ABSTRACT: This article proposes a dialogue between Saidiya Hartman's and Michel Foucault's concept of critique, with the aim of contributing to a broader rethinking of critical practice and theory. While Hartman's work has become central to contemporary debates in Black Studies and beyond, its implications for the practice of critique—particularly in relation to Foucault—remain underexplored. I argue that Hartman's speculative reconstruction of lives obscured or erased by the colonial archive constitutes not a departure from critique, but a reconfiguration of it. I demonstrate that her practice of critical fabulation—what I term speculative critique—generates, like Foucault's critique, a counter-knowledge that is targeted against the dominant regime of truth. However, Hartman pushes further than Foucault by deliberately moving beyond the limits of the archive. This speculative dimension of critique illuminates the specific historical and political problem Hartman's critique is concerned with. At the same time, it invites a broader rethinking of critique. In the final part of the article, I will thus argue that Hartman's speculative critique unsettles the opposition of negative and affirmative critique by articulating a double movement of critique, in which negation cannot be discerned from the generative work of imagining the otherwise.

ABSTRACT: This article takes its starting point in Michel Foucault's critical approach to critique and his distinction between critique and criticism. Through an engagement with Foucault's genealogy of the critical attitude, further inscribing Foucault himself in the genealogy, the article expands on the idea of critique as an affirmative enterprise contrary to the art of negative criticism. Building on this Foucauldian framework, it analyzes Peter Sloterdijk's oeuvre as an ongoing criticism of destructive critique and as a continuous practice of affirmative critique. It is argued that the philosophy of Sloterdijk represents one way of administering the heritage of Foucault's critical project. This is done through an analysis of his idea of co-immunity as a response to contemporary crises. Further, it is discussed how Sloterdijk's administration of the critical heritage of Foucault also points to a specific philosophical type and to ways of acting as a public intellectual that speaks the truth and in doing so utilizes the critical attitude on a collective and societal level.

ABSTRACT: This article provides a survey of the material in the University at Buffalo archives concerning Foucault's two visits in 1970 and 1972. The 1970 visit was Foucault's first trip to the United States, and he gave a course advertised as "The desire for knowledge or the phantasms of knowledge in French literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries." On his return in 1972 as the Melodia E. Jones Chair he gave two courses: a seminar on "The Criminal in the Literature of the 18th and 19th Centuries" and a lecture series on "The Origins of Culture," renamed as "History of Truth." Using the personnel files and correspondence with his host John K. Simon, as well as the audio recordings of the 1972 lectures and parts of the 1970 course, this article reports on what we know of his teaching and its role in his initial reception in the United States. Particular attention is given to how much of the 1970 course has been published in different places, without its overall organization and linking theme being previously recognized.

ABSTRACT: This paper starts from an enigmatic passage from Foucault's 1971 lectures on Nietzsche at McGill University about "the awful difficulties of a theory of the will" raised by the attempt to reduce Nietzsche's critique of knowledge to the signifier and the effects of meaning. I shed light on his reference by resituating it in the French interpretative context of the time. Then, through a comparison with Foucault's lectures at SUNY Buffalo given a year later, I highlight how this question also targets Lacanian psychoanalysis and, above all, Althusser's theory of ideology. I show that the conceptual scope of Foucault's critique of ideology can be better grasped if we link it to his interpretation and reworking of Nietzsche's thought during these years. Finally, I argue that the masking effects often evoked by Foucault in his genealogical research are incompatible with the notion of ideology. Yet they can be explained through the reference to Nietzsche's falsification apparatus that produces knowledge and its marks, by situating the emergence of knowledge and truth in the relationship between the "enchantment of the false" and the "domination of the will," which supports Foucault's genealogical aim of writing a history of truth and of the relationship between knowledge and power in Western culture.

ABSTRACT: In light of the recent publication of an important volume collecting previously unpublished lectures and manuscripts by Michel Foucault on Friedrich Nietzsche, this paper discusses the (largely implicit) presence of Nietzsche in Foucault's later lectures and writings. In particular, I address Foucault's references to the notions of Wahrsagen and Wahrsager in connection with his own project to write a genealogy of truth-telling, as well as his problematization of Nietzsche's reading of asceticism with the aim of shedding light on what I call an "asceticism of becoming," as opposed to the "asceticism of being" that Nietzsche examines and criticizes. I conclude by emphasizing several elements of continuity between Foucault's writings on Nietzsche in the 1950s and his own analyses of parrhesia , critique, and the role of the will in the final years of his life.

ABSTRACT: Based on tape recordings preserved in the archives of SUNY Buffalo, this article discusses a hitherto unpublished lecture course entitled "The History of Truth," which Foucault gave in Buffalo in 1972. It traces Foucault's archaeological investigation of the discursive practices that led to the phenomenon known in Western history as "truth." Accordingly, the article reconstructs the two central "knowledge-power" complexes that Foucault analyzes: the "truth of measure" in relation to the question of justice in the ancient Greek legal system and the "truth of investigation" within the discourse on war and the appeasement of society in medieval law. The Buffalo lectures clarify the substantive connection between these topics and also provide deeper insight into the methodological foundations of Foucault's archaeological approach. In this regard, particular attention is paid to his critical remarks on Althusser's variant of scientific Marxism. The article concludes that the audio recordings of the lecture course "The History of Truth" are an important addition to Foucault's first two already published lecture courses at the Collège de France, as they allow listeners to experience Foucault not only as an impressive scholar, but also as a philosophical practitioner.

ABSTRACT: This paper draws on Michel Foucault’s work to offer a critique of how two problems – COVID 19 and the racism that gave rise to the 2020 racial uprisings – were conjoined under one language of disease and, consequently, one model of disease management. Drawing on Foucault’s account of apparatuses [ dispositifs ] of security, it argues that the conjunction of COVID and racism tacitly invokes what I call a model of inoculation, wherein the goal is to nullify and normalize a threat. Invoking this inoculation model by analogizing COVID and racism tacitly oriented understandings of both what the problem around the racial uprisings was and how it ought to be solved. I argue that this analogy mobilized anti-racist practices toward stabilizing reforms over potentially more thoroughgoing societal changes.

ABSTRACT: In this paper, I offer an intellectual-historical reading of Foucault’s unpublished master’s thesis. In contrast with other recent scholarship on the pre-1961 period of Foucault’s career, the purpose of this paper is to grapple with the philosophical content of this thesis on its own terms, distinguishing it as far as possible from his mature work. This allows forgotten concepts to re-emerge in the course of reading the text and for a novel engagement with such neglected facets of Foucault’s oeuvre. Indeed, the key concept which I argue emerges from Foucault’s early thesis is that of language as the être-la of thought. By closely following Foucault’s Husserlian reading of Hegel, and his response to Eugen Fink’s paradoxes of phenomenology, it is possible to see how Foucault briefly lands upon a novel kind of scepticism about the reality of history and minds. In the same way, I will also show why Foucault was unable to fully develop or commit to these sceptical positions during this part of his career. The article concludes by briefly suggesting contrasts between my reading of this early text and the way Foucault’s oeuvre is more generally understood.

ABSTRACT: In this article, we propose an alternative Foucauldian reading of Martin Luther’s thought and early Lutheranism. Michel Foucault did not mention the Reformation often, although he saw it as an amplification of pastoral power and the governing of people’s everyday lives. We aim to fill the gap in his analysis by outlining the disciplinary and biopolitical aspects in Luther and early Lutheranism. Therefore, we also contribute to the ongoing debate regarding the birth of biopolitics, which, we argue, predates Foucault’s periodisation. Our approach to tackling these questions is three-pronged. First, we establish the context by highlighting a few Reformation-era examples of the conceptual opposite of biopower, namely, sovereign power. Second, we scrutinise the disciplinary aspects of early Lutheranism, underscoring the fact that disciplinary institutions appear to subject people to new models of behaviour. Third, we describe the biopolitical under-currents in Luther’s thought and its early reception. We argue that the reformer’s views on issues such as marriage and poor relief appear to carry a biopolitical significance before the alleged birth of biopolitics.