Jeder Denker hatte nur einen wesentlichen Gedanken / Philosophische Wahrheiten sind einfach, insofern sie auch einen anschaulichen Kern haben.
Vermutlich wäre etwas zu gewinnen, diese Einsichten zur Abwechslung einmal auf Michel Foucault anzuwenden, den gegenwärtig meistzitierten Theoretiker der Geisteswissenschaften und eine eminente Referenz ihrer methodologischen Betriebsamkeit.

This essay engages in Foucauldian understanding of power-knowledge to explore the intersection between the notions of nation, gender and sexuality, that produces gendered dimension of nationalism. It takes the case of Poland to contextualise reproduction, abortion and women's rights in the light of nationalist policies and aims to illustrate the influence of far-right nationalism on the control over women's reproductive rights and marginalisation of the LGBTQ community. It also highlights the dangers of state's monopolisation of 'public health' and the subjugation of women's rights to re-patriarchised family policies, particularly, in the times of the pandemic, when policies strictly regulating women's reproductive rights may slide through under the pretext of 'common good' – demographic growth.

The current pandemic has deeply affected our everyday lives. That is an unprecedented achievement, because modern quarantines usually crumbled if they tried to control or arrest the daily lives of cities, even in troubled times like the cholera outbreaks in the 19th century, or the Spanish flu epidemic in the early 20th century. The article argues that the deeper and more extensive impact of the measures aimed at defending life from COVID-19 can be explained by the intensive responsibilization, i.e. by the development of a power regime that constitutes all and everyone as subjects of responsibility to a potentially vulnerable population. Building on that, the article discusses the problematic side effects of the responsibilization in the context of the current pandemic, and tries to outline a critical practice able to question responsibly our biopolitical responsibility.

Is it possible to explain the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 with the theoretical concepts and historical examples that Michel Foucault developed in the 1970s? Yes—but not as is commonly assumed. And no, speaking of biopolitics does not help. This essay was first published in German in Geschichte der Gegenwart and has been translated for the G+C Blog by Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson.

Kirsten Hasberg talks to Dominic Boyer, anthropologist and author of Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthroprocene, and to Colin Koopman, philosopher and author of How We Became our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person.

Oliver Marchart and Renate Martinsen have edited a German volume that connects Foucault with the question of the political and attempts to establish new perspectives on contemporary issues of political theory and our political present: Foucault und das Politische: Transdisziplinäre Impulse für die politische Theorie der Gegenwart (Wiesbaden: Springer 2019). The papers of the volume reflect basic terms of political theory and philosophy, relate Foucault's oeuvre to the works of other famous theorists and show the wide range of Foucault's analyses in terms of criticizing and rethinking the foundations of society and political life.

Michel Foucault hat keine ausführliche oder explizite Interpretationen zu psychoanalytischen Konzepten oder Texten geliefert, dennoch nimmt die Psychoanalyse immer wieder einen strategisch wichtigen Platz in seinem Denken ein. Der Beitrag gibt einen Überblick über verschiedene Verortungen der Psychoanalyse in Foucaults Texten, wobei das Schwergewicht auf die 1960er- und vor allem die 1970er-Jahre gelegt wird.