Ben Golder
Biographic Data
| ID | 444179 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ben Golder |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ben |
| FAMILY NAME | Golder |
| SIGNATURE | BEN GOLDER |
| AFFILIATIONS | UNSW Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4481-9184 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 36 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The Politics of Legal Form: An Essay on Subjunctive Jurisprudence
How to do things with Foucault (legally)
In this essay, I discuss the legal theorist, Peter Fitzpatrick's, reading of philosopher Michel Foucault. My intent is to show how and why Foucault was important to Fitzpatrick and what this reveals about the latter's practices of reading. I characterise this particular reading in three ways. First, against the disciplinary tendency to assume that Foucault is more useful to lawyers for how he approaches law (as method), Fitzpatrick takes seriousl…
Introduction: Reflection on/as Supplement
Killing Time: Law Like Death
This article takes Peter Fitzpatrick’s writings on the modern death penalty, published over roughly a decade from the late 1990s, as a point of departure for considering wider themes in his scholarship, and reflecting on its significance and particular qualities. In these texts we see Fitzpatrick, as a legal theorist, engaging with a pressing political issue of, literally, life, death and the law. I take this textual archive and show how it illus…
The morals of the market: Human rights and the rise of neoliberalism
In Memoriam: Peter Fitzpatrick (1 November 1941—20 May 2020)
The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon
The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon is magisterial in scope; forbidding in length; endlessly interesting, surprising, provocative and insightful as a reference source; and, occasionally somewhat frustrating or curious for the baffled reader confronted with over 700 pages of erudite guidance to almost every imaginable highway and byway of Foucault scholarship today (almost: more on this, tendentiously, shortly).I should add that while these foregoing r…
The Politics of Legality in a Neoliberal Age
Politics of Legality in a Neoliberal Age
Foucault and Law
Theorizing Human Rights
This chapter remarks on the pragmatic element in human rights, focusing on the question of what it means to theorize them through the lens of pragmatism, as well as probing the limits of pragmatism. It aims to provide a conspectus of the way in which some recent and influential thinkers have theorized human rights through the lens of pragmatism, and to problematize this very turn to pragmatism. The argument here is that the critical potential of …
On the genealogy of human rights: An essay on nostalgia nostalgia
This article engages with the special issue's theme of human rights and utopia through examining recent scholarship on the history of human rights. Taking Samuel Moyn's The Last Utopia as an example of a genealogical approach to writing the history of human rights, the article argues that such an approach provides a helpful and productive political orientation towards the present that consists in an ambivalent attitude towards nostalgia (and utop…
Foucault and the Politics of Rights
Foucault and the Politics of Rights
Foucault and the Politics of Rights
This book proposes an original interpretation of the French philosopher Michel Foucault's late work on rights and human rights and relates this interpretation to current developments in contemporary political theory
Foucault, Rights and Freedom
Re-reading Foucault: On Law, Power and Rights
Part One: Law, Judgment and the Juridical:1.Expelled Questions: Foucault, the Left and the Law, Colin Gordon 2. Foucault's Other Law, Peter Fitzpatrick 3. Encounters with Juridical Assemblages: Reflections on Foucault, Law and the Juridical, Alan Hunt 4. Law, Literature, Morality: Michel Foucault and the Problem of Judgment, Lissa Lincoln Part Two: Sovereignty, Surveillance, Biopolitics: 5. Sovereignty by Acquisition at the Cape: Foucault, Hobbes…
On the Uses of Foucault for International Law
This symposium concerns the utility of the work of the French philosopher and social theorist, Michel Foucault (1926–84), for international law as an academic discipline. It almost goes without saying that there are several different ways to approach this question of utility . We want to introduce the symposium by sketching just a few of the different avenues by which one could approach the question of Foucault's utility for theorizing internatio…
Foucault’s Critical (Yet Ambivalent) Affirmation: Three Figures of Rights
Michel Foucault is not often read as a theorist of human rights. On the one hand, there is a tendency to read his works of the mid-1970s — his celebrated poststructuralist genealogies of subjectivity, of discipline, of bio-politics, and so forth — as proposing a critique of rights discourse which definitively rules out any political appeal to rights. On the other hand, somewhat curiously it has to be said, there is a tendency to read his works of…
Foucault and the Unfinished Human of Rights
This article argues that in his late work Foucault does not submit to the ‘‘moral superiority’’ of humanism and introduce a liberal humanist subject. Rather, Foucault’s late investigations of subjectivity constitute a continuation and not a radical departure from his earlier positions on the subject. This helps us in interpreting Foucault’s late supposed ‘‘embrace’’ of, or return to, human rights—which is here re-interpreted as a critical anti-hu…
Liberal Law's Fear of ‘Culture’
What is an anti-humanist human right
Responding to recent engagements with Foucault, this paper argues that in his late work Foucault does not submit to the ‘moral superiority’ of humanism and introduce a liberal humanist subject. Rather, Foucault's late investigations of subjectivity constitute a continuation and not a radical departure from his earlier positions on the subject. Such a reading helps us to assess Foucault's late supposed ‘embrace’ of, or return to, human rights – wh…
Foucault's Law
Foucault’s Law is the first book in almost fifteen years to address the question of Foucault’s position on law. Many readings of Foucault’s conception of law start from the proposition that he failed to consider the role of law in modernity, or indeed that he deliberately marginalized it. In canvassing a wealth of primary and secondary sources, Ben Golder and Peter Fitzpatrick rebut this argument. They argue that rather than marginalize law, Fouc…
Foucault and the Incompletion of Law
In a late interview given to the French newspaper Le Monde , Michel Foucault discussed his dreams for a different style of criticism. ‘I can't help but dream about a kind of criticism’, remarked Foucault, in which one would ‘not try to judge, but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea-foam in the breeze and scatter it.’ This somewhat wistful, poeti…
Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France (1977-1978), by Michel Foucault
Foucault’s Critical (Yet Ambivalent) Affirmation: Three Figures of Rights
Michel Foucault is not often read as a theorist of human rights. On the one hand, there is a tendency to read his works of the mid-1970s — his celebrated poststructuralist genealogies of subjectivity, of discipline, of bio-politics, and so forth — as proposing a critique of rights discourse which definitively rules out any political appeal to rights. On the other hand, somewhat curiously it has to be said, there is a tendency to read his works of…
Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France (1977-1978), by Michel Foucault
Balancing national security and human rights: Assessing the legal response of common law nations to the threat of terrorism
In this article the authors address the impact which post-September 11 counter-terrorist legislation has had on human rights and civil liberties in a number of common law jurisdictions. The authors conclude that the counter-terrorist legislative regimes in the countries discussed in the article do impinge significantly upon human rights, and argue in favour of a ‘balancing approach’ towards reconciling such legislation with domestic, regional and…
Foucault and the Unfinished Human of Rights
This article argues that in his late work Foucault does not submit to the ‘‘moral superiority’’ of humanism and introduce a liberal humanist subject. Rather, Foucault’s late investigations of subjectivity constitute a continuation and not a radical departure from his earlier positions on the subject. This helps us in interpreting Foucault’s late supposed ‘‘embrace’’ of, or return to, human rights—which is here re-interpreted as a critical anti-hu…
The morals of the market: Human rights and the rise of neoliberalism
On the genealogy of human rights: An essay on nostalgia nostalgia
This article engages with the special issue's theme of human rights and utopia through examining recent scholarship on the history of human rights. Taking Samuel Moyn's The Last Utopia as an example of a genealogical approach to writing the history of human rights, the article argues that such an approach provides a helpful and productive political orientation towards the present that consists in an ambivalent attitude towards nostalgia (and utop…
Balancing national security and human rights: Assessing the legal response of common law nations to the threat of terrorism
In this article the authors address the impact which post-September 11 counter-terrorist legislation has had on human rights and civil liberties in a number of common law jurisdictions. The authors conclude that the counter-terrorist legislative regimes in the countries discussed in the article do impinge significantly upon human rights, and argue in favour of a ‘balancing approach’ towards reconciling such legislation with domestic, regional and…
Imaginary Boundaries of Justice: Social and Legal Justice Across Disciplines
Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France (1977-1978), by Michel Foucault
Foucault and the Incompletion of Law
In a late interview given to the French newspaper Le Monde , Michel Foucault discussed his dreams for a different style of criticism. ‘I can't help but dream about a kind of criticism’, remarked Foucault, in which one would ‘not try to judge, but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea-foam in the breeze and scatter it.’ This somewhat wistful, poeti…
Foucault's Law
Foucault’s Law is the first book in almost fifteen years to address the question of Foucault’s position on law. Many readings of Foucault’s conception of law start from the proposition that he failed to consider the role of law in modernity, or indeed that he deliberately marginalized it. In canvassing a wealth of primary and secondary sources, Ben Golder and Peter Fitzpatrick rebut this argument. They argue that rather than marginalize law, Fouc…
Foucault and the Unfinished Human of Rights
This article argues that in his late work Foucault does not submit to the ‘‘moral superiority’’ of humanism and introduce a liberal humanist subject. Rather, Foucault’s late investigations of subjectivity constitute a continuation and not a radical departure from his earlier positions on the subject. This helps us in interpreting Foucault’s late supposed ‘‘embrace’’ of, or return to, human rights—which is here re-interpreted as a critical anti-hu…
Liberal Law's Fear of ‘Culture’
What is an anti-humanist human right
Responding to recent engagements with Foucault, this paper argues that in his late work Foucault does not submit to the ‘moral superiority’ of humanism and introduce a liberal humanist subject. Rather, Foucault's late investigations of subjectivity constitute a continuation and not a radical departure from his earlier positions on the subject. Such a reading helps us to assess Foucault's late supposed ‘embrace’ of, or return to, human rights – wh…
Foucault’s Critical (Yet Ambivalent) Affirmation: Three Figures of Rights
Michel Foucault is not often read as a theorist of human rights. On the one hand, there is a tendency to read his works of the mid-1970s — his celebrated poststructuralist genealogies of subjectivity, of discipline, of bio-politics, and so forth — as proposing a critique of rights discourse which definitively rules out any political appeal to rights. On the other hand, somewhat curiously it has to be said, there is a tendency to read his works of…
Re-reading Foucault: On Law, Power and Rights
Part One: Law, Judgment and the Juridical:1.Expelled Questions: Foucault, the Left and the Law, Colin Gordon 2. Foucault's Other Law, Peter Fitzpatrick 3. Encounters with Juridical Assemblages: Reflections on Foucault, Law and the Juridical, Alan Hunt 4. Law, Literature, Morality: Michel Foucault and the Problem of Judgment, Lissa Lincoln Part Two: Sovereignty, Surveillance, Biopolitics: 5. Sovereignty by Acquisition at the Cape: Foucault, Hobbes…
On the Uses of Foucault for International Law
This symposium concerns the utility of the work of the French philosopher and social theorist, Michel Foucault (1926–84), for international law as an academic discipline. It almost goes without saying that there are several different ways to approach this question of utility . We want to introduce the symposium by sketching just a few of the different avenues by which one could approach the question of Foucault's utility for theorizing internatio…
Foucault, Rights and Freedom
Foucault and the Politics of Rights
Foucault and the Politics of Rights
Foucault and the Politics of Rights
This book proposes an original interpretation of the French philosopher Michel Foucault's late work on rights and human rights and relates this interpretation to current developments in contemporary political theory
Theorizing Human Rights
This chapter remarks on the pragmatic element in human rights, focusing on the question of what it means to theorize them through the lens of pragmatism, as well as probing the limits of pragmatism. It aims to provide a conspectus of the way in which some recent and influential thinkers have theorized human rights through the lens of pragmatism, and to problematize this very turn to pragmatism. The argument here is that the critical potential of …
On the genealogy of human rights: An essay on nostalgia nostalgia
This article engages with the special issue's theme of human rights and utopia through examining recent scholarship on the history of human rights. Taking Samuel Moyn's The Last Utopia as an example of a genealogical approach to writing the history of human rights, the article argues that such an approach provides a helpful and productive political orientation towards the present that consists in an ambivalent attitude towards nostalgia (and utop…
The Politics of Legality in a Neoliberal Age
Politics of Legality in a Neoliberal Age
Foucault and Law
The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon
The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon is magisterial in scope; forbidding in length; endlessly interesting, surprising, provocative and insightful as a reference source; and, occasionally somewhat frustrating or curious for the baffled reader confronted with over 700 pages of erudite guidance to almost every imaginable highway and byway of Foucault scholarship today (almost: more on this, tendentiously, shortly).I should add that while these foregoing r…
Killing Time: Law Like Death
This article takes Peter Fitzpatrick’s writings on the modern death penalty, published over roughly a decade from the late 1990s, as a point of departure for considering wider themes in his scholarship, and reflecting on its significance and particular qualities. In these texts we see Fitzpatrick, as a legal theorist, engaging with a pressing political issue of, literally, life, death and the law. I take this textual archive and show how it illus…
The morals of the market: Human rights and the rise of neoliberalism
In Memoriam: Peter Fitzpatrick (1 November 1941—20 May 2020)
How to do things with Foucault (legally)
In this essay, I discuss the legal theorist, Peter Fitzpatrick's, reading of philosopher Michel Foucault. My intent is to show how and why Foucault was important to Fitzpatrick and what this reveals about the latter's practices of reading. I characterise this particular reading in three ways. First, against the disciplinary tendency to assume that Foucault is more useful to lawyers for how he approaches law (as method), Fitzpatrick takes seriousl…
Law (22 works) · Political science (22 works) · Sociology (22 works) · Philosophy (15 works) · Politics (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Foucault, Power, and Ethics (11 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics (8 works)