Foucault News

Timothy O’Leary, (2026). Fiction’s critique: Gray’s Poor Things and the conduct of sensibility. Textual Practice, 1–19.
https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2025.2608009

ABSTRACT
This essay explores how works of literary fiction contribute to the aims of critique, understood along Foucauldian lines as a transformative engagement with modes of subjectivity. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière, these modes are defined in terms of the ‘conduct of sensibility’. Alasdair Gray’s novel Poor Things (1992) reveals aspects of the conduct of sensibility and of the battle between conflicting forces that strive to give shape to that conduct. The novel makes a contribution to the practice of critique by providing both an analysis of a certain framework of subjectivation and by offering a strategic map for its transformation. If the conduct of sensibility unfolds along an axis of perception, interpretation, and action, then works of fiction offer privileged access to that complex web, not only as tools for analysis but also as interventions that nudge, probe, and disrupt. Hence, rather than critique on its own, or literature on its own, being able to engage in effective critique, my argument is that the practice of critique needs fiction, not as an occasional object of analysis but as a constant ally in its work.

KEYWORDS:
Critique, fiction, sensibility, Poor Things, Foucault

Richard Wolin, (2025). Blanchot Collabo: From the Jeune Droite to Jeune France. French Politics, Culture & Society, 43(1), 93-124.
https://doi.org/10.3167/fpcs.2025.430105

Abstract
Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) was best known for his pathbreaking forays in literary criticism: dense meditations on the abyss of literary meaning, culminating in his radical insight concerning the ontological impossibility of writing or écriture. Accordingly, Blanchot was justly canonized by luminaries of French Theory such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida as an indispensable precursor of their influential prognostications concerning la mort de l’auteur and le degré zéro l’écriture. At the same time, circa 1980, rumors began to circulate concerning what Michel Surya has denominated l’autre Blanchot: the right-wing political journalist of the 1930s, who enthusiastically embraced the neo-Maurrassian adage, Plutôt Hitler que Blum. Could it be that one of the reasons that, later in life, Blanchot was attracted to such hermetic theories of textuality and signification—écriture blanche—was to escape the trammels of his ignominious political past?

Dimitri M’Bama and William Tilleczek (2026). The Asceticism of the Oppressed: Anticolonial Ethics and the Politics of Collective Self-Transformation. Political Theory.
https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917251398786

Abstract
Asceticism has a bad reputation in political and social theory—insofar as it has any reputation at all. If it is not ignored entirely, it tends to be aligned with either political elitism or political quietism. On the one hand, asceticism is often considered a special privilege of the aristocracy, which alone has the leisure to turn away from worldly affairs and cultivate the self as an aesthetic object, and thus to reproduce its dominant position in a social hierarchy that it has a strong interest in maintaining. On the other hand, theorists from Hegel to Arendt and beyond have dismissed asceticism and practices of self-transformation as a mere retreat from politics into the “inner citadel.” This article seeks to excavate and theorize a counter-tradition of political asceticism in order to demonstrate that practices of the self are not the property of the elite and indeed have been the conditions of possibility for anticolonial and anti-racist resistance struggles in highly diverse contexts. With comparative attention paid especially to MK Gandhi and Frederick Douglass, we argue that traditional dismissals of asceticism in political theory have missed (a) the extent to which the “inner citadel” is often the prime location for struggle left to the colonized; (b) how this inner citadel is weaponized in endeavors to train oneself into capacities of political agency; and (c) how this training-into-agency—which we call liberation asceticism—is not merely an individual but a truly collective practice.