Foucauldian Reflections

The practices of theorists: Habermas and Foucault as public intellectuals

2011-06-29T20:13:00.002+10:00

he practices of theorists: Habermas and Foucault as public intellectuals
Thomas Biebricher
Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Thomas.Biebricher@normativeorders.net
Abstract

The scholarly works of Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault have been subject to ongoing scrutiny for a number of decades. However, less attention has been given to their activities as public intellectuals and the relation between these and their philosophical and theoretical projects. Drawing on their own conceptualization of the role of the intellectual, the article aims to illuminate these issues by examining Habermas’ advocacy of a ‘Core Europe’ and his defense of NATO bombardments in Kosovo in 1999 as well as Foucault’s involvement with the Groupe d’Information des Prisons (GIP) and a wide variety of his interviews, op-ed articles, etc. In showing that the intellectuals’ views differ in important ways from those of the scholars but nevertheless inhabit a crucial position in the overall edifice of their oeuvres, the article concludes that the practices of theorists deserve more attention for a comprehensive and more nuanced account of their thought.
from here

Biopower, Governmentality, and Capitalism Through the Lenses of Freedom: A Conceptual Enquiry.

2011-06-29T16:44:00.000+10:00

A draft of the above titled paper is now available for a download
from here

Michel Foucault: Key Concepts

2011-06-08T12:57:00.000+10:00

Dianna Taylor (ed.)
Michel Foucault: Key Concepts

Dianna Taylor (ed.), Michel Foucault: Key Concepts, Acumen, 2011, 200pp., $27.95 (pbk), ISBN 9781844652358.

Reviewed by Cynthia D. Coe, Central Washington University

Michel Foucault: Key Concepts is an anthology by contemporary Foucault scholars explaining and applying, as the title suggests, Foucault's most important ideas. The volume is divided into three parts -- power, freedom, and subjectivity -- with four essays addressing each topic. Taken as a whole, the essays provide succinct and insightful explanations of Foucault's contributions to our understanding of those concepts as well as demonstrations of how they can be put to use, both within Foucault's own work and in original applications. Particular attention is paid to the concepts associated with works from Foucault's "middle" and "late" periods: discipline, assujettisement, biopower, power/knowledge, parrhēsia, and the care of the self. Although the introduction begins by highlighting the unsystematic nature of Foucault's work, the essays together reveal the strong connections between the forms of analysis Foucault pursued and the concepts he developed to address those questions.

the full review here

philosophy . . .

2011-05-17T10:23:00.001+10:00

". . . what I am doing - I don't say what I am cut out to do, because I know nothing about that - is not history, sociology, or economics. However, in one way or another, and for simple factual reasons, what I am doing is something that concerns philosophy, that is to say, the politics of truth, for I do not see many other definitions of the word "philosophy" apart from this. So, insofar as what is involved in this analysis of mechanisms of power is the politics of truth, and not sociology, history, or economics, I see its role as that of showing the knowledge effects produced by the struggles, confrontations, and battles that take place within our society, and by the tactics of power that are the elements of this struggle."
Security, Territory, Population, pp. 2-3.

"I think this serious and fundamental relation between struggle and truth, the dimension in which philosophy has developed for centuries and centuries, only dramatizes itself, becomes emaciated, and loses its meaning and effectiveness in polemics within theoretical discourse. So in all of this I will therefore propose only one imperative, but it will be categorical and unconditional: Never engage in polemics."

ibid. pp. 3-4.

Biopower, governmentality, and capitalism through the lenses of freedom: A conceptual enquiry

2011-05-14T14:15:00.003+10:00

Biopower, governmentality, and capitalism through the lenses of freedom: A conceptual enquiry
Abstract: There is a theme running throughout Foucault’s analyses of governmentality, biopower, discussion on the changing nature of state and its relation to society, and neo-liberalism. The theme is particularly clear in the contrast he makes between governmentality and the art of government in previous centuries (police state etc), biopower versus disciplinary power, and the modern state versus the early modern state. The theme is that of freedom, the nature of freedom, and its relation to other notions such as power, rationality etc. Foucault wants to reject a certain notion of freedom. Let’s call it a negative notion of freedom. The notion of freedom sees freedom in terms of absence of something else, something it’s not, a way out. Specifically freedom is seen as absence of repression and domination, which are in turn associated with power. Hence, freedom becomes absence of power, and the way to freedom is a way out of power relations. This also leads to a negative notion of power. Power is domination. Hence where there is power there is no freedom and where there is freedom there is no power. Let’s call this “exclusory” hypothesis. But this, Foucault argues, is to misunderstand the nature of modern freedom and power and the way they operate in modern societies. Such notions of freedom and power might have some relevance in early modern and medieval societies, but they are quite inadequate in understanding our contemporary societies. One of the insights of the analysis is that freedom is a great managing power (and not just a liberating force) and power is not necessarily something bad (it can lead to either domination or freedom). The aim of the paper is twofold: First to make explicit Foucault’s insights about freedom and power through paying close attention to what he says in his discussion of governmentality, biopower and related issues. The second aim is to show that an understanding of freedom and power can shed light on understanding certain fundamental features of contemporary capitalism. Now Foucault’s research into the nature of biopower and governmental rationality, although evidently connected to the phenomenon of capitalism, were conducted in relative isolation and without explicit attention to the concept of capitalism. For at least two reasons. First, Foucault, from a methodological viewpoint, wanted to avoid universals. His method explicitly concentrated on understanding different practices and the rationality or irrationality involved in them. Second, for strategic reasons: Foucault once said that “experience has taught me that the history of various forms of rationality is sometimes more effective in unsettling our certitudes and dogmatism than is abstract criticism. For centuries, religion couldn’t bear having its history told. Today, our schools of rationality balk at having their history written, which is no doubt significant.” (Foucault, p. 323). Similarly, it seems to me Foucault wanted to disrupt certain assumptions about capitalism through historical investigation into different forms of powers and their genealogy in the West. In this paper I will step aside of the issues of interpretation and try to investigate the conceptual advances made by Foucault’s analyses, how some of his conceptual tools can be used in understanding capitalist rationality, and how it can help deconstruct certain traditional myths about capitalism.

The Gay Science : An interview with Foucault (previously unpublished)

2011-05-02T14:38:00.000+10:00

1) The Gay Science: Michel Foucault Translated by Nicolae Morar and Daniel W. Smith
(pdf)

About the interview:

This "lost and found" piece - Foucault's interview represents [not only] "his first public pronouncements on the topic of contemporary gay politics, gay sex, and gay culture that he intended to voice in print in his own person, implicitly acknowledging his own homosexuality", but he also makes a number of important observations about sexual liberation, gay movements, male sexual institutions, and also he elaborates on the crucial distinction between pleasure and desire. (As David Halperin see article below for details).

2) Michel Foucault, Jean Le Bitoux, and the Gay Science Lost and Found: An Introduction David M. Halperin
(pdf)

3) At the Source of Thought, Silence, and Laughter
Jean Le Bitoux
Translated by Nicolae Morar and Daniel W. Smith

For the links to the published versions go here (subscription may be required to see these).
Many thanks to Nicolae Morar for the links.

ROUNDTABLE

2011-05-02T13:49:00.000+10:00

Monday, May 23th 2011, 5-8 pm
ROUNDTABLE

Michel Foucault, Leçons sur la volonté de savoir. Cours au Collège de France (1970-1971)

introduced by Daniel Defert (Université Paris 8) and moderated by Arnold I. Davidson (University of Chicago)

with J.-F. Braunstein (Université Paris 1), M. Potte-Bonneville (CIPh), J. Revel (Université Paris 1)

Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne: 17, rue de la Sorbonne, 75005 Paris - Salle Cavaillès (1er étage, esc. C)
poster here

SPECIAL WORKSHOP ON BIOPOLITICS: Call for Abstracts and Papers

2011-03-27T17:08:00.001+11:00

Greetings. The IVR XXV WORLD CONGRESS OF PHILOSOPHY OF LAW AND SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY will take place at Goethe-Universität in Frankfurt, Germany, from August 15th to 20th 2011. We would like to invite you to propose a paper for presentation in the special workshop on Biopolitcs to be held in the Congress on August 18th., Thursday. The Organizing Comitte has accepted our workshop proposal, which is hence confirmed. We enclose bellow the call for abstracts and papers. All the papers effectively presented in this special workshop will be translated to portuguese, with the permission of the author, and published as a book in Brazil, possibily a bilingual edition.

SPECIAL WORKSHOP ON BIOPOLITICS
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS AND PAPERS
Michel Foucault summarizes his understanding of the term Biopolitics in the abstract of his 1978-1979 Course at College de France: it is understood as the way it was tried, since the XVIII century, to rationalize the problems faced by governmental practices by means of phenomena concerning a group of living beings taken as a population: health, hygiene, birth rates, races... In his 1975-1976 course he defines it as the movement by which power takes charge of life concerns. Gilles Deleuze spoke of the idea of managing a multiplicity of beings (a given population) over a vast and open space, where probabilistics become increasingly relevant. Giorgio Agamben states that the totalitarianism of our century is founded on the dynamical identity of life and politics.

This special workshop is intended to gather members and scholars who consider the idea of Biopolitics as understood by the authors above mentioned – as well as by other contemporary philosophers – useful for a better comprehension of XX and XXI century national and international politics. There is a special interest in discussions towards the ways Biopolitics can be related to the role of Social Philosophy and Philosophy of Law in the present world.

Papers relating the concept of Biopolitcs or the works of the above authors to other philosophical traditions are also welcome.

Abstracts up to 500 words should be sent by email until April 31st 2011 to one of the coordinators indicated bellow.

Full papers, until June 30th 2011, designed for a 20 minutes presentation, including 5 minutes for discussion. More time will be allowed if possible.

Abstracts and papers should be written and presented in English.

All selected participants should register for the Congress.
Further information can be obtained at the Congress website http://www.jura.uni-frankfurt.de/ifkur1/neumann/ivr2011/ENG/index.html
For a list of other groups and workshops to be held in the Congress, please refer to the same website.

Kind regards,

Special Workshop Coordinators

Prof. Lucas de Alvarenga Gontijo
Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais - Brazil
alvarengagontijo@gmail.com

Prof. Luís Antônio Cunha Ribeiro
Universidade Federal Fluminense - Brazil
advogados@superig.com.br

Foucault and Philosophy

2011-03-22T14:02:00.000+11:00

Foucault and Philosophy

Timothy O'Leary and Christopher Falzon (eds.), Foucault and Philosophy, Wiley-Blackwell, 2010, 259pp., $104.95 (hbk), ISBN 9781405189606.

Reviewed by Ladelle McWhorter, University of Richmond

"Philosopher" was a label that Michel Foucault sometimes resisted, especially in the earlier decades of his career, but Timothy O'Leary and Christopher Falzon have assembled an excellent anthology of articles demonstrating Foucault's engagement with and contributions to contemporary philosophical practice throughout his life's work. The book examines and situates Foucault's work in relation to several major strands of philosophical tradition. It consists of an introduction and one paper each by the editors and an additional nine papers by well-known Foucault scholars including Gary Gutting, Jana Sawicki, Amy Allen, and Paul Patton, among others. There is no lack of interpretive disagreement in the group, which is especially notable in Gary Gutting's explicit critique of Béatrice Han-Pile's work and Barry Allen's implicit challenge to C.G. Prado. However, the disagreements and alternative perspectives are informative and thought-provoking.

Obviously it is impossible in one review to do justice to all eleven articles, and O'Leary and Falzon do an excellent job of summarizing them in their introduction. Here I will simply discuss four themes, each of which runs through several different papers. The first is Foucault's relation to his predecessors, including Hegel (Gutting), Nietzsche (Hans Sluga), and Heidegger (Timothy Rayner). The second is Foucault's relationship to and, in some cases, value for contemporary philosophical debates, including critical theory (Falzon and Amy Allen) and queer theory (Sawicki), as well as other discussions less easily categorized (Prado and O'Leary). Aligned with the second theme, the third theme that emerges very strongly in this collection is the question of truth and Foucault's epistemological positions. This comes out to some extent in Rayner's article on Heidegger, but it is foregrounded in Barry Allen's essay entitled "Foucault's Theory of Knowledge." Finally, I will conclude this review with a look at the theme of political theory and practice, with a focus on Paul Patton's essay, "Foucault and Normative Political Philosophy: Liberal and Neo-Liberal Governmentality and Public Reason."

full here

Call for papers “Races and Racisms: Foucaultian Approaches”

2011-02-07T10:45:00.000+11:00

mf / materiali foucaultiani : volume 1, n. 2 (2011)
Call for papers
“Races and Racisms: Foucaultian Approaches”
Is it possible to analyze the contemporary forms of racism through a Foucaultian perspective? How could the Foucaultian boite à outils be useful in order to understand and reformulate the array of problems that, at present, are raising up around the different forms of racism?
The choice to dedicate a special issue of the online journal mf/materiali foucaultiani (www.materialifoucaultiani.org/en) to the articulation between race and racism which comes out from Michel Foucault’s thought, results both from the evidence that the phenomena bounded to racism are changing more and more, as well as from the necessity to contribute with a reflection on the epistemo-logical tools and the political stakes that take shape face to these questions. The scene of contemporary racisms shows a very complex and diversified landscape which requires to distinguish among overlap-ping heterogeneous times and spaces, thus raising the problem to verify whether or not the field of “problematisation” framed by Foucault could work also beyond the European borders within which he (almost completely) focused his analysis. Does Foucault’s grid of intelligibility turn out as versatile enough, in order to place itself in this horizon of analysis?
For these reasons, we would then be pleased to receive contributions that deal with and develop the following themes, underlining the advantages as well as the limits deriving from the use of the Fou-caultian perspective:
•
The historical and theoretical sources of the Foucaultian analysis on race and racism
•
The intertwining between racism and sexuality
•
Relationships between racism and violence in the governmental technologies
•
Relationships between race and the claims for the right of citizenship
•
The articulation of race and class
•
Relationships between racism and power of normalisation
•
Relationships between racism and psychiatry
•
Forms of resistance to the governmental technologies grounded on racism
Abstracts (500 words, in Italian, English or French) should be submitted by the 1st March, 2011 to: redazione@materialifoucaultiani.org.
Acceptance notices will be sent by the 21st March, 2011. Selected articles will have to be presented by the 1st June, 2011.

Professor Babak Rahimi's review of Janet Afary, Kevin B. Anderson. Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism

2011-01-15T13:36:00.001+11:00

Michel Foucault (1926-84), historian, philosopher,
and activist, was one of the most in
uential intellec-
tual gures whose works have had an enormous im-
pact on various elds in the humanities and the so-
cial sciences. His writings on authorship, power and
knowledge, medicine, the prison system, and psychi-
atry not only de ed general interpretive categories,
but also escaped a unifying schema through which
one could attain a reducible sense of his overall argu-
ments. Each of Foucault's writings is an act of trans-
gression, testimony to an anti-transcendental imag-
ination that contravenes established conventional
norms (especially academic ones), challenges the har-
monization of theory and the homogenization of con-
ceptions and practices, and pushes the limits of ra-
tionality by imposing new boundaries.

Read full review here

related previous posts

Foucault on Francis Bacon

2010-11-11T23:20:00.000+11:00

" . . . Francis Bacon, whom no one studies any more and who is certainly one of the most interesting figures at the start of the seventeenth century. I am not much in the habit of giving you advice concerning university work, but if you want to study Bacon, I don't think that you would be wasting your time." (Security, Territory, Population, p. 267).

CFP: Geographies of power: space and heterotopias, beginning from Foucault

2010-11-05T12:20:00.000+11:00

The online journal mf/materiali foucaultiani dedicates a special issue to the theme of space and its possible declinations in the fields of philosophy, politics and geography-urbanism, starting from the reflections brought forward by Michel Foucault.

In a number of brief texts from the seventies, Foucault confronted repeatedly and directly the question of space. A commitment associated in particular to his participation to research groups on the urbanistic policies of the time and the extended dialogue with the geographers that formed the backbone of the journal Hérodote. At the same time, his analytics of power never ceased to expose the constitutive interrelation between technologies of power and spatial organization.
We think that Foucault’s analytical paradigm can still be used today as an important matrix through which at once read and highlight the centrality of space in contemporary governmental practices. This course of research has been so far developed in fields only tangential to philosophical reflection: geographers, sociologists and urbanists have found in Foucault an innovative tool not only in order to think anew the implicit logics and the underlying power relationships of spatial distributions, but also in order to individuate possible points of resistance to them. Beyond these important and provocative appropriations, the theme of space still remains, within the area of Foucaultian studies, a vast field to explore and wander.

If only for this reason, we think that developing the theme here proposed may effectively extend the Foucaultian trajectory over and beyond the lines of research so far undertook. We would then be happy to receive contributions concerned with the following themes:
•
Space, power and resistances in Michel Foucault.
•
Contemporary declinations of disciplinary spatiality.
•
Genealogical perspectives and the analysis of space.
•
Governmental techniques deployed in space and practices of resistance existent and possible, a) in the postcolonial present; b) in the management of migrations.
•
Mapping of territory and new urbanistic practices: political stakes.
•
Society of control, disciplinary society: two readings of space between Deleuze and Foucault.
Abstracts (about 500 words, in Italian, English or French) should be submitted by 15 Dicember, 2010 to:
redazione@materialifoucaultiani.org
Selected articles will have to be presented by 15 March, 2011.

A new Foucault wbesite: materiali foucaultiani

2010-06-22T12:28:00.000+10:00

Here is a brief intro from the site:

"The objects of our project are to publish a new journal and to set up a web site dedicated to Michel Foucault. The primary aim is to fill a gap in the Italian academic milieu regarding one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. During the 1990s, several unpublished Foucaultian texts were edited and, by the end of the decade, the great task of publishing his Collège de France lectures has started. In front of such a flourishing editorial activity, in Italy there have been monographs, collective works and a significant number of international conferences and special issues that several journals devoted to the French thinker. However, there still does not seem to exist a recognised research platform on which scholars in Italy and elsewhere may interact on a continuous and organized way. The creation of such a platform represents the core of our project."

Go to materiali foucaultiani

Theory Culture & Society Special Issue – Michel Foucault

2009-12-15T13:34:00.001+11:00

Theory Culture & Society
Special Issue – Michel Foucault
Volume 26, Issue 6
Click here to access this issue for free! (access ends January 31st)

Edited by Couze Venn and Tiziana Terranova

Foucault’s Untimely Struggle

2009-12-15T13:26:00.002+11:00

Paul Rabinow
Abstract
In his series of essays on Kant written during the 1980s, Michel Foucault attempted to discern the difference today made with respect to yesterday. As his essays as well as his lectures (especially at the Collège de France and Berkeley) during the early 1980s demonstrate, he was drawn – and devoted the bulk of his scholarly efforts to a renewed form of genealogical work on themes, venues, practices and modes of governing the subject and others –to experiments in new forms of friendship, sociability and transformations of the self and others that he saw taking shape, or imagined were taking
shape around him. This work, which has come to be known unfortunately as the ‘late Foucault’, arose out of deep dissatisfaction with his own life conditions, the broader political climate of the time, and a profound and unexpected rethinking not only of the specific projects he had intended to carry out but of what it meant to think. This article explores some of the elements at play during these deeply (re)formative several years, which as they unfolded were in no way intended to constitute a ‘late Foucault’, quite
the opposite, even if fate would have it otherwise. The article begins with a ‘prelude’ that introduces the problem of what mode is appropriate for giving form to thinking. It proceeds to argue that Foucault engaged in a struggle to redefine the object of thinking; that in order to do so he was led to pursue a venue in which such thinking could be practised; and finally to an increasingly articulate and acute quest for a form that would constitute a difference between what Foucault diagnosed as an impoverished modern problem space and a future in which things might be different and better.

free access to the article (here)

Dialectical logic versus Strategic logic

2009-06-18T18:23:00.002+10:00

Dialectical logic puts to work contradictory terms within the homogeneous. I suggest replacing this dialectical logic with what I would call strategic logic. A logic of strategy does not stress contradictory terms within a homogeneity that promises their resolution in a unity. The function of strategic logic is to establish the possible connections between disparate terms which remain disparate. The logic of strategy is the logic of connections between the heterogeneous and not the logic of the homogenization of the contradictory. (TBoBP, p. 42).

Foucauldian Categorical Imperative

2009-06-18T10:38:00.004+10:00

Foucauldian Categorical Imperative

“. . . I will . . . propose only one imperative, but it will be categorical and unconditional: Never to engage in polemics.” (STP: 4).

"I like discussions, and when I am asked questions, I try to answer them. It’s true that I don’t like to get involved in polemics. If I open a book and see that the author is accusing an adversary of “infantile leftism” I shut it again right away. That’s not my way of doing things; I don’t belong to the world of people who do things that way. I insist on this difference as something essential: a whole morality is at stake, the one that concerns the search for truth and the relation to the other.

In the serious play of questions and answers, in the work of reciprocal elucidation, the rights of each person are in some sense immanent in the discussion. They depend only on the dialogue situation. The person asking the questions is merely exercising the right that has been given him: to remain unconvinced, to perceive a contradiction, to require more information, to emphasize different postulates, to point out faulty reasoning, and so on. As for the person answering the questions, he too exercises a right that does not go beyond the discussion itself; by the logic of his own discourse, he is tied to what he has said earlier, and by the acceptance of dialogue he is tied to the questioning of other. Questions and answers depend on a game—a game that is at once pleasant and difficult—in which each of the two partners takes pains to use only the rights given him by the other and by the accepted form of dialogue.

The polemicist , on the other hand, proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will never agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war and making that struggle a just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner in search for the truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is armful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat. For him, then the game consists not of recognizing this person as a subject having the right to speak but of abolishing him as interlocutor, from any possible dialogue; and his final objective will be not to come as close as possible to a difficult truth but to bring about the triumph of the just cause he has been manifestly upholding from the beginning. The polemicist relies on a legitimacy that his adversary is by definition denied.

Perhaps, someday, a long history will have to be written of polemics, polemics as a parasitic figure on discussion and an obstacle to the search for the truth. Very schematically, it seems to me that today we can recognize the presence in polemics of three models: the religious model, the judiciary model, and the political model. As in heresiology, polemics sets itself the task of determining the intangible point of dogma, the fundamental and necessary principle that the adversary has neglected, ignored or transgressed; and it denounces this negligence as a moral failing; at the root of the error, it finds passion, desire, interest, a whole series of weaknesses and inadmissible attachments that establish it as culpable. As in judiciary practice, polemics allows for no possibility of an equal discussion: it examines a case; it isn’t dealing with an interlocutor, it is processing a suspect; it collects the proofs of his guilt, designates the infraction he has committed, and pronounces the verdict and sentences him. In any case, what we have here is not on the order of a shared investigation; the polemicist tells the truth in the form of his judgment and by virtue of the authority he has conferred on himself. But it is the political model that is the most powerful today. Polemics defines alliances, recruits partisans, unites interests or opinions, represents a party; it establishes the other as an enemy, an upholder of opposed interests against which one must fight until the moment this enemy is defeated and either surrenders or disappears.

Of course, the reactivation, in polemics, of these political, judiciary, or religious practices is nothing more than theater. One gesticulates: anathemas, excommunications, condemnations, battles, victories, and defeats are no more than ways of speaking, after all. And yet, in the order of discourse, they are also ways of acting which are not without consequence. There are the sterilizing effects. Has anyone ever seen a new idea come out of a polemic? And how could it be otherwise, given that here the interlocutors are incited not to advance, not to take more and more risks in what they say, but to fall back continually on the rights that they claim, on their legitimacy, which they must defend, and on the affirmation of their innocence? There is something even more serious here: in this comedy, one mimics war, battles, annihilations, or unconditional surrenders, putting forward as much of one’s killer instinct as possible. But it is really dangerous to make anyone believe that he can gain access to the truth by such paths and thus to validate, even if in a merely symbolic form, the real political practices that could be warranted by it. Let us imagine, for a moment, that a magic wand is waved and one of the two adversaries in a polemic is given the ability to exercise all the power he likes over the other. One doesn’t even have to imagine it: one has only to look at what happened during the debate in the USSR over linguistics or genetics not long ago. Were these merely aberrant deviations from what was supposed to be the correct discussion? Not at all—they were the real consequences of a polemic attitude whose effects ordinarily remain suspended." (Polemics, Politics and Problematizations)

A short Review of - Security, Territory, Population

2009-06-17T11:32:00.002+10:00

here

Discourse, Power, and Subjectivation

2009-03-19T16:25:00.003+11:00

DISCOURSE, POWER, AND SUBJECTIVATION: THE FOUCAULT/HABERMAS DEBATE RECONSIDERED

AMY ALLEN

Foucault and Epistemology

2009-03-19T14:13:00.000+11:00

Course Description:

This course will provide an extensive analysis of Foucault's works, focusing on his conception of knowledge and the implications of this conception for contemporary epistemology as well as the social sciences. A major question we will pursue is how to understand his claim that there is a constitutive relationship between knowledge and power. Does this account, as his many critics claim, effectively reduce knowledge claims to the strategic effects of power? What are the implications of the constitutive relationship between knowledge and power on the project of epistemology itself? Most of the course will be spent on Foucault's own writings spanning the three major periods of his work. The last few weeks will be spent primarily with critical interpretations and debates concerning his account of knowledge.

full here

Review of Foucalt's introduction to Kant's Anthropology

2009-03-13T18:46:00.001+11:00

Michel Foucault, Introduction à l'Anthropologie (published in one volume with Foucault's translation of Emmanuel Kant's Anthropologie d'un point de vue pragmatique)

Michel Foucault, Introduction à l'Anthropologie (published in one volume with Foucault's translation of Emmanuel Kant's Anthropologie d'un point de vue pragmatique), Vrin, 2008, 272pp., €25.00 (pbk), ISBN 9782711619641.

Reviewed by Béatrice Han-Pile, University of Essex

Clarifying the Foucault—Habermas debate

2009-02-20T16:22:00.001+11:00

Clarifying the Foucault—Habermas debate
Morality, ethics, and `normative foundations'
Matthew King

Atkinson Faculty of Liberal and Professional Studies, York University, Toronto, Canada

Habermas charges that Foucault's work `cannot account for its normative foundations'. Responses to Habermas have consisted mostly of, on one hand, attempts to identify foundational normative assumptions implicit in Foucault's work, and, on the other hand, attempts to show that Foucault's work discredits the very idea of normative foundations. These attempts have suffered from a lack of clarity about Habermas' notion of normative foundations. In this article I clarify the terms of the debate by considering Habermas' critique of Foucault in light of his moral philosophy. I examine three representative responses to Habermas on Foucault's behalf, which attempt to identify normative foundations in Foucault's work, and I show why none of them meets Habermas' requirements. Finally, I argue that while Foucault's political judgments cannot have normative foundations, Foucault does adhere to the principles of Habermas' discourse ethics, and his doing so does not conflict with his genealogical approach.

Key Words: cryptonormativity • discourse ethics • Michel Foucault • foundations • Jürgen Habermas • truth

from here

Limits of the Human: Philosophical, Historical and Ecological Perspectives

2009-02-13T15:52:00.001+11:00

Limits of the Human: Philosophical, Historical and Ecological
Perspectives
2-4 September 2009
The Research School of Humanities, The Australian National University

Convened by Fiona Jenkins, Philosophy, School of Humanities
Debjani Ganguly, English and Postcolonial Studies, Research School of
Humanities

Keynote Speakers

Professor Eric Santner, University of Chicago
Professor David Wood, Vanderbilt University
Professor Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago

Modernity defines its civilization and epoch, its political desires and
ethical norms, through the value and meaning of being human. It is in
terms of the rights, needs and nature of a common humanity that
universal laws are conceived as valid and true. Today, however, the very notion of humanity faces crises that are at once practical and theoretical. The Idea of humanity remains a vital locus of normative, ethical, legal and political thought; and yet it is mired in histories of violence and exclusion that testify to how contested rights of membership in the human world have often been. The desire to secure a better and ‘more human’ future remains strong; but the human simultaneously appears as an element so disjoint with nature that it threatens to bring life to the threshold of extinction. Multiple hopes and desires for future development are attached to humanity as the subject and object of extensive technological innovation. Self-mapping and self-making, this is a humanity bearing startling knowledge of and capacity for intervention into the genomic elements of organic life.
Such power, however, also brings a new awareness of technological limits, a new set of questions about the relation of humanity and the natural world, and a sense of the narrowness of our intellectual and practical grasp of human life’s place within ecosystems. Our capacity to think the human as one species amongst others proves curiously – perhaps disastrously - at odds with the moral terms of modernist thought and humanistic politics.

How, then, are modernity’s legacies in thinking the human to be both
taken up and called into question today? What kind of limit has humanity reached? We invite papers that explore and test the linkages between philosophical, historical and ecological perspectives on humanity as a species confronting potential catastrophe, at an historical limit where forms of moral self-accounting arguably come into crisis or fail. What are the resources and what the problems inherent to humanist traditions in understanding present situations? And what survives of pertinence today in poststructuralist and postmodern anti-humanism? How do the
plurality of modern ways of thinking about the value, potential and capacities of the human coincide or clash? Is the very idea of history redefined by the threatened extinction of the human species if climate change continues unchecked? And can we imagine a politics adequate to the inhuman futures we are now anticipating?

This is an interdisciplinary conference and proposals for papers addressing any of these issues are welcome from scholars working in all fields of the humanities. Please send proposals of 300 words max, together with your institutional affiliation, and no more than 5 keywords, to Fiona Jenkins or Debjani Ganguly by 14th April 2009.

fiona.jenkins@anu.edu.au; debjani.ganguly@anu.edu.au

XXIV World IVR Congress of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy Beijing, China – September 15th-20th, 2009

2009-02-13T15:46:00.000+11:00

Workshop on Biopolitics - advogados@superig.com.br

Luís Antônio Cunha Ribeiro
Universidade Federal Fluminense – Brazil

Michel Foucault summarizes his understanding of the term Biopolitics
in the abstract of his 1978-1979 Course at College de France: it is
understood as the way it was tried, since the XVIII century, to
rationalize the problems faced by governmental practices by means of
phenomena concerning a group of living beings taken as a population:
health, hygiene, birth rates, races... In his 1975-1976 course he
defines it as the movement by which power takes charge of life
concerns. Gilles Deleuze spoke of the idea of managing a multiplicity
of beings (a given population) over a vast and open space, where
probabilistics become increasingly relevant. Giorgio Agamben states
that the totalitarianism of our century is founded on the dynamical
identity of life and politics.

This special workshop is intended to gather members and scholars who
consider the idea of Biopolitics as understood by the authors above
mentioned – as well as by other contemporary philosophers – useful for
a better comprehension of XX and XXI century national and
international politics. There is a special interest in discussions
towards the ways Biopolitics can be related to the theme of the
Congress (Global Harmony and Rule of Law) as well as to the role of
Social Philosophy and Philosophy of Law in the present world.

Papers relating the concept of Biopolitcs or the works of the above
authors to other philosophical traditions are also welcome.

The deadline for sending in the abstracts of papers to be presented at
the workshop is June 15, 2009. Abstracts should be about 1.000 to
4.000 words long. And the deadline for submitting the papers
themselves is July 15, 2009.

All abstracts and papers for the special workshop will be published on
the congress website at www.ivr2009.com. All efforts will be made to
producing a brazilian publication of a book containing all the papers
presented in the workshop.There will also be a volume of abstracts
produced by the Congress organizers.

Information on the Congress is available at www.ivr2009.com and this
call for papers will be available there in a few days.

Marc Djaballah Kant, Foucault, and Forms of Experience

2009-01-31T01:47:00.002+11:00

Marc Djaballah
Kant, Foucault, and Forms of Experience

Marc Djaballah, Kant, Foucault, and Forms of Experience, Routledge, 2008, 348pp., $105.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780415956246.

Reviewed by Johanna Oksala, University of Dundee

In this erudite study, Marc Djaballah analyses the specific character of Foucault's Kantianism. Despite the title suggesting that equal weight is given to Kant and Foucault, the book is primarily a contribution to Foucault scholarship attempting to show the extent of Foucault's proximity and debt to Kant. The main argument about their relationship takes the form of a structural reconstruction: Djaballah argues that the formal structure of their discursive practice -- the practice of criticism -- is the same. He analyses Foucault's Kantianism in formal terms by identifying his historical studies as an exercise of Kantian criticism.

The level of scholarship in Djaballah's book is exemplary: it is based on a wide reading of original French sources including archival material. All the English citations are Djaballah's own careful translations.

Foucault's relationship to Kant is an important and timely topic that has received surprisingly little attention. Foucault's relationship to Nietzsche has been analysed repeatedly and even his cursory remarks about the importance of Heidegger have spawned a host of articles, but the scholarly treatment of his Kantianism has been sparse. Yet, it is beyond doubt that Kant was a central figure for Foucault. One of his earliest publications was a translation of Kant's lectures on anthropology including an extensive introductory monograph. In his late essays on the Enlightenment Foucault presented his whole project as a version of Kantianism -- an ontology of the present.

full review here

Some old reflections on Zizek and Revolution

2009-01-29T17:09:00.001+11:00

1)What is exciting about Zizek’s recent writings on Lenin and Leninism is his reassertion as to the necessity and desirability of revolution and resistance. He thinks that revolutionary times and moments are rare but the lesson of Lenin is that it is absolutely necessary to keep the hope of revolution alive. It is the necessity to preserve and permanently reactivate what he terms as the Event. Thus it is not the party, or multitude, or universal objective history which should be the object of our loyalty but the event itself. Thus he describes the “Thermidorian turn” not as the “betrayal of the rvolution by a new bureaucratic clas), but primarily “as the cessation of the Event, as the betrayal not of a certain social group and /or their interests, but of the fidelity to the (revolutionary) Event itself. In the Thermidorian perception, the Event and its consequences became unreadable, ‘irrational’, dismissed as a bad dream of the collective plunge into madness…” (p. 153).

2)The second thing, which struck me in this essay, is insistence on the primacy of act. Act proper is prior to the dichotomisation of purely subjective and objective. The act redefines the very meaning of subjectivity and objectivity. Zizek explains through his complex discussion of Hegel, which though very interesting I cant indulge in here. His notion of action seems to me very Foucauldian but he prefers to elaborate this through Hegel and this may be a weakness.

“Act cannot ever be reduced to an outcome of objective condition” (p.165).

“if class consciousness arises ‘spontaneously’, as the actualisation of inner potential inscribed into the very objective situation of the working class, then there is no real act at all, just the purely formal conversion from in-itself to for-itself, the gesture of bringing to light what was always-already there; if the proper revolutionary class consciousness is to be ‘imported’ via the Party, then we have, on the hand, ‘neutral’ intellectuals who gain the ‘objective’ insight into historical necessity (without engaged intervention into it), and then what is ultimately their instrumental-manipulative use of the working class as the tool to actualise the necessity already written in the situation-again, no place for an act
proper” (p. 167, italics in the origianl)

3)It should be noted that act proper lead to overcoming the dichotomy between theory and practice. Theory is practice and practice is theory if they are act proper (on this see p. 172).

4)Revolution is an art. It is an art of realising and ‘seizing the moment’: “The art of what Lukacs called Augenblick”. (164). [It was interesting to note the parallel employment of the same notion of Augenblick in Heidegger and Foucault, See Stuart Elden’s Mapping the present on this].

5)One should make demands to the existing system but only impossible demands: “A certain particular demand possesses, at a specific moment, a global detonating power; it functions as a metaphoric stand-in for the global revolution: if we unconditionally insist on it, the system will explode; if, however, we wait too long, the metaphoric short-circuit between this particular demand and the global overthrow is dissolved, and the system can, with sneering hypothetical satisfaction, make the reply ‘Your want this? Here, have it!’, without anything truly radical happening” (164).

6)Another important feature of Zizek’s recent essay is to reject the blackmail of constitutional democracy. He says that we should reject the democratic blackmail and assert that “there are no ‘democratic (procedural) rules’ one is a priori prohibited to violate” (176).

Towards Theorising Postmodern Activism: A Foucauldian Perspective

2008-12-22T17:40:00.001+11:00

The purpose of this paper is to try to understand postmodern activism in the context of a systematic theoretical framework. I begin my analysis through situating postmodern movements in the framework of a Foucauldian theorisation of struggles. Concentrating on the notion of subjectivity and subjectivisation, I intend to make clear a specific danger faced by these movements in their present constellation.

download the full paper from here

Foucault and Capitalist Rationality : A Reconstruction

2008-12-22T17:11:00.006+11:00

The relation between the regimes of the accumulation of men and the accumulation of capital is problematised in the works of Michel Foucault. The paper challenges the prevailing wisdom that the relation between these regimes is contingent. The fundamental question of the conditions of the possibility of relation between the two regimes is raised. It is argued that both regimes are primordially related. Focusing on the Foucauldian analysis of the regime of the accumulation of men and its constituent elements an effort is made to the matize the primordial relation between the two regimes. It is shown that freedom is the condition of the possibility of a primordial relation between the two regimes. It is explained why freedom plays such a fundamental role in making possible and sustaining a capitalist order. The dual role of freedom as a principle of diversity and a principle of management is stressed. It is argued that capitalism as an order is conditioned upon the production and reproduction of individuals and populations that are simultaneously useful and free. It is also the condition of such an order that docility is produced without hampering utility. Freedom makes possible the enhancement of utility without making it unmanageable.

for the full paper go here

Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy (the new issue)

2008-11-25T21:09:00.002+11:00

FEATURES
'You cannot make a living just being a theoretician': An Interview with Jean-Michel Rabaté With
Jeroen Lauwers & Thomas Van Parys

Michel Foucault, Philosopher? A Note on Genealogy and Archaeology
Rudi Visker

ESSAYS
Beyond Resistance: a response to Zizek's critique of Foucault's subject of freedom Aurelia
Armstrong

Alain Badiou: Problematics and the Different Senses of Being in Being and Event
Sean Bowden

Eugen Fink and the Question of the World
Stuart Elden

Between Rupture and Repetition: Intervention and Evental Recurrence in the Thought of Alain
Badiou
Hollis Phelps

REVIEWS

Jeff Malpas, Heidegger's Topology
Miguel de Beistegui

Steven Crowell and Jeff Malpas (eds.) Transcendental Heidegger
Ingo Farin

Eric Paras, Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge
Sam Rocha
--------

Parrhesia is completely open access, and is a member of the Open Humanities Press

Habermas and Postmodernism

2008-06-15T14:26:00.001+10:00

A reader writes:

"I was looking at some posts on your blog and I was wondering if I could ask you a very elementary question about Habermas. (I'm writing a book on American multiculturalism and I have a chapter on "postmodern multiculturalism.")

My question is what the objection would be to putting Habermas under the heading of "postmodernism." I realize this is a crude question - and I confess I know almost nothing about Habermas (and I realize postmodern is a crude term).

By "postmodernist" all I mean is:
1) begins from diversity of cultural worldviews; sense of problem of relativity of truth-claims; sense that human understanding is derivative from culture and, hence, from politics/struggle
2) the "usual suspects" of those lumped under this category (many protesting of course): Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Rorty, Fish.

My sense is that Habermas would NOT be considered a postmodern - even though (as your blog suggests) there is a lot of overlap. My sense that H would NOT be considered a postmodernist is based on 2 crude facts:

1) his attempt to sketch an ethics [or is communicative ethics precisely a kind of attempt at an ethics on postmodernist assumptions?]
2) his overtures to Rawls

And so you see my judgement is based on very crude grounds - and (to repeat) on almost no actual understanding of Habermas.

I am only looking for a general reaction to my question - and I would be grateful for any response that might tell me whether to look into Habermas as a postmodernist (which from your blog it looks like you might be inclined to say?) or continue to assume that Habermas stands outside the camp of postmodernists as much as someone like Rawls would (tho on different grounds).

I'd be much obliged to hear whatever you might have time to say about this."

==

My response:

I have never considered Habermas a postmodernist but he has this remarkable tendency to not only learn from his adversaries but also in a sense overstates their case (and accepts it). He then moves on to defend his own position given the valid (even over exaggerated) critique of his adversaries. What Haberams accepts from the so called postmodernists is their critique of the philosophy of subject. The critique of the philosophy of subject can mean different things for different people but in this context I take it to be a critique of the notion of rationality which locates rational standards outside space and time, in other words outside "this" world. Habermas accepts this critique of otherworldly notions of rationality which linger on in modern and late modern philosophy. However, from the above Habermas doesn’t draw the conclusions which are drawn by most postmodernists. Specifically, Habermas doesn’t accept the claim that with the demise of the philosophy of subject all hope for "objective" standards of rationality is gone and we are ensnared in the immanence of our own worldviews. In Habermas' view a this-worldly "transcendence from within" is possible. For this Habermas develops his theory of communicative rationality which is based on his views of linguistic communication. Habermas thinks that a look at linguistic communicative action aimed at mutual understanding can give us access to criteria that are this worldly (since there is no supposition of a subject located outside space and time, language is a thing of this world), shared by every human being (since we are linguistic beings). These rationality criteria can help us overcome parochialism into which postmodernism inevitably leads. Thus we can defend a version of universalism and objectivity even after we have given up the philosophy of subject. This is Habermas' position anyway!

Any further thoughts from dear readers are most welcome!
[cross posted at HR]

The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory

2008-05-16T09:36:00.001+10:00

Amy Allen, The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory, Columbia University Press, 2008, 230pp., $34.50 (hbk), ISBN 9780231136228.

Reviewed by J. Jeremy Wisnewski, Hartwick College

In her recent book, Amy Allen tackles one of the persistent problems of post-Foucaultian critical theory: how can we acknowledge the pervasive mechanisms of power in the formation of our identities, and yet still allow for an ideal of autonomous action? This problem -- one that has been a sticking point in the discussion between Foucaultians and Habermasians -- has also come to be an issue of much importance in the feminist literature. The Politics of Our Selves is a persuasive and well-reasoned account of how we might find our way through some difficult -- some might say 'intractable' -- problems of contemporary feminism and critical theory. The book demonstrates that the perceived opposition between power and knowledge is something of a red herring. Recognizing this, moreover, has important consequences for some of feminism's most serious debates -- as well as for understanding the appropriate parameters of a critical theory.

The Politics of Our Selves begins by rethinking the Foucault/Habermas debate -- a debate that centers on the place of critique in the network of power. In reading Foucault's work, where power 'is everywhere' and is that in virtue of which agents are constructed and placed within systems of normalization and subordination, a persistent worry seems to arise: if power is absolutely everywhere, how is it possible to engage in the critique of power in such a way that we might (at least partially) liberate ourselves from the oppressive aspects of power? If power pervades everything, it follows that it pervades rationality, and hence that the use of rationality itself is riddled with the very means of subordination we are trying to overcome. It is precisely this criticism that has been leveled against the Foucaultian enterprise by philosophers like Habermas and Charles Taylor.

full here

Foucault and Spinoza: philosophies of immanence and the decentred political subject

2008-05-10T11:24:00.000+10:00

James Juniper
University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia

Jim Jose
University of Newcastle, Callaghan, NSW 2308, Australia.

Deleuze has suggested that Spinoza and Foucault share common concerns, particularly the notion of immanence and their mutual hostility to theories of subjective intentionality and contract-based theories of state power. This article explores these shared concerns. On the one hand Foucault's view of governmentality and its re-theorization of power, sovereignty and resistance provide insights into how humans are constituted as individualized subjects and how populations are formed as subject to specific regimes or mentalities of government. On the other, Spinoza was concerned with how humans organized themselves into communities capable of self-government. In particular, his idea of immanent causality was crucial because central to his ideas of freedom and power. We argue that Spinoza's approach to power and causality prefigures ideas developed by Foucault in his theory of governmentality, especially with respect to his biopolitical rethinking of power and resistance.

Key Words: causality • freedom • governmentality • immanence • power • subject • transcendence

from here

Drugs, Sport, Anxiety and Foucauldian Governmentality

2008-04-14T23:41:00.001+10:00

Abstract

This paper1 uses concepts of anxiety and Foucauldian governmentality to investigate the ways that the discourses supporting the ban on performance-enhancing drugs in sport have been manipulated and broadened to treat this issue as a public policy and health issue rather than an example of rule violation in sport. Some effects of this expansion include the broadening of drug testing to include testing for recreational drugs, the intrusion of both central governments and scientific experts into the issue and the curtailment of civil liberties for athletes. A further effect has been the perpetration of injustices against athletes under the guise of such injustices being necessary to maintain the integrity of sport.

Keywords: drugs; sport; Foucault; governmentality

from here

Foucault's Kantian critique

2008-04-08T01:11:00.000+10:00

Christina Hendricks
University of British Columbia, Canada

In several lectures, interviews and essays from the early 1980s, Michel Foucault startlingly argues that he is engaged in a kind of critical work that is similar to that of Immanuel Kant. Given Foucault's criticisms of Kantian and Enlightenment emphases on universal truths and values, his declaration that his work is Kantian seems paradoxical. I agree with some commentators who argue that this is a way for Foucault to publicly acknowledge to his critics that he is not, as some of them charge, attempting a total critique of Enlightenment beliefs and values, but is instead attempting to transform them from within. I argue further that Foucault's self-professed Kantianism can also productively be read as a means of encouraging change in his intellectual audience, a call to courage to take up the thread of Enlightenment thought that Foucault finds in Kant's essay, `What is Enlightenment?': that of directing one's philosophical efforts towards questioning and transforming one's own present in its historical specificity, for the sake of promoting the values of freedom and autonomy therein. Though much of Kant's philosophical work is focused on that which lies outside of history, Foucault locates in some of it a concern for what is happening here and now that, I argue, he encourages his audience to take up for themselves through tracing his own intellectual lineage to Kant. In so doing, he encourages contemporary philosophers to consider the value and effects of their work on the present social and political contexts in which they live.

from here

Ideology as pure negativity

2008-04-03T00:46:00.002+11:00

“In traditional Marxist analyses, ideology is a sort of negative element through which the fact is conveyed that the subject’s relation to truth, or simply the knowledge relation, is clouded, obscured, violated by conditions of existence, social relations, or the political forms imposed on the subject of knowledge from the outside. Ideology is the mark, the stigma of these political or economic conditions of existence on a subject of knowledge who rightfully should be open to truth.

What I intend to show . . . [is that], in actual fact, the political and economic conditions of existence are not a veil or an obstacle for the subject of knowledge but the means by which subjects of knowledge are formed, and hence are truth relations. There cannot be particular types of subjects of knowledge, orders of truth, or domain of knowledge except on the basis of political conditions that are the very ground on which the subject, the domains of knowledge, and the relations with truth are formed. Only by shedding these grand themes of the subject of knowledge – imputed to be at once originary and absolute – and perhaps by using the Nietzschean model, will we be able to do a history of truth.”

Truth and Jurdical Forms, p. 15, emphasis added.

It’s interesting to note that even in these 1973 lectures Foucault stays clear of the negative conception of freedom.

Related posts:

Foucault's critique of "Ideology" and "Repression"

Foucault, Marx and Marxism

Colloque sur Deleuze, Foucault et le neoplatonisme (Villejuif, 1-2/04)

2008-03-29T13:32:00.000+11:00

Présence du néoplatonisme dans la philosophie française contemporaine :

Deleuze-Foucault.

Journées d’études organisées par Alain PETIT et Sylvain ROUX

1-2 avril 2008,

Centre Jean Pépin (CNRS/UPR 76)

7, rue Guy Môquet, 94801Villejuif

Métro : ligne 7, station : Villejuif Paul Vaillant-Couturier

Programme :

Mardi 1 avril :

Hénologie, ontologie, immanence

-09 h 30 : Camille RIQUIER (Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne) : « Pour une lecture néoplatonicienne de l’histoire de la métaphysique : Bergson, Ravaisson, Deleuze ».

-10 h 30 : Guillaume SIBERTIN-BLANC (Université de Lille) : « Au-delà de l’être, évènement, conversion : la leçon du néoplatonisme dans la pensée deleuzienne de l’immanence ».

-14 h 30: Marc ROELLI (Université de Darmstadt) : « To bring ontology to an end. Deleuze’s critique of (neo)platonism ».

-15 h 30 : Matthias VOLLET (Université de Mayence) : « De Plotin par Bergson à Deleuze : l’Un multiple virtuel ».

Mercredi 2 avril :

La vie, le soi, la subjectivation

-09 h 30 : Gwenaëlle AUBRY (Centre Jean Pépin, CNRS/UPR 76) : « Vie et virtualité chez Deleuze et Plotin : différences et répétitions ».

-10 h 30 : Isabelle KOCH (Université d’Aix-Marseille) : « Quelle est la singularité du moment néoplatonicien dans l’Herméneutique du sujet ? »

-14 h 30 : Sylvain ROUX (Université de Poitiers) : « Subjectivation, assujettissement et connaissance de soi chez Plotin et Foucault ».

-15 h 30 : Alain PETIT (Université de Clermont-Ferrand) : « La disparition de soi. Le Plotin secret de Foucault ».

Education effect

2008-03-20T14:42:00.000+11:00

"In the introduction to Animal Farm he said, England is a free society, but it's not very different from the totalitarian monster I have been describing. He says in England unpopular ideas can be suppressed without the use of force. Then he goes on to give some dubious examples. At the end he turns to a very brief explanation, actually two sentences, but they are to the point. He says, one reason is the press is owned by wealthy men who have every reason not to want certain ideas to be expressed. And the second reason -- and I think a more important one -- is a good education. If you have gone to the best schools and graduated from Oxford and Cambridge, and so on, you have instilled in you the understanding that there are certain things it would not do to say; actually, it would not do to think. That is the primary way to prevent unpopular ideas from being expressed.

The ideas of the overwhelming majority of the population, who don't attend Harvard, Princeton, Oxford and Cambridge, enable them to react like human beings, as they often do. There is a lesson there for activists."

full here

Eagleton a Foucauldian or a Heideggerian?

2008-03-11T10:48:00.001+11:00

"The dethroning of God was not only the elevation of art. It was also the invention of Man. Because God had created human beings in his own image and likeness – that is to say, fashioned them as free – they were now able to press that freedom to its limit by abolishing the source of it and installing themselves in his place. Man was now the transcendent peak of creation, owing almost as little as the Almighty had to nature and biology. As Nietzsche scornfully pointed out, surprisingly little was thereby altered. Instead, the religion of Yahweh gave way to Feuerbach’s religion of humanity. There was still a stable metaphysical centre to the world; it was just that it was now us rather than a deity. Idolatry accordingly gave way to narcissism. In Nietzsche’s view, the toppling of God, if it were to constitute a genuine revolution, would have to involve the subversion of Man as we know him as well. Otherwise God would simply live a shadowy afterlife in the form of suburban morality.

Like aesthetics, then, humanism was covertly theological all along. It had its satanic side too, as humanity came to lord it destructively over its world with all the imperiousness that had once been ascribed to God. Moreover, just as creation is a delight in itself, so can destruction be. The two are closer than the naive Romantic supposes. The devil is a fallen angel. To destroy just for the hell of it, without any purposeful end in mind, is what is traditionally known as evil.

As Freud often pointed out, there is at the heart of humanity an impulse which yearns to tear it apart simply for the obscene pleasure of doing so. In this sense, creation is far from a purely benign idea. Throwing a brick through a stained glass window may be a perversely creative impulse, one which for some people would be far more delectable than actually designing the thing. We learn early on that smashing things up is a keen source of pleasure. If Satan is classically seen in a sulk, it is because God has kept the act of creation for himself, leaving the devil with nothing but destruction, a malicious parody of creation. Destruction may be a joy, but it means that the devil is always belated in relation to his divine antagonist. He has to depend on God to bring things into being so that he can annihilate them. And this means he can never be his own man – even though, as Conrad reminds us, Milton’s Satan declares himself to be ‘self-begot, self-raised’.

What the humanist parallel between the infinity of Man and the eternity of God overlooked was that God is traditionally thought to be in love with the fleshly, frail and finite – a doctrine known as the Incarnation. Once Man had emancipated himself from this belief, however, he was free to persuade himself that he was boundless. As such, he found himself in perpetual danger of developing too fast, over-reaching himself and bringing himself to nothing, as in the myth of the Fall. The consequence of forgetting one’s limits is hubris. There is a traditional cure for this oblivion known as tragic art, but it is a therapy almost as devastating as the sickness itself.

As a self-declared secular humanist, Conrad seems attracted by the idea of a divine spark in Man. He writes with implicit disapproval of St Augustine’s comment that created things should not presume to create. What they should not presume to create above all, however, is themselves. The myth that human beings are self-originating and self-fashioning lies at the root of a great deal of human disaster. In Shakespeare, those who regard themselves as authors of themselves, stiffly denying all human dependency, are either villains or tragically wrong-headed. In psychoanalytic thought, those who reject their parentage for the fantasy of being self-begotten are disavowing their birth, and in doing so hope to shuck off their mortality as well. For some postmodern thinkers, we are clay in our own hands, artist and artefact together, free to mould our bodies and psyches into whatever shapes we find most appealing. Behind a belief in the endless plasticity of the world lies a rather less congenial faith in an iron will which stamps its imprint on these shapes. Self-authorship is the bourgeois fantasy par excellence; and even though the bourgeoisie as Freud knew it has almost vanished from Europe, this middle-class myth is alive and well in the rugged individualism of the United States. The American Dream acknowledges no limits. When the ancient Greeks heard talk of such infinite striving, they looked fearfully to the sky."

full here

Foucault colloquium

2008-03-11T10:42:00.002+11:00

Foucault colloquium - available online

The link courtesy of Nicolae.

The Birth of Biopolitics

2008-03-01T20:44:00.001+11:00

A sample chapter

h/t Foucault blog

Habermas and Foucault: Discourse and Modernity

2008-02-28T10:47:00.001+11:00

A Masters dissertation on Foucault and Habermas (download from here)

The Bibliography is here

source: The Schizo-Stroller

Foucault's Heidegger: Philosophy and Transformative Experience

2008-02-27T17:18:00.000+11:00

Timothy Rayner, Foucault's Heidegger: Philosophy and Transformative Experience, Continuum, 2007, 166pp., $120.00 (hbk), ISBN 0826494862.

Reviewed by C. G. Prado, Queen's University

Excerpt

"One of the best theses I supervised was titled Foucault's Failure of Nerve: From Genealogy to Ethics. (Bronwyn Singleton, 1998) It argued that Foucault's shift from genealogy to ethics was a retreat from the bleakness of his vision of power and normalization. I think this is right,s that in his ethical thought Foucault rather anxiously strove to achieve what Rayner presents as much more gradually evolved aspirations. I do not see Foucault's last two books as capping a progressive development of thought; I see them as an attempt to reintroduce a measure of self-definition. As for what is of greatest value in Foucault's intellectual career, I agree with Rorty that "the most valuable part" of Foucault's work was showing how modern societies' "patterns of acculturation" have imposed on us "constraints of which older, premodern societies had not dreamed." (1989, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 63) In the end, Rayner's Heideggerian Foucault is simply safer than the Nietzschean Foucault because emphasizing Heidegger blunts and obscures the nihilism inherent in his genealogical analytics."

full here

Michel Foucault: - The Mythical Leader of the Iranian Revolt

2008-02-20T11:39:00.001+11:00

"After I left Iran, the question that I was constantly asked was, of course, 'Is this revolution?' (This is the price at which, in France, an entire sector of public opinion becomes interested in that which is 'not about us.') I did not answer, but I wanted to say that it is not a revolution, not in the literal sense of the term, not a way of standing up and straightening things out. It is the insurrection of men with bare hands who want to lift the fearful weight, the weight of the entire world order that bears down on each of us, but more specifically on them, these oil workers and peasants at the frontiers of empires. It is perhaps the first great insurrection against global systems, the form of revolt that is the most modern and the most insane.

One can understand the difficulties facing the politicians. They outline solutions, which are easier to find than people say. They range from a pure and simple military regime to a constitutional transformation that would lead from a regency to a republic. All of them are based on the elimination of the shah. What is it that the people want? Do they really want nothing more? Everybody is quite aware that they want something completely different. This is why the politicians hesitate to offer them simply that, which is why the situation is at an impasse. Indeed, what place can be given, within the calculations of politics, to such a movement, to a movement through which blows the breath of a religion that speaks less of the hereafter than of the transfiguartion of this world?"

full here
the link courtesy of Foucault blog

Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and its Intensifications since 1984

2008-02-20T11:19:00.000+11:00

"There is a witless, though common, interpretation of Michel Foucault circulating these days. It is an interpretation that seeks to declaw Foucault's political radicalism and bring him into the liberal fold. On this interpretation, Foucault abandoned the analysis of power constructed during his genealogical period (false) because it had a totalizing character that left no room for resistance (false) in favor of a sort of individual self-construction that he found in the ancient Greeks (false). If Jeffrey Nealon had done no more than recall to us the vapidity of this interpretation, he would have performed a service. However, he has done much more than this. In his slim volume on Foucault, he has offered a fascinating interpretation of Foucault's work, one that brings to light previous neglected elements of his thought. Although the stated motivation for Nealon's discussion is to counter the current interpretation of Foucault's ethical works, the result is one of the most interesting interpretations of Foucault to emerge in many years.

The lynchpin of Nealon's interpretation is the concept of intensification. Nealon argues that an understanding of that concept will enlighten us on the trajectory of Foucault's middle and late periods, from power to biopower and from genealogy to ethics.

For Foucault, this charting of emergent modes of power is hardly a story of progress or Enlightenment, but a story of what he calls the increasing "intensity" (intensité) of power: which is to say its increasing "lightness" and concomitant "economic" viability, in the broadest sense of the word "economic." Power's intensity most specifically names its increasing efficiency within a system, coupled with increasing saturation. (p. 32)

The history of power, in short, is a history of a force (applied against the force of resistance) that becomes more supple and more suffused."

full here

Two different conceptions of submission

2008-01-23T23:28:00.000+11:00

In the Hebrew conception, God being a shepherd, the flock following him complies to his will, to his law. Christianity, on the other hand, conceived the shepherd-sheep relationship as one of individual and complete dependence. This is undoubtedly one of the points at which Christian pastorship radically diverged from Greek thought. If a Greek had to obey, he did so because it was the law, or the will of the city. If he did happen to follow the will of someone in particular (a physician, an orator, a pedagogue), then that person had rationally persuaded him to do so. And it had to be for a strictly determined aim: to be cured, to acquire a skill, to make the best choice. In Christianity, the tie with the shepherd is an individual one. It is personal submission to him. His will is done, not because it is consistent with the law, and not just as far as it is consistent with it, but, principally, because it is his will.

Michel Foucault, Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of Political Reason

'Foucault Across the Disciplines'

2008-01-22T20:13:00.001+11:00

An interdisciplinary Foucault conference, to be held on March 1-2, 2008 at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Conference presenters include: Ian Hacking, Paul Rabinow, Arnold Davidson (tentatively),Hayden White, Martin Jay, Jana Sawicki, Amy Allen, Mark Poster, David Hoy, and many others.

A complete list of speakers is available on our conference webpage

Foucault and Habermas

2008-01-11T18:24:00.000+11:00

Habermas' and Foucault's approaches have many similarities and they share basic commitment to the project of freedom. Where they disagree is how to justify this project. For Habermas this requires proving non contingency of the project of freedom because he thinks that without this one cannot claim universal validity for such a project. For Foucault however the project is essentially contingent. However, this doesn't make the project less important or less dignified. Within this broader context, Habermas' and Foucault's respective projects take different shapes. True to his intent Habermas' whole project can be seen as trying to develop a theory of rationality (broadly construed in both theoretical and practical senses) from philosophical as well as sociological angles, from synchronic as well as diachronic viewpoints. Foucault on the other hand is more "practical." He takes our essential task to be not so much "seeking to make possible a metaphysics that has finally become a science" but rather "to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom." The task is to make possible the real exercise of freedom. This is a practical task and a difficult task. Archeology and genealogy are tools for making this difficult and precarious work of freedom possible. The project of freedom cannot rely on metaphysical or scientific certainties, nor on the promise of utopias. The only guarantee of freedom is freedom itself.

related posts

Education is Ignorance

2008-01-06T04:39:00.000+11:00

Mass education was designed to turn independent farmers into docile, passive tools of production. That was its primary purpose. And don't think people didn't know it. They knew it and they fought against it. There was a lot of resistance to mass education for exactly that reason. It was also understood by the elites. Emerson once said something about how we're educating them to keep them from our throats. If you don't educate them, what we call "education," they're going to take control -- "they" being what Alexander Hamilton called the "great beast," namely the people. The anti-democratic thrust of opinion in what are called democratic societies is really ferocious. And for good reason. Because the freer the society gets, the more dangerous the great beast becomes and the more you have to be careful to cage it somehow.

full here

The use of history

2007-12-27T19:38:00.000+11:00

. . . experience has taught me that the history of various forms of rationality is sometimes more effective in unsettling our certitudes and dogmatism than is abstract criticism. For centuries, religion couldn’t bear having its history told. Today, our schools of rationality balk at having their history written, which is no doubt significant.

from here

Power and Political Spirituality

2007-12-21T19:52:00.000+11:00

MICHIEL LEEZENBERG
Power and Political Spirituality:
Michel Foucault on the Islamic Revolution in Iran

FoucaultÕs writings on the Islamic revolution in Iran have not received the critical attention they deserve.1 Published in Italian and French periodicals between the autumn of 1978 and the spring of 1979, they may be seen as exercises in contemporary history or, as Foucault himself called it, Ôjournalism of ideasÕ; as such, they form an interesting complement to his other forays into cultural history, which deal with temporally more remote, but specifically European events and institutions. By and large, however, these articles have been either passed over in a slightly embarrassed silence, or taken as proof that FoucaultÕs enthusiasm for oppositional movements led him to uncritically applaud dictatorial regimes. Both attitudes, I believe, are mistaken: I hope to show that these journalistic writings indeed have a rather problematic status within FoucaultÕs work as a whole, but not for any such obvious reasons. I make no apologies for trying, in a perhaps rather un-Foucauldian manner, to locate them in his oeuvre. Further, not being a specialist on either Foucault or the Iranian revolution, I hope to avoid the two opposing risks of burying difficulties under apologetic exegesis and of merely pointing out alleged Ôfactual errorsÕ at the expense of more interesting theoretical questions.

The truth is . . .

2007-12-21T19:41:00.000+11:00

"The fact is, capitalism penetrates much more deeply into our existence." Truth and Juridical Forms, p.86.

I think this very realisation makes Foucault’s analysis of capitalism much more penetrating.

resistance and the fear of assimilation

2007-12-20T14:52:00.000+11:00

One theme that is constant in Foucault is the fear that movements of resistance to capitalism would be incorporated or assimilated into the system. In Foucault’s earlier work this emanates from anarchistic tendencies in Foucault:

“Anyone who attempts to oppose the law in order to found a new order, to organize a second police force, to institute a new state will encounter the silent and infinitely accommodating welcome of the law.” (The thoughts from outside, p. 450).

In Foucault’s later writings the theme of incorporation matures and deepens. Foucault is no longer deluded that a state-less society is possible. This is due to several factors. The primary factor, however, is Foucault’s move towards a more positive understanding of the conception of power and freedom.

Foucault's historical method

2007-12-15T18:19:00.000+11:00

"In his Archaeology of Knowledge Foucault questions, in particular, the concepts by means of which we normally denote historical continuities. `We must question those ready-made syntheses, those groupings that we normally accept before any examination’, he writes, `we must oust those forms and obscure forces by which we usually link the discourse of one man with that of another.’ His doubts aim also at terms like `school’ , `movement’ , and `tradition’ . But his purpose is not to throw everything into skeptical doubt ; it is rather to alert us to the need for methodological rigor .

Foucault insists that we cannot accord to such terms an `unqualified,spontaneous value’ . He proposes that we must concern ourselves, instead, in the first instance with statements, not with individual statements as analytic philosophers tend to do but with whole populat ions of them and their internal relations. These populations of statements do not form a single, unified, undifferentiated field, but fall into what appear to be naturally circumscribed discursive groupings. Statements belonging to one and the same discursive formation must share, in the first place, a common subject-matter. In these statements the same `objects’ are `named, circumscribed, analysed, then rectified, re-defined, challenged, erased’ . But for two statements to belong to the same discursive formation they must, according to Foucault, also
employ the same concepts and be concerned with the same argumentative strategies, i.e. they must agree in `the systematically different ways of treating objects of discourse’ and `of manipulating concepts’ . Finally, Foucault says, we must also consider who speaks, what the speaker’s position is, and what the sites are from which the subject is speaking. By this he means not to single out particular historical figures and locations, but the socially defined locations in which statements are made. Four factors determine then whether two statements belong to the same discourse. Foucault calls them, respectively, the formation of object, concepts, strategies, and enunciative modalities."

Sluga, What has history to do with me? Inquiry, 41, p. 104-105.

Franceso Guala on Foucault's Biopolitics

2007-12-15T17:54:00.000+11:00

"The title of this book is rather misleading. “Birth of neoliberal governmentality”, or something like that, would have been more faithful to its contents. In Foucault’s vocabulary, “biopolitics” is the “rationalisation” of “governmentality” (p. 261): it’s the theory, in other words, as opposed to the art (governmentality) of managing people. The mismatch between title and content is easily explained: the general theme of the courses at the Collège de France had to be announced at the beginning of
each academic year. It is part of the mandate of every professor at the Collège, however, that his lectures should follow closely his current research. As a consequence it wasn’t unusual for Foucault to take new directions while he was lecturing. In 1979, for the first and only time in his career, he took a diversion into contemporary political philosophy. His principal object of investigation
became “neoliberal” political economy. More precisely, he got increasingly interested in those strands of contemporary liberalism that use economic science both as a principle of limitation and of inspiration for the management of people.

Naissance de la biopolitique is the latest instalment in a series of publications that will eventually cover Foucault’s entire period as “Chair of the History of Systems of Thought” at the Collège de France (1970-1984). The books are based on tapes recorded by students and other members of the audience, edited using Foucault’s own notes, and complemented by comprehensive bibliographical
material. The course of 1978-1979 is not Foucault’s only engagement with economic science, of course, for a decade earlier he had devoted many pages of The Order of Things (1966) to outline the transition of economics from immature to mature science. As we shall see however there are several differences between Foucault’s perspective in The Order and in Naissance, which make the latter much more interesting quite independently of its topical character."

full here

from here

Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies

2007-12-13T13:03:00.000+11:00

"Deeply informed by both contemporary feminist theory and Michel Foucault's genealogical method and analytics of power, Cressida Heyes' Self-Transformations presents an extended consideration of a set of bodily practices that are increasingly common in North America, namely, sex reassignment surgeries and related sex-transformational regimes, dieting for the purpose of weight-loss, and cosmetic surgeries such as face-lift, liposuction, gastric bypass, and rhinoplasty. The book's discussion of these practices is interesting, nuanced, and politically sensitive. Heyes does an excellent job of reviewing the academic debates surrounding them and explicating the objections that many feminist social critics have made to them. But she doesn't stop there. She also critically, yet sympathetically, examines the claims and reports of those who take up these techniques and technologies and use them in their own projects of self-transformation. And she even goes so far as to take up one such practice herself, enrolling for a ten-month stint in Weight Watchers. Her descriptions in every case are vivid and compelling, and her prose is clear and honest, as well as often quietly amusing.

...

Heyes' book not only makes an important argument regarding feminist theory and strategy. It also addresses a controversial point in Foucault scholarship. Many scholars have seen a radical break in Foucault's work from the genealogies of power networks in the mid-1970s (Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1) to the last two volumes of the mid-1980s (The Use of Pleasure, The Care of the Self). In those last two works Foucault turns his attention away from the vast networks of biopower that produce subjectivity as subjection and toward the lives of free individuals and their life-shaping ethical choices. Some commentators have seen this shift as a radical departure, a retreat, or a betrayal (113). But Heyes contends that there is no discontinuity here at all. On the contrary, Foucault's account of subjectivity always included the possibility of resistance and uncertainty of outcome. Power networks are always unstable, he maintains, and subjects are almost always in a position to alter those networks to some degree by failing or refusing to repeat the patterns that define them. Foucault does not implicitly reject his work on biopower, then; his later work constitutes an effort to find ways in which subjects within regimes of power engage in self-transformative disciplines. Had he not died at the age of fifty-seven, he might well have moved beyond study of subjects in the ancient world to subjects in contemporary biopolitical networks. This is, in fact, exactly what Heyes herself does. Her book clearly brings together Foucault's work on biopower and normalization with his work on ethics and care of the self. Thus it constitutes, as well as makes, a powerful argument for her interpretation of Foucault's accounts of power and subjectivity in the 1970s and 1980s.

In sum, Cressida Heyes has produced a book that should be of great value to Foucault specialists as well as to feminist readers not well acquainted with Foucault. It is accessible and brief enough for undergraduate students, but original and compelling enough to hold the interest and perhaps spark the imaginations of professional philosophers and social theorists. This book deserves a place in every library."

full here

History and revolution

2007-12-13T01:28:00.000+11:00

Foucault:

The man in revolt is ultimately inexplicable. There must be an uprooting that interrupts the unfolding of history, and its long series of reasons why, for a man ’really’ to prefer the risk of death over the certainty of having to obey.

Zizek:

One should be aware of the Kantian connotation of these propositions: revolt is an act of freedom which momentarily suspends the nexus of historical causality, i.e., in revolt, the noumenal dimension transpires.

Deleuze:

It is fashionable these days to condemn the horrors of revolution. It's nothing new; English Romanticism is permeated by reflections on Cromwell very similar to present-day reflections on Stalin. They say revolutions turn out badly. But they're constantly confusing two different things, the way revolutions turn out historically and people's revolutionary becoming. These relate to two different sets of people. Men's only hope lies in a revolutionary becoming: the only way of casting off their shame or responding to what is intolerable.

Foucault:

The Iranian movement did not experience the ‘law’ of revolutions that would, some say, make the tyranny that already secretly inhabited them reappear underneath the blind enthusiasm of the masses. What constituted the most internal and the most intensely lived part of the uprising touched, in an unmediated fashion, on an already overcrowded political chessboard, but such contact is not identity. The spirituality of those who were going to their deaths has no similarity whatsoever with the bloody government of a fundamentalist clergy. The Iranian clerics want to authenticate their regime through the significations that the uprising had. It is no different to discredit the fact of the uprising on the grounds that there is today a government of mullahs. In both cases, there is ‘fear,’ fear of what just happened last Fall in Iran, something of which the world had not seen an example for a long time.

from here (pp. 10-11)

A deeply mistaken account of Foucault's interpretation of Iran

2007-12-10T21:54:00.000+11:00

A fine review of the recent book on Foucault and Iranian revolution. Far better than four or five "official" review I have read:

"This book has three elements. A full third is a compilation of Foucault's writings and interviews on Iran. It is a valuable addition to the Foucault literature. Second, there is a historical recounting of Islamism as it pertains to the Iranian revolution. I do not have the expertise to comment on this.* The third element, which frames the book, is an extended argument that in Foucault's reading of the Iranian revolution his own larger philosophical perspective is revealed. This element, which I do have expertise in, is comically bad.

The authors claim that Foucault values traditional forms of life over modern ones, and thus embraces (like the radical Islamists) a return to the past. In order to make their case, the authors resort to three strategies. First, they neglect Foucault's own statements about his writings. For instance, the authors insist that he saw ancient Greek sexual life as superior to ours, which Foucault explicitly denies. Second, they engage in egregious misinterpretation. For example, they read Foucault's book on the prisons as a plea for earlier forms of punishment. The first few pages of the prison book, detailing the excruciating torture of an attempted regicide, should be enough to convince anyone of the paucity of that interpretation. Finally, they misread Foucault's own sentences, in one case (p. 16) citing a long quote and then interpreting it as meaning something opposed to what it actually says.

Foucault insisted throughout his life that his work sought to deny the view that history naturally progresses from the worse to the better. The authors seem to think that this means that his view of history was that it moved from the better to the worse. It is harder to imagine a more fundamental mistake in the interpretation of Foucault's work.

All of this is unfortunate, particularly since Foucault, normally an astute observer of events, sorely misread the Iranian revolution. This requires explanation. The authors have provided the resources on which to base such an explanation. However, given their inability to understand even the basics of Foucault's work, the explanation itself will have to await another book."

from here
==

None of the reviewers I read had humility to say even that!

Key concepts

2007-12-08T23:55:00.000+11:00

Brief definitions of key Foucauldian terms here

A sample:

apparatus (dispositif)
Foucault generally uses this term to indicate the various institutional, physical and administrative mechanisms and knowledge structures, which enhance and maintain the exercise of power within the social body. The original French term dispositif is rendered variously as 'dispositif', 'apparatus' and 'deployment' in English translations of Foucault's work

archaeology
'Archaeology' is the term Foucault used during the 1960s to describe his approach to writing history. Archaeology is about examining the discursive traces and orders left by the past in order to write a 'history of the present'. In other words archaeology is about looking at history as a way of understanding the processes that have led to what we are today.

man more here

michel-foucault.com

2007-12-08T16:28:00.000+11:00

Professor Clare O'Farrell has done a complete redesign and update of her great Foucault website and has given it a new title michel-foucault.com.

The web site can be accessed fromhere

Foucault and Humanism

2007-12-05T02:19:00.000+11:00

"What Foucault means by [humanism] shifts somewhat throughout his work, but generally he is referring to various modern conceptions of what human beings are by nature. Instead of seeing human beings as having a true self, Foucault, following Nietzsche, sees all views of human nature as the expression of contingent histories and social practices. Any particular theory of what a person ought to be like by nature is false, and has effects of constraining human possibilities and marginalizing those who fall outside this "nature. "

A prominent aspect of humanism, one which Foucault is particularly concerned with attacking, involves references to a "normal" individual based on the scientific discourses of psychiatry or criminology. By legitimating what is done in prisons and asylums, the categories of humanism "dispel the shock of daily occurrences ." Humanism is also the legitimating force behind liberal democracy. It tells people that although they do not have power, they are still the rulers:

In short, humanism is everything in Western civilization that restricts the desire for power: it prohibits the desire for power and excludes the possibility of power being seized

"

Foucault and the Politics of Resistance, pp. 451-52."The humanist question, ‘What Is Man?’, assumes that man has an ahistorical essence, and thus eliminates the possibility of critique, of reflexive self-creation and autonomy."

Duschinsky Foucault’s Writings on the Iranian Revolution, p. 554.

Rationality, Dialogue, and Critical Inquiry

2007-11-30T01:21:00.000+11:00

Rationality, Dialogue, and Critical Inquiry: Toward a Viable
Postfoundationalist Stance

Abstract: Given the long-standing and deeply rooted intertwinement between reason and philosophy,there is a pressing need to reappraise our operative conceptions of rationality and critical inquiry in the wake of the transition from foundationalism to postfoundationalism. For while opening up exciting new vistas, this transition poses perplexing problems regarding how we might go about justifying our knowledge claims without the possibility of recourse to incontrovertible foundations, indubitable starting points, or algorithmic procedures. The challenge is all the more acute given that the turn to language and intersubjectivity that characterises this transition has fostered the proliferation of a diversity of competing and allegedly self-validating worldviews, that render the encounter with difference an indispensable feature of the contemporary epistemological landscape while reinforcing the threat of relativism and groundlessness. Through engaging with the work of Jurgen Habermas, Hans-Georg Gadamer and Michel Foucault, three theorists widely recognized as major contributors to the contemporary debate, the present paper responds to these problems by seeking to delineate the constitutive features of a dialogically-oriented conception of rationality and critical inquiry capable of meeting postfoundationalist needs. In the process, it reinforces the advantages of the reading these theorists as complementary rather than as oppositional, as has typically been the case.

Keywords: Rationality; Foundationalism; Postfoundationalism; Habermas; Gadamer; Foucault

Read the paper in full here

Ten best books on Foucault

2007-11-28T23:38:00.000+11:00

Here is my (tentative list), any suggestions, counter lists etc. are most welcome (the books blow are not in any particular order). Also, I have limited myself to books in English.

1) Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics

2) Foucault's Archaeology: Science and the History of Reason

3) Michel Foucault's Critical Project : Between the Transcendental and the Historical

4) Michel Foucault by Didier Eribon

5) The Lives of Michel Foucault

6) Foucault and His Interlocutors

7) Michel Foucault (Core Cultural Theorists series)

8)Foucault by Gilles Deleuze

9) The Cambridge Companion to Foucault

10) Mapping the Present: Heidegger, Foucault and the Project of a Spatial History

==

also of interest:

1) Foucault on Freedom

Foucault on Foucault

2007-11-28T00:17:00.000+11:00

“Anyway, my personal life is not at all interesting. If somebody thinks that my work cannot be understood without reference to such and such a part of my life, I accept to consider the question. I am ready to answer if I agree. As far as my personal life is uninteresting, it is not worthwhile making a secret of it. By the same token, it may not be worthwhile publicizing it.”
Michel Foucault, an Interview with Stephen Riggins, Toronto, 1982.

Text here

insurrection of men with bare hands . . .

2007-11-26T14:28:00.000+11:00

"I wanted to say that it is not a revolution, not in the literal sense of the term, not a way of standing up and straightening things out. It is the insurrection of men with bare hands who want to lift the fearful weight, the weight of the entire world order that bears down on each of us, but more specifically on them, these oil workers and peasants at the frontiers of empires. It is perhaps the first great insurrection against global systems, the form of revolt that is the most modern and the most insane." (Foucault, in Afary and Anderson, 2005: 222).

quoted here from The First Great Insurrection against Global Systems’
Foucault’s Writings on the Iranian
Revolution
Robbie Duschinsky
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY, UK in European Journal of Social Theory 9(4): 547–558.

Michel Foucault, "Revolutionary Action Until Now"

2007-11-26T12:34:00.000+11:00

here
==
excerpts:

FOUCAULT: Knowledge initially implies a certain political conformity in its presentation. In a history course, you are asked to learn certain things and to ignore others: thus, certain things form the content of knowledge and its norms.(1)To give two examples: official knowledge has always represented political power as arising from conflicts within a social class (the dynastic disagreements within the aristocracy or parliamentary conflicts in the middle class) or, perhaps, as a conflict generated between the aristocracy and the middle class. Popular movements, on the other hand, are said to arise from famines, taxes, or unemployment; and they never appear as the result of a struggle for power, as if the masses could dream of a full stomach but never of exercising power. The history of this struggle for power and the manner in which power is exercised and maintained remain totally obscured. Knowledge keeps its distance: this should not be known! To take another example: the workers, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, carried out detailed investigations into their material conditions. This work served Marx for the bulk of his documentation; it led, in large part, to the political and trade-union practices of the proletariat throughout the nineteenth century; it maintains and develops itself through continuing struggles. Yet this knowledge has never been allowed to function within official knowledge. It is not specific processes that have been excluded from knowledge, but a certain kind of knowledge. And if we become aware of it today, it is in a secondary sense: through the study of Marx and those elements in his texts that are most easily assimilated into official knowledge.

Dialogue and Transformation

2007-11-23T12:37:00.000+11:00

Richard Rorty writes:

“My hunch is that our sense of where to connect up Indian and Western texts will change dramatically when and if people who have read quite a few of both begin to write books which are not clearly identifiable as belonging to any particular genre, and are not clearly identifiable either Western or Eastern.” (Cultural otherness, p. 68).

My question is, is Rorty right in thinking that a dialogue with or exposure to the other would lead to transformation of both sides participating in the dialogue? I think it’s one of the possibilities and a remote one. More likely outcome in my opinion would rather be that the dominant partner in the dialogue would take from her lesser partner what is of use to her and modify her position here and there thus enriching herself. The lesser partner in the dialogue would end up (even if unconsciously) incorporating itself in the context of the dominant partner thus diluting its own otherness (which might be good or bad depending on how one sees things in their entirety). This has been the historical trend anyway.

[cross posted at Habermasian]

BORDERLANDS NEW HOME

2007-11-20T02:38:00.000+11:00

BORDERLANDS NEW HOME ::

Borderlands has moved from its original website at the University of
Adelaide. It now has a permanent home at:

http://www.borderlands.net.au/

Please change the Borderlands e-journal address in your favorites and
bookmarks of your internet browser, and inform your library of the
change so the new address can be listed in catalogues and databases.

Resistance Is Surrender

2007-11-12T01:39:00.000+11:00

Slavoj Žižek

"One of the clearest lessons of the last few decades is that capitalism is indestructible. Marx compared it to a vampire, and one of the salient points of comparison now appears to be that vampires always rise up again after being stabbed to death. Even Mao’s attempt, in the Cultural Revolution, to wipe out the traces of capitalism, ended up in its triumphant return.

Today’s Left reacts in a wide variety of ways to the hegemony of global capitalism and its political supplement, liberal democracy. It might, for example, accept the hegemony, but continue to fight for reform within its rules (this is Third Way social democracy).

Or, it accepts that the hegemony is here to stay, but should nonetheless be resisted from its ‘interstices’.

Or, it accepts the futility of all struggle, since the hegemony is so all-encompassing that nothing can really be done except wait for an outburst of ‘divine violence’ – a revolutionary version of Heidegger’s ‘only God can save us.’

Or, it recognises the temporary futility of the struggle. In today’s triumph of global capitalism, the argument goes, true resistance is not possible, so all we can do till the revolutionary spirit of the global working class is renewed is defend what remains of the welfare state, confronting those in power with demands we know they cannot fulfil, and otherwise withdraw into cultural studies, where one can quietly pursue the work of criticism.

Or, it emphasises the fact that the problem is a more fundamental one, that global capitalism is ultimately an effect of the underlying principles of technology or ‘instrumental reason’.

Or, it posits that one can undermine global capitalism and state power, not by directly attacking them, but by refocusing the field of struggle on everyday practices, where one can ‘build a new world’; in this way, the foundations of the power of capital and the state will be gradually undermined, and, at some point, the state will collapse (the exemplar of this approach is the Zapatista movement).

Or, it takes the ‘postmodern’ route, shifting the accent from anti-capitalist struggle to the multiple forms of politico-ideological struggle for hegemony, emphasising the importance of discursive re-articulation.

Or, it wagers that one can repeat at the postmodern level the classical Marxist gesture of enacting the ‘determinate negation’ of capitalism: with today’s rise of ‘cognitive work’, the contradiction between social production and capitalist relations has become starker than ever, rendering possible for the first time ‘absolute democracy’ (this would be Hardt and Negri’s position)."

...

The big demonstrations in London and Washington against the US attack on Iraq a few years ago offer an exemplary case of this strange symbiotic relationship between power and resistance. Their paradoxical outcome was that both sides were satisfied. The protesters saved their beautiful souls: they made it clear that they don’t agree with the government’s policy on Iraq. Those in power calmly accepted it, even profited from it: not only did the protests in no way prevent the already-made decision to attack Iraq; they also served to legitimise it. Thus George Bush’s reaction to mass demonstrations protesting his visit to London, in effect: ‘You see, this is what we are fighting for, so that what people are doing here – protesting against their government policy – will be possible also in Iraq!’

full here

==
A relevant quote (from elsewhere):

"What is at stake . . . is that the object, the target, of socialist transformation is overcoming the power of capital. Capitalism is a relatively easy object in this enterprise because you can in a sense abolish capitalism through revolutionary upheaval and intervention at the level of politics, the expropriation of the capitalist. You have put an end to capitalism but you have not even touched the power of capital when you have done it. Capital is not dependent on the power of capitalism and this is important also in the sense that capital precedes capitalism by thousands of years. Capital can survive capitalism hopefully not by thousands of years, but when capitalism is overthrown in a limited area, the power of capital continues even if it is in a hybrid form. The Soviet union was not capitalist, not even state capitalist. But the Soviet system was very much dominated by the power of capital: the division of labour remained intact, the hierarchical command structure of capital remained. Capital is command system whose mode of functioning is a accumulation-oriented, and the accumulation can be secured in a number of different ways" (Meszaros 1996 p. 54 emphasis retained).

Richard Roty on Foucault

2007-11-04T12:48:00.000+11:00

JA: After reading your article "Paroxysm & Politics" I wondered whether you thought Foucault has been a negative influence on American intellectual discourse.

RR: I think that. Like every other impressive intellectual figure, Foucault has had both good and bad effects. I think he's inspired a lot of very creative work, particularly at Berkeley. He's created a whole school there through other historians, through anthropologists; the literary critics are all more or less Foucaultians — that's quite a remarkable intellectual event. On the other hand, I think that there's a lot of trivialized Foucault doing the rounds in American intellectual circles, so that no matter what anybody says, there's always some silly Foucaultian statement that's in vogue: If you don't mention "power," someone says, "Ah, but you've forgotten power," that kind of thing.

from here

Int: Is that what you meant by "making asses of themselves"?

Rorty: I think that the English departments have made it possible to have a career teaching English without caring much about literature or knowing much about literature but just producing rather trite, formulaic, politicized readings of this or that text. This makes it an easy target. There's a kind of formulaic leftist rhetoric that's been developed in the wake of Foucault, which permits you to exercise a kind of hermeneutics of suspicion on anything from the phonebook to Proust. It's sort of an obviously easy way to write books, articles, and it produces work of very low intellectual quality. And so, this makes this kind of thing an easy target from the outside. It permits people like Roger Kimball and D'Souza to say these people aren't really scholars, which is true. I think that the use made of Foucault and Derrida in American departments of literature had been, on the whole, unfortunate, but it's not their fault. Nobody's responsible for their followers.

Int: You have criticized Foucault and others for their radical politics.

Rorty: What I object to about them is that they never talk in terms of possible legislation, possible national economic policy, things that might actually be debated between political candidates and you might pass a law about or something like that. It seems to me to be a continuation of the '60s attitude that the system is so hopelessly corrupt that you don't really take part in the day-to-day politics. You rise above it and sneer at it. They don't even try to be solutions. They're radical critiques without radical proposals.

from here

Genealogies of European states: Foucauldian reflections

2007-10-28T20:53:00.000+11:00

Abstract

The public lectures given by Foucault at the Collège de France that are only now being published demonstrate that, just before he turned his attention to the history of sexuality, Foucault's thorough historical research had laid out many of the elements needed for a genealogy of modern practices of state governance. This review essay pieces together elements provided in the lectures, and in a few already published writings, to prove that research on state powers and state knowledges can benefit a great deal from a close reading of the lectures.

from here

existence versus being

2007-10-27T01:39:00.001+10:00

So how does Foucault distinguish between the question of "existence" and the question of "being." In discussing the issue of spirituality Foucault contrasts the conditions of knowledge that affect the subject in its concrete existence and the conditions of knowledge that concern the subject in his being. The latter "only concern the individual in his concrete existence, and not the structure of the subject as such." (THOS, p. 18). So it seems that by the being of the subject Foucault means some things that applies to the subject in general and is not restricted to this or that subject.

Related post: How to define spirituality?

losing oneself. . .

2007-10-25T00:34:00.000+10:00

'What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing - with a rather shaky hand - a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.'

Michel Foucault. Archaeology Of Knowledge, Introduction.

The above passage from Archaeology of Knowledge, which shows that the concept of "losing oneself" is not limited to Foucault's later writings. Arnold I. Davidson captures the relation between "losing oneself" and spirituality in the following:

"To bring into effect the practice of thinking differently, to modify oneself through the movements of thought, we have to detach ourselves from the already given systems, orders, doctrines, and codes of philosophy; we have to open up a space in thought for exercises, techniques, tests, the transfiguring space of a different attitude, a new ethos, the space of spirituality itself. We have to prepare ourselves to face events in thought, events in our own thought. That is why Foucault's relentless pursuit of knowledge revolves not around the mere acquisition of knowledge, but around the value of losing one's way for the subject of knowledge ("l'egarement de celui qui connait"), a losing one's way which is the price of self-transformation."

Introduction to THoS, p. xxviii.

How to define spirituality?

2007-10-22T01:07:00.000+10:00

“Spirituality postulates that the truth is never given to the subject by right. Spirituality postulates that the subject as such does not have right to access to the truth and is not capable of access to the truth. It postulates that the truth is not given to the subject by a simple act of knowledge (connaissance), which would be founded and justified simply by the fact that he is the subject and because he possesses this or that structure of subjectivity. It postulates that for the subject to have right of access to the truth he must be changed, transformed, shifted, and become to some extent and up to certain point, other than himself. The truth is only given to the subject at a price that brings the subject’s being into play. For as he is, the subject is not capable of truth. I think that this is the simplest but most fundamental formula by which spirituality can be defined.” (p. 15).

Two quick observations:

1) Foucault defines spirituality in sufficiently general terms in order to find room in it for a very varied variety of pursuits, ambitions and worldviews, ranging from Greek philosophy to medieval Christianity to his own project.

2) Heidegger’s influence is quite clear when he contrasts between subject’s being and its existence. The question of spirituality involves not just the existence of the subject but its being (i.e. its structure as such).

BTW those who have misunderstood or missed the point (1) above have terribly misconstrued Foucault's use of "spirituality" in the context of the Iranian revolution.

. . . not to start with hatred

2007-10-17T23:38:00.000+10:00

'You must not attribute to me the idea that "Muslim spirituality will advantageously replace dictatorship". Since there have been demonstrations and people have been killed in Iran in the name of "Islamic government", it is an elementary duty to ask what content has been given to this term and what animates it... The Islamic problem as a political force is an essential problem for our times and for the years to come. The first condition for approaching it with some measure of intelligence is not to start with hatred.'

Foucault (1978) 'Réponse de Michel Foucault à une lectrice iranienne', Dits et Ecrits, Paris: Gallimard, 1994 t 111, p. 708

'...the "Islamic" movement could set fire to the whole region, overthrow the most unstable regimes and disturb the most solid. Islam which is not simply a religion, but a way of life, a belonging to a history and a civilisation, risks becoming a giant powder keg, on the scale of hundreds of millions of people.'

Foucault, Michel (1979) 'Une poudrière appelée islam', Dits et Ecrits, Paris: Gallimard, t 111, 1994 p. 761

from here

Foucault and Kierkegaard

2007-10-15T15:49:00.000+10:00

Reading through Foucault's lectures on "The Hermeneutics of the Subject" I came across this interesting note from the editors:

"Foucault was a great reader of Kierkegaard, although he hardly ever mentions this author, who nonetheless had for him an importance as secret as it was decisive." (p. 23, note, 46).

Philosophy and spirituality

2007-10-13T15:39:00.000+10:00

“We will call, if you like, “philosophy” the form of thought that asks, not of course that is true and what is false, but what determines that there is and can be truth and falsehood and that one can or cannot separate the true and the false. We will call “philosophy” the form of thought that asks what it is that allows the subject to have access to the truth and which attempts to determine the conditions and limits of the subject’s access to the truth. If we call this “philosophy” then I think we could call “spirituality” the pursuit, practice, and experience through which the subject carriers out the necessary transformations on himself in order to have access to the truth. We will call “spirituality” the set of these pursuits, practices, and experiences, which may be purifications, ascetic exercises, renunciations, conversions of looking, modifications of existence, etcetera, which are not for knowledge but for the subject, for the subject’s very being, the price to be paid for access to the truth.”

The Hermenutics of the Subject, p. 15.

Foucault's politics and bellicosity as a matrix for power relations

2007-10-07T04:33:00.000+10:00

Marcelo Hoffman

From the early to mid-1970s, Michel Foucault posited that power consists of a relation rather than a substance and that this relation is comprised of unequal forces engaged in a warlike struggle against each other, resulting invariably in the domination of some forces over others. This understanding of power, which he retrospectively dubbed `Nietzsche's hypothesis' and `the model of war', underpinned his well-known analyses of disciplinary power. Yet, Foucault in his Collège de France course from the academic year 1975-6, `Society Must Be Defended', suddenly began to call into question this understanding and his doubts about it did not abate well into the late 1970s. In this article, we suggest that his militant politics in the early 1970s sustained his adherence to the war model and that his more cautious political attitude later in the decade underpinned his suspicions about this model.

from here

Different meanings of 'Strategic' in Foucault

2007-10-07T01:44:00.002+10:00

There are at least three distinct meanings of strategic that can be found in Foucault’s usage:

1) Strategic as related to the space of freedom. In this sense Foucault contrasts strategic to what he calls “techne.” (This leads to the study of what could be called "practical systems." Here we are taking as a homogeneous domain of reference not the representations that men give of themselves, not the conditions that determine them without their knowledge, but rather what they do and the way they do it. That is, the forms of rationality that organize their ways of doing things (this might be called the technological aspect) and the freedom with which they act within these practical systems, reacting to what others do, modifying the rules of the game, up to a certain point (this might be called the strategic side of these practices). The homogeneity of these historico-critical analyses is thus ensured by this realm of practices, with their technological side and their strategic side.)

2) Strategic in the sense of instrumentalism (explained earlier here).

3) Strategic as belonging to an ethos, certain value system. This belonging is strategic to the extent that one cannot give ultimate justification for it.

==
Previous posts here

The distinction between practice of freedom and practices of liberation

2007-10-07T00:15:00.000+10:00

I think Professor Hoy hits the nail on the head when he writes:

". . . Foucault distinguishes between practices of freedom and practices of liberation. As I read the passage, Foucault is suspicious of Reich’s idea of liberation, which he thinks is derived from a dubious reading of Freud. “Liberation” in this specific sense seems to imply that there is something already there, one’s true self or one’s innate sexuality, for instance, that has been repressed by power and that just needs to be released. He also thinks that Reich’s notion of liberation rests on the assumption that power is only ever domination. In contrast, practices of freedom do not entail this theory of power as domination, even if they do involve resisting micro‐powers that try to make us conform. However, Foucault is not necessarily opposed to all senses of liberation, so if it is possible to use the term without invoking Reich’s assumptions, I do not think that there would be any strong objection.
;;;
Foucault himself says that there are cases and situations where “liberation and the struggle for liberation are indispensable for the practice of freedom.” The desubjectification will not be followed by anarchy, but by the formation of an ethics of how to live. For ethics is “the reflected [réfléchie] practice of
freedom,” and “freedom is the ontological condition of ethics.” When freedom is informed by reflection, that is ethics. However, Foucault is celebrating an ethics of freedom, not an ethics of duty. In that respect, he looks into a future that is very different from the future faced by Kant."

from here

The limits of dialogical rationality

2007-10-06T23:59:00.000+10:00

Abstract:

Dialogical rationality or dialogical modes of understanding are normally considered to be the preferred modes of understanding the “other,” be that other a culture or another mode of thinking. However, I will argue that the dialogical model of understanding is most efficient in the cases where we have considerable amount of background consensus, i.e., where we are not dealing with the other but what’s “our” own. I will argue that the dialogical model is least efficient when it comes to understanding the other. I shall bring home this point by concentrating on the works of Habermas and Foucault (with occasional references to Gadamer). I shall not be arguing that dialogical mode of understanding is totally irrelevant for understanding the other. However, what I will argue is that it give little or no access when it comes to the crunch issues (the issues that with the “otherness” of the other.)

Critique: Internal or external?

2007-10-06T23:46:00.000+10:00

Abstract:
The concept of “critique” is one of the defining concepts of the post Kantian Philosophy. Today, however, we need to problematise the concept of “critique” by pointing towards the fact that most critical theorists seem to deny the possibility of (or efficacy) of external critique and insist that a critique of Modernity (for example) must be internal. I argue that giving up on the concept of external critique is to give up the concept of critique itself. In order to argue my position I shall first develop the much needed typology of the concept of critique differentiating different meanings of the term critique and paying particular attention to developing a clear cut distinction between immanent critique and internal critique.

An Immanent Transcendental: Foucault, Kant and Critical Philosophy

2007-10-05T02:29:00.001+10:00

by Keith Robinson

"Every philosophy conceals a philosophy; every opinion is also a hiding place, every word also a mask. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil The relation of Foucault’s work to philosophy remains an unsettled issue. Indeed, Foucault sometimes preferred to present himself as ‘the masked philosopher’. Much like Nietzsche’s ‘hermit’, Foucault wrote books to conceal what lies within, a deeper cave behind every cave, ‘a stranger more comprehensive world beyond every surface, an abyss behind every ground, beneath every “foundation”’.1 However, a number of readers of Foucault have noticed that he constantly returned in his published work and interviews to an encounter with Kantian philosophy and the concept of the ‘transcendental’. Although these readers – including Gilles Deleuze, Jürgen Habermas, Beatrice Han, Gary Gutting and others – represent a broad range of interpretations of his work, the idea of the transcendental plays a key role in these readings providing the grounds for the legitimation, critique or disqualification of Foucault’s thought and its relation to philosophy. What is the status of the transcendental in Foucault’s work and what is Foucault’s relation to transcendental philosophy? Is the transcendental just another mask that is temporarily utilized and then abandoned in Foucault’s thought when it became clear that forging a new relation between the transcendental and empirical would eventually lead to insurmountable logical and theoretical difficulties? Or, rather, is there perhaps an attempt on Foucault’s part to ‘restore the forgotten dimension of the transcendental’,2 developing a conception that goes ‘all the way down’, so to speak, an immanent conception of the transcendental consistent with a thought without ground?

Drawing from some of the readings examined here I want to argue for this latter view. Foucault’s philosophy can be understood in terms of the development of his own conception of an immanent transcendental out of resources provided, in part, from Kant’s own work. Foucault’s work could thus be seen as a ‘radical transformation of Kantianism, a re-invention of the critique which Kant betrayed at the same time as he conceived it, a resumption of the critical project on a new basis and with new concepts’.3 Rather than a set of inconsistent, contradictory or viciously circular relations between the transcendental and the empirical, as some of Foucault’s best-known readers have claimed, I argue that in Foucault’s reinvention and transformation of Kantianism he develops an immanent conception of their relation as contingent and differential, a circle in which transcendental elements are immanently ‘caught up in the very things they connect’4 without being reduced to the same or to a simple repetition. By contrasting these differing accounts of the transcendental I will attempt to renew the question of what is at stake in Foucault’s critical project more than twenty years on, as well as raise important questions about the contemporary value of the transcendental, the Kantian legacy and the nature of philosophy itself.

In the first section I introduce the concept of the transcendental in Kant and post-Kantianism, indicating briefly how this has been taken up in contemporary philosophy. In the main section I explicate and contrast interpretations of the transcendental in some of the best-known recent readings of Foucault’s work. In the final section I raise some questions regarding these interpretations, the continuing value of transcendental philosophy and the nature of philosophy itself, and I conclude by laying out the grounds for Foucault’s conception of the immanent transcendental."

from here

Foucauldian struggles and the possibility of system wide resistance

2007-10-04T01:25:00.000+10:00

Abstract:

Foucault is normally thought of as a theorist who through his critique of the Marxist versions of revolution abandons the possibility of revolution altogether. In this paper I challenge this view and argue that Foucault develops a new concept of revolution that aims to avoid the pitfalls of the Marxist conceptions of revolution. This new conception of revolution focuses on the transformation of the “subject” rather than the “object.” (which is not to deny that the “object” would have to transform too with the transformation of the “subject.”) This is due to the fact that our historical situation and our challenges have changed - not because we have had second thoughts about the concept of revolution as such (which we had had anyway!). I describe the changed historical situation through developing a Foucauldian typology of struggles and their nature and relating it to the suggested new conception of revolution. Foucault's revolutionary credentials have been obscured by his peculiar vision of how revolutions occur. Foucault defines revolution as a “different type of codification of the same relations”. Foucault elaborates the implications of this by adding that "there are as many different kinds of revolution . . . as there are possible subversive recodification(s) of power relations". Three types of relations, which constitute the Foucauldian ontology are the ethical relation, the power relation and the knowledge/truth relation. The total transformation from one system of codification to another, according to this version is necessarily a revolutionary process.

A new Foucault blog!

2007-09-30T18:56:00.000+10:00

Foucault's Minions

The soul exists!

2007-08-30T18:23:00.000+10:00

"It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it has reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of power that is exercised on those punished—and in a more general way, on those one supervises, trains and corrects over madmen, children at home and at school, the colonized, over those who are stuck at a machine and supervised for the rest of their lives."

DP: 29

Foucault and resistance: a question.

2007-08-04T10:08:00.000+10:00

"Each of Foucault's major theoretical expositions of the concept of power - his critique of Rusche and Kirchheimer at the beginning of Discipline and Punish, his discussion of the "apparatus [dispositif]" of sexuality in The History of Sexuality, volume 1, and his response to questions posed by Dreyfus and Rabinow in the late essay "How is Power Exercised?" - reiterates various methodological precautions.1
Power, Foucault argues, is not a property, a possession, a commodity one can exchange for something else, a resource, or an institution. Further, power is not a function of law, morality, repression, or the economic base. Commentators have energetically exposed the culprits of these methodological errors, writers and schools of thought whose names Foucault rarely mentions - Durkheim, Weber, classical Marxism,phenomenology, depth hermeneutics, Lukacs, Marcuse and the Frankfurt School, Althusser, and Habermas.2 Foucault's theory of power is closely linked to concrete empirical studies, which in turn contribute to the refinement of his theoretical tools. Such is not the case,however, with Foucault's concept of resistance, which he articulated solely in theoretical terms. Foucault has asserted in essays and interviews that every power relation is accompanied by points of resistance, such that - as he puts it in Volume 1 of the History of Sexuality - "resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power (HS, 95)." But in spite of his repeated theoretical claim that resistance is the "irreducible opposite (HS, 96)" of power, this former concept received little attention in Foucault's historical studies. Why did Foucault insist on the centrality of resistance to all power relations but devote his studies of modernity almost exclusively to an analysis of modern forms of power, without ever examining corresponding forms of resistance?"

Downloadable from here

Foucault on Marx

2007-08-03T11:12:00.000+10:00

Don’t talk to me about Marx any more! I never want to hear anything about that man again. Ask someone whose job it is. Someone paid to do it. Ask the Marxist functionaries. Me, I’ve had enough of Marx.

(Foucault, cited in Eribon :266)

==

“I often quote concepts, texts and phrases from Marx, but without feeling obliged to add the authenticating label of a footnote with a laudatory phrase to accompany the quotation. As long as one does that, one is regarded as someone who knows and reveres Marx, and will be suitably honoured in the so-called Marxist journals. But I quote Marx without saying so, without quotation marks, and because people are incapable of recognising Marx’s texts I am thought to be someone who doesn’t quote Marx. When a physicist writes a work of physics, does he feel it necessary to quote Newton and Einstein?” (P/K p. 52).

==
As far as I’m concerned, Marx doesn’t exist. I mean, the sort of entity constructed around a proper name, signifying at once a certain individual, the totality of his writings, and an immense historical process deriving from him.

(P/K:76)

Foucault Archives

2007-08-01T13:00:00.000+10:00

Foucault Archives are available online

It's available in French, English and Arabic among other languages. It really feels funny to read Foucault in Arabic!

(The link courtesy of Foucault list and Foucault blog).

Habermas and Foucault: Deliberative Democracy and Strategic State Analysis

2007-07-31T18:15:00.000+10:00

Contemporary Political Theory, Volume 6, Number 2, May 2007 , pp. 218-245(28)

Abstract:

The paper explores ways to bring the approaches of J. Habermas and M. Foucault into a productive dialogue. In particular, it argues that Habermas's concept of deliberative democracy can and should be complemented by a strategic analysis of the state as it is found in Foucault's studies of governmentality. While deliberative democracy is a critical theory of democracy that provides normative knowledge about the legitimacy of a given system, it is not well equipped to generate knowledge that could inform the choice of strategies employed by (collective) actors from civil society — especially deliberative democrats — vis-à-vis the state to pursue their goals. This kind of strategic knowledge about strengths and vulnerabilities of a given state is provided by Foucault's reading of the state as driven by varying governing rationalities. Since, particularly in his later works, Habermas finds strategic action normatively acceptable under certain circumstances, I argue that societal actors could profit from an integrated approach that incorporates Foucault's strategic analysis into the framework of deliberative democracy. This approach would yield critical knowledge of both a normative and strategic, action-guiding nature.

Problems with the Critical Posture? Foucault and Critical Discourse

2007-07-31T18:08:00.000+10:00

Problems with the Critical Posture? Foucault and Critical Discourse

Abstract

This paper provides a brief analysis of Michel Foucault’s work on power and governmentality, and mounts the argument that the treatment of these concepts by Foucault is theoretical rather than empirical or historical. Foucault’s approach – a Kantian dialectical approach – allows the social to engulf politics, sovereignty and the state. Ultimately, Foucault follows a Kantian line to a moral critique of society. Given this critical edge to Foucault’s work, it is not surprising that endeavours such as critical discourse analysis use Foucault’s work to ballast their approach. Like Bruno Latour, however, we suspect that the fascination with social and moral critique is exhausted; and we suspect that the commitment to critique masks the understanding of the critic as an historically specific persona, and disallows – on moral grounds – non-teleological descriptive analyses. Rather than critique critique, however – and risk being hoist by our own petard – our purpose here is an exploration of those who adopt the critical persona.

An indigestible meal? Foucault, governmentality and state theory

2007-07-31T17:58:00.000+10:00

An indigestible meal? Foucault, governmentality and state theory by Thomas Lemke

Excerpt:

In his lectures of 1978 and 1979 at the Collège de France, Michel Foucault responded to some Marxist critics who had complained that the “genealogy of power” lacked an elaborated theory of the state.1 Foucault remarked that he had refrained from pursuing a theory of the state “in the sense that one abstains from an indigestible meal” (2004: 78).2 However, a few sentences later Foucault states: “The problem of state formation is at the centre of the questions that I want to pose.” (2004: 79)

This article explores this apparent contradiction and investigates the contribution of an “analytics of government” to state theory. This approach takes up methodological and theoretical considerations that Foucault developed in his “history of ‘governmentality’” (1991a: 102). It has three analytical dimensions. First, it presents a nominalist account that stresses the central importance of knowledge and political discourses in the constitution of the state. Secondly, an analytics of government uses a broad concept of technology that encompasses not only material but also symbolic devices, including political technologies as well as technologies of the self. Third, it conceives of the state as an instrument and effect of political strategies that define the external borders between the public and the private and the state and civil society, and also define the internal structure of political institutions and state apparatuses. After presenting the three analytical dimensions, the last part of the article will compare this theoretical perspective with the concept of governance and with critical accounts
of neo-liberalism.

Foucault and Capitalism: A bibliography

2007-07-31T16:42:00.000+10:00

I want to develop here a bibliography of quality books and articles on the above theme. Any suggestions welcome.

==

Richard Marsden (1999) The Nature of Capital: Marx after Foucault ; London and New York, Routledge.

"The synthesis of Marx and Foucault has traditionally been seen within the social sciences as deeply problematic. The author overturns this received wisdom by subjecting both thinkers to an original re-reading through the lens of the philosophy of critical realism. The result is an illuminating synthesis between Marx's social relations of production and Foucault's disciplinary power from which the author constructs a model of the material causes of our capacity to act. The laws of motion of a society and its microphysics are shown to be complementary parts of a theory of capital, society's genetic code. The Nature of Capital overturns traditional interpretations of Marx, presents an accessible and comprehensive account of the development of his model of capital and demonstrates its ability to explain modern societies."

Capitalism and bio-power

2007-07-31T16:35:00.000+10:00

What occurred in the eighteenth century in some Western countries,an event bound up with the development of capitalism, was a different phenomenon having perhaps a wider impact than the new morality; this was nothing less than the entry of life into history, that is, the entry of phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species into the order of knowledge and power, into the sphere of political techniques… . Western man was gradually learning what it meant to be a living species in a living world, to have a body, conditions of existence, probabilities of life, an individual and collective welfare, forces that could be modified, and a space in which they could be distributed in an optimal manner… . If one can apply the term bio-history to the pressures through which the movements of life and the processes of history interfere with one another, one would have to speak of bio-power to designate what brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of human life (HS–142-43).

Governmentality Resources

2007-07-30T13:11:00.000+10:00

Rethinking governmentality, Stuart Elden

From micro-powers to governmentality: Foucault’s work on statehood, state formation, statecraft and state power

Governing through contingency: The security of biopolitical governance
Pages 41-47 Michael Dillon

Spaces of security: The example of the town. Lecture of 11th January 1978
Pages 48-56 Michel Foucault

from here

Foucault and Enlightenment: A Critical Reappraisal

2007-07-30T12:53:00.000+10:00

Free download Foucault and Enlightenment: A Critical Reappraisal

Becoming somone else . . .

2007-07-23T02:20:00.000+10:00

"I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The
main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you
were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book
what you would say at the end, do you think that you would
have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a
love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile
insofar as we don't know what will be the end."

Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, p. 9.

Power, Moral Values, and the Intellectual

2007-07-18T16:38:00.000+10:00

From the journal History of the Present 4 (Spring 1988), 1-2, 11-13.

This interview was conducted on Nov. 3, 1980, by Michael Bess, a graduate student in the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley. Foucault was in Berkeley to deliver the Howison lectures (“Subjectivity and Truth”) on 20-21 October 1980. Excerpts of this interview appeared in an article written by Bess, and published on 10 November 1980 in the Daily Californian, the Berkeley student newspaper. The interview was conducted in French, and is translated by Michael Bess.

Read the interview here

H/T Professor Clare O'Farrell at Foucault. info.

An unacceptable notion of "strategic"

2007-07-13T00:25:00.000+10:00

In the previous posts I talked about the strategic side of Foucault's work but there is a use of the term "strategic" which Foucault obviously rejects. Here is the relevant quote where Foucault explains this rejection.

"If someone ask me what it is I think I am doing, I would answer: if the strategist is a man who says "what importance does a particular death, a particular cry, a particular uprising have in relation to the great necessity of the whole, and of what importance to me is such-and-such a general principle in the specific situation in which we find ourselves?" then it is indifferent to me whether the strategist is a politician, a historian, a revolutionary, someone who supports the Shah or the ayatollah. My theoretical morality is the opposite. It is "antistratgic": be respectful when singularity rises up, and intransigent when power infringes on the universal." ("Is it useless to revolt" (Inutile de se soulever?). I have quoted here from Eribon, Michel Foucault, pp. 290-91).

What after the "death of God?"

2007-07-13T00:13:00.001+10:00

"The "I" has exploded - we see this in modern literature - this is the discovery of "there is." There is one. In some ways, one comes back to the seventeenth-century point of view, with this difference: not setting man, but anonymous thought, knowledge without a subject, theory with no identity, in God's place." (Foucault, quoted in, Eribon, p. 161).

The neo Kantian link here is obvious!