This paper reconstructs Foucault's concept of illegalism and explores its significance for his genealogies of modern punishment and racial formation. The concept of illegalism, as distinct from illegality, plays a double role. It allows Foucault to describe a ruling class tactic for managing inequalities and also to characterize an important vein of resistant subjugated knowledges. The political project of the prison is linked to a new crime policy that does not so much aim to repress illegalisms as to manage them (...) differentially. This practice of differential management, which arises in the 18th century, produces a primary split along class lines between two types of illegalism—an insight that has a certain resonance with Edwin's Sutherland's concept of “white collar crime.” Foucault's investigation of a third category of “infralegal illegalism” sheds light not only on the genealogy of the category of delinquency but also on his genealogy of racial categorization. Finally, Foucault argues that a genuinely radical critique of modern society must address the “need” organized political power has for the illegalisms from which it purportedly seeks to protect society. Against this practice of differentially managing illegalisms, Foucault seeks to reactivate a subjugated problematic that might open up questions about the transformative possibilities of illegalism today. (shrink)

The fundamental principles of the classical utilitarian school characterize this trend as an administrative and legal criminology. This had two implications. On the one hand, the motives, and ultimate causes of the behavior and the unequal consequences of an arbitrary rule were ignored. On the other hand, the role of the judge was reduced to enforcing the law, while it was up to the judge to set a penalty for each offence. At the end of the nineteenth century, these principles (...) saw the gradual emergence of another punitive episteme that had emerged as a result of the colonization of the legal space by the positive sciences and etiological action programs. This was not a planned and pre-established course, but the confluence of a series of theories and programs for penal prevention that Michel Foucault summarized as the realization that the law was increasingly functioning as a norm. Now, criminality, besides being the object of scientific interest, also constitutes the indicator of a social problem and therefore its insertion in an economy of changing power. (shrink)

Michel Foucault’s first research on discipline—one of his main concepts for defining the modern account of power—suggests that the Benedictine Rule played a central role in the formation of discipl...

In this paper I analyze two distinct contemporary perspectives on the Foucauldian concept of power and resistance, namely the perspectives enlightened by Judith Butler’s La vie psychique du pouvoir and by Stéphane Legrand’s Le marxisme oublié de Foucault. Although these two approaches are interesting ways of discussing the Foucauldian concept of resistance and power, they fail to take into account the role that intellectuals play in practices of social emancipation. Instead I develop the concept of “specific intellectual” in order to (...) explore in more depth the Foucauldian concept of resistance and social innovation. (shrink)

Rationality at the Limits and the Limits of Rationality:The Question of the Integrity and Existence of the Human SpeciesThe purpose of this article is to address the question of our responsibility as human beings, by taking into consideration the intersection between ethics and science. I intend to prove that the issues raised by the existence and the integrity of the human species is a new and curious form of power founded on what I call “the principle of non-reciprocity” that unites (...) the humanity of today with the future generations. The question that I address is the following: how to act on the future of humanity so that this action can not be regarded as unfair? (shrink)