Foucault News

Nesbet, Anne,
Discipline Made Visible: Abram Room’s The Ghost That Never Returns and the Fantastic Origins of Foucault’s Panopticon (2023) Russian Review,
DOI: 10.1111/russ.12397

ABSTRACT:
In 1967 Abram Room’s film, The Ghost That Never Returns (1929), traveled to the Cinémathèque de Toulouse (France) and was conspicuously featured in the following year at a major festival held in Perpignan. This essay suggests that Room’s film may have been part of what set the scene for the emergence of the “Panopticon”–Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth-century design for a prison structure that would maximize visibility–in Michel Foucault’s 1975 Surveiller et punir. The film’s French reception (with reviews appearing in Les Lettres françaises and in Midi-Minuit Fantastique between 1968 and 1970) emphasized its status as an example of the boundary-blurring genre of the “fantastic.” It is this article’s suggestion that Abram Room’s prison film and the accompanying French debate about the nature of the fantastic are important facets underlying the Panopticon’s shift from relative obscurity into visibility (or even obviousness) in Michel Foucault’s writings of the 1970s. © 2023 The Russian Review.

Christofidou, A., Milioni, D.L.
Art heterotopias against hegemonic discourses: Dancing the Cyprus conflict
(2022) European Journal of Cultural Studies

DOI: 10.1177/13675494221118385

Abstract
We provide an analysis of dance as a practice and an ‘Other’ space; a counter-hegemonic ‘space’, which is affected by the existing social ordering, while simultaneously resisting it. We employ Foucault’s concept of ‘heterotopia’ to analyse dance’s potential to disrupt and deconstruct hegemonic discourses of the past in a conflict-ridden environment such as Cyprus. We analyse three dance works by choreographers who are living and working in Cyprus, and while we focus on the interrelated dimensions of time, space and the (choreographic) subject, we demonstrate how dance may (1) provide a space to problematize the past and recraft the present, (2) enable the re-signification of places of conflict into places of communication and peace and (3) invite artists to reflect on their subjectivities and transform into agents of peace. © The Author(s) 2022.

Author Keywords
Conflict; Cyprus; dance; heterotopia; peace; resistance

Mooney, J.
Personal narratives, public risk: using Foucault’s ‘confessional’ to examine adult retrospective disclosures of childhood abuse
(2023) Health, Risk and Society, .

DOI: 10.1080/13698575.2023.2166019

Abstract
Disclosure of childhood sexual abuse is a process that is often laden with boundary testing, decision-making and, at times, risk. Disclosures tend to be delayed, often into adulthood and later life, with disclosures to authorities remaining relatively low. In the Republic of Ireland adults who disclose experiences of childhood sexual abuse are directed towards child protection services due to an interplay between jurisprudence, child protection policy design, and mandatory reporting obligations, requiring social work practitioners to balance the social and the legal.

This article compares Foucault’s concept of the confessional to current social work practices of engaging with adult victims and survivors of abuse. It is argued that thinking about these interactions as a confessional-like system highlights a process of knowledge creation that is taking place when a personal narrative of abuse is shared, willingly or via mandated reporting, with a child protection agency under the auspices of a modern state. This ‘confessional-lens’ helps us identify a tipping of the balance in this area of social work practice, away from provision of care and person-centredness, across a boundary, to legalistic practice. Narratives of childhood abuse are transformed into knowledge deemed necessary to assess current risk to children. A process that places the adult on the periphery, leading to a potential for harm and re-traumatisation. © 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
child protection; Disclosure; Foucault; risk; sexual abuse; social work

Index Keywords
adult, adulthood, article, child, child protection, child sexual abuse, controlled study, decision making, female, human, human experiment, Ireland, jurisprudence, male, mandatory reporting, narrative, physician, risk assessment, sexual abuse, social work practice, survivor, thinking, victim

Schweyer, M. (2022). Généalogie du gouvernement de la famille: Foucault et l’histoire politique de l’autorité familiale. Archives de Philosophie, 85, 89-107. https://doi.org/10.3917/aphi.854.0089

Résumé
À la fin de Surveiller et Punir, Foucault indique qu’il faudrait étudier les débats révolutionnaires sur le droit des parents à faire enfermer leurs enfants, pour prolonger son analyse de la discipline comme « forme de société ». Cet article se propose d’étudier ces débats, en retraçant la manière dont l’autorité familiale a été constituée comme forme de pouvoir et objet de savoir, entre la fin du xviiie siècle et le début du xixe siècle français. L’analyse des discours juridiques, pédagogiques et politiques sur l’autorité familiale permet de retracer l’émergence d’une forme inédite de gouvernementalité, dont la spécificité ne peut être appréhendée qu’à la condition de passer d’une approche généalogique à une perspective sociohistorique sur les rapports entre les groupes qui s’affrontent au sein de la société. À la lumière de ce constat, le problème du rapport entre la méthode de la « pratique historico-philosophique » et la méthode de l’enquête sociohistorique peut être réexaminé.

Abstract
At the end of Surveiller et Punir, Foucault indicated that it would be important to study the revolutionary debates on the right of parents to have their children locked up, in order to build on his analysis of discipline as a “form of society.” This article proposes to study these debates, by retracing the way in which family authority was constituted as a form of power and an object of knowledge, between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century in France. The analysis of legal, pedagogical, and political discourses on family authority allows us to retrace the emergence of a new form of governmentality, whose specificity can only be apprehended if one moves from a genealogical approach to a socio-historical perspective on the relations between the groups in conflict within society. Considering this assessment, the problem of the relationship between the method of “historical-philosophical practice” and the method of socio-historical inquiry can be reexamined.