Foucault News

Hoffman, M. Foucault and the lesson of the prisoner support movement, New Political Science, Volume 34, Issue 1, March 2012, Pages 21-36
https://doi.org/10.1080/07393148.2012.646018

Abstract
Shocked by harsh prison conditions in France, Michel Foucault in February 1971 co-founded the Information Group on Prisons (GIP), a group dedicated to heightening public intolerance towards the prison system by facilitating the voices of prisoners themselves. Foucault immersed himself in the activities of the GIP for the better part of two years. This article explores the intricacies of Foucault’s involvement in the group in order to elucidate his approach to theory and practice. The article submits that a kind of dialectic between Foucault’s theory and practice emerged throughout the early 1970s, with his theories both arising from his participation in collective struggles against the prison and serving to inform such practices after his withdrawal from the prisoner support movement. Examining this dialectic helps us appreciate the extent to which resistance truly pervaded Foucault’s seminal account of disciplinary power and the prison in his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.

Dean, Mitchell. The signature of power, Journal of Political Power, Volume 5, Issue 1, April 2012, Pages 101-117
https://doi.org/10.1080/2158379X.2012.659864

Abstract
This concept of power keeps referring its users to a domain of apparent antinomies, which from a formal theoretical perspective are in turn construed as unities in opposition to further terms. Three such sequences are ‘power to’ and ‘power over’, power as capacity and as right, and juridical conceptions of sovereignty and ‘economic’ conceptions of government. This movement of opposition, unity and renewed opposition is however the signature of the concept of power, which, instead of being transcended or neutralised, must be kept in play in its analysis. As a consequence of the view that there is no essence of power, the paper further argues for a substantive rather than formal approach to power in which the analysis of power proceeds by paradigmatic cases, analogies and exemplars. The work of Ernst H. Kantorowicz, Michel Foucault, Max Weber and Giorgio Agamben helps to elucidate this approach.

Author keywords
concept; economy; government; signature; sovereignty; visibility

Stierl, M. ‘No One Is Illegal!’ Resistance and the Politics of Discomfort, Globalizations, Volume 9, Issue 3, June 2012, Pages 425-438
https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2012.680738

Abstract
This work attempts to recast conceptions of global/ised political resistance. Instead of following systematic accounts of actors seeking global social transformation, it is shown how a Foucauldian understanding of power and resistance-here developed into a ‘politics of discomfort’-can help illuminate more situated and cautious approaches to expressions of dissent. It is illustrated how undocumented migrants, or sans-papiers, with the support of the German activist network No One Is Illegal (NOII) can assume political subjectivity to confront and resist the dominating power of sovereign state agencies that attempt to marginalise and silence acts of contestation. I argue that NOII’s practical resistance, although local, nonetheless has important dimensions ‘beyond’, as it critiques through its creative actions (global) sovereign hypocrisy, violence, and the ‘governmentality of documentation’.

Author keywords
discomfort; Foucault; heterotopia; No One Is Illegal; resistance; social movements; undocumented migration