Foucault News

Matthew Bannister, ‘“I’m Set Free…”: The Velvet Underground, 1960s Counterculture, and Michel Foucault’, Popular Music and Society, Volume 33, Issue 2 May 2010 , pages 163 – 178
https://doi.org/10.1080/03007760903142889

Abstract
This article explores concepts of freedom, repression, and sexuality in Western society and popular music, in relation to selected aspects of Michel Foucault’s writing and the work of the Velvet Underground. Both were critically responding to the “repressive hypothesis” implicit in 1960s countercultural discourses of liberation from oppression, by highlighting the role of the gaze in power relations, its role in both disciplining and constructing sexual and other identities, and how possibilities for action or resistance can be enacted only through material and pragmatic interventions within existing power relations, rather than by reference to an imagined Utopia “beyond power.”

Corey McCall, The Art of Life: Foucault’s Reading of Baudelaire’s “The Painter of Modern Life”, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Volume 24, Number 2, 2010, pp. 138-157
https://doi.org/10.5325/jspecphil.24.2.0138

In lieu of an abstract, here is a preview of the article.

In his essay “What Is Enlightenment?” Foucault compares the role of modernity in the work of the decadent Parisian poet Charles Baudelaire with that of the austere Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant. He claims that the relationship between these two strange bedfellows can be found in the value each writer accords to the present in contrast to the past and future. Each writer claims, in his own style, that each individual must render his or her existence meaningful by cultivating what Foucault calls in this essay a philosophical ethos. This conception of the philosophical form of life forms the conceptual basis of Foucault’s later work. I briefly interpret Foucault’s discussion of Kant and Baudelaire in “What Is Enlightenment?” in order to begin to reconsider this idea of a philosophical ethos through a reading of Baudelaire’s seminal essay in art criticism, “The Painter of Modern Life.” From this initial ethical sense of life as self-fashioning, I turn next to the living body as the object of discipline (in Foucault) and custom (in Baudelaire) in the first section, before concluding with a consideration of life in its biological sense in the final section of the essay. I track these three senses of life in both Foucault’s work and Baudelaire’s “The Painter of Modern Life” and compare the philosophical significance of these three conceptions of life in the work of Baudelaire and Foucault. In terms of the title of Baudelaire’s essay, the first section focuses on the figure of the painter, while the second examines the concept of life.

Megan Warin, ‘Foucault’s progeny: Jamie Oliver and the art of governing obesity’, Social Theory & Health, (1 December 2010)
https://doi.org/10.1057/sth.2010.2

Abstract
Jamie Oliver is an English celebrity chef who has publicly politicised the relationships between class and food in Britain. No longer a simple chef, Oliver is presented as an evangelical saint, salvation of British school dinners, advocate for young disadvantaged kids, and now with his latest series Ministry of Food, a saviour of the British obesity epidemic. In this series, the population of Rotherham is surveilled and targeted as representative of poor eating habits and lifestyles in Britain. In need of urgent intervention, the townsfolk are urged to make themselves anew and ‘fight’ their way out of the obesity epidemic. Moving beyond a mechanistic application of Foucault, this article examines the intersections of different technologies that give rise to specific lifestyle interventions, and the forms of resistance they generate. Through a convergence of the cultural technology of reality TV and technologies of self-governance, this article argues that a novel form of obesity intervention is being re-invented in a health promoting, neoliberal environment.