While contemporary welfare processes have widely been analysed through the concepts of governmentality and pastoral power, this article diagnoses the dimension of confession or avowal within unemployment, job seeking and CV writing. This argument draws together the threads of Foucault’s work on confession within disciplinary institutions, around sexuality and genealogies of monasticism, adding the insights of writers in ‘economic theology’. Empirically the focus is on UK JobCentrePlus, whose governmentality is traced from laws and regulations, street-level forms, websites and CV advice. From the requirement of avowals of unemployment as a personal fault in interviews to professions of faith in oneself and the labour market, a distinctly confessional practice emerges – with the welfare officer as ‘pastor’ but with the market as the ultimate ‘test’ of worth. Furthermore, the pressure to transform the self through ‘telling the truth’ about oneself is taken as a normalising pressure which extends from the institutions of welfare across the labour market as a whole. In conclusion, the demand for self-transformation and the insistence on tests within modernity is problematised.
{"title":"Avowing Unemployment: Confessional Jobseeker Interviews and Professional CVs","authors":"T. Boland","doi":"10.22439/fs.vi30.6256","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.vi30.6256","url":null,"abstract":"While contemporary welfare processes have widely been analysed through the concepts of governmentality and pastoral power, this article diagnoses the dimension of confession or avowal within unemployment, job seeking and CV writing. This argument draws together the threads of Foucault’s work on confession within disciplinary institutions, around sexuality and genealogies of monasticism, adding the insights of writers in ‘economic theology’. Empirically the focus is on UK JobCentrePlus, whose governmentality is traced from laws and regulations, street-level forms, websites and CV advice. From the requirement of avowals of unemployment as a personal fault in interviews to professions of faith in oneself and the labour market, a distinctly confessional practice emerges – with the welfare officer as ‘pastor’ but with the market as the ultimate ‘test’ of worth. Furthermore, the pressure to transform the self through ‘telling the truth’ about oneself is taken as a normalising pressure which extends from the institutions of welfare across the labour market as a whole. In conclusion, the demand for self-transformation and the insistence on tests within modernity is problematised.","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42670903","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Stuart Elden, Canguilhem. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019. 215 pp. + Samuel Talcott, Georges Canguilhem and the Problem of Error. Cham: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019. 294 pp.","authors":"Codrin Tăut","doi":"10.22439/fs.vi30.6264","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.vi30.6264","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44116873","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Patrick G. Stefan, The Power of Resurrection: Foucault, Discipline, and Early Christian Resistance. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2020. 277pp.","authors":"Bianca Maria Esposito","doi":"10.22439/fs.vi30.6262","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.vi30.6262","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48174026","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Sverre Raffnsøe, A. Beaulieu, B. Cruikshank, B. Dalgliesh, Knut Ove Eliassen, Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson, A. Feldman, Marius Gudmand-Høyer, Thomas Götselius, Robert Harvey, R. Holt, L. Lawlor, Daniele Lorenzini, E. McGushin, H. Martínez, G. Mascaretti, J. Oksala, Clare D. O'Farrell, Rodrigo Castro Orellana, Eva Bendix Petersen, Alan Rosenberg, Ann-Christine Skoglund, D. Taylor, Martina Tazzioli
{"title":"Editorial","authors":"Sverre Raffnsøe, A. Beaulieu, B. Cruikshank, B. Dalgliesh, Knut Ove Eliassen, Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson, A. Feldman, Marius Gudmand-Høyer, Thomas Götselius, Robert Harvey, R. Holt, L. Lawlor, Daniele Lorenzini, E. McGushin, H. Martínez, G. Mascaretti, J. Oksala, Clare D. O'Farrell, Rodrigo Castro Orellana, Eva Bendix Petersen, Alan Rosenberg, Ann-Christine Skoglund, D. Taylor, Martina Tazzioli","doi":"10.22439/fs.vi30.6281","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.vi30.6281","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47157503","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Nancy Luxon (ed.), Archives of Infamy: Foucault on State Power in the Lives of Ordinary Citizens. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. 400 pp.","authors":"Julián Molina","doi":"10.22439/fs.vi30.6260","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.vi30.6260","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49207980","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Thomas Lemke, Foucault’s Analysis of Modern Governmentality: A Critique of Political Reason. Translation Erik Butler. London: Verso, 2019. 445 pp.","authors":"Paul O Gorby","doi":"10.22439/fs.vi30.6261","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.vi30.6261","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46356121","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This essay attends to the place of virginity at the center of the fourth volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Confessions of the Flesh. Reading virginity through a rhetorical lens, the essay argues for an ethics and a politics of counter-conduct in Foucault characterized by chiasmus, a rhetorical structure of inverted parallelism. That chiastic structure frames Foucault’s Confessions, and all of his work, as a fragmented, self-hollowing speech haunted by death and the dissolution of the subject. The essay reads Foucault as apophatic speech that returns to us, no longer itself, made strange. In that deathly movement of eternal recurrence, Foucault’s Confessions speak after death from the x’d out place of the queer virgin: on a threshold that separates life from death, in a movement of metanoia or ethical conversion. As an unfinished history in fragments, the essay’s form brings attention to incompletion as a crucial aspect of Foucault’s work. The fragmentation that characterizes an unfinished history underscores poetic discontinuity as the hallmark of Foucault’s genealogical method and thought.
{"title":"Foucault’s Queer Virgins: An Unfinished History in Fragments","authors":"L. Huffer","doi":"10.22439/FS.VI29.6212","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/FS.VI29.6212","url":null,"abstract":"This essay attends to the place of virginity at the center of the fourth volume of Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Confessions of the Flesh. Reading virginity through a rhetorical lens, the essay argues for an ethics and a politics of counter-conduct in Foucault characterized by chiasmus, a rhetorical structure of inverted parallelism. That chiastic structure frames Foucault’s Confessions, and all of his work, as a fragmented, self-hollowing speech haunted by death and the dissolution of the subject. The essay reads Foucault as apophatic speech that returns to us, no longer itself, made strange. In that deathly movement of eternal recurrence, Foucault’s Confessions speak after death from the x’d out place of the queer virgin: on a threshold that separates life from death, in a movement of metanoia or ethical conversion. As an unfinished history in fragments, the essay’s form brings attention to incompletion as a crucial aspect of Foucault’s work. The fragmentation that characterizes an unfinished history underscores poetic discontinuity as the hallmark of Foucault’s genealogical method and thought.","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"22-37"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41344513","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Setting out from the difficulty of translating the Foucauldian notion of aveu, this paper proposes an account of Foucault’s concept of confession in the years 1979-1983 surrounding the writing of Confessions of the Flesh. I focus on Foucault’s relative failure to bring together the complementary dimensions of confession as confession of sins and confession of faith in early Christianity. Foucault’s attempts to tackle this challenge nonetheless reveal a number of crucial aspects of his thought throughout the 1970s, e.g., the critique of the notion of ideology and the role that critique played in the setting of Foucault’s “critical philosophy of veridictions”. A comparison with the lectures given at Louvain and the Collège de France suggests that Foucault took an original and rather solitary path in Confessions of the Flesh, which may explain the surprises awaiting the reader. Finally, I propose an explanation of Foucault’s final shift away from Christian confession towards Greek parrhesia, pointing to the key role of the idea of a “duty of truth”. This idea led Foucault to an original approach to confession and the illocutionary force of statements.
{"title":"Foucault’s Concept of Confession","authors":"Philippe Büttgen","doi":"10.22439/FS.VI29.6210","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22439/FS.VI29.6210","url":null,"abstract":"Setting out from the difficulty of translating the Foucauldian notion of aveu, this paper proposes an account of Foucault’s concept of confession in the years 1979-1983 surrounding the writing of Confessions of the Flesh. I focus on Foucault’s relative failure to bring together the complementary dimensions of confession as confession of sins and confession of faith in early Christianity. Foucault’s attempts to tackle this challenge nonetheless reveal a number of crucial aspects of his thought throughout the 1970s, e.g., the critique of the notion of ideology and the role that critique played in the setting of Foucault’s “critical philosophy of veridictions”. A comparison with the lectures given at Louvain and the Collège de France suggests that Foucault took an original and rather solitary path in Confessions of the Flesh, which may explain the surprises awaiting the reader. Finally, I propose an explanation of Foucault’s final shift away from Christian confession towards Greek parrhesia, pointing to the key role of the idea of a “duty of truth”. This idea led Foucault to an original approach to confession and the illocutionary force of statements.","PeriodicalId":38873,"journal":{"name":"Foucault Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":"6-21"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"68620282","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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