Philosophy Seminars 2013
The Writing and Society Research Centre and Philosophy@UWS present:
Vanessa Lemm, A Biopolitical Reading of the Philosophical Life in Michel Foucault’s Le courage de la vérité
University of Western Sydney,
Bankstown Campus, Building 3, Room 3.G.54
20 March 2013
3.30-5pm
Abstract:
This paper investigates the relation between truth and the philosophical life in Michel Foucault’s Le courage de la vérité from the perspective of the Nietzschean question: how truth can be incorporated or embodied (einverleibt)? In contrast to the Arendtian idea that the philosophical life was a life that allowed a distance to the body, in order to avoid the problem of totalitarianism, the filling of the empty place of power or sovereignty by the “body” of the People, or what Esposito calls the closure of the political body on itself, this papers argues that in Foucault, and in particular, in his analysis of the philosophical life of the cynics, we finds an idea of the philosophical life where truth is incorporated or embodied. Here the immunitary and communitary resources of embodiment are shown to be necessary for the uniting of life (zoe) and philosophy so as to make possible a form of life (bios) that resists and overcomes the totalitarian government of life.
BIO: Prof. Vanessa Lemm (UNSW) is the author of Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics and the Animality of the Human Being (New York: Fordham 2009, Spanish trans. with Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago de Chile, 2011; German trans. with Diaphanes, Berlin/Zuerich, 2012). She has published a great number of articles on Nietzsche and contemporary political thought. She is currently working on the notion of justice in Nietzsche and Heidegger as well as the relation between life and community in Nietzsche and Esposito.
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