, son enseignement au Collège de France. Le savoir doit être lié au plaisir, la pression des parents sur les enfants, l’importance relative des diplômes, l’impression qu’il veut offrir à son lecteur.

– A 18’57 : pourquoi il a écrit sur la folie, le savoir médical lié au pouvoir psychiatrique, le livre “Histoire de la folie”. La psychiatrie comme instrument d’assujettissement et de normalisation des individus.

– A 28’49 Son livre: “Surveiller et punir”, la surveillance fait fonctionner le pouvoir punitif, la peine de mort, la police et l’armée. la police et l’armée supplicient, la surveillance n’a pas de bornes politique ni sociale, il n’est pas contre la punition, mais souligne le lien entre la punition et le pouvoir politique, les supplices étaient des rituels royalistes, les relations de pouvoir.

– A 49’18 la non réaction des psychiatres et des marxistes, parle de Roland BARTHES et de leurs divergences, son envie de liberté, de repartir à zéro.

Emission
Radioscopie

Robbie Duschinsky and Leon Antonio Rocha (Eds.), Foucault, the Family and Politics (2012)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

17 August 2013

Duschinsky, Robbie and Leon Antonio Rocha (Eds.) Foucault, the Family and Politics, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Foucault, the Family and Politics presents a rich account of the politics and power relations that organize family and intimate life, advancing with and beyond Foucault’s classic and more recently-published writings. The obligation to attend school, to go to work, to stay healthy, to follow the law – ‘being a good son, a good husband, and so on’ as Foucault wryly remarks – are frequently organized through the family.

Including contributions from a range of well-known scholars and an essay by Foucault himself, translated here in English for the first time, this volume is of interest to scholars in sociology, politics, history, philosophy, gender theory, literary criticism and cultural studies.

About the Editors
ROBBIE DUSCHINSKY is Senior Lecturer in Social Science for Social Work at the University of Northumbria, UK.

LEON ANTONIO ROCHA is Research Fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, UK and is affiliated with the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, UK and the Needham Research Institute, Cambridge, UK.

Katherine Nicoll, Andreas Fejes, Maria Olson, Magnus Dahlstedt, and Gert Biesta, Opening discourses of citizenship education: A theorization with Foucault (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

16 August 2013

Katherine Nicoll, Andreas Fejes, Maria Olson, Magnus Dahlstedt, and Gert Biesta. (2013) Opening discourses of citizenship education: A theorization with Foucault. Journal of Education Policy, 28 (6): 828–46.
https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.2013.823519

Abstract
We argue two major difficulties in current discourses of citizenship education. The first is a relative masking of student discourses of citizenship by positioning students as lacking citizenship and as outside the community that acts. The second is in failing to understand the discursive and material support for citizenship activity. We, thus, argue that it is not a lack of citizenship that education research might address, but identification and exploration of the different forms of citizenship that students already engage in. We offer a fragmentary, poststructuralist theorization oriented to explore the ‘contemporary limits of the necessary’, drawing on specific resources from the work of Michel Foucault and others for the constitution of local, partial accounts of citizenship discourses and activities, and exploration of their possibilities and constraints. We argue this as a significant tactic of theorization in support of an opening of discourses of citizenship and in avoiding the discursive difficulties that we have identified. Our theorization, then, is significant in its potential to unsettle discourses that confine contemporary thought regarding citizenship education and support exploration of what might be excessive to that confinement.

Keywords
citizenship education, active citizenship, discourse, power, statement, condition of possibility, democracy

With thanks to David Fryer for this item

Margaret Walshaw, Post-structuralism and ethical practical action: Issues of identity and power (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

15 August 2013

Margaret Walshaw, Post-structuralism and ethical practical action: Issues of identity and power (2013) Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 44 (1), pp. 100-118.
https://doi.org/10.5951/jresematheduc.44.1.0100

Abstract
In an era when familiar categories of identity are breaking down, an argument is made for using post-structuralist vocabulary to talk about ethical practical action in mathematics education. Using aspects of Foucault’s post-structuralism, an explanation is offered of how mathematical identifications are tied to the social organization of power. An analysis of 2 everyday instances is provided to capture the oppressive conditions in which ordinary people involved in mathematics are engaged. Describing how systemic constraints become lived as individual dilemmas offers a way of understanding what we might do to effect change, and what we might do to produce tangible results.

Author Keywords
Equity; Qualitative methods; Social and cultural issues

François Ewald, Présentation des “Dits et écrits” de Michel Foucault (TV) (1994)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

14 August 2013

Présentation “Dits et écrits” de Michel Foucault
Includes some footage of Foucault

06 déc. 1994

Après un extrait de “Lecture pour tous” du 15 juin 1966, François EWALD présente les “Dits et écrits” de Michel Foucault , textes écrits par le philosophe de 1954 à sa mort en 1984, en France et dans le monde entier et rassemblés dans quatre volumes. Arlette FARGE parle du bonheur qu’elle a eu en lisant ces textes. François EWALD évoque le reportage de FOUCAULT en Iran, dont il a soutenu la révolution de 1978. Avant de mourir, Michel FOUCAULT travaillait sur la notion de l’amitié. Jean-Pierre FAYE se souvient de son amitié avec FOUCAULT, de son rire, de l’affaire iranienne, de sa maladie, de l’affaire Klauss Croissant, de sa défaite par rapport à l’histoire qui a été plus rapide que lui.

Emission
Le cercle de minuit
France 2

Hans-Martin Jaeger, Governmentality’s (missing) international dimension and the promiscuity of German neoliberalism (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

13 August 2013

Hans-Martin Jaeger, Governmentality’s (missing) international dimension and the promiscuity of German neoliberalism (2013) Journal of International Relations and Development, 16 (1), pp. 25-54.
https://doi.org/10.1057/jird.2012.6

Abstract
An important insight from the recent publication of Foucault’s governmentality lectures for International Relations (IR) is that international manifestations of governmentalities such as police and liberalism, rather than constituting mere domestic analogies, have inherently international dimensions. Police and liberalism are both constituted by and constitutive of the international contexts in which they emerge: historically, the European balance of power and a ‘globalisation’ of markets, respectively. However, Foucault’s account of German and American neoliberalism in the twentieth century omits references to the international context. This article first reconstructs the ‘domestic-international nexus’ in Foucault’s account of police and liberalism, and then recovers aspects of the missing international dimension of his analysis of German neoliberalism with recourse to Wilhelm Röpke’s writing on IR. The upshot of this recovery effort is threefold. First, the international remains pivotal to (mid-) twentieth-century neoliberal governmentality. Second, (German) neoliberalism’s association with multiple ‘international’ governmentalities, including liberal and non-liberal ones, exposes neoliberalism as a ‘promiscuous’ mode of governance. Third, German neoliberalism’s promiscuity is underwritten by (though not reducible to) a conservative ethos of moderation. More broadly, this article contributes to efforts to theorise the relationship between domestic and international politics, and to understand neoliberalism as a ‘variegated’ phenomenon.

Author Keywords
domestic-international nexus; Foucault; international governmentality; ordoliberalism; variegated neoliberalism; Wilhelm Röpke

Index Keywords
globalization, governance approach, government, international relations, neoliberalism, political power, twentieth century; Germany

Stuart Elden, Foucault audio files (2013, 2025)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

12 August 2013

Update September 2025 See this page on Progressive Geographies for a more updated list

Progressive Geographies

There are audio recordings of Foucault at various places online. This post attempts to make sense of them. Comments and additions gratefully received.

update 9 Dec 2014 – see this page for a better, reorganised chronological list.

Ubuweb has the following:

‘Discourse and Truth: Parrhesia’, UC Berkeley, October 24-November 21 1983 – these were transcribed as the Fearless Speech book.

‘Truth and Subjectivity’, Howison lectures, UC Berkeley, October 20-21 1980 – not published, but later versions were given on November 17 and 24 at Dartmouth, which were published in The Politics of Truth and in Political Theory. Variants between the Berkeley and Dartmouth versions are noted.

The Culture of the Self, UC Berkeley, April 12 and 19 1983

They then have some radio broadcasts from the 1960s – on Histoire de la folie, Raymond Roussel, and one from 1966 entitled ‘Le corps, lieu d’utopies’…

View original post 318 more words

On Foucault’s obscurity: informational prosaicity vs transformational poeticity (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

11 August 2013

ON FOUCAULT’S OBSCURITY: informational prosaicity vs transformational poeticity
Posted on July 19, 2013 by terenceblake
From the Agent Swarm blog

Possible sources of the appearance of obscurity:

1) Vocabulary: French being Latin based looks more complicated than it is when viewed by an English speaker. I remember my surprise when I first arrived in France and a fairly unintellectual friend said “I just want to deculpabilise him”. In English that would sound highbrow, in French not so much. Another lexical factor giving the appearance of abstraction is the tendency, contrary to English, to prefer nominal expressions to verbal ones. “Natation” means “swimming”, and is an ordinary word in French, but it has an abstract feel to an English speaker. Further, at the level of meaning the suffix “-ation” seems more reified and static compared to the processual “-ing”.

With thanks to Dirk Felleman for this link

Stuart Elden, Annuaire du Centre coordinateur de la recherche urbaine pour la France – a Foucault query (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

10 August 2013

Stuart Elden ends this entry with a request for information:

So, does anyone know about Annuaire du Centre coordinateur de la recherche urbaine pour la France, or what that might be a reference to?

Progressive Geographies

In Daniel Defert’s ‘Chronologie’/’Chronology’ in Dits et écrits/A Companion to Foucault, he makes reference to a publication entitled Annuaire du Centre coordinateur de la recherche urbaine pour la France. This is in the entry for October 1973 (p. 44/55), and Defert suggests that it published some of the results of research projects conducted by CERFI under Foucault’s sponsorship – the particular project was on “the role of urban facilities in town planning”.

I’ve written about the CERFI projects in some detail, but I can find no trace of this publication. It doesn’t come up in library databases, google, etc. I know about other publications that came from this, and related, work, including François Fourquet and Lion Murard, Les équipments du pouvoir: Villes, Territoires et équipements collectifs, Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1976 (originally an issue of Recherches in 1973). But this publication escapes me.

So, does anyone know about

View original post 20 more words