Foucault News

Kabalay, B. (2024). Fail-Yapı İlişkisine Yersizleştirme Üzerinden Bir Müdahale: Foucault’nun İktidar Analizi Örneği. Manisa Celal Bayar Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 22(2), 329-347. https://doi.org/10.18026/cbayarsos.1467977

ÖZET
Bu çalışma fail ve yapı arasındaki ilişkinin ontolojik bir hiyerarşiye referans veren yer metaforuna bağlanarak açıklanmasını eleştirmektedir. Çünkü bu ontolojik düzlemde, yerde mevcudiyeti bulunan şey diğer nesneyi ikincil bir fenomen haline getirip mutlak bir biçimde kurar ve dönüştürür. Mücadeleler ve imkânlar göz ardı edildiği ölçüde, soyutlamanın siyasal sonuçları olur. Bu siyasal sonuçları bertaraf etmek için yapılan ontolojik düzlemin eleştirisi, yani yersizleştirme, eylem bileşkelerine yaslanır. Bu eleştiri basitçe yerde ikamet eden fail veya yapının yerine eylemin geçirilmesi değil, ontolojik düzlemin soykütüksel biçimde kurgulanmasıdır. Bu yersizleştirme, en iyi Michel Foucault’nun iktidar analizinde örneklenir. İktidarı bir ayrıcalık değil eylem olarak tanımlayan Foucault, soykütüksel ontolojik düzlemin ve bu düzlemde şeyleri kuran eylem bileşkelerinin açık bir tanımını sunar. Aynı ontolojik perspektiften, bu çalışma, fail-yapı ilişkisini eylem kavramı ve olumsallık üzerinden açıklamaktadır. Bu açıklama aracılığıyla fail-yapı etkileşimi siyasal imkânlara olanak sağlayan ve siyaseti belli mekânlara kısıtlamayan bir alternatif oluşturmaktadır.

Anahtar Kelimeler: Fail, Yapı, Eylem, İktidar, Michel Foucault.

An Intervention to Agent-Structure Relationship Through De-Grounding: The Example of Foucault’s Analysis of Power
Berkay Kabalay

ABSTRACT
This study criticizes the explanation of the relationship between agent and structure by linking it to the metaphor of ground, which refers to an ontological hierarchy. For at this ontological plane, what has presence on the ground makes the other thing an epiphenomenon, and constitutes and transforms it absolute. To the extent that struggles and possibilities are ignored, the abstraction has political consequences. The critique of the ontological plane, that is de-grounding, to eliminate these political consequences relies on ensemble of action. This critique is not simply the replacement of the grounded agent or structure for the action, but the genealogical formation of the ontological plane. The de-grounding best manifested in Michel Foucault’s analysis of power. By defining power as an action and not as a privilege, Foucault offers a clear definition of the genealogical ontological plane and the ensemble of action that constitute things at this plane. From the same ontological perspective, this study explains the agent-structure relation through the concepts of action and contingency. Through this explanation, the agent-structure interaction constitutes an alternative that enables political possibilities and does not limit politics to certain spaces.

Keywords: Agent, Structure, Action, Power, Michel Foucault.

Ximenez, A.
What is wrong with urban regeneration practices? Towards a Foucauldian analysis of urban regeneration documents.
(2024) Articulo – Journal of Urban Research, 2024 (24), .

DOI: 10.4000/articulo.5650

Abstract
Urban design practices are hard to analyse and critique. In this paper, we suggest that part of the difficulty can be alleviated if one problematises them as having a “positivity”. That Foucauldian notion refers to the discursive rules that must be met in order for a statement to be considered as “knowledge” in a specific discipline and at a specific time in history. We then describe the “archaeological” method that Foucault developed to analyse “positivities”. Applying this method to the analysis of a multidimensional diagnosis document produced by a team of consultants in the first stage of an urban regeneration project, we describe the discursive rules of construction that seem to underlie the reasoning displayed in the document. The findings cannot be generalised but they provide strong hypotheses for future inquiry into urban regeneration discursive practices. © 2024, Articulo – Journal of Urban Research. All rights reserved.

Author Keywords
diagnosis; discourse; Foucault; practitioners; Urban design; urban regeneration

Krylova, A.
Foucault, Post-structuralism, and the Fixed “Openness of History”
(2024) Modern Intellectual History

DOI: 10.1017/S1479244324000088

Abstract
Today, it seems impossible to discuss historians’ encounter with post-structuralist theory, the ensuing triumphant surge of the cultural turn, and the establishment of what scholars have recently called the postcultural historiography without the help of such paramount concepts of post-structuralist analysis as contingency, variability, instability, open-endedness, and so on. Having defined the last forty years of theoretical and methodological developments in history, these nowadays conventional tools of critique and interpretation have grown to become synonymous with the post-structuralist conceptual promise and outcome.

This article questions this standard and exceptionally generous account. What if, the article asks, we start our account not with the resolute assertion of the radical contingency and variability of the post-structuralist view of history, but with something more fundamental to it – its own fixed and totalizing presuppositions? To show how an intellectual agenda opposed to fixed and totalizing reasoning can end up operating with fixed and totalizing logics of its own, the essay turns to Michel Foucault and his momentous career, to be traced from the 1960s to the 1980s. Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press.

Loriane Lafont-Grave, The Mystical Quality of Foucault’s Confessions of the Flesh: An Inquiry from Within, The Journal of Religion 2024 104:2, 145-170

Abstract
This article offers an investigation of Foucault’s Confessions of the Flesh—published in 2018, thirty-four years after the death of the author—through a literary approach. It argues that “The Laborious Baptism,” the second section of the first chapter of the book, “The Formation of a New Experience,” has an immersive quality of writing that signals a way of writing “from within,” to take up an expression coined by Emerson.

By putting Foucault in conversation with James Bernauer, Willemien Otten, Philippe Büttgen, and Pierre Macherey, among others, this article aims to show that Foucault’s Confessions of the Flesh may best be seen, in a final analysis, as a confessio fidei in the flesh. It owns, at some point, a mystical quality so that the book truly offers a peculiar experience to its readership. In the first part of the article, we make some metaliterary comments about the potential pitfalls of dealing with a posthumous book, helped by T. S. Eliot and Nietzsche. In the second part, we delve into “The Laborious Baptism” by making a close reading of it. In concluding remarks, we reflect on how Confessions of the Flesh may display a form of Christian parrhesia under the sign of risk-taking in keeping with Foucault’s ultima verba as a professor in his very last lecture at the Collège de France.