Foucault News

Kevin Hetherington, Foucault, the museum and the diagram, The Sociological Review Volume 59, Issue 3, Article first published online: 1 SEP 2011
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Abstract
Foucault’s work on the museum is partial and fragmentary but provides an interesting opportunity through which to explore issues of power, subjectivity and imagination. Following a discussion of Deleuze’s reading of Foucault and his introduction of the issue of diagram as a way of understanding the discursive and visual operation of power, the paper explores some of Foucault’s work from the period around 1967–9 on the non-relation to consider how he engaged with the question of seeing/saying that Deleuze identifies as a key problematic in his work. Through analysis of Foucault’s discussions of the themes of the outside, heterotopia and the work of the painter Manet, in the context of the museum, the paper explores how power operating through the diagram of the museum allows us to understand the space of imagination as one in which subjectivity is constituted.

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Jörg Spieker, Foucault and Hobbes on Politics, Security, and War, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political August 2011 vol. 36 no. 3 187-199

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Abstract
This article engages and seeks to develop Michel Foucault’s account of the nexus between modern politics, security, and war. Focusing on his 1976 lecture series Society Must Be Defended, the article considers Foucault’s tentative hypothesis about how the logic of war becomes inscribed into modern politics through the principle of security. Contra Foucault, it is suggested that this nexus can already be found in the proto-liberal political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. In order to make this argument, the article focuses on the ontological dimension of Hobbes’ thought. It suggests that the relationship between the state of war and political order in Hobbes is more complex and more ambiguous than Foucault thought. Rather than being transcended, the Hobbesian state of war is appropriated by the state, and converted into the fundamental antagonism between reason and passion. The latter gives rise to a regime of security through which a relationship of war is inscribed into the Hobbesian commonwealth.

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Michael Welch, Counterveillance: How Foucault and the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons reversed the optics, Theoretical Criminology August 2011 vol. 15 no. 3 301-313
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Abstract
The analysis herein considers the dynamics of panopticism by developing further the concept of counter-surveillance—or counterveillance—whereby prison officials rather than the prisoners become the target of unwanted attention. While maintaining an interest in panoptic as well as synoptic theory, the article describes two counterveillant tactics deployed by Foucault and the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (GIP) in France during the 1970s. First, the GIP turned the prison inside out, in a manner of speaking, so as to publicly expose the harsh conditions of confinement. Second, the group set out to watch the watchers in an effort to hold certain prison administrators accountable for their unjust policies and practices. Implications of optical activism aimed at improving transparency in penal operations also are discussed alongside the limits of such protest.

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Ben Golder, Foucault’s Critical (Yet Ambivalent) Affirmation: Three Figures of Rights, Social Legal Studies September 2011 vol. 20 no. 3, 2011 pp. 283-312

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Abstract
Michel Foucault is not often read as a theorist of human rights. On the one hand, there is a tendency to read his works of the mid-1970s — his celebrated poststructuralist genealogies of subjectivity, of discipline, of bio-politics, and so forth — as proposing a critique of rights discourse which definitively rules out any political appeal to rights. On the other hand, somewhat curiously it has to be said, there is a tendency to read his works of the late 1970s and early 1980s — his perhaps less celebrated concern with ethics and with technologies of the self — as tacitly re-introducing a liberal humanist notion of subjectivity and, with that, an embrace of orthodox rights discourse. Beginning from this curious disjunction between the rejectionist Foucault and the liberal Foucault, this article attempts to articulate a Foucauldian politics of human rights along the lines of a critical affirmation. Neither a full embrace nor a total rejection of human rights, the Foucauldian politics of human rights developed here elaborates (and attempts to connect) several disparate figures in his thought: rights as ungrounded and illimitable, rights as the strategic instrument-effect of political struggle, and rights as a performative mechanism of community.

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Sam Binkley, “Psychological Life as Enterprise: Social Practice and the Government of Neoliberal Interiority” Journal of the History of Human Sciences 24: 3 July 2011.

Abstract
This article theorizes the contemporary government of psychological life as neoliberal enterprise. By drawing on Foucauldian critical social theory, it is argued that the constellations of power identified with the psy-function and neoliberal governmentality can be read through the problematic of everyday practice. On a theoretical level, this is involves a reexamination of the notion of dispositif, to uncover the dynamic, ambivalent and temporal practices by which subjectification takes place. Empirically, this point is illustrated through a reflection of one case of neoliberal psychological life: life coaching.

This article was originally delivered as a seminar

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