Foucault News

Anna Nygren, An Archive of Associations: When My Father Bought Foucault’s Old Car (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

1 April 2026

Anna Nygren, An Archive of Associations: When My Father Bought Foucault’s Old Car, Literary Hub, 13 February 2026.

Anna Nygren on Writing Between Intertextuality, Obsession and Categorization

One day last summer, at my parents’ house on the east coast of Sweden, my dad says he wants to show me something. He pulls out a piece of paper. It’s a certificate of ownership from the National Archives (Riksarkivet), for the car he bought earlier in the summer.

My childhood was full of cars and car parts and things related to cars. My dad is an expert in British old cars. […]

Dad hands me the paper, the certificate of ownership from the National Archives. He has found this by means of thorough archival work. I notice that it says in large red text that the paper must not be folded, but that it obviously has been folded in the middle and I say that to Dad. Dad says that it is the National Archives that folded, he is innocent of the paper abuse. He points to the box where the car owner’s name is written. It says Paul-Michel Foucault.
[…]

Finding Foucault was not easy. Dad tells me about his search for the car’s previous owners. In 1972, the registration number system in Sweden was changed, and the car’s entire previous history disappeared, everything was reset to zero, and it was impossible to find anything about the life of the car before that. But Dad has found a receipt in the car with the previous license plate number, and based on that, he can trace the car back to its birth, where he finds Foucault as the first owner. It is a Work in the Archive.
[…]

Stuart Elden, Foucault’s 1972 visit to Attica prison (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

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31 March 2026

Foucault’s 1972 visit to Attica prison

Stuart Elden, Foucault’s 17 May 1979 Collège de France seminar with Paul Veyne published (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

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30 March 2026

Séminaire de Michel Foucault du 17 mai 1979 au Collège de France
Par Michel Foucault, François Ewald, Alessandro Fontana, Paul Veyne, Raisons politiques 2025/4 n° 100, Pages 15 à 52 https://doi.org/10.3917/rai.100.0015

Texte établi à partir d’une discussion d’environ deux heures, enregistrée et conservée par François Ewald, assistant de Michel Foucault entre 1976 et 1984 par Michel Senellart et Carolina Verlengia

Foucault’s 17 May 1979 Collège de France seminar with Paul Veyne published

Appel à communication | 11e rencontres doctorales du Centre Michel Foucault (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

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29 March 2026

Appel à communication | 11e rencontres doctorales du Centre Michel Foucault

23 au 25 septembre 2026 à l’Abbaye d’Ardenne à Caen, IMEC

Soumissions avant le 1er juin 2026

Appel à communications/
Pour le centenaire de Michel Foucault, l’Imec accueille les rencontres doctorales de l’Association pour le Centre Michel Foucault. Ces journées en immersion à l’abbaye d’Ardenne visent à réunir des doctorants travaillant sur, avec et autour de la pensée de Michel Foucault. L’objectif est de mettre en relation de jeunes chercheurs afin de leur donner l’occasion de présenter leurs travaux dans un cadre international.

Ces rencontres auront lieu du 23 au 25 septembre 2026 à l’Abbaye d’Ardenne à Caen (avec un départ de Paris le mercredi 23 en matinée et un retour le vendredi 25 en fin de journée).

Les frais de séjour sur place et les billets de train à partir de Paris (Paris-Caen-Paris) seront offerts aux intervenants par l’Association pour le Centre Michel Foucault.

Pour que les échanges puissent être les plus féconds possibles – et compte tenu des capacités d’accueil de l’Abbaye – nous limitons le nombre de participants à une douzaine, ce qui impliquera nécessairement une sélection des candidatures proposées. La priorité sera donnée aux doctorants en deuxième et troisième année de thèse.

Ces rencontres doctorales sont ouvertes à tou.te.s les étudiant.e.s sans distinction de nationalité, mais la langue de travail sera le français, avec possibilité éventuelle d’intervenir en anglais.

Modalités de soumission/
Les propositions d’intervention (2.500 signes max.), portant soit sur une question particulière du travail de thèse, soit sur un problème méthodologique précis, devront nous être envoyées, avec un CV (indiquant obligatoirement l’année d’inscription en thèse et le titre de celle-ci, le nom du directeur, de l’université et de l’école doctorale de rattachement) avant le 1er juin 2026, à l’adresse suivante : journeescmf@gmail.com

Diffusion du programme : fin juin 2026.

Un partenariat entre l’Imec et le Centre Michel Foucault, avec le soutien de la Fondation de France.

Nele Jensen, Experiments in response-ability: Integrative medicine, rebel doctors and expanding repertoires of care (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

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27 March 2026

Nele Jensen, Experiments in response-ability: Integrative medicine, rebel doctors and expanding repertoires of care, Social Science & Medicine, Volume 397, 2026
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2026.119127.

Abstract:
Recent years have seen the progressive expansion of Integrative Medicine (IM) as a self-proclaimed movement of medical professionals aiming to radically re-orient medicine’s reductionist focus on disease and treatment towards a new approach centred on health and healing. Despite its increasing mainstream visibility, IM remains under-theorised in the social sciences and is often dismissed as a repackaged version of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM). As a result, little scholarly attention has been paid to the kinds of questions that IM poses to conventional medicine, or, indeed, why it appears to capture the imagination of an ever-growing number of medical practitioners discontent with the status quo.

Based on a pilot study with leading IM doctors in the UK conducted in 2023-24, this paper argues that their engagement with IM reflects a deep disconcertment with the conceptual and practical limitations of conventional medical practice. Rather than a coherent field of theory and practice, IM emerges as a heterogenous space for problematising medicine’s perceived limitations and for experimenting with new modes of ‘response-ability’; that is, new ways of engaging with the situated demands of therapeutic encounters. While questions remain about IM’s ability to unsettle some of the problematic conceptual assumptions that inform current medical orthodoxies, I argue that it offers not just a compelling object for social scientific inquiry but also a potential site from within which to reimagine what a different medicine might look like.

Stuart Elden, A 1970 French interdisciplinary seminar on structuralism (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

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26 March 2026

A 1970 French interdisciplinary seminar on structuralism, organised by Gilbert Gadoffre, André Lichnerowicz and François Perroux, and attended by Suzanne Bachelard, Pierre Bourdieu, Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, André Martinet, Jacques Monod, Clémence Ramnoux, Michel Serres, Gilbert Simondon and René Thom

İhsan Gürsoy, Can education liberate us? Reframing an old question (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

24 March 2026

İhsan Gürsoy, Can education liberate us? Reframing an old question, Journal of Philosophy of Education, February 2026
https://doi.org/10.1093/jopedu/qhag002

Abstract
This article reframes the question ‘Can education liberate us?’ by shifting attention from education’s capacity to produce emancipated individuals to its capacity to enable—or foreclose—liberation within the experience of subjectivation. Instead of proposing new educational theory or conducting empirical research, it examines how normative frameworks in educational discourse limit possibilities for thinking about freedom and self-relation. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s and Michel Foucault’s respective critiques, the article argues that liberation must target not just the individual, but the very experience by which one comes to recognize oneself as an educational subject. Through critical analysis of Paulo Freire, critical pedagogy traditions, and Gert J. J. Biesta’s vision of democratic education, it shows that the most explicitly critical approaches operate within normative frameworks that presuppose specific forms of subjectivity, and predetermine what liberation means. As a counterpoint, the article returns to Plato’s paideia, reinterpreting it through Foucault’s ‘technologies of the self’, and Heidegger’s analysis of the Cave Allegory. This reinterpretation considers whether education might function not as formation, but as a practice of freedom—one that frees the relation to self from normative constraints.

Joanne Hunt, Understanding disability/impairment, inclusively: the case of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (2026)

Clare O'Farrell

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21 March 2026

Joanne Hunt, (2026). Understanding disability/impairment, inclusively: the case of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, Disability & Society, 41(1), 281–287.
https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2025.2492653

Abstract
Whilst myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) has recently attracted high-profile media coverage, dominant accounts do not tell the whole story of how this group of disabled people came to occupy – albeit unequally – society’s fringes. This article, platforming some of the sidelined work of disabled activist-scholars, offers an understanding of oppressions confronting people with ME/CFS that is more inclusive of the politics impacting wider marginalised communities, offering possibilities for coalition-building with other social movements. Moreover, overlooked literature reveals intersecting power systems that differentially shape how ME/CFS is experienced, promoting an understanding of disability/impairment more inclusive of diversity. Inspired by the exhortation of Mike Oliver to record our own histories – lest they be written for us – this contribution seeks to challenge hierarchies and exclusions confronting the author as an academically-sidelined person with ME/CFS.

Keywords:
Disability, intersectionality, myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, neoliberal-capitalism, politics of knowledge production, social movements

Joanne Hunt, Mapping the government of disability in myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome: A critical feminist account (2025)

Clare O'Farrell

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20 March 2026

Joanne Hunt. Mapping the government of disability in myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome: A critical feminist account. International Journal of Disability and Social Justice. 2025. Vol. 5(3):332-356.
https://www.doi.org/10.13169/intljofdissocjus.5.3.0004

Abstract
People with myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome have historically been conceptualised in health and social policy as “undeserving” of societal support, largely via a variant of biopsychosocial model charged with promoting multifaceted harms.

Whilst scientific literature has been preoccupied by paradigm conflicts pertaining to (bio)psychosocial and biomedical models of disability, the socio-cultural and biopolitical context driving (bio)psychosocial hegemony has received little mainstream scholarly attention.

Nevertheless, this context is addressed within subjugated knowledges, notably through the epistemic labours of disabled activists and marginally situated scholars.

This article espouses a feminist standpoint, feminist disability studies, and Foucauldian thought in re-examining and synthesising some of this work, locating psychosocial truth claims within an intersectionally oppressive and ever-expanding government of disability.

I argue that greater respect for subjugated knowledges could lead not only to a more strongly objective and nuanced understanding of (bio)psychosocial hegemony but also to greater possibilities in terms of resistance.

Jürgen Habermas (1929-2026)

Clare O'Farrell

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17 March 2026

Stuart Jeffries, Jürgen Habermas obituary, The Guardian, 16 March 2026

Philosopher and social theorist who advocated a new direction for German thought after the horrors of Nazi rule

The philosopher, social theorist and defender of humane Enlightenment values Jürgen Habermas, who has died aged 96, spent the last months of the second world war helping to protect the Third Reich. He was 15 and a member of the Hitler Youth. Too young to fight and too old to be exempted from war service, he was sent to the western front to man anti-aircraft defences.

He later described his father, the director of the local seminary, as a “passive sympathiser” with the Nazis and young Habermas shared that mindset. But he was soon shaken out of his and his family’s complacency by the Nuremberg trials and documentaries of Nazi concentration camps.

[…]

His great leftist, Jewish teachers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer philosophised in that rupture. Their student would follow suit. Adorno and Horkheimer had returned from American exile after the war to re-establish the Institute of Social Research at the University of Frankfurt, and were developing an interdisciplinary way of thinking called critical theory. Adorno, in particular, whose assistant Habermas became in 1956, mused on whether “one who escaped [Auschwitz] by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living”.
[…]

Reason, Habermas maintained, was crucial to clear communication and such communication was a bulwark against fascism. Violence could have no role in that. The Enlightenment, Habermas concluded, continued to have “a sound core”. But in accepting the Enlightenment legacy Habermas was a man out of time – opposed not just by student radicals but by postmodernist thinkers.

The French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, author of The Postmodern Condition, said: “After the massacres we have experienced, no one can believe in progress, in consensus, in transcendent values. Habermas presupposes such a belief.” Habermas’s book The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985) defended those values against postmodernists – among them Lyotard, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

[…]

For background reading on the “debate that never was” between Foucault and Habermas, see
James Schmidt, Foucault, Habermas, and the Debate That Never Was, Persistent Englightenment, 17 July 2013