Foucault News

Robert Badinter (1928-2024)

Clare O'Farrell

11 February 2024

Robert Badinter, a just man for posterity
EDITORIAL
Le Monde, 10 February 2024

The former French justice minister died on Friday. It is salutary to recall his righteousness and intransigence at a time when France’s interior minister is pitting politics against law, the role of the Constitutional Council is being challenged, and prison overcrowding is reaching worrying records.

Few men embody the universality of human rights, the defense of civil liberties, and a certain idea of justice and the Republic as clearly during their lifetime as Robert Badinter, who died on the night of February 9, aged 95. If the abolition of the death penalty – the battle of his life, won in 1981 – will remain attached to his name in the history of France, it is because the idea was highly controversial at the time, and by no means a foregone conclusion, even after the election of President François Mitterrand.

[…]
But his time at the Ministry of Justice is also to be applauded for the adoption of a multitude of laws reinforcing the rights of many individuals, from the abolition of the “offense of homosexuality,” in 1982, to the authorization granted to prisoners to watch television, to citizens’ right to a direct referral to the European Court of Human Rights.

See also Badinter sur France Inter!, Lundi 29 janvier 2018. Radio Interview

Sur Foucault
Robert Badinter explique : “Quand Foucault dénonce la prison, il dénonce la civilisation du XIXe, de la civilisation industrielle. Le système carcéral est une invention d’à peu près de la même époque que les usines. Avant, c’est le châtiment corporel, c’est le corps qui paye pour le crime.

La prison sert d’instrument parce qu’on lui prête des vertus qui, en réalité, sont empruntées à celles qu’ont aux couvents au Moyen Âge. On croit aux vertus de l’incarcération.

Michel Foucault était un très grand écrivain et un grand érudit. Nous étions liés par des combats identiques. Et le lendemain du jour de l’abolition de la peine de j’ai reçu une lettre de Foucault, que j’ai conservée, qui disait : “La fin de la peine de mort, c’est très bien. Ce qui compte maintenant, c’est l’abolition de la prison”.

Après tant d’années de combat s’entendre dire ce qu’il fallait faire ! Mais comme je suis assez d’accord, que j’ai du mal à rédiger l’exposé des motifs et notamment par quoi, on la remplacera la prison, je lui réponds : “Vous m’envoyez l’exposé des motifs. Je suis sûr qu’il sera d’une qualité littéraire incomparable. Mitterrand sera sûrement ravi. Et puis, j’ajouterai le dispositif juridique. Il ne l’a jamais fait. Il a éclaté de son [rire] presque satanique. J’ai d’ailleurs chez moi un admirable portrait de Foucault par Fromanger, où c’est le diable qui a l’air de jaillir du tableau !

Greer, K., King, H., Glackin, M. ‘Standing back’ or ‘stepping up’? Exploring climate change education policy influence in England (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

10 February 2024

Greer, K., King, H., Glackin, M.
‘Standing back’ or ‘stepping up’? Exploring climate change education policy influence in England (2023) British Educational Research Journal

DOI: 10.1002/berj.3888

Abstract
This paper explores the nature of climate change education-related policy influence in England at a time when public consciousness about the need to accelerate climate change action was heightened, and as the 2018 climate strikes gathered momentum around the world. Informed by Foucault’s concept of ‘governmentalities’, and using data generated through 24 exploratory interviews and reflexive thematic analysis, we examine the extent to which influential individuals were advocating for policy change. We discuss the nature of policy influence with particular reference to the ‘stances’ that individuals adopted relative to climate change education policy influence and noting a common tendency exhibited amongst participants which was a tendency towards ‘deference’. Coupling our insights with theorisations of dissent, we consider how ‘infra-political dissent’ could support key individuals to ‘step up’ and influence for more effective policy relative to climate change education, and to other areas of education or environment policy. © 2023 The Authors. British Educational Research Journal published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Educational Research Association.

Author Keywords
activism; climate change education; influence; infra-political dissent; policy

Bahmanteymouri, E., Mohammadzadeh, M. ‘Neoliberalism is dead’: Traversing neoliberal planning education is an exigency (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

7 February 2024

Bahmanteymouri, E., Mohammadzadeh, M.
‘Neoliberalism is dead’: Traversing neoliberal planning education is an exigency
(2023) Policy Futures in Education

DOI: 10.1177/14782103231181241

Abstract
Neoliberalism has been the hegemonic ideology that has fundamentally transformed planning over the last four decades. Neoliberalism has significantly restructured pre-existing organisations, such as universities that were initially expanded during the period of industrial capitalism. From Foucault’s perspective, universities work as components of the dominant control apparatus to subjectively normalise people to docile bodies in the capitalist society. In planning schools, new planning students are introduced to the discipline and its values, norms, knowledge, and practices. This article explores how neoliberalism has changed planning education and subsequently practice in favour of the market operation by detaching planning from its intellectual and theoretical context, and used planning as its scapegoat to conceal its failures. Following the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2008 and the global pandemic of COVID-19, several thinkers, economists and politicians have declared that ‘neoliberalism is dead’ and pointed to the necessity of a new doctrine to address the adverse side effects of neoliberalism that include social inequality and climate change. Planning was initially developed to address the environmental issues and social inequality that resulted from industrial capitalism. This article suggests that planning education should traverse neoliberalism by retrieving its critical and theoretical knowledge to redefine its role in the post-neoliberal era. © The Author(s) 2023.

Author Keywords
critical thinking; education; Neoliberalism; planning; planning theory

Tony Bennett, Habit’s Pathways. Repetition, Power, Conduct (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

6 February 2024

Tony Bennett, Habit’s Pathways. Repetition, Power, Conduct, Duke University Press, 2023

Habit has long preoccupied a wide range of theologians, philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, and neuroscientists. In Habit’s Pathways Tony Bennett explores the political consequences of the varied ways in which habit’s repetitions have been acted on to guide or direct conduct. Bennett considers habit’s uses and effects across the monastic regimens of medieval Europe, in plantation slavery and the factory system, through colonial forms of rule, and within a range of medicalized pathologies. He brings these episodes in habit’s political histories to bear on contemporary debates ranging from its role in relation to the politics of white supremacy to the digital harvesting of habits in practices of algorithmic governance. Throughout, Bennett tracks how habit’s repetitions have been articulated differently across divisions of class, race, and gender, demonstrating that although habit serves as an apparatus for achieving success, self-fulfillment, and freedom for the powerful, it has simultaneously served as a means of control over women, racialized peoples, and subordinate classes.

Tony Bennett is Emeritus Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University and Honorary Professor in the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University. Among his many books are Making Culture, Changing Society and, as coauthor, Collecting, Ordering, Governing: Anthropology, Museums, and Liberal Government.

Tony Bennett on habit, culture as a way of life, Bourdieu, Foucault, and decolonization – podcast (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

6 February 2024

Tony Bennett on habit, culture as a way of life, Bourdieu, Foucault, and decolonization – podcast (February 2024) The date is not listed on the site
Interview with Toby Miller as part of his Cultural Studies podcast interviews

Tony Bennett on habit, culture as a way of life, Bourdieu, Foucault, and decolonization

You can read more about Tony’s work here:

https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/ics/people/researchers/tony_bennett

https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-1-4780-2498-9_601.pdf

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

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

4 February 2024

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 (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

1 February 2024

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

Servalli, S., Gitto, A., Gandelli, F. Florence flood and the rescue of the Florence state archives: The role of accounting and accountability (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

1 February 2024

Servalli, S., Gitto, A., Gandelli, F.
Florence flood and the rescue of the Florence state archives: The role of accounting and accountability (2023) Accounting History

DOI: 10.1177/10323732231175711

Abstract
This archival research aims to explore the role of accounting for natural disasters. It is focused on the 1966 Florence flood. Considering the role of Florence in the worldwide cultural context, our attention is focused on the cultural patrimony in the Florence State Archive and on the role that accounting and accountability had in its rescue. The work refers to Foucault’s and Derrida’s concept of the archive and draws on the notion of accounting as ‘naming and counting’ practices. The investigation highlights the pivotal role of accounting in the rescue process of archival documents. Using ‘naming and counting’ practices, the damaged documentation was identified and inventoried and the accountability activities offered researchers knowledge of historical documents not available for investigation. These accounting practices realised the exercise of the power of re-‘consignation’ permitting an invaluable cultural patrimony to be re-consigned to the community. © The Author(s) 2023.

Author Keywords
accountability; accounting; archive; Derrida; flood; Foucault; Italy; natural disasters

Foucault quote: What is critique?

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

29 January 2024

Editor: These passages are from Foucault’s original manuscript for “What is critique?” but weren’t included in his presentation to the Société française de Philosophie – the version that was published in 1978 in French and later in two separate English translations in 1996 and 1997. These passages appear in the new edition and translation of “What is Critique?” published in English in 2024.

This quick genealogy of the “critical way,” and its location within the great process of governmentalization, has of course been done with the aim of resituating it within a broader history than simply the Kantian moment, making it something other than the legacy of a particular stream of philosophical thought. But it was also to link it to those elements of religious life that I think have marked it from the beginning:

-Critique as something that [challenges] governmentality (in either its general or particular forms) and its principles, methods, and results, and raises the question of the salvation of each and all: whether salvation means eternal bliss or simply happiness.
-Critique as the suspension of the combined effects of power and truth, by the person who is subjected to it.

[…]

– The roots of critique in the history of Christian spirituality also explain why the critical attitude is not content to demonstrate and refute in general. It doesn’t speak to everyone in general, it is addressed to each and all. It tries to establish a general consensus or in any case a community of scholars, scientists, and enlightened minds. It’s not enough for it to say what it has to say for once and for all. It needs to be heard, to find allies, to have converts to its own conversion, to have followers. It works and battles. Or rather, its work is inseparable from a battle against two orders of things: on the one hand, an authority, a tradition, or an abuse of power; on the other, its complement—inertia, blindness, illusion, or cowardice. In short, it is against excess and for awakening.

In a word, critique is the attitude of challenging the government of people understood as the combined effects of truth and power, and this in the form of a battle which, starting as an individual decision, aims at salvation for all.

[…]

There is no owner or theoretician when it comes to critique. The universal and radical critic doesn’t exist. The critic in himself and of himself doesn’t exist. But in the West, every activity of reflection, form of analysis, or knowledge bears within itself the dimension of a possible critique. In any case, it is a dimension that is perceived as necessary, desirable, and useful; but it leaves one wanting, it’s not sufficient in itself and as a result provokes mistrust and, as it happens, critique.

Beloved and despised critique, mocked mockery; its assaults are ceaselessly attacked by those it attacks, because all it does is attack and because its whole existence is about being attacked.

Michel Foucault, “What Is Critique?” & “The Culture of the Self”. Edited by Henri-Paul Fruchaud, Daniele Lorenzini, and Arnold I. Davidson. Translated by Clare O’Farrell, Chicago University Press, 2024, pp.26-7, 21.