Foucault News

Châteauvert-Gagnon, B. ‘How dare she?!’: Parrhesiastic resistance and the logics of protection of/in international security (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

27 August 2022

Châteauvert-Gagnon, B.
‘How dare she?!’: Parrhesiastic resistance and the logics of protection of/in international security
(2022) Security Dialogue

DOI: 10.1177/09670106221090830

Abstract
Malalai Joya, Greta Thunberg, Idle No More leaders – what do these figures have in common? They each decided to act/speak out against the failures, lacks, exclusions, violence and injustices in the words and deeds of different authorities claiming to act on behalf of (their) security and protection, and thus made visible, challenged and disrupted the dominant logics of protection on which such claim is based. More specifically, they each enacted this critique by performing a contemporary form of parrhesia – a practice in Ancient Greece that consisted in speaking truth frankly and courageously to power, taking risks in doing so out of a sense of duty to improve a situation for oneself and others. Yet none of these women stated anything radically new or shockingly unknown. So why, then, did speaking truths that were already known lead to such dire consequences and intense reactions? This article will argue that by mobilizing the frameworks of logics of protection and parrhesia together, we can have a fuller understanding of these figures’ dissident truth-speaking: it is precisely their positionings within logics of protection that made their truths so daring and, in turn, it is through parrhesia that Joya, Thunberg and Idle No More activists made logics of protection visible through their disruption, opening up potentialities for ‘doing’ and ‘being’ otherwise. The dual framework offered in this article thus offers interesting avenues through which to explore resistance, truth and protection in (feminist) security studies today. © The Author(s) 2022.

Author Keywords
Civil society; Foucault; gender; insecurity; international security

Dyakov, A.V. Michel Foucault and Antiquity: Between the philosophical historicism and the history of thought (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

26 August 2022

Dyakov, A.V.
Michel Foucault and Antiquity: Between the philosophical historicism and the history of thought
(2022) Vestnik Sankt-Peterburgskogo Universiteta, Filosofiia i Konfliktologiia, 38 (1), pp. 19-29.

DOI: 10.21638/spbu17.2022.102
Article in Russian
Abstract
Michel Foucault was well known as an epistemologist, historicist, and historian of thought. His analyses of ancient culture are a crucial moment for his doctrine of the becoming of the subject. The Foucaultian version of the ancient legacy in modern and contemporary Western culture shows clearly its aspects in the opposition of Pierre Hadot’s doctrine. If Hadot accents the mystic mode of subjectivation, Foucault tends to the modes of dandyism and the esthetics of existence. At the same time, both of them belong to the same tradition in the history of the Western intellectual culture that traces the meaning of the human being in the perfectibility and concern of self. This article detects the roots of Foucaultian historicist position and origins of his conceptualization of the care of the self. The Foucaultian conceptualization mixes platonic concerns of the government of self, Nietzschean critics of Kantianism, and the Heideggerian approach to the philosophy of history, the sum of which in this case is radical historicism. As a result, Foucault proposes a contemporary version of the ancient practice of self and asserts the understanding of philosophy of the self. The author’s theses is that the focus of Foucauldian philosophy is the care of self as the basic mode of subjectivation in the political and ethical realms of the Western culture © 2022 Saint Petersburg State University. All rights reserved.

Author Keywords
care of self; esthetics of existence; historicism; Michel Foucault; parresia; Pierre Hadot; subject; subjectivation

Kikabhai, N. How educational systems respond to diversity, inclusion and social justice: Disability, power, discipline, territoriality and deterritorialization (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

25 August 2022

Kikabhai, N.
How educational systems respond to diversity, inclusion and social justice: Disability, power, discipline, territoriality and deterritorialization
(2022) British Journal of Sociology

DOI: 10.1111/1468-4446.12969

Abstract
This paper presents a critical examination of a vexed issue relating to how educational systems respond to diversity, inclusion, and social justice. Whilst there are unique factors specific to the various educational sectors; that is, to early years, schools, colleges, higher education and to the life-long learning sector, this paper explores education and diversity in its broadest sense and recognizes that issues are as much cross-sector as they are within-sector. Further still, this paper shifts across disciplinary epistemic boundaries making use of Foucault’s tools and the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Given this broader context, this paper primarily traverses the borders of schooling and higher education. It utilizes the notion of scales of justice and draws upon the work of Fraser and explores how this can offer insights into issues not only in relation to redistribution and recognition, but also to representation. It intentionally, draws upon (critical) disability studies literature; and the often-forgotten discrimination known as disability. It acknowledges the various paradigms and terminological descriptors associated with disabled people, how these are intentionally, I argue, produced and re-produced, subject to a process of misframing, misrecognition and maldistribution through various territorialized and often segregated educational spaces. In response, this paper offers a reading of dis/ability which moves through theoretical and conceptual understandings and advances the notion of deterritorialization in order to escape, engage and identify larger patterns of inequality. It offers different insights, provides an alternative mapping that can raise different critical questions about disability, also to issues of diversity, inclusion, and social justice. © 2022 The Authors. The British Journal of Sociology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science.

Author Keywords
deterritorialization; disability; diversity; framing; inclusion; inclusive education; politics; representation; social justice; territorial boundaries; widening participation

Foucault and Praxis: On Genealogical Method and Abolition with Bernard Harcourt (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

24 August 2022

Foucault and Praxis: On Genealogical Method and Abolition with Bernard Harcourt, Acid Horizon, Aug. 13, 2022

ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Acid Horizon hosts Bernard Harcourt, a distinguished critical theorist, legal advocate, and prolific writer and editor. Bernard joins the cast to discuss the legacy of Foucault’s work, its emergence within its historical milieu, and the practical implications it offers. Bernard also offers a concise explanation of what is meant by Foucault’s genealogical method and how we can best understand the normative aspects implicit in Foucault research.

Bernard Harcourt’s links:

Critique and Praxis: http://cup.columbia.edu/book/critique-and-praxis/9780231195720

“On Critical Genealogy”: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4147668

13/13 Seminars: https://cccct.law.columbia.edu/content/13-13

Christopher Blackwell, Reading While Incarcerated Saved Me. So Why Are Prisons Banning Books? (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

23 August 2022

Christopher Blackwell, Reading While Incarcerated Saved Me. So Why Are Prisons Banning Books?, The New York Times, 17 August 2022

SHELTON, Wash. — During my first decade in prison, I busied myself with exercising and hanging out in the big yard. I hardly grew as a person, aside from developing muscles that I really used only to intimidate others.

I stopped going to school at around 14. After multiple stints in juvenile detention, I was too far behind all my classmates to catch up. By my mid-20s, I was sentenced to a total of 45 years in prison, first for a robbery and then for taking the life of another person during a drug robbery. Every day I regret what I did. It wasn’t until I began college in prison in my 30s that I started to realize my full potential.

In my classes, I met people who were intelligent, spoke with confidence and understood structural forces I had almost no knowledge of, despite the huge role they played in my life. I realized I didn’t want to feel like the most ignorant person in the room. I, too, wanted to participate in an intellectual conversation and have people think I was smart and well spoken.

Shyly, I asked a classmate and fellow prisoner in my class if he’d be willing to help me. He jumped at the task. Before I knew it, I was absorbed in David Foster Wallace and Michel Foucault and using concepts and terms in conversations that were previously far over my head.
[…]

Books, like everything an incarcerated person receives — personal mail, emails, photos, news and education materials — are evaluated by prison officials and rejected or shared with us. Corrections departments typically claim they ban books that contain sexual content, racial animus or depictions of violence, criminal activity, anti-authority attitudes or escape. In practice, PEN America wrote in a 2019 report on prison book restriction policies, the restrictions “have been wide-ranging, from perverse to absurd to constitutionally troubling, with bans being applied in ways that defy logic.”
[…]

Schliehe, A., Philo, C., et al, Lockdown under lockdown? Pandemic, the carceral and COVID-19 in British prisons (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

22 August 2022

Schliehe, A., Philo, C., Carlin, B., Fallon, C., Penna, G.
Lockdown under lockdown? Pandemic, the carceral and COVID-19 in British prisons
(2022) Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

DOI: 10.1111/tran.12557

Abstract
The relationship between pandemic, or chronic infectious diseases, and the carceral, meaning set-apart spaces of enforced confinement for “wrong-doers,” has a long, tangled history. It features in Foucault’s inquiries into disciplinary power and its associated spatial formations, not least in the shape of the modern prison. Drawing lightly from Foucault’s claims about disciplinary and biopolitical power, as well as on his anti-prison activism, this paper explores three possibilities for penal transformation arising during the early months of COVID-19 in UK prisons (circa March to August 2020). Consulting primary source material, these possibilities are respectively identified as “retrenching,” “reworking” or “reducing” the carceral. A chief finding is that under the press of pandemic “emergency,” the tilt of emphasis has been towards a retrenched or reworked “carceral state,” disappointing any promise of abolition, let alone more humble reduction in carceral conditions. The “biological sub-citizens” of prisons are hence being left especially vulnerable to the press of pandemic, in part precisely because of how carceral spatialities are being intensified.

Tsiakiri, L., Euthanasia: Promoter of Autonomy or Supporter of Biopower? (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

21 August 2022

Tsiakiri, L.
Euthanasia: Promoter of Autonomy or Supporter of Biopower?
(2022) Conatus – Journal of Philosophy, 7 (1), pp. 123-133.

DOI: 10.12681/cjp.25088

Abstract
The medical developments and their subsequent influence on the duration of human life have brought in the limelight various moral questions. The pathological conditions do not constitute anymore the decisive causes of death, whereas an ascending number of people suffer more by being maintained in life. In this reality, the euthanasia debate seems more apropos than ever. The following article examines the aforementioned issue through the supportive argument of autonomy in contrast to a Foucauldian approach. In essence, based on the Kantian concept of autonomy, several scholars have advocated in favor of the legalization of euthanasia in order that our ability to define not only the course of our life and its duration, but also the way of our death is ensured. However, on the other side, a Foucauldian approach of the issue seems to be equally worth cited and taken into consideration. In accordance with that, the domination of Foucault’s concept of biopower would deterministically imply that our choices are totally determined by a form of power that targets at the absolute control over our lives through medicine and legislation. In such a context, euthanasia could not constitute a promoter of autonomy. On the contrary, it would contribute to the absolute escalation of the governmental power that would be imposed on every inch of our lives being exclusively interested in its own prosperity!. © 2022, Lydia Tsiakiri.

Author Keywords
autonomy; biopower; euthanasia; Foucault; heterodetermination; life

Special Issue: Foucault’s Method Today. Continental Thought and Theory (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

20 August 2022

CT&T: Continental Thought and Theory: A Journal of Intellectual Freedom
Volume 3, Issue 4, 2022 Foucault’s Method Today

Open access

“Foucault’s Method: Introduction to Issue”, Cindy Zeiher and Mike Grimshaw
“Notes on the Concept of Hyper-subjectivity—Foucault, Lacan, Illouz”, Rey Chow and Austin Sarfan
“Foucault v Freud: Unthought, Unconscious, and Kant’s ‘Rhapsody of Perceptions’”, Henry Krips
“Contemporary Implications of Michel Foucault”, Jean Allouch
“Post-Truth and the Controversy over Postmodernism. Or, was Trump Reading Foucault?”, Saul Newman
“Reassessing the Productive Hypothesis: How Foucault Taught us to Think About Sex and Self”, Christopher Breu
“Foucault after Baudrillard”, Rex Butler
“Flayed Bodies and the Re-turn of the Flesh: Foucault and Contemporary Gendered Bodies”, Talyor Adams and Rosemary Overell
“Lacan avec Foucault: Reflections on Monstrosity”, Leilane Andreoni, Manuella Mucury, Jorge e Adeodato, Rodrigo Gonsalves (former members of ‘Monstrosity’)
“The Glory of Nicocles: Foucault’s Greeks and the Inegalitarian Underside of the Professional-Managerial Class”, Matthew Sharpe
“Caesar’s Tear; or, Paedagogia Interruptus: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Neoliberal University”, Phillip Wegner
“Epistème la gris: Foucault and Psychedelic Neoliberalism”, Nathan Gorelick
“Postmodern Ressentiment, or the Virtue of ‘Voluntary Inservitude’ in the Age of Identity Politics”, Zahi Zalloua
“Foucault’s Apophasis: Beyond Modernity, the Real”, Mark G. E. Kelly
“The Foucault Fiasco Plague: Frugality, the Gaze, and the Return of Postmodernism”, Clint Burnham
“Foucault’s Marxism”, David Pavón-Cuéllar

Dossier

“On Some Questions Prior to any Possible Treatment of Lacan’s Theory of Discourses as Political”, Lorenzo Chiesa
“’Kant with Sade’: on the Relationship between the Moral Law and Jouissance in the Ethics of Psychoanalysis”, Christian Ingo Lenz Dunker and Patricia de Campos Moura
“Farewell”, Saitya Brata Das
“Tricks with Transference: Naming in a Post-Truth World”, Warwick Tie

Notes on Contributors

Nadarajan, D., “The Zombification Crisis in a Crisis: Neoliberal Battles and Teacher Survivors in the Pandemic” (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

19 August 2022

Nadarajan, D. (2022), “The Zombification Crisis in a Crisis: Neoliberal Battles and Teacher Survivors in the Pandemic”, Wiseman, A.W. (Ed.) Annual Review of Comparative and International Education 2021 (International Perspectives on Education and Society, Vol. 42A), Emerald Publishing Limited, Bingley, pp. 149-157.

https://doi.org/10.1108/S1479-36792022000042A013

Abstract
In this piece, the author invokes Beck’s (1997) conception of “zombie categories” to discuss how the virus of neoliberalism has infected ideas and key actors within a highly stratified teaching community in Malaysia. Drawing from the recent COVID-19 pandemic, the author employs a zombie metaphor as a heuristic to trace the stages of a neoliberal apocalypse. The author first considers how neoliberal ideologies have mutated into a new strain of virus that have infiltrated the teaching landscape by comparing teachers employed by the Ministry of Education against teachers who have been recruited by Teach For Malaysia in the public schooling system. The author then explores how sources of zombification have contaminated actors using governmentality (Foucault, 1991) through intensification, corporatization, marketization, metricization, and performativity. This is followed by an attempt to construct a survival response to the apocalypse by suggesting how specific neoliberal competencies are coveted and the implications behind it. Finally, the author outlines how the forces of neoliberalism engender a crisis in education that mirrors a zombie culture of breeding a contagion that could widen existing educational inequalities and inequities. The author concludes by offering a tentative containment plan that considers existing alongside this neoliberal virus that refuses to die. © 2022 by Emerald Publishing Limited.

Author Keywords
governmentality; Malaysia; Neoliberalism; pandemic; teaching; zombie

Normalization. A Discussion with Gëzim Visoka and Nicolas Lemay (2022)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

18 August 2022

Normalization.
A Discussion with Gëzim Visoka and Nicolas Lemay
New Books Network, Aug 16, 2022

In this episode of High Theory, Gëzim Visoka and Nicolas Lemay-Hebert tell us about normalization in international relations. Their research applies Foucault’s social theories of the normal and abnormal to the objects of political science: states, international organizations, and practices of intervention.

In the episode (and in their book) Gëzim and Nicolas reference Foucault’s Lectures at the College de France on the Abnormal (printed in English by Verso and Macmillan). They discuss three exemplary figures from Foucault’s work on the abnormal: the monster, the incorrigible, and the onanist. Each one has a corresponding figure in international politics.

Their new book Normalization in World Politics is available as an open access text from Michigan University Press. That means you can read it for free! Check it out, and learn all about the ways we produce, impose, and maintain normal and abnormal affairs in the international order.