Vol. 18/2025
Foucault – 40 Jahre Rezeption
Lang, Jonas; Oestmann, Jannik [Publishing editor]
Content
Scientific article
Editorial: Foucault – vierzig Jahre Rezeption / Lang, Jonas [Autor:in] … – 2025
Lang, Jonas; Oestmann, Jannik
Abstract:
Pages: 1-7
Scientific article
Between ontology and anthropology. world, life, and transcendental experience in early Foucault
Riep, Leonhard
Abstract:
The question of the relationship between the transcendental and the empirical-historical is of particular concern to Foucault during his archaeological phase in the 1960s, as is evident in the concept of the historical a priori. However, as I argue in this article, Foucault already problematizes the status of the transcendental in the so-called Lille manuscripts of the 1950s. The concept of ‘transcendental experience,’ which Foucault addresses in Phénoménologie et psychologie in relation to Edmund Husserl, and in La question anthropologique in relation to Wilhelm Dilthey, is particularly relevant in this regard, as it can be understood as a structurally analogous cue (among several) for the genesis of the concept of the historical a priori. Furthermore, I demonstrate that a philosophical problem is linked to the concept of transcendental experience, which will also preoccupy the later Foucault, namely the tendency of modern thought to either ontologize or empiricize the sphere of the transcendental. Despite the central contrast between the ontologization and the empiricization of the transcendental, the concept of transcendental experience, as Foucault encounters it in Husserl and Dilthey, is characterized by a methodological orientation. Based on this, I briefly conclude that the concept of ‘the naked experience of order,’ which Foucault prominently introduces in The Order of Things as the central aim of his archaeological investigation, can be made plausible as an experience of the transcendental.
Pages: 8-23
Scientific article
Critique of power between dictatorship and democratic transformation: Foucault’s reception in brazilian educational science
Velasques, Matheus Trindade
Abstract:
This essay reconstructs how Michel Foucault's work was received in Brazilian educational science. Two waves of reception can be distinguished: The first wave refers to the impact of the Brazilian publication of Discipline and Punish, which, against the backdrop of the Brazilian military dictatorship, contributed to labeling Foucault as a theorist of power. The second wave encompasses the reinterpretation of Foucault's work by the Porto Alegre Group, which contributed significantly to the dissemination of his work in Brazil during a phase of democratic renewal. The article thus offers an overview of Foucault's influence on Brazilian educational science and demonstrates the contingency of Foucault's reception in relation to its political context.
Pages: 24-34
Scientific article
Critique of power between dictatorship and democratic transformation: Foucault’s reception in brazilian educational science
Velasques, Matheus Trindade
Abstract:
This essay reconstructs how Michel Foucault's work was received in Brazilian educational science. Two waves of reception can be distinguished: The first wave refers to the impact of the Brazilian publication of Discipline and Punish, which, against the backdrop of the Brazilian military dictatorship, contributed to labeling Foucault as a theorist of power. The second wave encompasses the reinterpretation of Foucault's work by the Porto Alegre Group, which contributed significantly to the dissemination of his work in Brazil during a phase of democratic renewal. The article thus offers an overview of Foucault's influence on Brazilian educational science and demonstrates the contingency of Foucault's reception in relation to its political context.
Pages: 24-34
Scientific article
Foucault in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung : Media history of an Intellectual Canonization
Oestmann, Jannik
Abstract:
Using the example of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), this essay reconstructs the history of Foucault's public presentation to a West German readership from 1967 to the present. In doing so, it identifies various phases of reception which increasingly follow their own logic of Foucaults iconization. With regard to criticism of Foucault, academic controversies are taken up sporadically, but are hardly radicalized into a political problematization of Foucault. This only changes in the 1990s with the re-importation of US debates, which breaks with the pragmatic and interested basic attitude of Foucault's reception in the FAZ.
Pages: 35-49
Scientific article
Archaeology as a diagnostic method : reflections on Michel Foucault's Le Discours philosophique
Lorenzini, Daniele
Abstract:
This paper addresses Michel Foucault’s archaeological method as a diagnostic practice by focusing on the way he defines it in Le Discours philosophique and other texts from the same period as well as the following two decades. It argues that, for Foucault, doing archaeology means engaging with complex epistemic and social processes that are still unfolding, and making visible the conditions that shape what can be understood about them in the present. Far from being an interpretive search for hidden meaning, archaeology is an analysis of the rules that structure current discursive practices, while also pointing to their lines of fragility and potential to change. Thus, the paper shows that Foucault’s archaeology, as a diagnosis of the present, plays a crucial role in the project of widening the space of possible transformations, offering a form of critique—archaeological and genealogical at once—that intervenes strategically in contemporary configurations of knowledge and power.
Pages: 50-60
Scientific article
Grey and Blue : Philosophy with and after Foucault
Vogelmann, Frieder
Abstract:
The paper argues that philosophizing in the tradition of Foucault’s critical approach can only be successful when not his diagnostic concepts are taken up but his historically oriented method and his sense for determining adequate objects of critique. It reconstructs this method as a threefold analysis of knowledge, power, and subjectivity shaped by nihilistic, nominalistic, and historicist imperatives. Beyond genealogy’s “grey” work of tracing the contingent emergence of present conditions, the paper emphasizes Foucault’s “blue” philosophical aim of uncovering the discursive systems that make certain truths rationally acceptable. Finally, it proposes political epistemology as a field in which this method can be fruitfully applied, outlining how a non-sovereign epistemology can address the socio-historical constitution of truth and contemporary forms of false-truth and ideology.
Pages: 61-72
Scientific article
Grey and Blue : Philosophy with and after Foucault
Vogelmann, Frieder
Abstract:
The paper argues that philosophizing in the tradition of Foucault’s critical approach can only be successful when not his diagnostic concepts are taken up but his historically oriented method and his sense for determining adequate objects of critique. It reconstructs this method as a threefold analysis of knowledge, power, and subjectivity shaped by nihilistic, nominalistic, and historicist imperatives. Beyond genealogy’s “grey” work of tracing the contingent emergence of present conditions, the paper emphasizes Foucault’s “blue” philosophical aim of uncovering the discursive systems that make certain truths rationally acceptable. Finally, it proposes political epistemology as a field in which this method can be fruitfully applied, outlining how a non-sovereign epistemology can address the socio-historical constitution of truth and contemporary forms of false-truth and ideology.
Pages: 61-72
Scientific article
Does Foucault have heirs? : looking back at a reception and its issues
Revel, Judith
Abstract:
The paper examines how the reception of Michel Foucault’s works has been continually reshaped — from the published books to the Dits et Écrits, the Collège de France lectures, and recently released manuscipts from the archives. It identifies four major ‘families’ of this reception: philological engagements with the texts, attempts to update Foucault’s concepts for the analysis of contemporary society, methodological appropriation of his “toolbox” to new domains, and more speculative or de-historicized uses of his work. The paper argues that the foucauldian approach depends on two non-negotiable commitments: rigorous historicization and a focus on analysing changing modes of subjectivation. Together, these commitments define what Foucault later called the posture of critique.
Pages: 73-84