Project MUSE®: Foucault Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/891
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Foucault Studies.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USIss. 31 (2021) through current issueLatest Articles: Foucault StudiesTWOProject MUSE®Foucault Studies1832-5203Latest articles in Foucault Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Editorial
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988222
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© Daniele Lorenzini, Alain Beaulieu, Niki Kasumi Clements, Bregham Dalgliesh, Knut Ove Eliassen, Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson, Marius Gudmand-Høyer, Thomas Götselius, Robert Harvey, Robin Holt, Leonard Richard Lawlor, Hernán Camilo Pulido Martínez, Giovanni Mascaretti, Edward McGushin, Richard Niesche, Clare O'Farrell, Johanna Oksala, Mark Olssen, Rodrigo Castro Orellana, Eva Bendix Petersen, Sverre Raffnsøe, Alan Rosenberg, Annika Skoglund, Dianna Taylor, Shelley Tremain, Carolina IribarrenThe editorial team is thrilled to publish this 39th issue of Foucault Studies. The year 2026 marks the 100th anniversary of Michel Foucault's birth. On this occasion, we are most pleased to publish a long special section devoted
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/891/image/coversmallEditorial2026-04-22text/htmlen-USEditorial2026-04-222026TWOProject MUSE®89692026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-22Critique Beyond Criticism: The Crisis and Potentials of Critique in Critical Times
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988223
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In this special issue of Foucault Studies, published in 2026 (the 100th anniversary of Foucault's birth), we seek to address the essential and decisive questions of critique anew, in ways that are on par with present predicaments. What is it to offer critique today in continuation of a Foucauldian heritage—with and beyond Foucault?The contributions to this special issue address this question, and this challenge, in many fruitful ways. They collectively explore the concept of critique and examine its crises, challenges, and potentials in critical times. In addition to this introduction, which reopens the question of critique in relation to Foucault's oeuvre, the special issue includes ten original articles
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/891/image/coversmallCritique Beyond Criticism: The Crisis and Potentials of Critique in Critical Times2026-04-22text/htmlen-USCritique Beyond Criticism: The Crisis and Potentials of Critique in Critical Times2026-04-222026TWOProject MUSE®1480802026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-22Critique and Criticism, in Times of Crisis
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988224
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Conversation on March 3rd, 2025, between Dipesh Chakrabarty, Lawrence A. Kimpton Distinguished Service Professor in History, South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, and Sverre Raffnsøe, Professor of Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School and one of the editors of the special issue of Foucault Studies Critique beyond Criticism.Dipesh Chakrabarty is the author of the following monographs: One Planet, Many Worlds: The Climate Parallax, Brandeis University Press 2023; The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, University of Chicago Press 2021; The Crises of Civilization: Exploring Global and Planetary Histories, Oxford University Press 2019; The Calling of History: Sir Jadunath Sarkar
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/891/image/coversmallCritique and Criticism, in Times of Crisis2026-04-22text/htmlen-USCritique and Criticism, in Times of Crisis2026-04-222026TWOProject MUSE®1091652026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-22Criticism, Confidence and the Crisis in Critique
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988225
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The focus of this essay is on the crisis in critique, that is, the crisis that critique aims to produce through its questioning of what is given to us as 'natural, necessary or obligatory' limits, a crisis in the subjectivity of the audience to which the act of criticism is addressed.1 The presumption of this enquiry is that it is in the passage through crisis that thought is linked to action, critique to praxis.2I conduct this enquiry across three sections. In Section I, to situate this investigation, I begin by sketching Foucault's reflections in the essay "What is Critique?" on the critical attitude and the distinction that he draws in comparative historical terms between two modes of the relationship of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/891/image/coversmallCriticism, Confidence and the Crisis in Critique2026-04-22text/htmlen-USCriticism, Confidence and the Crisis in Critique2026-04-222026TWOProject MUSE®671422026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-22Critique "After" Foucault: Peter Sloterdijk, Affirmative Critique, and the Genealogy of the Critical Attitude
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988226
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In the intellectual history of Western modernity, the idea and practice of critique has played a central role ever since Kant diagnosed his time as a "genuine age of criticism."1 However, the decades surrounding the turn of the millennium saw a critique of critique with recurring arguments that critique was in crisis2 and in many ways had become an ineffective enterprise.3 Focusing on the debunking nature of critique, "[t]he critique of critique objects to the now dominant forms of social and cultural criticism for their denunciative mode of critique."4 This diagnosis of the status of critique has become increasingly pertinent in recent years as social, political, and environmental crises have intensified and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/891/image/coversmallCritique "After" Foucault: Peter Sloterdijk, Affirmative Critique, and the Genealogy of the Critical Attitude2026-04-22text/htmlen-USCritique "After" Foucault: Peter Sloterdijk, Affirmative Critique, and the Genealogy of the Critical Attitude2026-04-222026TWOProject MUSE®1254982026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-22Genealogy as Critical Practice: Toward a Reading of Affective Genealogy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988227
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Michel Foucault was, undoubtably, one of modernity's fiercest critics. Despite this commonly held view, it nonetheless remains unclear what the true purpose and potential of Foucauldian critique is; a question that is particularly pertinent in relation to the political efficacy of Foucauldian genealogy. In this paper, I argue that there is a dimension of Foucauldian genealogy which has been underappreciated and, concomitantly, undertheorized, what I will call 'affective genealogy.' My contention is that by theorizing genealogy's affective dimension, we are able to properly account for the fundamentally felt worldmaking and we-making effects that Foucault's genealogies have on readers. This affective dimension
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/891/image/coversmallGenealogy as Critical Practice: Toward a Reading of Affective Genealogy2026-04-22text/htmlen-USGenealogy as Critical Practice: Toward a Reading of Affective Genealogy2026-04-222026TWOProject MUSE®1086692026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-22The Impolitical Concept of Uselessness as a Heuristic Category for Critical Resistance to the Neoliberal Order: A Foucauldian Approach
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988228
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Public utility, a concept rooted in Roman law, serves to prioritize the collective interest over arbitrary power. Framed as an impartial and objective public will, it echoes ideals like the general interest or the common good. Frequently invoked in political and administrative discourse, it symbolizes a unified nation governed by a neutral and universal public. Politically and morally, the notion of utility carries a normative weight, gradually becoming a taken-for-granted political value as its terminology came to signify civic virtue.In neoliberal context, the omnipresent quest for utility takes on the meaning of efficiency and exacerbated productivity.1 The useless is then presented as an axiological negation
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/891/image/coversmallThe Impolitical Concept of Uselessness as a Heuristic Category for Critical Resistance to the Neoliberal Order: A Foucauldian Approach2026-04-22text/htmlen-USThe Impolitical Concept of Uselessness as a Heuristic Category for Critical Resistance to the Neoliberal Order: A Foucauldian Approach2026-04-222026TWOProject MUSE®1309102026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-22Sadomasochism in Foucault's Thought and Its Potential Critical Dimension
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988229
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Michel Foucault's political thought has often been criticized for a "normative deficit": while his genealogies illuminate how power operates, they seem to offer no firm criteria for assessing or guiding resistance.1 This critique has been highlighted by a range of philosophers who argue that Foucault's refusal to ground the critique in universal moral norms makes him vulnerable to the claims of relativism.2As widely noted in the secondary literature, this tension lies at the heart of Foucault's rejection of foundationalist epistemologies and his preference for historically situated analyses of power/knowledge. Nancy Fraser was among the pioneers in articulating that the genealogy's political potency seemed
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/891/image/coversmallSadomasochism in Foucault's Thought and Its Potential Critical Dimension2026-04-22text/htmlen-USSadomasochism in Foucault's Thought and Its Potential Critical Dimension2026-04-222026TWOProject MUSE®766762026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-22Critique, Counter-Conduct, Form of Life
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988230
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To assert that critique is in crisis is by now something of a banality. We have long been accustomed to a critical analysis whose self-interpretive impulse inflicted, and now ceaselessly worries, a narcissistic wound in Western thought.1 Combined with the mounting catastrophes of the present, the acuity and accrued volume of critical analysis is a constant reminder that what we are up against (and who is "we"?) is not just massive but totalizing, not just all around but inside. Political depression comes as no surprise.If one is in search of scapegoats for the failure of cathexis to a political imaginary, Michel Foucault is an easy target. After years spent elaborating the saturation and density of power relations
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/891/image/coversmallCritique, Counter-Conduct, Form of Life2026-04-22text/htmlen-USCritique, Counter-Conduct, Form of Life2026-04-222026TWOProject MUSE®1037792026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-22"Toward the Life that It Is Preparing": Dreaming and Fabulating as Critical Arts
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988231
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In the early 1950s, Michel Foucault took great interest in the works of Ludwig Binswanger, a Swiss psychiatrist whose Daseinsanalyse combined Freudian psychoanalysis with Heideggerian existential phenomenology. They exchanged some letters, and Foucault went to visit Binswanger in Kreuzlingen, where he directed the private sanatorium Bellevue, established by his grandfather.1 One of Foucault's early texts, published in 1954, was an extensive introduction to the French translation of Binswanger's "Traum und Existenz" (1930), an essay on dream analysis.2 Around the same time, Foucault also wrote a monograph on Binswanger's Daseinsanalyse, which remained unpublished till 2021.3These texts are relevant in the light of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/891/image/coversmall"Toward the Life that It Is Preparing": Dreaming and Fabulating as Critical Arts2026-04-22text/htmlen-US"Toward the Life that It Is Preparing": Dreaming and Fabulating as Critical Arts2026-04-222026TWOProject MUSE®989452026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-22Speculative Critique: Saidiya Hartman, Michel Foucault, and the Limits of the Archive
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988232
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In recent years, Saidiya Hartman's method of critical fabulation and her concept of the "afterlife of slavery" have become central reference points in debates across Black Studies and beyond.1 Her work examines how blackness has been historically produced in and through overlapping regimes of sovereign, disciplinary, and biopower—and how these regimes continue to shape black life in the present.2 Hartman also extends and transforms foundational insights from thinkers such as Hortense Spillers and Angela Davis, particularly regarding the violent production of gendered and racialized subjectivities under slavery and in its aftermath.3 Yet what most distinctly marks Hartman's intervention is her epistemological and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/891/image/coversmallSpeculative Critique: Saidiya Hartman, Michel Foucault, and the Limits of the Archive2026-04-22text/htmlen-USSpeculative Critique: Saidiya Hartman, Michel Foucault, and the Limits of the Archive2026-04-222026TWOProject MUSE®1138682026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-22Problematizing Nature: A Foucault Against the Anthropocene
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988233
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"My back is turned to it," Michel Foucault supposedly replied to the scenic landscapes pointed out to him on a trip to the Alps.1 Whether true or not, this anecdote seems to most adequately capture in a nutshell the famous philosopher's attitude towards more-than-human nature. While being praised for his outstanding contributions to destabilize constructions of humanism, Foucault has been simultaneously and sharply criticized for his ignorance of more-than-human nature, in the consequence of which some authors consider his thinking and especially his concept of biopolitics to be completely out of date in the twenty-first century.2 In our contemporary era of the so-called 'Anthropocene' that has seen multiple
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/891/image/coversmallProblematizing Nature: A Foucault Against the Anthropocene2026-04-22text/htmlen-USProblematizing Nature: A Foucault Against the Anthropocene2026-04-222026TWOProject MUSE®1014382026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-22Black Thought Contra-Foucault? Critique, Counter-History, and the Search for an Originary Cut
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988234
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Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her, and even if they were, how can they call if they don't know her name. Although she has claim, she is not claimed.In his 1977 essay, "Lives of Infamous Men," Michel Foucault attends to eighteenth-century French lives archived through chance encounters with power: "Lives that are as though they hadn't been, that survive only from the clash with a power that wished to annihilate them or at least obliterate them, lives that come back to us only through the effect of multiple accidents—these are the infamies that I wanted to assemble here in the form of a few remains."1 These unfortunate individuals are known to us exclusively
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/891/image/coversmallBlack Thought Contra-Foucault? Critique, Counter-History, and the Search for an Originary Cut2026-04-22text/htmlen-USBlack Thought Contra-Foucault? Critique, Counter-History, and the Search for an Originary Cut2026-04-222026TWOProject MUSE®1555372026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-22Foucault's Aesthetics of Existence and Shusterman's Somaesthetics ed. by Valentina Antoniol and Stefano Marino (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988235
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What is the role of the body in contemporary life? It occupies an ambiguous position, both central and neglected. On one side, the body is highly visible—not only in philosophical discussions but also in media and social narratives—often subjected to intense objectification. In this hyper-visibility, the body is treated as a project to be refined and reshaped, whether through cosmetic surgery or other enhancements, molded to fit ideals of beauty and perfection. On the other side, our experience of the body is increasingly overshadowed by the digital sphere, where interactions take place in virtual spaces that seem to transcend the physical. As we shift more of our lives online, the body risks being sidelined in
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/891/image/coversmallFoucault's Aesthetics of Existence and Shusterman's Somaesthetics ed. by Valentina Antoniol and Stefano Marino (review)2026-04-22text/htmlen-USFoucault's Aesthetics of Existence and Shusterman's Somaesthetics ed. by Valentina Antoniol and Stefano Marino (review)2026-04-222026TWOProject MUSE®154422026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-22Young Foucault: The Lille Manuscripts on Psychopathology, Phenomenology, and Anthropology, 1952–1955 by Elisabetta Basso (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988236
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Elisabetta Basso's Young Foucault: The Lille Manuscripts on Psychopathology, Phenomenology, and Anthropology, 1952–1955 is a significant reassessment in Michel Foucault studies, challenging the long-dismissed narrative of his early work as mere 'juvenilia' or a 'false start' (Basso 2022, 4). Contrary to longstanding assumptions that regard Foucault's early writings as immature or tangential to his later breakthroughs, Basso contends that his Lille manuscripts (1952–1955) form the methodological and conceptual root for his archaeological approach. These texts, long obscured or inaccessible, proffer novel ideas into Foucault's engagement with phenomenology, psychopathology, and philosophical anthropology, that
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/891/image/coversmallYoung Foucault: The Lille Manuscripts on Psychopathology, Phenomenology, and Anthropology, 1952–1955 by Elisabetta Basso (review)2026-04-22text/htmlen-USYoung Foucault: The Lille Manuscripts on Psychopathology, Phenomenology, and Anthropology, 1952–1955 by Elisabetta Basso (review)2026-04-222026TWOProject MUSE®136362026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-22Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group (1970–1980) ed. by Kevin Thompson and Perry Zurn (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988237
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The publication of Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group (1970–1980) is a significant event for both Foucault scholarship and the wider field of critical prison studies. Edited by Kevin Thompson and Perry Zurn, with translations by Zurn and Erik Beranek, the volume gathers an extraordinary range of documents produced by the Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons (GIP). These texts, written between 1970 and 1980, highlight the collective effort of Foucault and his collaborators to amplify the voices of prisoners, expose the hidden violence of the penal system, and rethink the place of intellectuals in political struggles. The book is not simply a historical archive. It also poses
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/891/image/coversmallIntolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group (1970–1980) ed. by Kevin Thompson and Perry Zurn (review)2026-04-22text/htmlen-USIntolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group (1970–1980) ed. by Kevin Thompson and Perry Zurn (review)2026-04-222026TWOProject MUSE®150642026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-22A Face Drawn in Sand: Humanistic Inquiry and Foucault in the Present by Rey Chow (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988238
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In this book, Rey Chow reimagines humanistic inquiry "outside" of the global corporate university's current "moralistic-entrepreneurial" production and ordering of knowledge. Foucault is significant for this project, because his international influence on humanities and interpretive social sciences since the 1970s makes his framework a familiar part of the scholarly debates across various disciplines (p. 5). Moreover, the publication of Foucault's Collège de France lectures, along with the ongoing release of his previously unpublished works, has not only expanded and updated classics such as Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, but also drawn attention to pressing issues of the moment "such as
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/891/image/coversmallA Face Drawn in Sand: Humanistic Inquiry and Foucault in the Present by Rey Chow (review)2026-04-22text/htmlen-USA Face Drawn in Sand: Humanistic Inquiry and Foucault in the Present by Rey Chow (review)2026-04-222026TWOProject MUSE®179892026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-22The Pressing Task of Critique
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988304
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A conversation with Bernard E. Harcourt, the Corliss Lamont Professor of Law and Civil Liberties; Founding Director of the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought at Columbia University; and Directeur d'Études at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.Organized by Robert Harvey, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Stony Brook University, with the participation of Sverre Raffnsøe, Professor of Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School.Let us begin by welcoming you, Bernard, on behalf of the editors of the forthcoming special issue of Foucault Studies entitled Critique Beyond Criticism: The Crisis and Potentials of Critique in Critical Times. We are delighted that you have agreed to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/891/image/coversmallThe Pressing Task of Critique2026-04-22text/htmlen-USThe Pressing Task of Critique2026-04-222026TWOProject MUSE®425912026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-22