Foucault News

Baker, E.-R.
The Third Reich of Dreams: Resisting fascism through the oneiric unconscious
(2023) In Emily-Rose Baker and Diane Otosaka (eds) Dreams and Atrocity: The Oneiric in Representations of Trauma, Manchester University Press, 2023, pp. 120-138.

DOI: 10.7765/9781526158086.00015

Abstract
Between 1933 and 1939, Berlin-based Jewish journalist Charlotte Beradt undertook a clandestine project to collect the nightmares of the German nation, which were eventually published in 1966 under the title The Third Reich of Dreams. Demonstrating the deep psychological reach of the Third Reich, which penetrated even the unconscious minds of its subjects during sleep, this extensive archive boasts over three-hundred dreams of German citizens, both Jews and gentiles, yet has received little critical attention since its publication over fifty years ago. This chapter critically examines the political potency and collective nature of dreams of Nazi fascism in Beradt’s archive alongside an analysis of Arthur Miller’s play Broken Glass (1994), in which a Jewish woman living in 1938 New York is inexplicably paralysed by reports of antisemitic violence in the Third Reich. By uniting these real and fictional episodes of the collective interwar unconscious, this chapter demonstrates the ability of dreams and other psychic modes to not only reflect but respond to the otherwise latent fears of the collective interwar imaginary as a reaction against the ways in which totalitarianism seeks to colonise the psyche. Bringing Michel Foucault’s early work on the dream as constitutive of the imagination into dialogue with Cathy Caruth’s notion of the ‘life drive’ central to traumatic dreams, I build on Sharon Sliwinski’s convincing notion of dreaming as an expressly political act to elucidate the decolonising logic harnessed by dreams. © Manchester University Press 2023.

Leclercq-Vandelannoitte, A.
Is employee technological “ill-being” missing from corporate responsibility? The Foucauldian ethics of ubiquitous IT uses in organizations
(2022) In Kirsten Martin, Katie Shilton, Jeffery Smith (eds.)Business and the Ethical Implications of Technology, Springer, 2022, pp. 33-55.

DOI: 10.1007/s10551-019-04202-y

Abstract
The ethical issues introduced by excessive uses of ubiquitous information technology (IT) at work have received little attention, from either practitioners or ethics scholars. This article suggests the concept of technological ill-being and explores the ethical issues arising from such ill-being, according to the individual and collective responsibilities associated with their negative effects. This article turns to the philosopher Michel Foucault and proposes a renewed approach of the relationship among IT, ethics, and responsibility, based on the concepts of practical rationality, awareness, and self-engagement. This article reports a case study of an international automotive company actively engaged in both corporate social responsibility (CSR) and ubiquitous IT deployment. Technological ill-being is an expression of the tension between an individual’s social attributes and aspirations when using modern IT and a system of norms, rules, and values imposing constraints on him or her. We identify the reasons for the lack of consideration of technological ill-being in CSR through identification of the inclusion-exclusion principle. The resulting critical, comprehensive approach to corporate responsibilities and IT uses incorporates the ethical implications of the latter, highlights the practical rationality of their relationship, and demands both individual and collective responses, through a call for collective ethical awareness and self-engagement. The findings prompt a Foucauldian ethics of IT use in organizations, which emerges in a mutually constitutive relationship between the self, as a moral subject of own actions, and broader organizational principles, in which CSR appears as a techne (i.e., a practical rationality governed by conscious aims). © Springer Nature B.V. 2019. All rights reserved.

Author Keywords
Corporate responsibility; Ethics; Inclusion-exclusion principle; Michel Foucault; Technological ill-being; Ubiquitous information technology