Foucault News

Beatrice Hibou, The Force of Obedience: The Political Economy of Repression in Tunisia, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011

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Description
This highly original book is a detailed analysis of the everyday mechanisms of domination and repression that enable political regimes to function and to secure the submission of their populations. It takes modern-day Tunisia as its object of analysis but this book is not just a case study of a particular country: it is a brilliant analysis of the politics and economic life under which we all live today.

Hibou combines two intellectual traditions, drawing on Weber and Foucault, in order to scrutinize the modes of government and the apparatuses that regulate the concrete exercise of power. Starting from an analysis of the Tunisian economy, she lays bare the mechanisms of subjection. She explains how the debt economy, the tax system, the management of privatizations, and the organization of social solidarity and welfare all create processes of mutual dependence between the governing and the governed. As a result, repression and police control appear to play a less central role than the accommodations, calculated stratagems, day-by-day compromises, and reciprocal interdependencies which, together, secure the daily legitimizing of the regime.

Above and beyond the case of Tunisia, this brilliant work unveils the processes through which authoritarian regimes are perpetuated. It sheds light on the mechanisms of domination at work in apparently democratic states too.

James D. Faubion, An Anthropology of Ethics, Cambridge University Press, 2011

Description
Through an ambitious and critical revision of Michel Foucault’s investigation of ethics, James D. Faubion develops an original program of empirical inquiry into the ethical domain. From an anthropological perspective, Faubion argues that Foucault’s specification of the analytical parameters of this domain is the most productive point of departure in conceptualizing its distinctive features. He further argues that Foucault’s framework is in need of substantial revision to be of genuinely anthropological scope. In making this revision, Faubion illustrates his program with two extended case studies: one of a Portuguese marquis and the other of a dual subject made up of the author and a millenarian prophetess. The result is a conceptual apparatus that is able to accommodate ethical pluralism and yield an account of the limits of ethical variation, providing a novel resolution of the problem of relativism that has haunted anthropological inquiry into ethics since its inception.

Author
James D. Faubion is Professor of Anthropology and Director of Graduate Studies at Rice University. In addition to ethics, his interests include epistemic authority, kinship, social and cultural theory, aesthetics, heterodoxy and radicalism. He has published widely on research interests, including The Shadows and Lights of Waco: Millennialism Today (2001), and two edited volumes of Essential Works of Michel Foucault (1998 and 2000).

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Anne Brunon-Ernst, ed. Beyond Foucault: New Perspectives on Bentham’s Panopticon, London: Routledge, March 2012

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Description
In his hugely influential book Discipline and Punish, Foucault used the example of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon prison as a means of representing the transition from the early modern monarchy to the late modern capitalist state. In the former, power is visibly exerted, for instance by the destruction of the body of the criminal, while in the latter power becomes invisible and focuses on the mind of the subject, in order to identify, marginalize, and ‘treat’ those who are regarded as incapable of participating in, or unwilling to submit to, the disciplines of production. The Panopticon links the worlds of Bentham and Foucault scholars yet they are often at cross-purposes; with Bentham scholars lamenting the ways in which Foucault is perceived to have misunderstood panopticon, and Foucauldians apparently unaware of the complexities of Bentham’s thought. This book combines an appreciation of Bentham’s broader project with an engagement of Foucault’s insights on economic government to go beyond the received reading of panopticism as a dark disciplinary technology of power.

Scholars here offer new ways of understanding the Panopticon projects through a wide variety of topics including Bentham’s plural Panopticons and their elaboration of schemes of ‘panoptic Utopia’, the ‘inverted Panopticon’, ‘panoptic governance’, ‘political panopticism’ and ‘legal panopticism’. French studies on the Panopticon are groundbreaking and this book brings this research to an English-speaking audience for the first time. It is essential reading, not only for those studying Bentham and Foucault, but also those with an interest in intellectual history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and those studying contemporary surveillance and society.

Contents:
Foreword, Clare O’Farrell;
Introduction, Anne Brunon-Ernst;
Part I Historiography Reconsidered: from Discipline to Governmentality: Deconstructing Panopticism into the plural Panopticons, Anne Brunon-Ernst;
From Discipline and Punish to The Birth of Biopolitics, Christian Laval.
Part II Status of the Panopticon in Prison, Penal and Constitutional Reform: From ‘utopia’ to ‘programme’: building a Panopticon in Geneva, Emmanuelle de Champs;
Penal theory without the Panopticon, Jean-Pierre Cléro;
From the penitentiary to the political Panoptic paradigm, Guillaume Tusseau.
Part III Is There a Panoptic Society? Social Control in Bentham and Foucault: Transparency and politics: the reversed Panopticon as a response to abuse of power, Marie-Laure Leroy;
Social control and the legal Panoptic paradigm, Malik Bozzo-Rey;
Epilogue: the Panopticon as a contemporary icon?, Anne Brunon-Ernst and Guillaume Tusseau;
Bibliography; Index.

About the Editor:
Anne Brunon-Ernst is Senior Lecturer in Legal English at the University of Paris 2 (Panthéon-Assas) and a member of the Centre Bentham, Paris.

Jonathan Tran, Foucault and Theology, Bloomsbury, 2011

Description
Near the end of his life, Michel Foucault turned his attention to the early church Fathers. He did so not for anything like a return to God but rather because he found in those sources alternatives for re-imaging the self. And though Foucault never seriously entertained Christianity beyond theorizing its aesthetic style one might argue that Christian practices like confession or Eucharist share family resemblances to Foucaultian sensibilities. This book will explain how to do theology in light of Foucault, or more precisely, to read Foucault as if God mattered. Therefore, it will seek to articulate practices like confession, prayer, and so on as techniques for the self, situate “the church as politics” within present constellations of power, disclose theological knowledges as modes of critical intervention, or what Foucault called archaeology, and conceptualize Christian existence in time through mnemonic practices of genealogy.

Table of Contents
Acknowledgements / Introduction / Part I: Power and Totality / 1. Power / 2. Capitalism, Totality, and Resistance / Part II: Self-Writing / 3. Biography and Biopolitics / 4. Writing the Self / 5. Self-Care: The Case of Animals / Postscript
Author(s)

Jonathan Tran,
Jonathan Tran is Assistant Professor of Theological Ethics at Baylor University, Waco, Texas. His book Theology and the Vietnam War: History, Memory, and Redemption is forthcoming in the Blackwell series “Challenges in Contemporary Theology”