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This article examines the transformative effects of adding gaze theory to the critical approaches that have focused on Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021). Drawing on the issues of looking dynamics and surveillance in Michel Foucault’s epistemology of the gaze, the argument is that a Foucauldian reading of Ishiguro’s story uncovers the dependence of its power relations on gazing practices. By exploring the humanoid robot Klara’s storyline, I highlight the dual role of the gaze and related visual dynamics in Klara and the Sun as both facilitators of humans’ mastery of nonhumans and sites of nonhuman possibility. My analysis suggests that the novel articulates a complex disciplinary system in which the technological Other is constantly reified by both the human gaze and internalised practices of self-discipline. At the same time, against the reductive reading of Klara as a technological Other at the service of human selves, this article also proposes her figure as one of transgressive boundaries and gaze-engendered opposition, arguing that the novel’s social system is ultimately undermined by the visual acts of overconformity that Klara adopts. Publisher PDF

Contrary to most postcolonial approaches that focus on modernity/coloniality, this article argues for the relevance of heterarchical theories of power. In his lectures at College de France, Foucaul...

Fascism is currently resurgent in national governments and enhanced popular acceptance of fascist ideas. But preconditions of fascism may also lie in ordinary language or speech. I draw from twenti...

In his 1981–82 lectures The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Michel Foucault claims that a significant portion of the modern historiography of ancient philosophy tends to discredit the ethical framewor...

This study examines the power relations found in Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ films. Since 2005, Lanthimos has been making films that left his mark on art cinema. Despite the inevitable rise of...

This paper discusses the possible contributions of the Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA) to the exploration of the person-centered approach (PCA) hence relating Michel Foucault to Carl Rogers. D...

This paper argues that Maja Lee Langvad’s Hun er vred deserves appreciation as an important work of contemporary literature that reveals a new form of counterculture in the age of contested moderni...

This article identifies and discusses some of the ideas of Michel Foucault and applies them to the history of Brazilian city planning. It is argued and shown that the theoretical framework develope...

What are the dominant framings by which public inquiries understand and analyze power dynamics in the events they examine? We draw on unique data from the Saville Inquiry into the killing of 13 people by British soldiers at acivil rights demonstration in Northern Ireland in 1972. Juxtaposing an analysis of the actions of senior military figures with the final Inquiry report, we show how an approach of ‘sufficient rationalization’ dominated apublic inquiry’s conclusions, marginalizing and discounting important aspects. Emphasizing the local exercise of power and affective attachments, our article contributes an alternative approach to analyzing public inquiries. peer-reviewed

This paper firstly presents Statement Archaeology, an innovative and rigorous method devised to systematically operationalise the approach to historical exploration used by Michel Foucault in pursu...

This article examines Michel Foucault’s contributions to the study of power in the history of political economy. It employs Foucault’s readings on economic thought to investigate two moments in the...

Public administration as a field of study (PA) has long suffered from a chronic identity crisis. Against such a background, by adopting Michel Foucault’s governmentality perspective, this paper cri...

In The Order of Things (1966), Michel Foucault builds an opening meditation on Diego Velazquez’s 17th century painting Las Meninas into a sweeping exploration of the changing relationship between t...

This lengthy tome is an imaginative post-modern excavation of Moroccan political culture inspired by Michel Foucault and, curiously, Max Weber. In an earlier publication, one of the authors, Beatri...

This article adopts a theoretical perspective inspired from the work of Michel Foucault to explore the experience of disabled students in Malta. In particular, it studies the discourses and educati...

In this piece I explore resonances between Foucault's engagements with political theology and a localized political spirituality embedded in a vast popular uprising in Colombia's Afro-Pacific litto...

In Michel Foucault's original formulation of the concept, governmentality is intrinsically linked to religious practices and institutions. Although Christian practices associated with the pastorate...

The last volume of Foucault's History of Sexuality, Confessions of the Flesh, offers a detailed excursion into Early Christianity and its distinct mode of subjectivation. But it also discloses a pa...

Crimes such as terrorism pose some of the biggest contemporary challenges to criminal justice systems across the world. Systemic reaction in preventing such criminality raises numerous legal and po...

This article evaluates the extent to which Michel Foucault’s concepts of sovereignty and biopolitics satisfactorily explain the UK’s law and practice of denationalising terrorists. It argues that t...

Why should a practitioner of psychoanalysis read Foucault? Is Foucault still a “hot topic” for psychoanalysts in 2019? To prevent psychoanalysis from becoming a dead language, reading and re-readin...

While utopia implies an ideal space, and dystopia a site of dysfunction, Michel Foucault coined the word heterotopia to depict a space containing multiple, overlapping and sometimes conflicting lay...

Michel Foucault has enumerated four locales as institutional “sites” from which a physician operating in a medical setting makes their discourse. Yet it is a typology that neglects somewhat recuper...

This essay examines modes of English governance in the trading outposts of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mercantile capitalism in order to argue for the constitutive role of commercial practi...

In "Il faut defendre la societe", Foucault attempted to historicize and criticize Nietzsche's equating of the social with struggle. In order to do so, Foucault produced a descriptive discursive history of his genealogical project by deploying the method of the critical archaeology. Foucault realized thereinafter that his archaeological exposition of the genealogical discourse in fact laid bare a close historical and conceptual bond between genealogy and modern racial discourses. In the first lectures, Foucault, unearthed the genealogical discourse hidden in the literature written by the nobility as they attempted to resist the centralisation of royal power. In the latter part of his lectures, he described a discursive interplay between genealogy-as-struggle and the biopolitical practices of the modern state. As such, he gave a tentatively description how the modern state inherited and extensively applied the notion of struggle in its biopolitical control on its populations. The immoral and historical consequences of this affinity, resulting in the biopolitics of genocide, warranted Foucault to distance himself from Nietzsche's concept, which in effect resulted in rethinking the social within the framework ofgouvernmentalite, in which struggle was a modality rather than the prime mover of society.

a. The literature on biopolitics emerged 1970s with Michel Foucault’s (1976)‘Right of Death and Power over Life’, part five of The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (Volume 1):For a long time, ...

The paper studies two fundamentally different forms in which the concept of care makes its comeback in twentieth-century thought. We make use of a distinction made by Peter Sloterdijk, who argues that the ancient and medieval ‘ascetic’ ideal of self-enhancement through practice has re-emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly in the form of a rehabilitation of the Hellenistic notion of self-care (epimeleia heautou) in Michel Foucault’s late ethics. Sloterdijk contrasts this return of self-care with Martin Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world as ‘total care’ (Sorge), an utterly ‘secularized’ understanding of the human being as irreducibly world-embedded that rejects the classical ascetic ideal of world-secession. We examine further the historical roots and emergence of these contrasting contemporary reappropriations of care in the Western tradition of thought and show them to be rooted in two different ontologies and ethics of the self as either world-secluded or world-immersed, autonomous or constitutively relational. The historical point of divergence of these two approaches to care, we argue, can be found in the Christian transformation of Hellenistic ethics. peerReviewed

This paper draws from the writings of Michel Foucault and his recently reconsidered provocations on race and racialization. Using Foucault’s definition of ‘internal racism,’ race is understood as a...

Ever since its emergence, the modern concept of revolution rests on an ambiguity. While it insists on the present’s intellectual sovereignty over the past, it cannot get rid of its pre-modern prede...

This article investigates how popular self-help books on work and career construct problems and solutions related to the subject and its working life. The investigation draws on Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘problematization’ along with concepts of governmentality and ethical self-government. The first part of the analysis shows how problems in self-help are generally articulated as different types of inadequacies, which must accordingly be amended through constant development towards a goal of self-realization, which can never be fully achieved. Accordingly, the subject is offered a subjectivation as an incomplete project, which is never quite good enough and always in need of improvement. The second part of the analysis shows how this general form of problematization plays out in relation to the paradoxical cultivation of autonomy in self-help books, in which the subject must follow instructions of an external authority, in the form of a self-help book, in order to achieve independence.

In Fernando de Rojas’ La Celestina truth and truth-telling are dangerous activities that could lead the characters to be harmed or killed. After Michel Foucault’s 1983 series of conferences and cla...

This interdisciplinary study offers an exploration of the polysemy of the term “fiction,” as a possible tool which could contribute to conceptualizing the links and exchanges between Law and Litera...

This article seeks to explore how, why and under which conditions a move away from critique as a negative practice towards an – educationally more valuable – affirmative notion of critique is impor...

Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics serves to analyze Ecuador's foreign policy towards the Venezuelan migration crisis. First, I discuss the interrelations between the fields of border and mobi...

The importation of wire-fencing to Australia from the 1840s transformed the management of sheep. Rather than shepherds watching over flocks, wire-fences allowed sheep to roam relatively uns...

The issue of political violence is mostly absent from current debates about power. Many conceptions of power treat violence as wholly distinct from or even antithetical to power, or see it as a mer...

If Michel Foucault is among those thinkers complacently claimed by certain currents of ‘progressive’ thought as philosophical authenticators of identity politics – despite his clear insistence that...

The history of the self has been discussed extensively by modern thinkers, from Michel Foucault (The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 1981–82; The History of Sexuality, 1976–1984) and Charles Taylor (S...

About half a century has passed since Michel Foucault’s work shifted French structuralist terminologies and the philosophic discourses towards questions concerning the body and ethical technologies...

The question of why the works of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Derrida are often attributed to France by HE lecturers and students when the origins or developments of their key ideas...

With the rise of authoritarian populism and critical border studies, as well as the continued presence of the Minutemen and borderlands studies, it is safe to say that sovereign borders are...

The Zomba Mental Hospital in Malawi has gained mythical connotations in the history of its existence, both through its association with political detention and through serving as a reminder for the...

This essay develops the concept of exposure as it functions in Michel Foucault's philosophical project. I argue that exposure is a critical component of subject formation in disciplinary society. I...

Through writings of Simone Weil and Michel Foucault, the article explores the notion of education as the formation of the attending and attentive subjects. Both writers have in different ways ackno...

Religious and secular groups alike have long marginalized those who practice “kinky sex.” These discourses of bodily control have been deconstructed and proven faulty. However, this proposa...

On the theoretical backdrop of Mike Davis’s Ecology of Fear, Michel Foucault’s ‘Of Other Spaces’, Felix Guattari’s Schizoanalytic Cartographies and Gilles Deleuze’s ‘Postscript on the Socie...

Teach First is a fast-track route to teacher qualification in England and Wales. The initial aim of the programme was to place high-calibre graduates as classroom teachers in schools with challenging social intakes. The programme has grown incrementally since it began in 2002. In 2017, Teach First trained 5 per cent of the total number of postgraduate trainee teachers. Research into Teach First is a growing field but is generally focused on the impact of the programme or the identity of its participants. The aim of this think-piece is not to discuss, or indeed to challenge, the effectiveness of the Teach First programme. Drawing on the theoretical work of Michel Foucault, and in particular his thought on bio-politics, the aim of this article is to open up avenues for critical reflection on the possible effects of Teach First on the wider education and social policy landscape.

Foucault extolled the Iranian revolution and, anticipating the havoc that his public intervention in favour of the revolution would create, he wrote: “I can already hear the French laughing, but I know that they are wrong”. Examining Foucault’s (so unlikely) valorisation of certainty and the partisan affectivity it bestows upon knowledge and truth, I read his unusual engagement with the Iranian revolution against the grain. A major tendency is to approach Foucault’s Iranian writings as aberration against this tendency, I read them as an effect of Foucault’s specific epistemic and utopian optics. Through a critical reading of neglected aspects of Foucault’s comments on Iran, I argue that much nuance is missing when damning critiques fail to see why and how Foucault’s interest in an active rather than folklore non-European political identity unveils deeper tensions of his own worldview and outlook on international politics and interrogates mainstream appraisals of Foucault’s political philosophy. 20 1 1 19

This paper compares Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic critical realism and Michel Foucault’s implicit discursive realism. It argues that there is a surprisingly high degree of correspondence between ...