This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue "Beyond Foucault: Excursions in Political Genealogy" that was published in Genealogy

In Foucault Beyond Foucault Jeffrey Nealon argues that critics have too hastily abandoned Foucault's mid-career reflections on power, and offers a revisionist reading of the philosopher's middle and later works. Retracing power's "intensification" in Foucault, Nealon argues that forms of political power remain central to Foucault's concerns. He allows us to reread Foucault's own conceptual itinerary and, more importantly, to think about how we might respond to the mutations of power that have taken place since the philosopher's death in 1984. In this, the book stages an overdue encounter between Foucault and post-Marxist economic history.

This book brings together two of the most influential thinkers in critical theory. By unmasking reality as contingent symbolic fiction, the authors argue, Foucauldian criticism has only deconstructed the world in different ways; the point, however, is 'to recognize the Real in what appears to be mere symbolic fiction' (Žižek) and to change it.

Viewing Foucault in the light of work by Continental and American philosophers, most notably Nietzsche, Habermas, Deleuze, Richard Rorty, Bernard Williams, and Ian Hacking, Genealogy as Critique shows that philosophical genealogy involves not only the critique of modernity but also its transformation. Colin Koopman engages genealogy as a philosophical tradition and a method for understanding the complex histories of our present social and cultural conditions. He explains how our understanding of Foucault can benefit from productive dialogue with philosophical allies to push Foucaultian genealogy a step further and elaborate a means of addressing our most intractable contemporary problems.

Contributes to Foucauldian scholarship by contextualizing Foucault's key concepts and identifying current and emerging applications of his work.

In his hugely influential book Discipline and Punish, Foucault used the example of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon prison as a means of representing the transition from the early modern monarchy to the late modern capitalist state. In the former, power is visibly exerted, for instance by the destruction of the body of the criminal, while in the latter power becomes invisible and focuses on the mind of the subject, in order to identify, marginalize, and 'treat' those who are regarded as incapable of participating in, or unwilling to submit to, the disciplines of production. The Panopticon links the worlds of Bentham and Foucault scholars yet they are often at cross-purposes; with Bentham scholars lamenting the ways in which Foucault is perceived to have misunderstood panopticon, and Foucauldians apparently unaware of the complexities of Bentham's thought. This book combines an appreciation of Bentham's broader project with an engagement of Foucault's insights on economic government to go beyond the received reading of panopticism as a dark disciplinary technology of power. Scholars here offer new ways of understanding the Panopticon projects through a wide variety of topics including Bentham's plural Panopticons and their elaboration of schemes of 'panoptic Utopia', the 'inverted Panopticon', 'panoptic governance', 'political panopticism' and 'legal panopticism'. French studies on the Panopticon are groundbreaking and this book brings this research to an English-speaking audience for the first time. It is essential reading, not only for those studying Bentham and Foucault, but also those with an interest in intellectual history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and those studying contemporary surveillance and society.

The issue of the senses and sensual perception in Michel Foucault's thought has been a source of prolific discussion already for quite some time. Often, Foucault has been accused of overemphasizing the centrality of sight, and has been portrayed as yet another thinker representative of Western ocularcentricism. This innovative new work seeks to challenge this portrait by presenting an alternative view of Foucault as a thinker for whom the sound, voice, hearing, and listening, the auditory-sonorous, actually did matter. Illustrating how the auditory-sonorous relates most integrally to the most pertinent issues of Foucault - the intertwinement and confrontations of power, knowledge, and resistance - the book both presents novel readings of some of Foucault's most widely read and commented-on works (such as Discipline and Punish, the first volume of History of Sexuality), and discusses the variety of his lectures, essays, and interviews, some of which have not been noted before. Moving beyond a commentary on Foucault, Siisiainen goes on to examine other philosophers and political thinkers (including Roland Barthes, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Rancière) in this context in order to bring to the fore the potentials in Foucault's work for the generation of a new perspective for the political genealogy of the sound, hearing, and listening, approaching the former as a key locus of contemporary political struggles. This work will be of great interest to students and scholars in a range of areas including political theory, philosophy, and cultural studies.

Sexual identities are dangerous, Michel Foucault tells us. Categories of desire harden into stereotypes by which the forces of normalization hold us and judge us. In Bodies and Pleasures, Ladelle McWhorter reads Foucault from an original and personal angle, motivated by the differences this experience has made in her life. At the same time, her analysis advances discussion of key issues in Foucault scholarship: the genealogical critique, the status of the subject and humanism, essentialism versus social construction, and the relationships between identity, community, and political action. Weaving her own experience of coming to grips with her lesbian sexual identity into her readings of Foucault's most recent writings on sexuality and power, McWhorter argues compellingly that Foucault's texts should be read less for the arguments they advance and more for their transformative effect. By exploring bodies and pleasures—gardening, line dancing, or doing philosophy, for example—McWhorter shows that it isn't necessary to conform with socially recognized sexual identities. Bodies and Pleasures takes the reader beyond unexplored norms and imposed identities as it points the way toward a personal politics, ethics, and style that challenges our sexual selves.

Tracing neoliberalism's devastating erosions of democratic principles, practices, and cultures.

Study of the intersection of history and philosophy as it relates to recent French political change, evidenced in essays concerning popular justice, power struggles, and the history of sexuality