Foucault News

Radu, Carmen. 2011. “Governmentality and the Deportation of Eastern European Roma in Italy and France.” Student Pulse Academic Journal 3.04.

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Abstract
This case study asks the following question: given the symbol of the European Union as the ultimate supranational, rights-based, compliance-inducing international organization, why have member states France and Italy escaped punishment for their blatant violations of international law, reflected in their mass deportations of Roma and the dismantlement of Roma camps during the period of 2008 to 2010? Inspired by a Foucauldian theoretical framework, this paper analyzes how discourses and practices reveal power relationships at the EU and state levels, and argues that the mass deportations are a site of governing and biopower as defined by Foucault. The main theoretical Foucauldian tools used are governmentality, discourse, biopower, the archaeology of knowledge, and the genealogy of practice. Given that this case study analyzes factors that lie both inside and outside the state, the paper draw upon scholars who explain why governmentality is relevant to the study of international politics. Finally, because of the dire poverty in which Roma live, governmentality studies are used to highlight the government of poverty, and show how the government of poverty today entails the criminalization of the poor.

The main contention is that the discourses and practices surrounding the 2008-2010 Roma deportations reveal a power struggle between the EU’s governing of France and Italy, and France and Italy’s governing of the Roma. This power struggle allows us to understand why France and Italy were able to evade punitive measures. Because of its lack of power of norm formation in the socioeconomic rights sphere, EU discourse reveals that the EU understands the Roma situation within the context of ethnic discrimination. By governing the Roma within the context of poverty as a social danger, France and Italy escaped punitive measures because the EU has been weak in alternatively shaping the government of poverty. The Eastern European Roma remain caught in intersecting persecutions due to their status as both ethnically different and poor.

Strausz, Erzsébet, ‘Foucault’s Critique: A Topology of Thought’, Law and Critique, March 2011, 1-15
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-011-9082-5

Abstract
In order to elucidate some of the ways in which critique and subjectivity become inextricably linked in Foucault’s oeuvre, the paper proceeds first by briefly discussing the concept of critique as limit-attitude as it appears in some of Foucault’s methodological writings. Subsequently, the main tenets of Judith Butler’s commentary on the essay ‘What is Critique?’ will be summarized, concentrating on the image of the virtuous, self-making subject that the author’s interpretation brings out of Foucault’s original text. The second part of the paper aims to develop an alternative reading of Foucault’s notion of critique by looking at the ways in which the notion of space operates as an underlying perspective in his archaeological analysis. Ultimately, it will be shown how the spatial implications of Foucault’s early works and a more passive form of subjectivity as unfolding from his discussion of the ‘author function’ and his own methodological reflections coalesce into a form of practical critique, which, as wished by the author, may take ‘the form of a possible transgression’ (Foucault 1984a, p. 45).

Saul Newman, ‘Postanarchism and Power’, Journal of Power, Vol. 3, No. 2, August 2010, 259–274
https://doi.org/10.1080/17540291.2010.493704

Abstract
This article develops a postanarchist conception of power by using Foucault to reveal some of the tensions and limitations within classical anarchist theory. As a Foucauldian poststructuralist analysis shows, the operation of power is more complex and constitutive than was allowed in classical anarchist theory, which tended to focus on state sovereignty. The revealing of the pervasiveness of power makes problematic any sort of ontological separation between society and power. However, rather than this insight undermining the possibility of anarchism – a form of radical politics that I argue is becoming more relevant today – it necessitates a certain modification of classical anarchism into postanarchism. Postanarchism might be seen as a new way of thinking about a politics of autonomy based on practices of freedom.