Foucault News

Nielsen, Cynthia R. (2011), Unearthing consonances in Foucault’s accourn of Greco-Roman self-writing and Christian technologies of the self, The Heythrop Journal, pp. 1-15
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2265.2011.00694.x

Opening paragraphs
Although his critics claim otherwise, Michel Foucault understood his work as consistently focused in one way or another on the genealogy of the subject and the construction of subjectivities.1 In other words, while acknowledging changes, developments, retractions, methodological expansions and the like, Foucault also observed strong lines of continuity unifying his corpus – continuity centered upon and constantly hovering around subject-formation.2 Here perhaps I should say a few words regarding my synonymous employment of the terms ‘subject,’‘subjectivity,’ and ‘self.’ Although some scholars might contest my usage, claiming that it conflates distinct concepts, my riposte is that Foucault himself, or at least the English translators of his work, employ the terms synonymously. For example, in his essay, ‘About the Beginnings of the Hermeneutics of the Self,’3 he describes his work on the institutional practices associated with prisons, hospitals, and asylums as directed towards how ‘subjects became objects of knowledge and at the same time objects of domination.’4 He then describes the next phase of his work – the focus of this essay – as an analysis of ‘those forms of understanding which the subject creates about himself.’5 This attention to an active subject who creates, transforms, or reconstitutes himself, Foucault correlates with what he calls, a ‘technology of the self.’6 Rather than analyze the subject primarily from the perspective of social construction or ‘techniques of domination’– as was the case in Discipline and Punish–, he now examines how subjects constitute themselves via techniques allowing them ‘to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves.’7 In these passages, as well as others, Foucault uses the terms ‘subject’ and ‘self’ interchangeably, adding qualifiers such as ‘phenomenological’ or ‘transcendental’ to the word ‘subject’ when distinguishing his particular understanding from that of Husserl, Kant, Sartre, or any other philosopher.

Kevin Hetherington, Foucault, the museum and the diagram, The Sociological Review Volume 59, Issue 3, Article first published online: 1 SEP 2011
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954X.2011.02016.x

Abstract
Foucault’s work on the museum is partial and fragmentary but provides an interesting opportunity through which to explore issues of power, subjectivity and imagination. Following a discussion of Deleuze’s reading of Foucault and his introduction of the issue of diagram as a way of understanding the discursive and visual operation of power, the paper explores some of Foucault’s work from the period around 1967–9 on the non-relation to consider how he engaged with the question of seeing/saying that Deleuze identifies as a key problematic in his work. Through analysis of Foucault’s discussions of the themes of the outside, heterotopia and the work of the painter Manet, in the context of the museum, the paper explores how power operating through the diagram of the museum allows us to understand the space of imagination as one in which subjectivity is constituted.

Jörg Spieker, Foucault and Hobbes on Politics, Security, and War, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political August 2011 vol. 36 no. 3 187-199
https://doi.org/10.1177/0304375411418596

Abstract
This article engages and seeks to develop Michel Foucault’s account of the nexus between modern politics, security, and war. Focusing on his 1976 lecture series Society Must Be Defended, the article considers Foucault’s tentative hypothesis about how the logic of war becomes inscribed into modern politics through the principle of security. Contra Foucault, it is suggested that this nexus can already be found in the proto-liberal political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. In order to make this argument, the article focuses on the ontological dimension of Hobbes’ thought. It suggests that the relationship between the state of war and political order in Hobbes is more complex and more ambiguous than Foucault thought. Rather than being transcended, the Hobbesian state of war is appropriated by the state, and converted into the fundamental antagonism between reason and passion. The latter gives rise to a regime of security through which a relationship of war is inscribed into the Hobbesian commonwealth.

Michael Welch, Counterveillance: How Foucault and the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons reversed the optics, Theoretical Criminology August 2011 vol. 15 no. 3 301-313
https://doi.org/10.1177/1362480610396651

Abstract
The analysis herein considers the dynamics of panopticism by developing further the concept of counter-surveillance—or counterveillance—whereby prison officials rather than the prisoners become the target of unwanted attention. While maintaining an interest in panoptic as well as synoptic theory, the article describes two counterveillant tactics deployed by Foucault and the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (GIP) in France during the 1970s. First, the GIP turned the prison inside out, in a manner of speaking, so as to publicly expose the harsh conditions of confinement. Second, the group set out to watch the watchers in an effort to hold certain prison administrators accountable for their unjust policies and practices. Implications of optical activism aimed at improving transparency in penal operations also are discussed alongside the limits of such protest.