Foucault Studies
https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies
<p><span id="E112" class="qowt-font4-PalatinoLinotype">Foucault Studies</span><span id="E113" class="qowt-font4-PalatinoLinotype"> is the only international journal in the English language devoted to the work and influence of the </span><span id="E115" class="qowt-font4-PalatinoLinotype">thinker Michel Foucault, often listed as the most cited contemporary author within the humanities and social sciences.</span></p>Copenhagen Business Schoolen-USFoucault Studies1832-5203<p>Authors retain copyright to their work, but assign the right of the first publication to Foucault Studies. The work is subject to a <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND 4.0</a> license, but despite these restrictions, authors can take for granted that Foucault Studies will permit articles published in Foucault Studies to be translated or reprinted in another format such as a book providing a full reference is made to Foucault Studies as the original place of publication.</p>Foucault Studies No. 35
https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/7092
Editorial team
Copyright (c) 2023
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
2023-12-292023-12-291264Special Issue Introduction
https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/7071
Annika SkoglundAnindya Sekhar PurakayasthaFabiana JardimDavid Armstrong
Copyright (c) 2023 The Authors
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
2023-12-292023-12-2912010.22439/fs.i35.7071Governmentality, Science and the Media. Examining the “Pandemic Reality” with Foucault, Lyotard and Baudrillard
https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/7073
<div><span lang="EN-US">This article examines the legitimization process of the public health preventive measures implemented in many Western countries following the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak. Through concepts such as governmentality, disciplinarization and security mechanisms proposed by Foucault, we trace some of the basic principles and implications of the relationship between biopower and medicine, as well as the media dissemination of an official narrative on scientific truth. These reflections are complemented by the contributions of Francois Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard. Lyotard reflects on the relationship between science and a “performative game”, whose own staging is the core of its criteria of truth. Baudrillard shows the relevance of a “hyperreality” in which the signs presented by the media take precedence over the experience of the subjects. We argue that a mediatized version of science, defined through a strong disciplinarization of knowledge and the censorship of dissident voices, played a key role in the establishment of consensus and the legitimization of policies that granted extraordinary power to governments and transnational elites. Although the work of Foucault in this demonstration is essential, the contributions of Lyotard and Baudrillard provide additional elements to understand a fundamental problem: the public acceptance of “truth” as an instrument of governmentality on a global scale.</span></div>Jean-Paul SarrazinFabián Aguirre
Copyright (c) 2023
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
2023-12-292023-12-29214510.22439/fs.i35.7073Securing the Pandemic: Biopolitics, Capital, and COVID-19
https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/7072
<p>In this article, I consider the interoperation of twin contemporary governmental imperatives, fostering economic growth and ensuring biopolitical security, in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. At a theoretical level, I thereby consider the question of the applicability of a Marxist analysis vis-à-vis a Foucauldian one in understanding state responses to the pandemic. Despite the apparent prioritization of preserving life over economic activity by governments around the world in this context, I will argue that the basic problem that COVID-19 posed for the state was one of sheer unknowability and that the fundamental motive for the governmental response was a concern for security in Foucault’s sense, that is, ensuring a baseline predictability in the social field, upon which economic activity, like myriad other social activity, is premised. I argue that this drive for security motivated states to appeal to medical experts to determine the direction of their response, who in turn applied a default model of quarantine. While we cannot be certain that the medically-guided response was optimal in terms either of health outcomes or economically, I argue it served its essential purpose by providing a structured framework for social action in the face of the unknown. While this is vital for the maintenance of the basic coordinates of capitalist society, I argue it nonetheless cannot entirely be explained simply by an appeal to Marxist categories and instead requires Foucault’s insights into the medicalization of society.</p>Mark G. Kelly
Copyright (c) 2023
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
2023-12-292023-12-29466910.22439/fs.i35.7072Plague, Foucault, Camus
https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/7078
<div><span lang="EN-US">In January 1975, Michel Foucault contemplated the nature and formation of what in subsequent years he would come to know as governmentality. For Foucault, plague marks the rise of the invention of positive technologies of power, where these relations center around inclusion, multiplication, and security, rather than exclusion, negation, and rejection. In a point that might at first seem ancillary to his central argument, Foucault comments on stylized works about plague, such as those, according to the lecture series’ editors, exemplified by Albert Camus. In footnote fifteen of the January 15, 1975 lecture, in reference to what Foucault deemed the “literary dream of” plagues, the editors list Camus’ 1947 novel <em>La Peste</em>, among other works, as representative of what Foucault described as “a kind of orgiastic dream in which plague is the moment when individuals come apart and when the law is forgotten.”. This article places Camus’ novel and other works in conversation with Foucault on governmentality, subjectivation, and truth to demonstrate the ways in which individualism itself can be viewed biopolitically. In so doing, it offers an urgent intervention that speaks powerfully to and is exemplified by the current global pandemic. Plague serves both as this literary dream and as a discursive mechanism engaged simultaneously with regimes of truth and the individuals constructing them. By pairing Foucault’s historical understanding of the invention of positive technologies of power with Camus’ treatment of “the absurd” in and out of the plague context, one uncovers the interrelation of governmentality, subjectivation, and truth. </span></div>Adam Herpolsheimer
Copyright (c) 2023
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
2023-12-292023-12-29709610.22439/fs.i35.7078Fragile Responsibilization: Rights and Risks in the Bulgarian Response to Covid-19
https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/7086
<div><span lang="EN-US">This article discusses the Bulgarian response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The Bulgarian case is characterized by an ineffective constitution of the individuals as subjects of responsibility for the health of the population, which resulted in a vaccine coverage considerably lower than the European average. The article argues that the fragile responsibilization is an effect of the response to the pandemic that, building on older post-socialist regulations of the access to healthcare, instead of restricting the circulation of bodies in general, tried to differentiate between economically productive and unproductive circulation and to limit only the latter by progressively increasing its differential costs (both in terms of time and efforts and in terms of risks). An analysis of the legal actions against quarantine violators, however, suggests that such a strategy stimulated the public to respond to the pandemic by calculating risks, and if the social actors nevertheless behaved irresponsibly, it was often because they took into account not only the risks posed by the virus but also smaller-scale risks affecting their social support networks. The authorities, however, tried to repair the unreliable responsibilization by articulating an <em>ad hoc</em> right to health defined at the level of the population. That biopolitical right to health was crucial to the implementation of certificate requirements. It was harmonized with individual rights by opening up fields of choice such as the choice between vaccination and daily testing. However, since the differential costs of the higher-risk options seemed irrational, the constellation of individual rights and right to health left a growing residue of irresponsible conducts justifying a further intensification of control.</span></div>Todor Hristov
Copyright (c) 2023
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
2023-12-292023-12-299712110.22439/fs.i35.7086A Critique of Pandemic Reason: Towards a Syndemic Noso-Politics
https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/7087
<div><span lang="EN-GB">The main objective of this article is to provide a critique of the pandemic strategy suggested by the World Health Organization (WHO) and implemented by various countries from March 2020 onwards in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, China. Based on the theories of Michel Foucault, this critique aims to show that, in the first instance, the pandemic may be understood in terms of the art of governing human beings at the point of interaction between politics and medicine; secondly, in Foucauldian terminology, such interaction may be referred to as ‘noso-politics’, that is, a mechanism used to control the body of the population via authoritarian measures exercised in the name of the health of the population; thirdly, such a mechanism exercises its power by invoking a mechanistic truth about the SARS-CoV-2 virus which may be countered by an argument that takes a historical perspective on the virus; fourthly, the pandemic strategy may be opposed by a syndemic approach that takes into account interactions between emerging diseases such as COVID-19 and non-communicable illnesses, as well as the biological and socio-economic conditions that the well-being of the population depends on. In short, by providing a critique of the politics of truth about the pandemic, the virus, and health measures, the article aims to encourage a critical attitude that will challenge both the authorities and the truth they invoke to prevent the pandemic strategy being used as a mechanism for governing, given the predictions of the recurrent emergence of new viruses.</span></div>Jorge Vélez VegaRicardo Noguera-Solano
Copyright (c) 2023
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
2023-12-292023-12-2912214710.22439/fs.i35.7087Foucault Meets Novel Coronavirus: Biosociality, Excesses of Governmentality and the “Will to Live” of the Pandemicariat
https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/7088
<div><span lang="EN-US">This essay situates Foucault`s ideas of ‘biopower’ and ‘governmentality’ within the Indian context of the Covid emergency, analysing how the excesses of ‘biopolitical’ and the authoritarian forms of ‘governmentality’ evoke a radical re-reading of Foucault within Covid-infested India. We argue how pre-existing ‘discursive’ conditions of biomedical, digital, and neoliberal India facilitated more majoritarian and undemocratic forms of (bio)politics during the Indian experience of the pandemic, exposing the migrant workers in particular to tremendous ‘precarity’ and turning them into <em>pandemicariat</em>. To meet our theoretical ends, we investigate through forging links between Foucauldian theory – consisting of a set of concepts like <em>biopolitics</em>, <em>anatomo-politics</em>, <em>governmentality </em>etc— and ideas like <em>transmuted</em> <em>biosociality</em>, <em>truncated sociality, will to live, pandemicariat</em> etc. Current conditions of <em>truncated sociality </em>render human bodies more ‘discursively’ available for ‘biomedical’ and ‘biopolitical’ interventions, disempowering people’s capacity to sustain the more <em>synthetic</em> biosocial substances of conviviality. However, following Agamben’s early controversial stance for braving the virus, we would like to envisage “life” to be more than “survival” alone. We would also argue that the hard times of the pandemic invoke a new grammar of the “will to live” that was practised by the <em>pandemicariat </em>against heavy odds.</span></div>Subhendra BhowmickMursed Alam
Copyright (c) 2023
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
2023-12-292023-12-2914816910.22439/fs.i35.7088Critical Friendship After the Pandemic
https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/7079
<p>Are critique and the “art of governing” antithetical? The aim of this article is to examine this tension that was laid bare by the Covid-19 pandemic by introducing “critical friendship” as a conceptual framework for a constructive interdisciplinary engagement with science in a post-pandemic era. It does so by drawing on several works and insights: (i) Michel Foucault’s notion of “critical attitude” as well as his assessment of philosophy as providing a “diagnosis of the present;” (ii) Bruno Latour and colleagues’ idea of a “critical zone” or what I call a horizontal epistemology of critique; (iii) Aristotle’s notion of friendship as being necessary for the “common good;” and finally (iv) Jacques Derrida’s interpretation of the messianic character of friendship in the constitution of progressive democracies. Whereas critical theory has been described as either “explanatory-diagnostic” or “emancipatory-utopian,” a <em>critical friendship</em> approach aims to be both diagnostic <em>and</em> emancipatory in an age of uncertainty and democratic backsliding.</p>Joelle M. Abi-Rached
Copyright (c) 2023 The Author
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
2023-12-292023-12-2917019110.22439/fs.i35.7079The Covid-19 Pandemic and the Freedom-Security Tension: Calibrating their Fragile Relationship
https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/7080
<p>Grounded in a will to adapt to dangers, and espouse both responsibility and resilience, voluntary measures have largely replaced one of the oldest public health strategies, quarantine. The Covid-19 pandemic, however, elicited a broad sweep of tactics from the archive of public health armoury. On a general level, this review essay addresses the common measures rolled out by various authorities against the pandemic - the lock-downs, reopening process, financial support and vaccination. By relating these measures to 1) the “plague-stricken town”, deployed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe by the<em> Polizeistaat</em>; 2) the “self-regulation strategy” that emerged with liberal ideas at the end of the eighteenth century; and 3) the “minimum security” programmed by neoliberal governmentality in the second half of the twentieth century, it is suggested that tensions between freedom and security during, and after, the pandemic can be better understood. To end, the essay noticed that the pandemic has enforced tensions in the administration and calibration of individual wishes and collective wellbeing, creating a fragile “freedom-security relationship” and new problem space for self-regulation.</p>Pablo Martín Méndez
Copyright (c) 2023 The Author
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
2023-12-292023-12-2919221010.22439/fs.i35.7080Virus as a figure of geontopower or how to practice Foucault now?
https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/7081
<p>Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Franz Boas Professor at Columbia University, is a philosopher and anthropologist who has critically engaged with Michel Foucault’s ideas as well as scholarship inspired by his works. Povinelli has been dedicated to research on colonialism within liberalism and is also a filmmaker and founding member of The Karrabing Film Collective. The film collective is part of a larger organization of Aboriginal peoples and artists living in the Australian Northern Territory that refuses ‘fantasies of sovereignty and property’.<a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1"><sup>[1]</sup></a></p> <p>As Povinelli shares with us during the interview, her trajectory was constituted in the middle of the 1980s following her life-changing encounter with the elders in Belyuen in the Australian Northern Territory. In the wake of that encounter, and with urgent issues raised about indigeneity due to changes in Australian law, Povinelli has been working even closer with her Karrabing family. The changes in law both acknowledged Aboriginal peoples' rights to their territory and imposed certain ideas of identity, family and culture, producing an entanglement between rights and government. These efforts to manage differences – cultural, race, gender – are problematized and deciphered in Povinelli’s ethnographic work with a focus on how late settler liberalism has been reconfigured with novel expressions of colonialism and imperialism. Now embedded...</p>Fabiana JardimAnnika SkoglundAnindya Sekhar PurakayasthaDavid Armstrong
Copyright (c) 2023 The Authors
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
2023-12-292023-12-2921123110.22439/fs.i35.7081Metamorphosis of Biopolitics. A Foucauldian Ecological Perspective and the Challenge of the Pandemic
https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/7082
<p>This paper is a review essay of Ottavio Marzocca, <em>Biopolitics for Beginners. Knowledge of Life and Government of People</em>, Milan/Udine: Mimesis International, 2020. Pp. 457. ISBN: 9788869771781 (paperback). It focuses on Marzocca's investigations into biopolitics, a topic of which the author offers an original ecological reconfiguration. The proposed reflections, which address the recent pandemic crisis of COVID-19, are developed from the work of Foucault but are not limited to this thinker. In fact, they offer an articulate examination of the issue by also taking into broad consideration the thought of authors such as Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, Roberto Esposito, Jacques Donzelot, Robert Castel, Pierre Rosanvallon, Nikolas Rose, Melinda Cooper and Gregory Bateson.</p> <p> </p>Valentina Antoniol
Copyright (c) 2023 The Author
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
2023-12-292023-12-2923224210.22439/fs.i35.7082Editorial
https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/7085
<p class="p1">Editorial by Sverre Raffnsøe, Alain Beaulieu, Barbara Cruikshank, Bregham Dalgliesh, Knut Ove Eliassen, Verena Erlenbusch, Alex Feldman, Marius Gudmand-Høyer, Thomas Götselius, Robert Harvey, Robin Holt, Leonard Richard Lawlor, Daniele Lorenzini, Edward McGushin, Hernan Camilo Pulido Martinez, Giovanni Mascaretti, Johanna Oksala, Clare O’Farrell, Rodrigo Castro Orellana, Eva Bendix Petersen, Alan Rosenberg, Annika Skoglund, Dianna Taylor, Thomas Lin, Andreas Dahl Jakobsen, Mathias Mollerup Jørgensen & Rachel Raffnsøe.</p>Sverre Raffnsøe et al.
Copyright (c) 2023 The Authors
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
2023-12-292023-12-29iiii10.22439/fs.i35.7085Jussi Backman and Antonio Cimino (ed.), Biopolitics and Ancient Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. Pp. 240.
https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/7083
Morten S. Thaning
Copyright (c) 2023 The Author
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
2023-12-292023-12-2924325010.22439/fs.i35.7083Post-pandemic South Asian Governmentalities and Foucault: State Power and Ordinary Citizens
https://rauli.cbs.dk/index.php/foucault-studies/article/view/7084
<p>As the post-COVID world order necessitates a radical overhaul of the ways in which we understand the very notions of “health”, “care” and “security”, one must revisit Michel Foucault and his works in these shifting times to rethink biopolitics as a category viz-a-viz contemporary globalectics. Keeping that in mind, while reviewing two very interesting books by and on Foucault – <em>South Asian Governmentalities: Michel Foucault and the Question of Postcolonial Orderings</em> and <em>Archives of Infamy: Foucault on </em><em>State Power</em><em> in the </em><em>Lives</em><em> of </em><em>Ordinary Citizens</em> – the article attempts to highlight certain core Foucauldian concerns in different domains of human existence that the...</p>Nasima Islam
Copyright (c) 2023 The Author
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
2023-12-292023-12-2925126710.22439/fs.i35.7084