Foucault News

Schmidt, James (2011). “Misunderstanding the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’: Venturi, Habermas, and Foucault”. History of European ideas, 37 (1), p. 43.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.histeuroideas.2010.08.002

Abstract
In his 1969 Trevelyan Lectures, Franco Venturi argued that Kant’s response to the question “What is Enlightenment?” has tended to promote a “philosophical interpretation” of the Enlightenment that leads scholars away from the political questions that were central to its concerns. But while Kant’s response is well known, it has been often misunderstood by scholars who see it as offering a definition of an historical period, rather than an attempt at characterizing a process that had a significant implications. This article seeks (1) to clarify, briefly, the particular question that Kant was answering, (2) to examine using Jurgen Habermas’ work as a case in point – the tension between readings that use Kant’s answer as a way of discussing the Enlightenment as a discrete historical period and those readings that see it as offering a broad outline of an “Enlightenment Project” that continues into the present, and (3) to explore how Michel Foucault, in a series of discussions of Kant’s response, sketched an approach to Kant’s text that offers a way of reframing Venturi’s distinction between “philosophical” and “political” interpretations of the Enlightenment

Jenkins, Laura (2011). “The Difference Genealogy Makes: Strategies for Politicisation or How to Extend Capacities for Autonomy”. Political studies, 59 (1), p. 156-74.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.2010.00844.x

Abstract
Processes of politicisation and depoliticisation have become the empirical and theoretical focus for a growing body of political studies. However, the disparate literatures on these processes conceptualise and explore them in quite different ways. This article seeks to make some inroads into these debates by re-evaluating the concept of (de)politicisation and considering how academics can themselves participate in such processes. It suggests that (Foucauldian) genealogical critique offers a particularly fruitful analytically informed strategy for politicisation. Drawing on the work of David Owen, it is suggested that genealogical strategies help to address a depoliticising condition of aspectival captivity and extend human capacities for autonomy, without intensifying states of domination.

Legg, Stephen (2011). “Assemblage/apparatus: using Deleuze and Foucault”. Area, 43 (2), p. 128.
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01010.x

Abstract
In this commentary I would like to offer some reflections on the Deleuzian concept of ‘assemblage’ (agencement) from the perspective of my grounding in ‘governmentality studies’ and, secondly, on the latter’s central concern with the concept of the security ‘apparatus’ (dispositif). I would like to suggest that the two be thought of dialectically, both as concepts and as actually-existing things in the world. After outlining my use to date of these concepts, and their deployment in my research into colonial India, I will counterpoise Giorgio Agamben’s and Giles Deleuze’s reflections on Michel Foucault’s use of the term dispositif/apparatus. Deleuze’s obvious and acknowledged indebtedness to Foucault’s work, but his explicit re-rendering of the Foucauldian interest in order with the Deleuzian conceptualisation of dis-order, will be used to conclude with some methodological suggestions regarding how Deleuze and Foucault, agencement and dispositif, assemblages and apparatuses, can and should be thought together.

Thibaut Bardon and Emmanuel Josserand (2011). “A Nietzschean reading of Foucauldian thinking: constructing a project of the self within an ontology of becoming”. Organization, 18 (4), p. 497-515.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508410384758

Abstract
As influential as Michel Foucault may be in organization theory, several critics have seriously questioned the epistemological foundations of the Foucauldian philosophical project (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1995, 1999; Caldwell, 2007; Habermas, 1990; Newton, 1994, 1998; Reed, 2000; Thompson, 1993). If these remain unanswered, the Foucauldian approach could be relegated to a self-contradictory, ultra-relativist and partial reading grid of ‘reality’. In this article, we develop a Nietzschean reading of Foucault’s thinking that offers answers to these criticisms, and reinstates it as an independent philosophical project grounded in epistemological assumptions that are coherent with its ontology and methodology. Finally, we suggest that, following Nietzsche, the whole Foucauldian project can be approached as a genealogy of morals. Subsequently, we call on scholars to further explore the ‘third generation’ of Foucauldian studies which would study management practices as morals understood as an ‘art de vivre’.

Machado, R. Foucault, philosophy, and literature, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Volume 16, Issue 2, 1 March 2012, Pages 227-234
https://doi.org/10.1080/17409292.2012.668814

Abstract
This article focuses on Foucault’s archeological books: Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, and The Order of Things. It addresses two issues in particular: first, Foucault’s criticism of modern philosophical and scientific knowledge about man, showing how this knowledge is based on Nietzsche’s criticism of humanism in modernity; second, Foucault’s thoughts about modern literary language, contending that it is an affirmative counterpoint to the historic-philosophical analyses of knowledge about man he carried out during this archeological phase. In addition, the objective is to situate Foucault’s views on literature during this period of genealogies of power and subjectivity.

Author keywords
Foucault; Human Sciences; Language; Literature; Nietzsche; Philosophy