Foucault's Work Research Articles

‘It's not just a matter of taking the drug. It's about changing the way you function in your society too’: Narratives of power and resistance in the lived experiences of opioid agonist therapy consumers in regional Victoria, Australia

Opioid Agonist Therapy (OAT) has initiated extensive discussion regarding its efficacy, cost-effectiveness and best practice delivery. Although this discussion has been dominated by pharmacologists, clinicians, pharmacists and public policy-makers, there is increasing interest in examining OAT consumer experience and voice, particularly regarding consumers’ navigation and experience of the social field of their treatment. Concerned with the expression and circulation of power and resistance, Michel Foucault's work offers rich resources for examining OAT consumers’ experience and navigation of the social field of their treatment, including the administration of OAT as a harm reduction and social welfare intervention and consumers’ efforts to shape their relationships with medical and allied health professionals and other stakeholders. In the case of this study, Foucault's conceptions of power provide a productive means to critically interrogate the experience of 16 OAT consumers participating in pharmacotherapy treatments within a community pharmacy model in regional Victoria, Australia. Through the application of Foucauldian analyses of subjects and power to OAT participant accounts, precisely what the participant responses in our study have shown is that the relationship between OAT practitioners and consumers is neither always oppositional nor binary. Findings suggest that practitioners must pay attention to the everyday interactions they have with consumers (and others)—to how they communicate, listen, understand, present and provide solutions. Interactions with consumers should be treated as sites that produce complex power relations with moral and ethical implications for subjects, including consumers, practitioners and other stakeholders. Both practitioner and consumers need to remember that they are both productive subjects locked in a complex assemblage of practices and social discourses that circumscribe the social field of opioid treatments.

Problematising the ‘Man Problem’ in the Domestic Abuse Act: Discursive Co-option and The (In)Visibility of Gender

This article offers a discourse analysis of domestic abuse's ‘Man Problem’ by combining and developing Naffine's, Foucault's and Bacchi's work in a new way. Taking the parliamentary debates around the Domestic Abuse Act 2021 in England and Wales as our focus, we critique how MPs problematise gender to justify a gender-neutral definition of domestic violence and abuse (DVA). We illustrate how MPs reframe DVA's ‘man problem’ not as the problem of men as perpetrators of violence against women. But rather, they represent the law and policy ‘problem’ as men's invisibility as victims of DVA. We develop a new theoretical innovation to advance our critique: discursive co-option, and we uncover two gender paradoxes. We argue that MPs co-opt gender equality discourses to advance masculinist politics and patriarchal logics in ways that have detrimental effects for the less powerful, and which elide the reality of women's experiences of DVA.

The Evolution and Integration of Life and Theory in Foucault's Work on Power.

The article is a response to Kaldybekov and his colleague's, 2024 paper about Foucault's theory on power. I argue that it is difficult to understand Foucault's theory of power without looking into his intellectual life and experiences, especially his war experiences. The objective of my study is to show that there is a connection between Foucault's ideas about power and his own lived life, and that he always has been critical of totalitarian theories although he seems influenced by Marxist theories, early in his career. In the paper I show how he deals with this dilemma by incorporating some of Nietzsche's ideas into his thinking. To illustrate the connection between Foucault's lived life and his theories about power, I take a particular point of departure in Foucault's lecture series on psychiatric power in the 1970s and an interview conducted by the Italian journalist Trombadori.

The Things of Order: Affect, Material Culture, Dispositif

Abstract: Commenting on Frantz Fanon's account of the material culture created by European colonizers in the aftermath of invasion, Achille Mbembe notes that the colony is fundamentally a state of war, a contest of forces, in which "sensory life"—the continuum of bodies, objects, and landscapes—is a battlefield. "From this point of view," he writes, "colonial domination requires an enormous investment in affect and ceremony and a significant emotional expenditure." This essay argues for a reappraisal of the work of Michel Foucault as a theory of material culture. Linking Foucault's work on power to studies of material culture, it reviews Foucault's late concept of the dispositif , which specifies the ways power is projected by objects like the scaffold and the panopticon. The article then puts Foucault's approach to material culture in conversation with two strands of contemporary critical thought—New Materialism and affect theory—to show how a full-fledged analytics of power–matter–affect might emerge. What Foucault calls the "analytics of power" supports the critical study of affect and ceremony—the streams of force that constitute subjectivity above, beneath, or outside of language. By way of example, this article explores how this emergent framework can provide new resources for moving beyond liberal approaches to the problem of Confederate monuments. Although Foucault is often read as a theorist preoccupied with discourse, a reconsideration of the dispositif shows that Foucault's analytics of power enhances our understanding of the role of material culture in guiding political affects.

The violences of disability disclosure and the aberrant possibilities of the crip

AbstractThis article delves into the processes of disability disclosure, cripped experiences and a particular theoretical flight with posthuman subjectivity. The article critiques disability disclosure for coercively reifying cripped experiences into normative narratives. Moreover, disclosures determine coercive and performative regimes in educational contexts, where disciplinary power defines possible experiences for cripped folks. Drawing on Foucault's and Butler's works to ground our conversations of reification and coercion, I then pull on and complement Deleuze and Guattari's works to argue that disclosure places the nonsensicality of disability outside conventional determinations of sense, defining the cripped being as nonbeing to maintain the productive boundaries of sense/nonsense. Finally, I play with crippedness that refuses definition and disclosure as a posthuman subjectivity that celebrates fluidity, multiplicity and nonsense. My final section of the article offers a cripped path where the disabled, posthuman subject resists sense‐making and embraces multiplicity, fluidity and nonsensicality as a particularly embodied refusal. This article critically explores the reifying nature of disclosure while envisioning possibilities where crip and posthuman studies converge, promising a shift towards imagining posthuman subjects that honour the nonsensical and multiplicitous nature of cripped experiences that refuse disclosure/definition qua reification, coercion and sense.

Prisons, Immigration, and the Right to a Livable Life in the Anthropocene: Reading Garrett Hardin and Michel Foucault

Abstract Critical work theorizing the nature of immigration imprisonment in relation to anthropogenically influenced ecological phenomena is in its infancy. Scholars have productively made sense of the modern carceral state's expansion by locating it within the framework of race and neoliberalism, registering the collateral damage essential to Western European whiteness and a neoliberal problematic. These framings of migrant incarceration continue to effectively serve a critical function. However, this essay argues that the historical character of immigration incarceration is in the process of changing in the face of real and imagined Anthropocene impacts. Increasingly, immigration is the result of ecological collapse, and taking race and neoliberalism as primary frameworks for understanding forces subtending the carceral system has become critically restrictive. This essay develops an environmental genealogy from historical references within Michel Foucault's work on the relationship between land enclosures and rise of the prison, in order to establish a larger constellation in which to think the event of immigration incarceration today. The essay places Foucault's work in conversation with the work of prominent ecologist and white nationalist Garrett Hardin, whose concurrent pro-enclosure work on immigration and the environment inaugurated a coercive truth discourse that has come to impact not only ecological disciplines in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the environmental humanities but also current US immigration policy.

Of power, knowledge and method: The influence of Michel Foucault in accounting history

Michel Foucault's work had a strong influence not only in philosophy but also in a wide range of humanistic and social disciplines, including accounting. Notably, the first studies which brought Foucault's thought to the attention of interdisciplinary accounting scholars were historical. This article documents how Foucault's ideas have directly inspired accounting history scholars, how the latter have interpreted and brought Foucault's work into their field as well as what future research paths may lie ahead. The article offers a systematisation of how the complex ideas of Foucault have been translated into eight key themes that have provided a crucial interpretive prism to many studies in accounting history. In doing so, it assists scholars wishing to familiarise themselves with Foucault's work and employ it in their research.

MICHEL FOUCAULT AS THE FOUNDER OF THE DOCTRINE OF DISCOURSE

The article deals with topical issues of the contribution of the French sociologist Michel Foucault to the development of sociological science. The authors of the article show that the scientist became one of the founders of the doctrine of discourse, considering the issues of interaction between society and government. The article also identifies milestones in the biography of the sociologist, and presents his main works. The views of the French scientist on the nature of power are analyzed. The authors conclude that the significance of M. Foucault's works for sociological science lies in the fact that he developed the concept of "archaeology of knowledge", which allows us to explore the historical, social and political conditions of the emergence and operation of knowledge, introduced the concept of discourse.

"Duh u svetu bez duha" - Fukoovo tumačenje Iranske revolucije i otpor zapadnoj modernosti

In this article, we analyze Foucault's research of the Iranian Revolution, conducted at the end of 1978. This research has made Foucault the target of numerous criticisms from his contemporaries, while later interpreters of his work have tried in various ways to understand how this research relates to the rest of his oeuvre. A review of the relevant literature shows that there are different currents in interpreting the place that the study of the Iranian Revolution has in Foucault's work. One of these currents argues that Foucault was "seduced" by the "irrational" aspects of Islam because his theoretical and epistemological standpoints inherently contain anti-Enlightenment aspects. A certain number of authors also agree on the interpretation that sees inconsistency in Foucault's study of the Iranian Revolution, as they believe that at this point, he abandons his understanding of power as a totalizing mechanism and introduces the idea of a free acting subject. We will attempt to show that both currents miss the most important aspect of Foucault's research of the Iranian Revolution, which is the way this research fits into his academic interests at that time. Specifically, we will try to locate his study of the Iranian Revolution within the framework of his academic research in the late 1970s, as well as show how the socio-political context of France at that time influenced his work. We will start the article by examining the relationship between French left-leaning intellectuals and the French Communist Party during this period, as well as their stance on the coalition between the French Communist Party and the Socialist Party. We will show that due to the influence of cooperation with Maoist organizations and his participation in the student revolt of 1968, Foucault developed a negative attitude towards the Stalinist orientations of the French Communist Party and therefore at that time tries to develop a theoretical framework for a non-Marxist understanding of macro-social reality. In such a context, Foucault develops his theory of "governmentality", which refers to the specific logic of social relations that regulates the institutions of society in a given historical period. The set of institutions and social relations that governmentality regulates he calls a "dispositive". Foucault's research leads him to the conclusion that the dispositive regulating contemporary society is guided by the logic he calls "pastoral governmentality", claiming that it involves regulating individuals' actions through their dimension of subjectivity, i.e., through the way they relate to themselves and manage their behavior. Furthermore, he demonstrates how this logic, rooted in the Catholic Church, extends to other social institutions from the seventeenth century and becomes associated with the capitalist mode of production in the eighteenth century. It then assumes a role in regulating individuals' subjectivity in accordance with the concept of the individual as homo economicus. Aligning with his concept of governmentality, Foucault develops the notion of "counter-conduct" as a form of resistance to pastoral governmentality. This idea involves rejecting the prescribed model of subjectivity and, consequently, developing practices that transcend the power relations shaped by pastoral governmentality. We will demonstrate that Foucault's research of the Iranian Revolution serves as a real-time, practical test of his idea of counter-conduct. Namely, he claimed that the reforms of the Iranian Shah aimed at establishing a dispositive guided by the pastoral logic of governmentality. Therefore, he sees the Iranian Revolution as a collective revolt against the dispositive that has been dominant in Western countries since the seventeenth century. In his study of the Iranian Revolution, he is particularly interested in the role of Shia Islam in regulating practices of resistance. He sees Shiism as the discourse through which the Iranian Revolution as a collective form of counter-conduct is coordinated and argues that this form of Islam allows revolutionaries to transform their subjectivity by rejecting the model of subjectivity prescribed by pastoral governmentality. Finally, the article concludes with a review of two ways in which the study of the Iranian Revolution fundamentally affects Foucault's work. The first way involves a shift in the focus of his research, which from 1979. becomes centered on the phenomenon of subjectivity. Thus, during the 1980s, Foucault's work involves exploring various models of subjectivity in the history of Western culture. The second influence of the Iranian Revolution can be observed in Foucault's renewed focus on the concept and phenomenon of the Enlightenment.

Knowledge in the public realm – the educative agent

PurposeThe purpose of the project was to intervene in a deficit reading of communities. This article engages public pedagogy in a way that suggests a new approach to the field. To this end, both the terms public and pedagogy are interrogated.Design/methodology/approachThe approach in this paper is an analysis of a qualitative research project: the knowledge project and pop-up school. The theoretical framework used to undertake the analysis of this project is Hannah Arendt's conceptualisation of the public realm and Michele Foucault's use of parrhesia (the truth teller), alongside Foucault's work on power.FindingsThis article offers a whole new subject position that of the educative agent. Further, this article suggests that the educative agent takes a carriage of knowledge and therefore enacts authority.Originality/valueThis article is an original theoretical engagement with knowledge, authority and power.

How to be reflexive: Foucault, ethics and writing qualitative research as a technology of the self

ABSTRACT This paper explores reflexivity in qualitative research, challenging conventional perspectives that revolve around the binary of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ positioning. While traditionally reflexivity has been understood through the lens of a researcher's socio-historical positionality, we argue for a more dynamic understanding, emphasizing that academic self-formation is an ongoing process of self-creation. Drawing inspiration from the ancient Akadēmía, where writing was a method of self-reflection, we recontextualize reflexive qualitative writing, aligning it with Foucault's interpretations of Ancient Greek and Renaissance concepts. We posit that writing, especially in doctoral research, is not just a tool for communication but a means of self-formation. This perspective redefines reflexivity as a transformative intellectual and existential process. The paper critically examines the prevailing insider/outsider binary in the research literature, suggesting that researcher identities are fluid and constantly shaped by interactions. By integrating Foucault's later work on ethics, we explore the ethical dimensions of reflexivity and the formation of the ethical subject. Ultimately, this paper contributes to the academic discourse on reflexivity, offering a more fluid, transformative view of the doctoral process and reflexive writing in qualitative research.

“I Can't Read This”: Plagiarism, Biopolitics, and The Production of The Trans‐Dividual Student

AbstractIn this paper, Tony Iantosca situates the academic integrity policies of US colleges and universities, as well as student plagiarism, in biopolitical frameworks. By examining the aporias that result from student plagiarism in the context of neoliberal knowledge production, which produces and depends upon individualized, skills‐bearing students, Iantosca interrogates what educators can learn philosophically and pedagogically from the mutual misrecognition that occurs between institutional policy and the transgressing student. He frames this discussion with Michel Foucault's classic work on biopolitics as well as Roberto Esposito's immunitary paradigm in order to examine the implications of student illegibility for what Bernard Stiegler has called education's trans‐individuating potential. The argument that emerges is that student plagiarism has multiple, contradictory significances that can nonetheless teach educators important lessons about property and individualism, and these lessons must be retained as we reinitiate, rather than punish, plagiarizing students. Iantosca then closes the paper with a brief consideration of the pedagogical implications of this argument.

A place for pastoral power: From the “government of souls” to “global struggles for souls”

While research on geopolitical space and faith has drawn on Michel Foucault's work on power/knowledge, subjectivity, and strategy, little use has been made of his genealogies of Christian pastoral power. Arguing that Foucault's work on the pastorate analyzes political-religious submission, care, control, and resistance without reflexively secularizing faith (by either normalizing or abnormalizing it), this article calls for its use in research on “global struggles for souls”. However, to make pastoral power relevant to contemporary Christian and non-Christian subjectivities in Europe and beyond, Foucault's confinement of the concept to ancient-medieval Western-European Christendom must be revisited. To that end, the article undertakes a close and concurrent reading of Foucault's key works on pastoral power and identifies core conditions around the concept's contemporary applicability. Moreover, in critiquing Foucault's Eurocentric mapping of the pastorate, I argue that its analytical merits cannot extend to subaltern subjects (Christian and otherwise, in Europe and beyond) unless it is rethought through postcolonial and decolonial notions of power as relations of embodied race, class, gender, and other difference reproduced through colonial legacies.

Problem of Power in Michel Foucault's Philosophy.

For many centuries, the issues of power, politics, and state have been widely discussed in scientific literature. Developing theories, philosophers proceeded from the side of hierarchical affiliation of power, which is confirmed in theological and biological concepts. Relevance of the presented article is conditioned by the fact that for the first time the French philosopher M. Foucault has offered innovative ideas of power concept from the social point of view. M. Foucault's works are of significant importance for modern researchers in various branches of science since he created a universal tool for the study of social relations. The objective of this study entails conducting a thorough examination of the development of his theory, as well as exploring diverse perspectives presented by scholars on this matter. The result of the research was a full-fledged analysis of the "power" category from the position of a comprehensive phenomenon, which penetrates the whole structure of the state, and not only selected organs or institutions. The main conclusion of the paper is that "power" is a complex social phenomenon that cannot be equated with categories such as "law", "discipline", "subordination", or "punishment".

Foucault's Epicureanism: Parrhēsia , Confession, and the Genealogy of the Self

Abstract: This paper addresses the apparent absence of a systematic analysis of Epicureanism in Foucault's exploration of ancient philosophy. By considering Pierre Hadot's remark concerning Foucault's problematic neglect of the Epicurean notion of hēdonē , it revisits Foucault's work in search of traces of his engagement with Epicureanism. It then goes on to analyze the genesis of the notion of parrhēsia in Foucault's work, showing how it first appears and is developed in a series of analyses of the "philosophy of the garden," first in a reading of Epicurus's view on the study of nature in the Vatican Sayings , second in his study of Philodemus's Peri Parrhēsias . It is precisely in a series of readings of the Epicurean school that Foucault finds one of his key theoretical resources guiding his study of ancient philosophical practices in the 1980s. More importantly, the paper seeks to articulate the ways in which the analysis of parrhēsia —and of the Epicureans in particular—is situated in a broader genealogy of confession, which connects Foucault's studies of ancient philosophy to his readings of Christianity and the formation of the modern technologies of power and veridiction, defining aspects of the earlier project of a History of Sexuality , as announced in the Will to Knowledge . Finally, the paper articulates a possible view on the critical import of parrhēsia in this broader genealogy of confession.

Bridging Divides: art and religion in the early AIDS pandemic.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, visual artists created a canon of work examining the illness experience of people living with AIDS. Largely forgotten today is a subset of this canon that simultaneously engaged AIDS narratives and religion, thereby dialoguing across political, cultural, and ideological divides. The artists who crafted these works created spaces of sanctioned discourse, drawing together sexual and religious histories in a manner reminiscent of the confessional as analyzed in Michel Foucault's work. This article rediscovers an archive rich in interdisciplinary illness narratives, arguing that the unearthed art pieces articulate four themes that interrogate the relationship between people with AIDS and religious traditions. In addition to furthering our understanding of a forgotten expression of AIDS illness narratives, this analysis provides insight into art's capacity to dialogue between communities in the setting of internal divisions. These lessons may aid us as we endeavor to understand the diversity, function, and applications of illness narratives in the setting of the politicized diseases of the 21st century, including COVID-19.

The contested status of theory/theorizing and humanism/posthumanism in Olga Petrovskaya's Nursing theory, postmodernism, poststructualism, and Foucault.

The contested status of theory/theorizing and humanism/posthumanism in Olga Petrovskaya's Nursing theory, postmodernism, poststructualism, and Foucault.

Theological Genealogies of Modernity: An Introduction

Theological Genealogies of Modernity: An Introduction

Foucault, the Digital Humanities, the Method

Starting from a review of the book Foucault, digital published by Bernhard J. Dotzler and Henning Schmidgen in 2022, this article deals with the question of how Michel Foucault's theoretical and methodological concepts can be operationalized in digital humanities research. It takes a critical stance on the assumption that discourse analysis is a quantitative, "big data" method and makes the case for translating the concept of the dispositive into qualitative digital projects. Finally, the essay relates Foucault's late works on governmentality and self-care to post-phenomenology and interaction design, advocating theorization by building digital tools and platforms.

Sexuality: The 1964 Clermont-Ferrand and 1969 Vincennes Lectures by Michel Foucault

Reviewed by: Sexuality: The 1964 Clermont-Ferrand and 1969 Vincennes Lectures by Michel Foucault Mathew Rickard Sexuality: The 1964 Clermont-Ferrand and 1969 Vincennes Lectures. By Michel Foucault. Ed. by Claude-Olivier Doron, François Ewald, and Bernard E. Harcourt. Trans. by Graham Burchell. (Foucault's Early Lectures and Manuscripts) New York: Columbia University Press. 2021. 1+383 pp. $28; £22. ISBN 978–0–231–19507–2. The impact of Michel Foucault's work on sexuality cannot be overstated within the humanities and social sciences. Often considered to be one of the most cited scholars on the matter, Leo Bersani once described him as 'our most brilliant philosopher of power' whose 'importance can hardly be exaggerated' ('Michel Foucault: Philosopher of Power', Washington Post, 15 March 1981). Bersani was writing at the beginning of what would come to be known as the AIDS epidemic, during which sexuality would become heavily policed. In 2022, with culture wars targeting queer and transgender people, people of colour, and women, we have recourse to Foucault's thinking more than ever. This newly published translation of courses Foucault taught at the University of Clermont-Ferrand in 1964 and the experimental university centre in Vincennes in 1969 reveals the archaeology of what would become established Foucauldian thought. This volume traces Foucault's academic interest in sexuality from his focus on the epistemological origins of sexuality as a scientific discipline in his lectures at Clermont-Ferrand to the ideological turn he took at Vincennes, undoubtedly informed by the events of May 1968, which served as an intellectual revolution in France at the time. As such, while the focus of the book is sexuality, it also provides [End Page 248] an invaluable insight into the development of academic enquiry in mid-twentieth-century France. Given the book's origins as lecture notes, it can at times be dense and scientific. However, it has been expertly edited and extensively annotated, with prefaces written by Bernard E. Harcourt and François Ewald, and translation and editing notes provided by both Claude-Olivier Doron and Graham Burchell. The lectures are followed by interpretative discussions by Doron. An unexpected value can thus be found in this surrounding paratext. As Harcourt reflects, 'the notes are so rich and provide a remarkable bibliography, references, and historical links to many of Foucault's and his contemporaries' related writings. The notes alone are worth the price of admission, in addition to the brilliant course contexts which mine Foucault's unpublished notebooks' ('A Preface to Philosophical Praxis', pp. xi–xxxix (p. xxxiii)). The lectures begin in 1964 and seek to understand the construction of sexuality, especially in relation to so-called perversions. While Foucault had taught psychology from 1960, these lectures were given in the philosophy department, and as such present us with an insight into Foucault's unique blend of the two. The lectures take us through an introduction to the understanding of sexuality as a line of enquiry, which Foucault asserts is 'one of the characteristics of Western civilization' (p. 4). This is followed by discussions of the scientific knowledge of sexuality, sexual behaviour, sexual perversions, and infantile sexuality. Foucault's course on the discourse of sexuality in 1969, however, marks an ideological turn and a focus on how 'sexuality in its mechanisms and meanings is not just confined to sexual practices but extends very much further into behavior apparently very distant from it' (p. 4). These lectures look to history, literature, and law to understand sexuality more broadly. Beginning with an introduction to the discursive study of sexuality that will follow, they map the changes in our understanding of sexuality from the Enlightenment until the present day. This volume will be of interest to all scholars working on sexuality across many disciplines, particularly those whose study is informed by Foucauldian analyses of power, knowledge, and desire. By publishing and translating these early lectures, the editors have expanded our knowledge and appreciation of Foucault as a philosopher but have also contributed to continuing debates on the nature of human sexuality, which, as Harcourt notes, 'in the end, is basically written in sand' (p. xxxiii). Mathew...