ABSTRACT: This article proposes a Foucauldian genealogy of uselessness and argues that uselessness can function not only as a mechanism of exclusion within neoliberal governmentality but also as a potential tool of resistance. Neoliberal rationality constructs uselessness as the negative counterpart of productivity, efficiency, and measurable performance, drawing on two liberal regimes of truth: the juridico-deductive logic, which frames the useless as a parasitic element of the social body, and the utilitarian logic, which disqualifies what produces no quantifiable effects. While neoliberalism intensifies these logics through governance by numbers and New Public Management, the article contends that uselessness occupies a paradoxical position at the margins of governmentality. Precisely because it lies outside dominant regimes of value, uselessness can be reinterpreted as an impolitical category that exposes the contingency and violence of neoliberal norms. When reappropriated under specific material and political conditions, uselessness becomes a critical lens and, potentially, a site of resistance against productivist and functionalist imperatives.
ABSTRACT: In this paper, I develop a reading of Foucauldian genealogy as a mode of critical political practice. I argue that the Anglo-American interpretation of Foucauldian genealogy has been dominated by a reading which I call conceptual genealogy. On this reading, genealogy—as a form of Kantian critique which seeks to uncover the conditions of possibility of a given social formation—is an intellectual-epistemic enterprise that is denunciatory and only ever preparatory for politics. I argue that this reading fails to account for the fundamentally felt worldmaking and we-making effects which Foucault's texts have on their readers, what I will call affective genealogy. The production of feelings, I argue, constitutes a positive political element of Foucauldian genealogy to the extent that it highlights aspects of our world that should matter and ties us to transhistorical and trans-geographical communities of resistance. In order to show that Foucault intended his genealogies to have this positive aspect, I argue, we should be more attentive to Nietzsche's modification of Kantian critique and the genealogy of critique, which is central to his understanding of critique as a transgressive social practice. I argue that the effect of worldmaking and we-making affects in making certain things matter over and above others means that they are normatively significant. In closing, I suggest a number of ways in which these insights into genealogy as a mode of critical political practice that functions through the production of worldmaking and we-making feelings can be elaborated in a broader theory of affective genealogy.
ABSTRACT: This article employs Foucault's concept of "sadomasochism" as a critical tool for rethinking the dynamics of power. In sadomasochistic scenes, the authority of the one occupying the dominant role is not absolute, but rather depends on the conditions, desires, and agency of the submissive partner. This interdependence destabilizes rigid, one-directional conceptions of power, revealing it as an unstable, performative process that is continually negotiated. The constant shifting of control between participants demonstrates that domination and submission are not fixed positions, but reversible configurations shaped by both tacit and explicit agreements. In this way, such practices challenge conventional power hierarchies and offer an analytical framework for understanding power as a two-way, ephemeral, and relational mechanism, rather than as an inherent or permanent attribute.
ABSTRACT: Compared with his robust critical diagnoses, Foucault's work seems to offer few resources which might be put to use toward a positive or anticipatory political project. To mobilize the ethico-political commitment to freedom implicit (and, at moments, telegraphically explicit) in his work, he is frequently read together with theorists whose objectives and proposals are overtly normative and more clearly defined. However, to limit Foucault's contribution to problematization would deprive critical theory of crucial insights. This paper develops that claim by staging a dialogue between Rahel Jaeggi's Critique of Forms of Life (2018) and Foucault's concept of counter-conduct. Building on engagements with the pragmatist tradition which already have proven generative, I submit that the concept of counter-conduct has something salutary—even necessary—to offer dialectical and pragmatist efforts at thinking through the dynamics of social and political transformation.
ABSTRACT: This essay stages an encounter between Foucault and black thought. It examines how Foucault has become a bad object in black studies while drawing attention to the fact that many of the problems that preoccupy black critical theory were also problems that Foucault engaged with—conceptual problems surrounding historicism, absent archives, and the genesis of worlds predicated on exclusion. Although Foucault ignored blackness and while black studies is largely critical of Foucault, this article argues that at the level of method and critical ethos, there is a generative resonance that remains underdeveloped. I explore this resonance and focalize the question of critique through different styles of writing used to tell stories silenced by history. The recurrent challenge is to find writing practices and experimental methods that work against the structuring forces of an antiblack social order. The intersection between Foucault's essay "Lives of Infamous Men" and Saidiya Hartman's rebellion against historicist practice—her "critical fabulation"—provide the initial point of contact for the exploration of these issues. The article further develops these conceptual linkages and critical exchanges as they take shape in the writing of Joy James, Angela Y. Davis, Christina Sharpe, Dionne Brand, and M. NourbeSe Philip.
ABSTRACT: 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. Starting with Foucault's reflections on the critical attitude and the distinction that he draws in comparative historical terms between two modes of the relationship of critique and Aufklärung , I offer an account of the distinction between the two modes by distinguishing two types of confidence questions that can be addressed to our outlooks: "can it be justified?" and "can it be vindicated?" I go onto to argue that these two ways of problematizing confidence can be related to "ideological captivity" and "aspectival captivity" respectively, with the two modes of critical attitude exemplified in ideology-critique and genealogy. I conclude by showing how these confidence questions also arise for each of the two modes of critical attitude and with some reflections on the politics of these forms of critical attitude.
ABSTRACT: This article proposes a dialogue between Saidiya Hartman's and Michel Foucault's concept of critique, with the aim of contributing to a broader rethinking of critical practice and theory. While Hartman's work has become central to contemporary debates in Black Studies and beyond, its implications for the practice of critique—particularly in relation to Foucault—remain underexplored. I argue that Hartman's speculative reconstruction of lives obscured or erased by the colonial archive constitutes not a departure from critique, but a reconfiguration of it. I demonstrate that her practice of critical fabulation—what I term speculative critique—generates, like Foucault's critique, a counter-knowledge that is targeted against the dominant regime of truth. However, Hartman pushes further than Foucault by deliberately moving beyond the limits of the archive. This speculative dimension of critique illuminates the specific historical and political problem Hartman's critique is concerned with. At the same time, it invites a broader rethinking of critique. In the final part of the article, I will thus argue that Hartman's speculative critique unsettles the opposition of negative and affirmative critique by articulating a double movement of critique, in which negation cannot be discerned from the generative work of imagining the otherwise.
ABSTRACT: This article takes its starting point in Michel Foucault's critical approach to critique and his distinction between critique and criticism. Through an engagement with Foucault's genealogy of the critical attitude, further inscribing Foucault himself in the genealogy, the article expands on the idea of critique as an affirmative enterprise contrary to the art of negative criticism. Building on this Foucauldian framework, it analyzes Peter Sloterdijk's oeuvre as an ongoing criticism of destructive critique and as a continuous practice of affirmative critique. It is argued that the philosophy of Sloterdijk represents one way of administering the heritage of Foucault's critical project. This is done through an analysis of his idea of co-immunity as a response to contemporary crises. Further, it is discussed how Sloterdijk's administration of the critical heritage of Foucault also points to a specific philosophical type and to ways of acting as a public intellectual that speaks the truth and in doing so utilizes the critical attitude on a collective and societal level.
ABSTRACT: As this article intends to argue, the Foucauldian critical method of problematization is a promising approach to do critical philosophy after and following Foucault in times of the so-called 'Anthropocene.' Despite contrary claims, Foucault's analysis and critique of biopolitical government still have tremendous contemporary critical value and can be applied to questions of human-nature relations, and particularly the field of academic ecology. Thus, Foucauldian critique is on par with the contemporary predicament of ecological crises and can contribute to its critical and urgently necessary analysis in important regards that go beyond criticism for its own sake. In order to show this, I will first present the approach of problematization as a mode of critical inquiry beyond constructivism and realism. Second, I will revise Foucault's concept of biopolitical governmentality to open it for its application to the more-than-human complex of ecology. Based on this, I will third and finally outline the problematization of the ecosystem concept to demonstrate what a problematization of nature after and following Foucault could look like.
ABSTRACT: The early Foucault was strongly interested in the work of the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, and in particular his view on dreams. For Binswanger, the dream is the result of an imagination that is not merely the expression of hidden desires or repressed memories, but the dreamer's active preparation of a possible future. Foucault would soon dismiss Binswanger's approach as still too uncritically normative, and lacking a historical perspective on the modes of subjectivation. Nonetheless, the transformative potential of the imagination would continue to fuel Foucault's philosophical practice. This future-oriented, speculative aspect of Foucault's criticism can be compared to contemporary post-critical practices like Donna Haraway's speculative fabulation. These practices want to challenge the status quo of academic critique, and confront the Humanities with the urgent task to examine and develop new modes of existence. Many of these post-critical practices, like Haraway's, seem to take the cue from Foucault's antihumanist stance. But what is remarkably absent is Foucault's later focus on techniques of the self, by which an individual develops an aesthetics of existence. While Haraway makes clear how modern critical theory neglected the other-than-human world, Binswanger's Daseinanalyse , revaluated through the lens of the later Foucault, shows how the experience of this other-than-human world cannot be fully separated from an individual's imagination.
ABSTRACT: This paper uses the methodological dispute between Karen Barad and Thomas Lemke over the concept of strategy and the dispositif to access a deeper methodological issue in genealogy pertaining to matter. Critics including Barad and Beatrice Han find a problematic ambiguity in Foucault’s writings around how to articulate the force of discursive practices. This ambiguity coalesces in the figure of the individual and the question of how genealogy handles the non-discursive in relation to the institution. To Han, it marks a failure of genealogy to overcome Kant’s transcendental theme. To Barad and Lemke, however, further developing certain concepts in genealogy’s analytic framework in a materialist direction can resolve these issues. Both Barad and Lemke aim to move genealogy towards a new engagement with the natural sciences, but they disagree over which concepts require revision. Lemke rejects Barad’s agential realist re-conception of the dispositif on the grounds that it neglects its strategic dimension; Lemke prefers to develop the concept of governmentality. I argue against Lemke that his focus on governmentality perpetuates the problematic ambiguity of discourse and matter by subsuming the non-discursive back into the institution, and that his demand for an intelligible account of how strategy stabilizes is misapplied to Barad’s work, which is not itself conducting a genealogy of the tactics that constitute strategies. To help make the case, I read their dispute back into Han’s critique, which though unconcerned with matter, demonstrates why the figure of the individual and the question of the non-discursive are substantial obstacles for genealogy.
ABSTRACT: Habermas and Foucault read Nietzsche at exactly the same period (1968–1970) and started from the same problem of knowledge and science. This paper aims to explore the parallel between these two readers of Nietzsche, not in order to compare them but to highlight the specificity of the Foucauldian reading. My hypothesis is that Habermas and Foucault have in common not only their reading of Nietzsche but also how they use it to rethink the status of social struggles by reconfiguring the relationship between theory and practice, reason and emancipation. If Habermas makes emancipation an interest of reason, Foucault aims at another emancipation concerning the truth in which Nietzsche is the great instigator.
ABSTRACT: This paper starts from an enigmatic passage from Foucault's 1971 lectures on Nietzsche at McGill University about "the awful difficulties of a theory of the will" raised by the attempt to reduce Nietzsche's critique of knowledge to the signifier and the effects of meaning. I shed light on his reference by resituating it in the French interpretative context of the time. Then, through a comparison with Foucault's lectures at SUNY Buffalo given a year later, I highlight how this question also targets Lacanian psychoanalysis and, above all, Althusser's theory of ideology. I show that the conceptual scope of Foucault's critique of ideology can be better grasped if we link it to his interpretation and reworking of Nietzsche's thought during these years. Finally, I argue that the masking effects often evoked by Foucault in his genealogical research are incompatible with the notion of ideology. Yet they can be explained through the reference to Nietzsche's falsification apparatus that produces knowledge and its marks, by situating the emergence of knowledge and truth in the relationship between the "enchantment of the false" and the "domination of the will," which supports Foucault's genealogical aim of writing a history of truth and of the relationship between knowledge and power in Western culture.
ABSTRACT: Based on tape recordings preserved in the archives of SUNY Buffalo, this article discusses a hitherto unpublished lecture course entitled "The History of Truth," which Foucault gave in Buffalo in 1972. It traces Foucault's archaeological investigation of the discursive practices that led to the phenomenon known in Western history as "truth." Accordingly, the article reconstructs the two central "knowledge-power" complexes that Foucault analyzes: the "truth of measure" in relation to the question of justice in the ancient Greek legal system and the "truth of investigation" within the discourse on war and the appeasement of society in medieval law. The Buffalo lectures clarify the substantive connection between these topics and also provide deeper insight into the methodological foundations of Foucault's archaeological approach. In this regard, particular attention is paid to his critical remarks on Althusser's variant of scientific Marxism. The article concludes that the audio recordings of the lecture course "The History of Truth" are an important addition to Foucault's first two already published lecture courses at the Collège de France, as they allow listeners to experience Foucault not only as an impressive scholar, but also as a philosophical practitioner.
ABSTRACT: In light of the recent publication of an important volume collecting previously unpublished lectures and manuscripts by Michel Foucault on Friedrich Nietzsche, this paper discusses the (largely implicit) presence of Nietzsche in Foucault's later lectures and writings. In particular, I address Foucault's references to the notions of Wahrsagen and Wahrsager in connection with his own project to write a genealogy of truth-telling, as well as his problematization of Nietzsche's reading of asceticism with the aim of shedding light on what I call an "asceticism of becoming," as opposed to the "asceticism of being" that Nietzsche examines and criticizes. I conclude by emphasizing several elements of continuity between Foucault's writings on Nietzsche in the 1950s and his own analyses of parrhesia , critique, and the role of the will in the final years of his life.
ABSTRACT: Michel Foucault started to reflect on a methodology for analyzing power relations upon his appointment to the Collège de France in 1970. This essay discusses potential unacknowledged sources of these reflections. Drawing on archival material deposited at the Bibliothèque nationale de France , I highlight similarities between Foucault's pre-1976 portrayal of power relations as essentially warlike and a passage from Erich Ludendorff's Der totale Krieg that Foucault excerpted as a reading note. On this basis, I ask to what extent the interpretation of Nietzsche developed by Foucault in the early 1970s depends on ideas that had been brought to Nietzsche's work from elsewhere. Citing a manuscript on governmentality not yet published in full, I argue moreover that although Foucault began to identify 'power' with 'government' after 1976, he still construed politics as a form of warfare. His reference henceforth would be Carl Schmitt's definition of the political through the friend-enemy distinction.
