Foucault News

May, L.
Virtual Heterotopias and the Contested Histories of Kowloon Walled City
(2022) Games and Culture

DOI: 10.1177/15554120221115398

Abstract
Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City has found new life in videogames during the three decades since its demolition, taking on unstable and sometimes contradictory forms when reimagined through virtual architecture. At stake in these acts of memory are the historical discourses surrounding everyday life in Kowloon Walled City, its uncertain political and cultural status, and ongoing postcolonial debates concerning Hong Kong identity. I analyze Kowloon’s Gate, Shenmue II, and Mr Pumpkin 2: Walls of Kowloon to uncover the contestation of the city’s histories through the types of spaces Michel Foucault described as heterotopic: at once real and unreal, and existent and non-existent. This analysis reveals the fluid nature of cultural memory and historical discourse in videogame spaces, as well as how virtual spatiality and the past can be used together to understand and define the present. © The Author(s) 2022.

Author Keywords
cultural memory; heterotopia; Kowloon Walled City; Kowloon’s Gate; Mr Pumpkin 2; Shenmue II; space

Jones, L., Avner, Z., Denison, J.
“After the Dust Settles”: Foucauldian Narratives of Retired Athletes’ “Re-orientation” to Exercise
(2022) Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 4, art. no. 901308

DOI: 10.3389/fspor.2022.901308

Abstract
One aspect of sports retirement that has been overlooked until recently is the manner in which retired athletes relate to, and seek to redefine, the meaning of exercise in their post-sport lives. In this article, three Foucauldian scholars present and analyze a series of vignettes concerning their own sense-making and meaning-making about exercise following their long-term involvement in high-performance soccer (authors one and two) and distance running (author three). In doing so, this paper aims to underline the problematic legacy of high-performance sport for retiring athletes’ relationship to movement and exercise, and to highlight how social theory, and Foucauldian theorization in particular, can serve to open new spaces and possibilities for thinking about sports retirement. Copyright © 2022 Jones, Avner and Denison.

Author Keywords
ethical movement practices; exercise; Foucault; movement; sports retirement

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) 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