The provocative essays in this volume respond to Foucault's call to question what is regarded as natural, inevitable, ethical, and liberating, while they ...

The second edition of Foucault and the Government of Disability considers the continued relevance of Foucault to disability studies, as well as the growing significance of disability studies to understandings of Foucault. A decade ago, this international collection provocatively responded to Foucault’s call to question what is regarded as natural, inevitable, ethical, and liberating. The book’s contributors draw on Foucault to scrutinize a range of widely endorsed practices and ideas surrounding (...) class='Hi'>disability, including rehabilitation, community care, impairment, normality and abnormality, inclusion, prevention, accommodation, and special education. In this revised and expanded edition, four new essays extend and elaborate the lines of inquiry by problematizing (to use Foucault’s term) the epistemological, political, and ethical character of the supercrip, the racialized war on autism, the performativity of intellectual disability, and the potent mixture of neoliberalism and biopolitics in the context of physician-assisted suicide. (shrink)

The course given by Michel Foucault from February to March 1984, under the title 'The Courage of Truth', was his last at the Collège de France. His death shortly after, on June 25th, tempts us to detect a philosophical testament in these lectures, especially in view of the prominence they give to the theme of death, notably through a reinterpretation of Socrates' last words--'Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius'--which, with Georges Dumézil, Foucault understands as the expression of (...) a profound gratitude towards philosophy for its cure of the only serious illness: that of false opinions and prejudices. These lectures continue and radicalize the analyses of those of the previous year. Foucault's 1983 lectures investigated the function of 'truth telling' in politics in order to establish courage and conviction as ethical conditions for democracy irreducible to the formal rules of consensus. With the Cynics, this manifestation of the truth no longer appears simply as a risky speaking out, but in the very substance of existence. In fact, Foucault offers an incisive study of ancient Cynicism as practical philsophy, athleticism of the truth, public provocation, and ascetic sovereignty. The scandal of the true life is constructed in oppositon to Platonism and its world of transcendent intelligible forms"--Publisher's description, p. [2] of dust jacket. (shrink)

An exciting and highly original examination of the practices of truth-telling and speaking out freely (parr?sia) in ancient Greek tragedy and philosophy. Foucault discusses the difficult and changing practices of truth-telling in ancient democracies and tyrannies and offers a new perspective on the specific relationship of philosophy to politics.

On May 27, 1978, Michel Foucault gave a lecture to the French Society of Philosophy where he redefines his entire philosophical project in light of Immanuel Kant's 1784 text, "What Is Enlightenment?" Foucault strikingly characterizes critique as the political and moral attitude consisting in the "art of not being governed in this particular way," one that performs the function of destabilizing power relations and creating the space for a new formation of the self within the "politics of truth." (...) This volume presents the first critical edition of this crucial lecture alongside a previously unpublished lecture about the culture of the self and three public debates with Foucault at the University of California, Berkeley in April 1983. There, for the first time, Foucault establishes a direct connection between his reflections on Enlightenment and his analyses of Greco-Roman antiquity. However, far from suggesting a return to the ancient culture of the self, Foucault invites his audience to build a "new ethics" that bypasses the traditional references to religion, law, and science. (shrink)

The Courage of the Truth is the last course that Michel Foucault delivered at the College de France before his death in 1984. In this course, he continues the theme of the previous year's lectures in exploring the notion of "truth-telling" in politics to establish a number of ethically irreducible conditionsbased on courage and conviction.

The article explores the perspectives of Foucault’s notion of government by linking it to the debate on the ‘new materialism’. Discussing Karen Barad’s critical reading of Foucault’s work on the body and power, it points to the idea of a ‘government of things’, which Foucault only briefly outlines in his lectures on governmentality. By stressing the ‘intrication of men and things’, this theoretical project makes it possible to arrive at a relational account of agency and (...) ontology, going beyond the anthropocentric limitations of Foucault’s work. This perspective also suggests an altered understanding of biopolitics. While Foucault’s earlier concept of biopolitics was limited to physical and biological existence, the idea of a ‘government of things’ takes into account the interrelatedness and entanglements of men and things, the natural and the artificial, the physical and the moral. Finally, the conceptual proposal of a ‘government of things’ helps to clarify theoretical ambiguities and unresolved tensions in new materialist scholarship and allows for a more materialist account of politics. (shrink)

In this article, I engage with the ways in which disability is governed within the Millennium Development Goals. Using a Foucauldian perspective on the governing of populations in modern states, I problematise this politics of disability and development by interrogating the ways in which biopower, through the constructions of modern development frameworks, has shaped our understanding of disability and impairment. I pursue this historical trajectory by tracing the emergence of the Global Burden of Diseases, a global study (...) developed by the World Health Organization and the World Bank in the 1990s. The forms of knowledge emerging in these global frameworks shed light on genealogies of disability in the twenty-first century. By re-visiting a postcolonial critique of Foucault’s conception of power in the context of Third World’s struggles for liberation, I suggest that a Foucauldian critique in disability and development could be deepened through its engagement with postcolonial studies. A critical and genealogical perspective on disability and development, I argue, is useful for understanding the government of disability and impairment in the intersections of global and local histories. (shrink)

This essay addresses the ethical and political significance of Foucault’s late work on the ethics of care of the self and parrhesia. We argue, first, that understanding this significance requires seeing Foucault’s investigation of these classical practices against the backdrop of his identification of, and attempt to make perspicuous, the problem of biopolitical governance – specifically the paradox of relations of power and capacity. On this basis we go on, second, to consider how this turn may inform an (...) ethics of democratic governance. In constructing this case, we demonstrate the relationship between the ethics of care of the self as a practice of freedom and the tradition of moral perfectionism identified by Stanley Cavell. This allows us to show how Cavell and Foucault mutually complement each other in the articulation of an approach to an ethics of democracy and we outline the fundamental features of such an approach. (shrink)

These thirteen lectures on the 'punitive society,' delivered at the Collège de France in the first three months of 1973, examine the way in which the relations between justice and truth that govern modern penal law were forged, and question what links them to the emergence of a new punitive regime that still dominates contemporary society. Praise for Foucault's Lectures at the Collège de France Series “Ideas spark off nearly every page...The words may have been spoken in [the 1970s], (...) but they seem as alive and relevant as if they had been written yesterday.”—Bookforum “Foucault is quite central to our sense of where we are...[He] is carrying out, in the noblest way, the promiscuous aim of true culture.”—The Nation “[Foucault] has an alert and sensitive mind that can ignore the familiar surfaces of established intellectual coded and ask new questions...[He] gives dramatic quality to the movement of culture.”—The New York Review of Books. (shrink)

"Critically engaging with some limitations of new materialist scholarship, Lemke draws on Foucault's concept of a "government of things" to propose a relational understanding of political ontologies"--.

Written with the suppression of the Tunisian students by their own government in view, Michel Foucault’s March 1968 ‘Linguistics and Social Sciences’ opens up a new horizon of historical inquiry and epitomises Foucault’s abiding interest in formulating new methods for studying the interaction of language and power. Translated into English for the first time by Jonathan D.S. Schroeder and Chantal Wright, this remarkable lecture constitutes Foucault’s most explicit and sustained statement of his project to revolutionise history (...) by transposing the analysis of logical relations into the history of knowledge. (shrink)

Shelley Tremain's book, Foucault and Feminist Philosophy of Disability, considers how disability has been incorrectly contained by medical ethics or ignored entirely by mainstream philosophy. She argues for an antifoundational approach to disability that accounts for the historical and material conditions of people while also attending to the conditions of disabled philosophers themselves. This important contribution to the fields of philosophy, gender studies, and disability studies explicitly addresses how ableism has impacted academic discourses in philosophy, (...) harming disabled philosophers, disabled people, and the production of knowledge in these areas. This interrogation of ableism in academia comes as a... (shrink)

Competency has become a key concept in education in general over the last four decades. This article examines the development of the competency‐based movement with a particular focus on the significance it has had for nursing education. Our hypothesis is that the competency movement can only adequately be understood if it is analyzed in relation to the broad societal transformation of the last decades—often summarized under the catchword neoliberalism—and with it the emergence of managerial models for Human Resource Management (HRM) (...) for the reorganization of social services. Classical professions, which were characterized under welfarism by an esoteric knowledge based on ethical norms, have now become marketable commodities that can be evaluated in the same way as other commodities. We want to underline that while this development is still under way, it is the concept of competency that was the decisive political instrument enabling this profound change. With the widespread implementation of competency‐based education that now governs nursing knowledge, the development of a critical, oppositional perspective becomes more challenging, if not entirely impossible. We will be focusing primarily on nursing education in Canada, although we maintain that it has relevance for nursing internationally. (shrink)

In this article I reconstruct the philosophical conditions for the emergence of the notion of counter-conduct within the framework of Michel Foucault’s study of governmentality, and I explore the reasons for its disappearance after 1978. In particular, I argue that the concept of conduct becomes crucial for Foucault in order to redefine governmental power relations as specific ways to conduct the conduct of individuals: it is initially within this context that, in Security, Territory, Population, he rethinks the problem (...) of resistance in terms of counter-conduct. However, a few months later, in What is Critique?, Foucault replaces the notion of counter-conduct with that of critical attitude, defined as the particular form that counter-conduct takes in modern times. This notion allows him to highlight the role played by the will in resistance to governmental strategies. But since the notion of counter-conduct is conceptually wider than that of critical attitude, I suggest in conclusion that it could be worth reactivating it as a “historical category which, in various forms and with diverse objectives, runs through the whole of Western history.”. (shrink)

Sur fond d’une critique du (néo)libéralisme, qui rend notamment inopérante l’idée de souveraineté populaire, l’article cherche à montrer qu’une conception de la démocratie intégrant le conflit doit être élaborée à partir du cadre théorique de la gouvernementalité. Il donne en ce sens comme critère de la démocratie l’existence d’une situation de gouvernementalités multiples. Il identifie enfin, comme alternative potentielle à la gouvernementalité néolibérale, le « gouvernement du commun » dont l’existence est aujourd’hui ce qui donne sens à la démocratie.

Part intellectual history, part critical theory, The Last Man Takes LSD challenges the way we think about both Michel Foucault and modern progressive politics. One fateful day in May 1975, Foucault dropped acid in the southern California desert. In letters reproduced here, he described it as among the most important events of his life, one which would lead him to completely rework his History of Sexuality. That trip helped redirect Foucault's thought and contributed to a tectonic shift (...) in the intellectual life of the era. He came to reinterpret the social movements of May '68 and reposition himself politically in France, embracing anti-totalitarian currents and becoming a critic of the welfare state. Mitchell Dean and Daniel Zamora examine the full historical context of the turn in Foucault's thought, which included studies of the Iranian revolution and French socialist politics, through which he would come to appreciate the possibilities of autonomy offered by a new force on the French political scene that was neither of the left nor the right: neoliberalism. (shrink)

Abstract and Keywords Mainstream philosophers take for granted that disability is a prediscursive, transcultural, and transhistorical disadvantage, an objective human defect or characteristic that ought to be prevented, corrected, eliminated, or cured. That these assumptions are contestable, that it might be the case that disability is a historically and culturally specific, contingent social phenomenon, a complex apparatus of power, rather than a natural attribute or property that certain people possess, is not considered, let alone seriously entertained. This chapter (...) draws on the insights of Michel Foucault to advance a historicist and relativist conception of disability as an apparatus (dispositif) of power and identify mechanisms of power within philosophy that produce the underrepresentation of disabled philosophers in the profession and the marginalization of philosophy of disability in the discipline. -/- Keywords: disability, Michel Foucault, apparatus, historicist, relativist, underrepresentation of disabled philosophers. (shrink)

What is freedom? In this study, Thomas Dumm challenges the conventions that have governed discussions and debates concerning modern freedom by bringing the work of Michel Foucault into dialogue with contemporary liberal thought. While Foucault has been widely understood to have characterized the modern era as being opposed to the realization of freedom, Dumm shows how this characterization conflates Foucault’s genealogy of discipline with his overall view of the practices of being free. Dumm demonstrates how Foucault’s (...) critical genealogy does not shrink from understanding the ways in which modern subjects are constrained and shaped by forces greater than themselves, but how it instead works through these constraints to provide, not simply a vision of liberation, but a joyous wisdom concerned with showing us, in his words, that we “are much freer than we feel.” Both as an introduction to Foucault and as an intervention in liberal theory, Michel Foucault and the Politics of Freedom is bound to change how we think about the limits and possibilities of freedom in late modernity. (shrink)

Recent controversies surrounding Michel Foucault suggest tensions and unresolved issues in his unfinished work. Here we interrogate Foucault’s legacy in relation to his claim that the welfare-state is a secularization of the Christian pastorate. We challenge Foucault’s binary narrative of the Christian flock versus the Graeco-Roman citizen and expand the focus to other ‘technologies of power’ in medieval Islam. Rather than an outburst of governmentality in modernity, we suggest a transregional and longue durée history of which the (...) Christian pastorate was merely one facet. This non-binary framework indicates that Foucault’s claim of a ‘demonic’ fusion of sovereign and pastoral power in modern politics requires significant revisitation. Finally, we claim that Foucault’s much-discussed fascination with neoliberalism may have roots in this one-sided narrative regarding the birth of the welfare-state. (shrink)

: This article critically examines the constitution of impairment in prenatal testing and screening practices and various discourses that surround these technologies. While technologies to test and screen prenatally are claimed to enhance women's capacity to be self-determining, make informed reproductive choices, and, in effect, wrest control of their bodies from a patriarchal medical establishment, I contend that this emerging relation between pregnant women and reproductive technologies is a new strategy of a form of power that began to emerge in (...) the late eighteenth century. Indeed, my argument is that the constitution of prenatal impairment, by and through these practices and procedures, is a widening form of modern government that increasingly limits the field of possible conduct in response to pregnancy. Hence, the government of impairment in utero is inextricably intertwined with the government of the maternal body. (shrink)

In this article, I reflect back on the period since the publication of the first edition of Foucault and the Government of Disability in order to argue that the intervening years have seen the increasing advance of neoliberal politics that impact on the lives of disabled people. Beginning from an overview of Foucault’s 1978-9 lectures on neoliberalism, I seek to demonstrate that a range of policy developments that affect disabled people can be read against the background (...) of Foucault’s analyses of neoliberal rationalities and practices of government. The impact of these developments has been economically harsh for many; hence, the article considers the potential for effective critique of these issues starting from a Foucauldian analytics. I argue that Foucault’s works, whilst useful in unsettling taken-for-granted assumptions about subjectivity and autonomy given by neoliberal governmental rationalities, do not, in and of themselves, suggest a form of critique that is capable of mounting an effective challenge to the neoliberal consensus. My argument ends with a challenge to Foucault-inspired social scientists to ally the valuable insights available from Foucauldian analyses to a critical perspective that can, in addition, diagnose and respond to problems of economic marginalisation, the concentration of wealth, and the marketisation of the social. (shrink)

Americans today seem to be more divided than at any time since the Civil War. Our differences are not just political and moral, but philosophical and even spiritual. Red and Blue America hardly seem to live in the same reality. Something has gone terribly wrong with the American political community. It has been a long time since the people of the United States fully exercised their sovereign authority to choose the officials in government whose primary job is to protect (...) the people's natural rights according to the Constitution. Our political community has become something different. America, our "regime," has become post-constitutional. Yet it is not entirely clear what this post-constitutional arrangement is, how it operates, who is in charge, or how to fix it. Where did this crisis come from? Can it be overcome? What does the future hold for the survival of the American Constitution? Glenn Ellmers--a senior fellow with the Claremont Institute, prolific analyst of current affairs, and scholar of political philosophy--explores the deepest roots of our political turmoil and shows the connections between government bureaucracy, the misuse of science, and the leftwing ideology that controls so much of our public and private life. (shrink)

On the Government of the Living plays a pivotal role in the evolution of Foucault’s thought because it constitutes a “laboratory” in which he forges the methodological and conceptual tools—such as the notions of anarcheology and alethurgy (or, better, what I call here the “alethurgic subject”)—necessary to carry on his study of governmentality independently from his History of Sexuality project. In this paper, I argue that Foucault’s projects of an anarcheology of the government of human beings (...) through the manifestation of truth in the form of subjectivity and of a genealogy of the subject of desire, albeit essentially linked to one another, are conceptually autonomous. These projects are both part of a genealogy of the modern subject but should be treated independently insofar as it is the former, elaborated in On the Government of the Living, that provides us with the key to understanding Foucault’s interest in the care of the self and parrhesia as an integral part of his analyses of governmentality and the critical attitude from the late 1970s. (shrink)

This essay challenges some of the recent scholarship which claims that Michel Foucault was more sympathetic to neoliberalism than is typically acknowledged. Accordingly, it considers the possible motivations for Foucault’s 1978-1979 lecture course, The Birth of Biopolitics; the relationship between liberalism and the various forms of power identified by Foucault; and, finally, claims that Foucault’s account of the ‘care of the self’ was itself informed by the neoliberal theory of human capital. It finds that Foucault (...) regarded neoliberalism as coercive social arrangement on par with the other forms of power/knowledge targeted by his work. And it concludes with some reflections on how Foucault’s account of the ‘aesthetics of existence’ might facilitate resistance to neoliberalism. (shrink)

This paper explores the political thought of Michel Foucault, which is anchored on his philosophy of subjectivation or the transformation of individuals into subjects. It presents his ideas of the State from the point of view of specific strategies and practices of power used in the transformation of individuals into subjects. It also presents his analysis of government as an organization that looks after the achievement of individual's goals and interests. The goal of government is not to (...) achieve the common good but to realize the suitable end of each individual. (shrink)

Uberrima Fides is a legal doctrine that governs insurance contracts and expects all parties to the insurance agreement to act in good faith by declaring all material facts relative to a policy. The doctrine originated in England in 1766 with the case Carter v Boehm ruled by Lord Mansfield. Ever since, it has become, with some differences in interpretation, a cornerstone of insurance relationships around the world. The role that trust plays within it, however, is not simple and should not (...) be taken for granted. While it is expected that an idea of trust represents an order of truth, trust in itself is the outcome of a complex negotiation of moral orders. Semiotically, trust operates here not as a Kantian category for the understanding but as a signifier of an order of truth that upholds the possibility for insurance relationships. Trust, as sign, operates as a condition of possibility for the performance of insurance. In this article, a Foucaultian approach is employed to problematise the idea of trust and its role in insurance relationships. The case of mis-selling of insurance policies in the United Kingdom since the 1980s, which has given rise to numerous legal rulings, is used as the empirical site for the problematisation. (shrink)

This study analyzes the ideals of responsibility and accountability, asking such questions as when it is legitimate to blame top officials of an organization for mistakes made by personnel below them in the bureaucratic hierarchy; when things go wrong in a large and complex organization like the Canadian Forces, who is responsible and accountable; and whether a plea of ignorance is a good excuse. The study also analyzes the doctrine of ministerial responsibility in both the British and Canadian parliamentary traditions, (...) asking whether it is realistic to expect that a government minister should be held responsible for everything that goes wrong in his/her department. Finally, traditional military values are examined, considering the kinds of attitudes and values expected from Canada's armed forces and the differences between the military and civilian sectors. (shrink)

This article seeks to refine understandings of the governmental logics that comprise and shape urban governance. Drawing on research using ethnographic methods that explore the business improvement district and the condominium corporation it is argued that exclusive focus on urban neo-liberalism neglects an urban ”police.” This latter logic is most famously remarked upon in Michel Foucault’s writings as targeting “little things” in urban spaces. Both “police” and the ”free rider problem” it confronts predate and are irreducible to neo-liberalism. Ethnography (...) helps discern this “police” as well as how neo-liberalism relates to it in private urban realms typically hidden from view. Examining BIDs and condos in this way shows that neo-liberalism and “police” co-exist and combine in the governance of urban residential and commercial life. This matters because it reveals a more complex picture of urban governance than is sometimes assumed when neo-liberalism is exclusively invoked and one that is necessarily considered when conceiving of alternative governing arrangements. (shrink)

In every search for knowledge one presupposes that there is more to the phenomenal field one studies than what meets the eye. A play between those phenomena thatpresentthemselves to an observer andabsententities or phenomena, and the orders, structures or laws that govern these, lies at the heart of anysearchfor empirical knowledge. On the basis of this play of presence and absence read by a particular discourse into a more or less defined phenomenal field, phenomena are constitutedquasigns for that discourse's participants.

Allen criticizes Foucault for having a “narrow and impoverished conception of social interaction, according to which all such interaction is strategic.” I challenge this claim, partly on the basis of comments by Foucault which explicitly acknowledge and in some cases endorse forms of non-strategic interaction, but more importantly on the basis of the significant changes in Foucault’s concept of power that he elaborated in lectures from 1978 onwards and in “The Subject and Power.” His 1975–1976 lectures embarked (...) upon a critical re-examination of the “strategic” concept of power that he had relied upon up to this point. However, it was not until 1978 and after that he outlined an alternative concept of power as government, or more broadly as “action upon the actions of others.” After retracing this shift in Foucault’s understanding of power, I argue that the concept of power as action upon the actions of others does not commit him to a narrow conception of social interaction as always strategic. At the same time, Foucault’s concept does not answer normative questions about acceptable versus unacceptable ways of governing the actions of others. (shrink)