Remembering / Forgetting Foucault: Reassessing a Critical Legacy, Maison Française, Oxford, 16 June 2025

Registration and further details at the above link

Nearly forty years after the death of Michel Foucault, the time may be ripe for a critical reassessment of his place in contemporary thought. Few thinkers have left such a deep imprint on the formation of critical theory, political sociology, and the history of ideas across disciplines. Yet today, Foucault’s legacy appears increasingly unsettled. 

Critiques of Foucault have long pointed to his ontological flattening, methodological ambivalence, and a tendency to obscure structural domination in favour of dispersed power. Others have questioned the conceptual limits of his treatment of resistance. More recently, scholarship across political economy, Black studies, queer of color critique, Indigenous theory, disability studies, and decolonial thought has not only highlighted the silences within Foucauldian frameworks, but also raised the question of whether it is time to move beyond them. Yet, many of these same approaches have built on or been shaped by Foucauldian tools, creating a layered and often ambivalent intellectual inheritance. 

This workshop seeks to open a space for reassessing Foucault’s place in the academy–not to reject or defend his thought as such–but to develop (new) practices of forgetting/remembering him. What does it mean to treat Foucault not only as a thinker, but as a conceptual industry? What are the long lasting effects of his influence on practices of critique, modes of teaching, and intellectual languages? And what might this re-reading make possible: intellectually, politically, affectively, and institutionally?

I’ll be speaking to the title “Before California: Foucault’s Early Visits to the Americas”.