Foucault News

Boland, T., Moore-Ponce, J.
Confessional critiques: Parrhesia and avowal in contemporary anti-racist discourses
(2023) European Journal of Social Theory

DOI: 10.1177/13684310231179150

Abstract
Confessional critiques proliferate in contemporary culture, remodelling critical politics as self-purification. Within Foucault’s work, critique is associated with resistance to power and subjectification, whereas confession appears a technique of disciplinary and pastoral power. However, genealogy creates hybrids, and herein we observe how critique and confession are entangled in contemporary social justice discourses, focusing empirically on contemporary anti-racist texts. These critique their imagined readers and society more generally, demanding confessions, castigating denials and exhorting interminable purificatory self-work. This analysis draws from Foucault’s genealogies of parrhesia and avowal, through his latter works on the problem of ‘truth-telling’ and how it forms subjects, even by critique. Recognising this historical hybridisation of critique and confession within discourses such as anti-racism may help to clarify the political stakes of critique. © The Author(s) 2023.

Author Keywords
Confession; critique; Foucault; parrhesia

Gerardo Ienna & Matteo Vagelli, Bourdieu e Foucault: un confronto critico a proposito dei fondamenti della spazializzazione del potere, Quaderni di Teoria Sociale, V. 2 N. 1, 27 June 2023

DOI: https://doi.org/10.57611/qts.v2i1.237
Open access

Abstract
Our aim in this paper is to carry out a comparative analysis of Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault – two figures traditionally opposed in the French academic field – in order to highlight the areas in which their respective aims and methods partially overlapped. Tacking stock of Bourdieu’s analyses in Homo academicus, we wish to argue that the opposition between the two concerns more the empirical individuals – resulting from the respective disciplinary and academic positionings – than the epistemic individuals. Bourdieu, in conceiving of the notion of social space and consequently of field, focuses on the dimension of power and describes the space of the positionings according to principles which are relative to force relations. It is in these latter that he finds the source of sense relations. Foucault, following a different but complementary trajectory, begins with the analysis of the order of discourse and then articulates its implications on the level of power relations and of subjection and subjectivation practices.

Keywords
Social space, Order of discourse, Power relations

Lorenzini, D., Tiisala, T.
The architectonic of Foucault’s critique (2023) European Journal of Philosophy

DOI: 10.1111/ejop.12877

Abstract
This paper presents a new interpretation of Michel Foucault’s critical project. It is well known that Foucault’s genealogical critique does not focus on issues of justification, but instead tackles “aspectival captivity,” that is, apparently inevitable limits of thought that constrain the subject’s freedom but that, in fact, can be transformed. However, it has not been recognized that, according to Foucault, critique can proceed along two distinct paths. In a key passage of “What Is Critique?,” Foucault states that critique is tasked with questioning truth about its effects of power and with questioning power about its discourses of truth. We show that this “double movement” organizes Foucault’s critical project as a whole, giving it a significantly wider scope and a more complex structure than has been previously acknowledged. At the heart of the above-mentioned bifurcation lies an apparent tension between two contrastive roles Foucault assigns to truth-telling in the context of critique: on the one hand, truth-telling (as avowal) is a target of critique; on the other, truth-telling (as parrhesia) is one of critique’s methods. We argue that combining these two dimensions in a unified account is crucial for understanding and re-evaluating Foucault’s critical project as a whole. By showing that truth-telling remains an essential element of Foucauldian critique, this paper also rectifies some influential misinterpretations according to which Foucault’s critical project seeks to eliminate truth from the picture. © 2023 The Authors. European Journal of Philosophy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Yang, X., Hu, N.
#girls help girls#: feminist discussions and affective heterotopia in patriarchal China (2023) Feminist Media Studies

DOI: 10.1080/14680777.2023.2229967

Abstract
In June 2021, a girl named Du Meizhu revealed on Weibo (Chinese Twitter) of having been emotionally and sexually abused by the top-tier idol Kris Wu. The incident gained publicity over the month and climaxed in mid-July, when netizens started the hashtag #girls help girls# on Weibo. Rapidly topping the trending list, this incident led to heated discussions around the case and women’s social status in contemporary Chinese patriarchy. Yet unlike its #MeToo counterpart, the hashtag had been taken down hastily within hours, cutting its practitioners off from further engagements. In this paper we nonetheless propose a more positive interpretation of the incident. Combining Massumi’s affect theory with Foucault’s heterotopia, we argue that Weibo users constructed themselves an affective heterotopia in the hashtag #girls help girls#. Through an affective textual analysis of the posts in the hashtag, we argue that while vulnerable to censorship, the affective force in this heterotopia is ultimately untameable to the discursive regime, potentially leading to concrete feminist ends. In so doing, we offer methodological insight for understanding online feminist discussions in the particular context of contemporary China, adding to scholarship that transcends the global North orientation in feminist theory and politics. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
affective heterotopia; China; feminism; methodology; Weibo