Foucault News

Michael Guilfoyle, Towards a grounding of the agentive subject in narrative therapy, Theory & Psychology, October 2012 vol. 22 no. 5, 626-642

https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354311433446

Abstract
This paper examines the tensions between narrative therapy’s self-identification as a Foucauldian poststructural practice, and its attachment to the notion of personal agency. Michael White—narrative therapy’s primary author—used Foucault’s work as a theoretical foundation, moving us to pose a question that White did not address: Can the narrative therapeutic commitment to an agentive subject be sustained alongside White’s loyalty to the Foucauldian notion of power/knowledge and its account of the constituted subject? I argue that while Foucault is often criticized for not making space for freedom or agency, something like an agentive subject is implicit in, even required for, his constitutionalist perspective to work. Working through this problem could be useful for the developing field of narrative therapy. Three proposals are offered as a way of imagining this agentive figure, and their relevance to narrative therapy practice is discussed.

Keywords
agency, agentive subject, constituted subject, Foucault, narrative therapy

Kioupkiolis, A. The agonistic turn of critical reason: Critique and freedom in Foucault and Castoriadis, European Journal of Social Theory, Volume 15, Issue 3, August 2012, Pages 385-402
https://doi.org/10.1177/1368431012439866

Abstract
Straddling the divide between universalism and relativism, agonistic reason as construed by Foucault and Castoriadis dismisses universal foundations without becoming context-bound or inescapably subjectivist. It is propelled by a strong commitment to freedom and it draws flexibly on available resources and its creative potentials in order to vindicate its conditional claims. This provides a hyper-critical and liberating mode of critical reason which delves into the underlying norms of agency in order to open them up to question and to enhance free self-direction. The argument that is put forward, then, is threefold. Firstly, Castoriadis’ accent on ontological reflection, the imaginative disclosure of new figures and the global intent of critique contrasts with Foucault’s account of agonistic reason and yields a more robust version of critical rationality. Secondly, this form of reflective agonism can effectively address fundamental challenges and reason across contexts, tackling moral and other issues that arise from cultural innovation and exchange. Lastly, agonistic reason need not, and should not, call upon absolute principles on any level in order to uphold its own values and do justice to its radical others.

Author keywords
Agonistic reason; boundless critique; disclosure

Marie-Christine Leps, Thought of the outside: Foucault contra Agamben. Radical Philosophy, (Sep/Oct 2012)

Further info

It is gladly believed that a culture is more attached to its values than to its forms, that these can easily be modified, abandoned, taken up again; that only meaning is deeply rooted. This is to misunderstand … that people cling more to ways of seeing, saying, doing, and thinking, than to what they see, what they think, say or do… In the twentieth century things have taken an unusual turn: the ‘formal’ itself, reflexive work on the system of forms, has become an issue. And a remarkable object of moral hostilities, of aesthetic debates and political clashes.
Michel Foucault

Beginning of article

If Giorgio Agamben expressly situates his work on biopolitics in relation to Michel Foucault’s, it is on a somewhat ambiguous footing. ‘The Foucauldian thesis’, he famously states in Homo Sacer, ‘will then have to be corrected, or at least completed.’ More recently in The Signature of All Things, Agamben claims a methodological filiation: ‘these observations appear to be investigations on the method of Michel Foucault, a scholar from whom I have learned a great deal in recent years.’ ‘Archaeological vigilance’ brings him to interpret the affinities, and perhaps even the signatures among their respective genealogical inquiries on life, the body, and their politicization. Yet critics argue that Agamben’s interpretations of Foucault’s biopolitics amount to radical transformations; that his analyses take place on ontological, epistemological, historical and political planes that fundamentally alter those of his precursor. Arguing from a juridico-institutional, linguistic and transhistorical perspective, through what Paul Patton terms ‘conceptual fundamentalism’, it seems that Agamben would be guilty of turning Foucault on his head, apparently without noticing. I would like to return to the crux of this argument and suggest that Agamben is indeed following lines of analysis drawn by Foucault, but by the early Foucault, the one before May ’68, the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons and Discipline and Punish – paradoxically, the Foucault who, by his own admission, did not have the concepts or the means to deal with power, bio- or otherwise.

Ilivitzky, M., Origins of biopolitics: Tensions between Foucault and Arendt [Orígenes de la biopolítica: tensiones entre Foucault y Arendt] Araucaria Volume 14, Issue 27, 2012, Pages 24-41

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Abstract
This article aims to explore the differences between the views that Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt respectively held of the political sphere in general and of its relation with biological, social and economical processes in particular. Hence, the theoretical presumptions present in Foucault’s La volonté de savoir will be contrasted with those analyzed by Arendt in her work The Human Condition. In the conclusions Giorgio Agamben’s desire of reunion of part of these authors’ weltanshauungen over this topic will be enquired.

Author keywords
Action; Biopolitics; Hannah Arendt; Michel Foucault; Politics

Neiva Furlin, Is a sociology of the subject possible? An approach to the theories of Foucault and Touraine [É possível uma sociologia do sujeito? Uma abordagem sobre as teorias de Foucault e Touraine] Sociologias Issue 29, January 2012, Pages 274-311
https://doi.org/10.1590/S1517-45222012000100011

Abstract
This research essay analyzes the theoretical concepts of the notion of “subject” in the works of two French intellectuals, Touraine and Foucault. This comparative approach seeks to establish a relation between the convergent and the contrasting aspects of their social theories, on the purpose of reflecting on their contributions to the comprehension of contemporary society, especially concerning individuals’ subjectivation processes. For this purpose we chose the last works in the scholarly trajectory of these intellectuals. Touraine as well as Foucault offer theoretical contributions to a sociology that does not resort to the great historical phenomena, but puts the efforts of the subjects within their social micro-relations on the stage, considering their cultural, economic, political and personal contradictions.

Author keywords
Contemporary society; Social theory; Sociology of the subject