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Foucault's discussion of parrhēsia - frank speech - in his last two Collège de France lecture courses has led many to wonder if Foucault is pursuing parrhēsia as a contemporary strategy for resistance. This essay argues that ethical parrhēsia on either the Socratic or Cynical model would have little critical traction today because the current environment is plagued by problems analogous to those Plato thought plagued Athenian democracy. Specifically, authentication of parrhesiasts as a technique for authenticating their speech - the specific problem that the move to ethical parrhēsia in ancient Greece was designed to solve - becomes intractable in a social media environment, even with the added Cynical move to pure visibility. The problem is that contemporary society overproduces visibility as a condition for participation, which means that the context for authenticating parrhesiastic speech is one in which visibility is banalized and in which there is a surplus of speech which presents as parrhesiastic. The problem of authentication is thus a serious one, one which social media makes particularly intractable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper builds upon a growing body of critical research on the proliferating use of bibliometrics as a means to evaluate academic research, but brings to it a specifically Foucauldian, genealogical approach. The paper has three parts. Part 1 situates bibliometrics as a new technology of neoliberal, biopolitical governmentality, alongside the host of other 'metrics' (led by biometrics) that have emerged in the last two decades. Part 2 analyses bibliometrics' antecedents in prior notational practices in the Western heritage, highlighting how forms of noting have almost always had political valences tied to projects of control or subversion. Part 3 then delineates the specific features of bibliometrics as a new form of notation, highlighting the latest forms of academic subjectivity bibliometrics suppose and increasingly are summoning into being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a Foucauldian analytics of resistance in relation to components of a system of governance – a governmentality. Techniques of resistance that can transform a governmentality towards the development of a new politics of truth require the design of techniques of resistance to counter directly oppressive techniques of biopower and disciplinary power, in turn to produce new regimes of practices or counter-conduct that can engender a new mentality and set of discourses to convey it. Strategies of resistance towards transformative change in the governance of a population as well as of the self therefore require development following, and in relation to, an analytics of governance. I thread these points through a particular case, the problem of care for the infirm elderly in the United States, focusing specifically on nursing homes by critically synthesizing issues from inter-disciplinary literatures and casting them in terms of governmentalities. I frame the problems of eldercare broadly in terms of interrelated neoliberal and (western) scientific mentalities and associated discourses, and then examine the associated techniques of biopower, disciplinary power, and regimes of practices to identify roots of problems, explain failures of policies, and crucially, to frame the design of techniques of resistance to produce new regimes of counter-conduct. I suggest avenues of resistance in relation to existing governmentalities on the terrain of inter-firm relations and everyday life in nursing-home care, all currently entangled with government policies, economies of documentation, and dehumanizing scientific practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses Foucault's concepts "discipline" and "biopower" to expose the complexity of power relations in Augustan Rome and its historiography. Focusing on Augustus' Res Gestae and Tacitus' Annales, I argue that the absolute sovereignty of the emperor did not preclude the advancement of techniques to classify, hierarchize and normalize individuals, nor did Imperial sovereignty work against the development of a discourse about the enhancement and protection of the population. By demonstrating the conceptual and historical relevancy of Foucault's modern power triad of "sovereignty-discipline-government" to first century CE Rome, the paper suggests that biopolitical societies have a far more extensive history than the one said to have started around the turn of the eighteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper notes the re-ignited controversy surrounding the publication of a new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), suggesting that the early work of Michel Foucault can explain why the mere diagnosis of or criteria for mental illness remains a heated flashpoint. In particular, it argues that Foucault articulates a common issue within the philosophical foundations of psychiatry and psychology that the paper terms the 'subjectivity problem.' It observes, using Foucault's work, that these disciplines treat not just simple objects but complex subjects that are capable of interacting with that labelling and who are shaped by it. Drawing on the related work of Ian Hacking on kind-making as world-making, the article fleshes out why the subjectivity problem remains persistent within psychiatry and psychology as forms of knowledge, preventing them from operating as many commentators might desire them to - as pure and objective sciences. Finally, the paper reflects on the relationship of psychiatry and psychology as forms of knowledge, the manner in which they constitute their objects, and how this might shape the biopolitical episteme in which we find ourselves today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite appearances, Agamben's engagement with Foucault in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is not an extension of Foucault's analysis of biopolitics but rather a disciplining of Foucault for failing to take Nazism seriously. This moralizing rebuke is the result of methodological divergences between the two thinkers that, I argue, have fundamental political consequences. Re-reading Foucault's most explicitly political work of the mid-1970s, I show that Foucault's commitment to genealogy is aligned with his commitment to "insurrection"--not simply archival or historical, but practical and political insurrection--even as his non-moralizing understanding of critique makes space for the resistances he hopes to proliferate. By contrast, Agamben's resurrection of sovereignty turns on a moralizing Holocaust exceptionalism that anoints both sovereignty and the state with inevitably totalitarian powers. Thus, while both Agamben and Foucault take positions "against" totalitarianism, their very different understandings of this term and method of investigating it unwittingly render Agamben complicit with the totalitarianism he otherwise seeks to reject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the Michel Foucault Circle Selection is presented in which the editor discusses various topics including the return of modern feminist philosophy to nature leaving unexplored implications for ethics, the view of feminists on laughter and its transgressive possibilities to destroy gender expectations and the positive valuation of the Foucauldian notion of biopower.

This article deals with civil society organizations active in the field of family policy and demographic issues in contemporary Russia. This article uses Michel Foucault's concepts of biopolitics and governmentality and later developments discussing technologies of citizenship. More specifically, using interviews, documents, and participant observations, so-called "daddy-schools" that have emerged in and around Saint Petersburg since 2008, are studied as a mode of governmentality. The analysis shows how the civic initiative studied attempted to empower fathers and how it has altered demographic discourses while approaching similar societal goals as the state does in its biopolitical strategies. Thus, the daddy-schools provide a complementary discourse concerning fatherhood while approaching the same perceived demographic crisis that the Russian state is challenged by. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As it has often been emphasised, through the concept of biopower, Foucault attempts to move away from the problem of sovereign power. Yet, after exposing Foucault's conceptualisation of biopower, in this article I argue that he cannot simply leave this problem behind. In particular, reflections on Nazism and how the Nazi state uses racism to sustain itself force him to return to the problem of sovereign power to explain how state killing continues to be possible, and actually takes on new and extreme forms, in modern times. These same considerations further complicate the theoretical distinction between biopower and sovereign power put forward, albeit not without hesitations, by Foucault but contested by other authors such as Agamben, while offering an interesting standpoint from which to reconsider the question of sovereignty and its interrelationship to biopower. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foucault has been criticized for overlooking the similarities among Platonism, Christianity and Stoicism, and overstating Stoicism's distinctness. However, an examination of Stoic theories of truth shows that the Stoics sought out a particular kind of knowledge, and that this knowledge was necessarily sought by means of a certain circular process, to which Foucault himself vaguely alludes. This accounts for many of Foucault's observations, and explains why, even when Stoics speak about such topics as self-knowledge and self-renunciation in ways that recall Platonism and Christianity, their approach is rightly characterized as differing from that of their Platonic and Christian counterparts. Ultimately, this sheds light on Stoicism's import for politics. In short, only by the Stoic will the search for truth be carried out in such a way that the individual's identity will neither reinforce, nor be reinforced by his or her grasp of the truth; and this will uniquely prepare the Stoic to enter the political domain and to be recognized there as someone who speaks the truth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics, this article aims, firstly, to consolidate our understanding of Foucault's engagement with law by fleshing out his approach to law and by clarifying that he distinguishes between different kinds of law on the basis of the objectives that law serves and the regime of truth that it embodies. Secondly, using this understanding, the article proceeds to illustrate how the objectives and the regime of truth of the EU internal market law have been displaced in the last few decades. It is argued that this body of law has increasingly come to perform the tasks of law in neoliberal government as pointed out by Foucault in these lectures, namely of expanding the domain of market values and mechanisms, and of restricting the exercise of legitimate government by opposing the rule of law to planning. In this regard, particular attention is paid to the way in which justiciable rights function as a technology of neoliberal rule within the internal market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editors discusses articles within the issue on topics including biopolitics, neoliberal government, and individual virtuosity.

The authors reflect on the presentation of the special issue on the works of Michel Foucault. The author agree that topics on Foucault and Civil Society section present the perspective of Foucault and his notion about civil society while Foucault Circle Special Section features works from the 2014 conference. An overview of original articles and the reviews is given. The authors suggest that readers should submit their works to be featured in future issues.