We are currently accepting submissions in the form of academic articles, essays, reviews, interviews, literary texts, images, or other formats that reflect upon the theme, with a deadline of May 30, 2026.

 

We open this call for papers in celebration of the centenary of Michel Foucault’s birth, with an invitation to reflect on the eruptive force of critique as both method and ethical-political gesture within his work. From his early investigations into madness, through the archaeology of the human sciences, to the genealogical reflections on biopolitics and the care of the self, the critique Foucault developed should not be confused with the pursuit of fixed truths or a universal program of ethical-political intervention. Rather, it constitutes an intensity that seeks to (re)think and (re)configure the relations between knowledge, power, and subjectivity, beginning from a problem of the present and casting its shadow onto the past. Therefore, it is a diagnosis that both casts suspicion on the various economies of truth and indicates the radical absence of any ontopolitical principle or command, allowing difference, multiplicity, and immanence to emerge.

In his 1978 lecture What Is Critique?Foucault defined critique as “the art of not being governed quite so much.” It is a negative attitude that questions unthought presuppositions and the limits of reason and politics, both on a macro and a micro scale, departuring from the existence of the critic herself. In this reflective and virtuous indocility, the body and time open beyond the discourses and institutions, the dispositifs that subject us and order history. Critique is thus inseparable from the fabric of power and truth relations within which it operates, dispensing with any transcendent foundation or a priori. Its practice unfolds in the tension between the supposed necessity of humanity’s forms of conduct and the perception of their originary contingency, allowing us to interrogate what we are while simultaneously envisioning what we might become, outside the fascist tone.

To revisit Michel Foucault a century after his birth is as an opportunity to engage with his work in light of our own crises —ontological, epistemological, political, and ethical—, which are not only “pathologies” of social immanence but conditions of possibility for new knowledge and new events to emerge, amid uncertainty and openness. These crises demand not merely the application of his conceptual framework, but the reactivation of the critical attitude that the French philosopher demanded of philosophy — distant from academic disciplines and closer to a way of life. In other words, to think and practice critique as an askesis, as an exercise of evoking history and the self, insofar as it expels any primordial mask.

We thus propose to think of the Foucauldian gesture not as a closed corpus, but as a living archive, as a seismic, destabilizing, and transformative thought that can unfold within new scenes.

 

Call for Contributions

We invite submissions for this thematic issue that address these questions from diverse theoretical, philosophical, and in-disciplinary perspectives. We especially welcome works that not only interpret Foucault’s thought but intervene in it; texts that test the limits of philosophical reflection and engage critically with the mutable conditions of contemporary life.

We encourage contributors to think transgressively: to move beyond inherited conceptual frameworks and disciplinary boundaries, to question what is taken as necessary, and to explore new modes of thought and practice that emerge from the very experience of rupture.

How can philosophical critique, in the Foucauldian sense, continue to operate as an exercise of thought and ethical-political resistance? What does it mean to practice archaeology, genealogy, or care of the self beyond a certain form of governmentality? And how do the crises and transformations that define our time call for a renewed engagement with the critical ethos that marks Foucault’s thought?

Suggested Topics

• Periodization of Michel Foucault’s work
• Philosophy and the biographical events of Michel Foucault
• The art of thinking through crisis: archaeology, genealogy, and critique
• Dispositifs of knowledge and power
• Art, literature, and the production of meaning
• Knowledges of the body and normalization
• Discipline, biopolitics, and governmentality
• Ethics, care of the self, and the courage of truth
• Foucaultian reflections and methods applied to new themes
• Michel Foucault’s philosophy in other authors

We also emphasize that, beyond this thematic issue, Des(t)roços: Journal of Radical Thought accepts general submissions on a rolling basis, provided they align with the journal’s commitment to radical thought and its editorial line, as described at: https://periodicos.ufmg.br/index.php/revistadestrocos/about. Submissions must be made through the OJS platform, following the submission guidelines for texts (https://periodicos.ufmg.br/index.php/revistadestrocos/about/submissions). Academic degree requirements do not apply to image submissions, which will be evaluated exclusively by the editorial board. Text-based submissions will be reviewed by the editorial board and through a double-blind peer review process. Once approved, texts and images will be published in the journal’s thirteenth issue of the magazine, scheduled for release in the second half of 2026.