Michel Foucault Archives - Public Seminar

Media

What Does It Mean to Be “Latino”?

From ads to academia, which box do we check?

November 21, 2023 • by Kevin Anzzolin

From historical influences to contemporary marketing, Kevin Anzzolin explores the evolving nomenclature of the diverse "Latino" community....

Sex & Gender

Gimme My Poppers Or Else

Gay sex in New Zealand and the backsliding of an apparently permissive society

June 27, 2022 • by Samuel Te Kani

It’s no secret gay sex and drugs go together like vodka and soda, or vodka and cranberry, or vodka and my mouth. Pop the words “chem sex” into a Google search and you’ll get no end of salacious fear-mongering reportage barely concealing cultural assumptions of self-harm while peddling journalistic neutrality. ...

Migration

Breaking the ‘Otherness’ Fixation

Diversity is held at the pinnacle of progressive thought, but full inclusion is far from becoming a reality

May 25, 2021 • by Halleh Ghorashi

_____ I arrived in the Netherlands as an asylum seeker in 1988. In Iran, I had been active in a revolution that later became an Islamic revolution. I felt connected to leftist movements all over the world, and the idea of international solidarity gave me strength and hope for the future. With ...

Interviews

On Fascism, Non-fascism, and Antifa

Natasha Lennard in conversation with James Miller

October 15, 2020 • by Natasha Lennard and James Miller

JM: Since you've written an entire book with the title Essays on a Non-Fascist Life, can you tell me a bit about how you chose that title, and what the term "non-fascist" means to you, in the context of those essays? We both know the appearance of the phrase in the context ...

History

Time Is Out of Joint

Simultaneity in the epoch of the near and far

July 16, 2020 • by Sergio Infante

For those who are either unemployed or overworked, those whose habits and routines have fallen apart, those experiencing psychological or bodily distress, the days may seem to drag on endlessly. For others -- perhaps those who find themselves on the pandemic’s frontlines or those who have discovered a sense of ...

Public Health

The Job of Critical Thinking Now

Protest offers a vision of the future that refuses mere recovery

May 7, 2020 • by Joan Wallach Scott

As with those other fault-lines, the problem is not new, as François Hartog reminds us when he writes of “presentism.” Sometime in the twentieth century, we lost our belief in the redemptive power of history and so in the guarantee of a better future. Wendy Brown puts it succinctly: “We know ...

Feature

Left Melancholy, Neoliberalism, and the Investee Condition

An interview with Michel Feher, author of Rated Agency: Investee Politics in a Speculative Age

May 10, 2019 • by Michel Feher

Public Seminar (PS): What motivated you to write Rated Agency? Michel Feher (MF): Well, three motivations probably. The first one, which is the longer one, comes from reading many years ago Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism and then thinking through that from the Foucauldian perspective but also realizing soon that these lectures were delivered ...

Left Melancholy, Neoliberalism, and the Investee Condition

Media

The Power of Platforms

How biopolitical companies threaten democracy

January 25, 2019 • by Janosik Herder

The 2010s will likely be remembered as the decade of the rise of platforms. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber -- all of these companies have become more than just billion-dollar businesses. Over the last ten years they have started to play an essential role in the everyday life of most ...

Feature

The Banality of Evil and the Death of the Author

Thoughts on social interaction, and questions of individual recognition and responsibility

May 18, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

I hope we can agree: we are not alone, and even when we are alone, we are not alone. We humans are what we are as we interact with each other: no interaction, no person; no interaction, no politics; no interaction, no art, science and love; no sex and no ...

Feature

The Death of the Author

Historians and Citation

May 17, 2018 • by Brian Connolly

Why should journalists, or anyone else, cite historians explicitly? “Many historians,” Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz writes in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education essay, “have become familiar with the feeling of anonymity as their work gains attention from the news media.” The historians at the center of the article – Danielle McGuire, Heather Ann Thompson, and James ...

Uncategorized

Revisiting Bartky on Foucault

The production and discipline of femininity

March 21, 2018 • by Alexandra Tadros

In “Femininity and Domination,” Sandra Lee Bartky examines the underlying causes and effects of women’s subjugation in contemporary society. Though women are generally understood to have equal rights, oppression, she argues, does not have to involve “physical deprivation, legal inequality, nor economic exploitation” in order to have a systemic and ...

Uncategorized

Philosophers on Fake News

Arendt and Foucault on power and truth in media politics

March 19, 2018 • by Haeun Kim

Despite their irrefutable and continued presence in the world today, for some time the practices of banning and censorship have struck me as antiquated, almost quaint, like a desperate but not wholly effective grasp for control by a declining State. My admission of this admittedly unsubstantiated and impressionistic outlook—although not ...