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.
