Wir wissen nicht, wie eine emanzipative und kritische Institutionentheorie aussehen kann, weil wir in einem theoretischen Dilemma stecken: Traditionelle politische Theorie, von Liberalismus bis Marxismus, ist machtblind und damit unrealistisch – dies hat Foucaults Kritik gezeigt. Unrealistische Theorie kann nicht die Basis für die Konzeption gu…[Read more]

I would like to deal with the following questions: What is the reason for the failure of Western states to protect refugees and to welcome migrants? And what is an ad-equate response? One popular hypothesis is that liberalism is the problem. The most elaborate version of this hypothesis comes from Christoph Menke, who employs his radical critique…[Read more]

Thank you very much for this excellent presentation. In my comment I aim to render more explicit some fundamental tensions or contradictions between legal emancipation and queerness, which are at stake in your description of the legal frameworks for the protection of queers. It thereby reopens the question of the strategic choice between appealing…[Read more]

One of the longest lasting problems in the discussion about Foucault has been the problem of freedom. More precisely the question is: How can freedom and resistance be thought and explained in a theory of power and subjectification?
I will address this problem not by talking about Foucault himself, for example by offering a new interpretation of…[Read more]

Wie können Freiheit und Widerstand innerhalb von Foucaults Theorie der Macht und Subjektivierung konzipiert werden? Karsten Schubert liefert die erste systematische Rekonstruktion der sozialphilosophischen Debatte um Freiheit bei Foucault und eine neue Lösung für das Freiheitsproblem: Freiheit als die Fähigkeit zur reflexiven Kritik der eig…[Read more]

Foucault’s theory of power and subjectification challenges common concepts of freedom in social philosophy and expands them through the concept of ‘freedom as critique’: Freedom can be defined as the capability to critically reflect one’s own subjectification, and the conditions of possibility for this critical capacity lie in political and soc…[Read more]

Right-wing intellectuals often invoke Nietzsche’s concept of slave morality to underpin their criticism of ‘political correctness’ (‘PC’). This interconnection of Nietzsche’s slave morality and ‘PC’ criticism is correct, as a systematic analysis of their common elements shows, which leads to a new description of ‘PC’ criticism as a defense of…[Read more]

The article develops the concept of “political judgement” – a new, affirmative understanding of the phenomena which are criticized as “political correctness” by both right-wing and liberal commentators. To that end, it takes the right’s claims, that “political correctness” is slave morality in Nietzsche’s sense seriously and proposes a systematic…[Read more]

How can freedom and resistance be conceived within Foucault’s theory of power and subjectivation? This central question of the interpretation of Foucault’s multi-layered work has been widely discussed and yet not satisfactorily answered. The fact that until today there has been little clarity about the status of freedom in Foucault’s work is also…[Read more]