Foucault News

CFP: Session – Geographies of Parrhesia: Resistance, Critique, and the Formation of Self and Other

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Federico Ferretti, University of Bologna

Stephen Legg, University of Nottingham

Session in Royal Geographical Society with IBG Conference, August 2022, Newcastle University.

The influence of Michel Foucault on geographical research is long-standing, widespread, and much critiqued. While his philosophy and practice have influenced geographical research into discourses, institutions, governmentalities, and the ethics of self-formation, this research tends to tell the same story of control. Foucault’s insistence that power was always accompanied by resistance has been much touted but also criticised for its nihilism and apoliticism. In his final years Foucault moved from the language of resistance to that of critique, and finally to the notion of parrhesia (Foucault 1982-83 [2010], 1982-1983 [2019], 1983-84 [2011]), first elaborated most famously by Cynic philosophers of Ancient Greece. Translated as “frank speech”, “speaking truthfully” or the “courage of truth”, parrhesia more broadly represents a political, ethical and philosophical commitment to living a true life and transforming others and the world. This “final Foucault” is attracting increasing discussion in the light of new (re)translations of lectures which “…indisputably constitutes his final major contribution to philosophy.” (Gros 2019, xiii)

Notions of parrhesia can potentially be extended beyond Foucault’s lessons to become operational concepts in the fields of both critical theory and empirical studies on the histories and philosophies of science. Being especially fit to be applied to individuals’ behaviours, the notion of parrhesia can nourish studies on political dissidences and resistances by nonconformist individuals that are increasingly valued after the “(auto)biographical turn” in the history of geography.  

In this panel we build on the existing work of geographers on the late Foucault (Elden 2016), critique (Cadman 2010), and parrhesia itself (Brigstocke 2013, Legg 2018, 2019, Brigstocke 2020, Ferretti 2021, 2022 in press). We welcome geographical interpretations and interrogations of this work, theoretical and/or empirical, which may include:

• Which spaces of politics does an analysis of parrhesia open up?
• What potential does parrhesia have for contributing to debates on spaces of race, gender, or sexuality given Foucault’s near total attention in his last lectures on white(?) heterosexual(?) men?
• Can parrhesia be situated in and explain broader governmentalities?
• Given Foucault’s focus on philosophical not political parrhesia, what politics is there in his study of the agonistic relationships between self and others? Does the philosophical/political parrhesia distinction hold?
• How does the term work with or against notions of critique, counter-contact, resistance or problematisation?
• Can parrhesia become an operational lens to read political dissidence, insubordination and resistance? 
• How can parrhesia help us re-approach histories of the discipline?
• How to deal with biography and autobiography in geography through notions of parrhesia?
• Questions of parrhesia and the archive.
• Beyond philosophy or politics what other forms of parrhesia might we study?

We plan to hold this session in-person. Deadline for titles and abstracts of 200 words February 28^th, sent to federico.ferretti6@unibo.it and stephen.legg@nottingham.ac.uk. 

References

Brigstocke, Julian. 2013. “Artistic Parrhesia and the Genealogy of Ethics in Foucault and Benjamin.”  Theory, Culture & Society 30 (1):57-78. doi: 10.1177/0263276412450467.

Brigstocke, Julian. 2020. “Resisting with authority? Anarchist laughter and the violence of truth.”  Social & Cultural Geography:1-19.

Cadman, L. 2010. “How (not) to be governed: Foucault, critique, and the political.”  Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28 (3):539-556.

Elden, Stuart. 2016. Foucault’s Last Decade. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Ferretti, Federico. 2021. “Parrhesia and female leadership: radical women in Brazilian geography against dictatorship and academic conservatism.”  Gender, Place & Culture:1-33.

Ferretti, Federico. 2022 in press. “Indignation, civic virtue and the right of resistance: critical geography and anti-fascism in Italy (1960s-1970s).”  Annals of the American Association of Geographers.

Foucault, Michel. 1982-83 [2010]. The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982-1983. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Foucault, Michel. 1982-1983 [2019]. “Discourse and Truth” and “Parresia”. Translated by Nancy Luxon. Edited by Daniele  Lorenzini and Henri-Paul  Fruchaud. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Foucault, Michel. 1983-84 [2011]. The Courage of Truth (the Government of Self and Others II): Lectures at the Collège de France 1983-1984. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Gros, Frédéric. 2019. “Introduction.” In “Discourse and Truth” and “Parresia”, edited by Daniele  Lorenzini and Henri-Paul  Fruchaud, xiii-xx. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Legg, Stephen. 2018. “Colonial and Nationalist Truth Regimes: Empire, Europe and the Latter Foucault.” In South Asian Governmentalities: Michel Foucault and the Question of Postcolonial Orderings, edited by Stephen Legg and Deana Heath, 106-133. New Delhi: Cambridge University Press.

Legg, Stephen. 2019. “Subjects of truth: Resisting governmentality in Foucault’s 1980s.”  Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 37 (1):27-45.

Call for Papers
7th International Workshop on Historical Epistemology: Arts and Sciences, Historicizing Boundaries
Venice, 9-10 June 2022

Confirmed keynote speakers:

Peter Galison (Harvard)
Caroline Jones MIT

Abstract [for full abstract see here]

The 7th International Workshop on Historical Epistemology is dedicated to exploring new ways of approaching the historical, conceptual, methodological, and technical relations between the arts and the sciences. Rather than looking for logical criteria for demarcating these domains, the workshop aims to question the arts/sciences dyad from the vantage point of its history.

If the armchair philosopher recognizes demarcations among cognitive, perceptual, or operational domains, what can historical epistemology teach us about the boundary lines or relationship between the arts and the sciences? What might a historicized approach to the epistemological question of the different ways of accessing reality, of capturing or intervening in the world, add to our discussion? Can the distinction between scientific discovery and artistic creation be tackled from the point of view of historical epistemology? At the methodological level, can the history of the sciences fruitfully mesh with art history? Can art historians, historians of science, philosophers and cultural historians learn from each other’s methods? These transversal questions—cutting across the human, social, and natural sciences—have bearing on the “boundary questions” situated at the borders of the arts and sciences. While this workshop aims to move beyond the idea of a “binary economy,” (Galison & Jones, Picturing Science, Producing Art, 1998) it also aims to keep the specificity of each in sight.

Although it does not appear at the forefront of French epistemology, the careful observer will notice that this topic was taken up by a number of historical epistemologists. Gaston Bachelard, for instance, identified an irremovable divide between epistemology and the poetic imagination but he also considered it possible for the latter to underpin or contribute to the former (Chimisso, Bachelard, Critic of Science and the Imagination, 2001). This aspect of Bachelard’s work could be put fruitfully in dialogue with later analogous attempts to make similar connections in the Anglophone domain (Holton, The Scientific Imagination, 1978). Bachelard moreover insisted on the creative dimension of scientific thinking and its technological inventiveness (Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit, 1934), claiming that science can, to some extent, be regarded as an artistic creation belonging to both the human mind and the material world.

Georges Canguilhem, on the one hand, maintained that knowledge and truth pertain only to science, which in this respect is “incommensurable” with other forms of cultural expression (e.g., the arts) underpinned and motivated by different values such as beauty. However, in his early writings, Canguilhem also reflected at length on the problem of artistic and technical creation and later came to consider medicine an “art”: a set of techniques situated at the crossroads of different scientific disciplines and aimed at the production of new norms of existence for organisms. Canguilhem’s work thus rested on a philosophy which appealed to a multiplicity of irreducible values and mobilized a Nietzschean perspective according to which the task of philosophy is to compare and contrast scientific, religious, ethical, and aesthetic values.

In a similar vein, Michel Foucault suggested that the tools he deployed in his archeology of scientific knowledge could also be applied to art history (Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, 1969). His famous comment on Las Meninas in The Order of Things suggests that analysis of artistic productions is a means of investigating the structure of knowledge. Despite inheriting Bachelard’s divide between art and science, Gilles-Gaston Granger instead wondered whether the artistic notion of style could be applied to the analysis of scientific knowledge (Granger, Essai d’une philosophie du style, 1968). Finally, Jean-Claude Passeron’s work—premised upon the sociology of art and culture, on the one hand, and upon the epistemology of the social sciences on the other—raises questions about the extent to which these two origins of his work are completely separate or constantly in dialogue (Passeron, Sociological Reasoning, 1991).

These themes will be at the center of the 7th Workshop on Historical Epistemology. We hope the discussion will be a moment for philosophers, historians of philosophy, historians, philosophers of science, and art historians to encounter scholars with different methodological approaches. In particular, we expect contributions falling along the following three axes:

1. Historical epistemology Can the arts/science dyad be an object of inquiry for historical epistemology? What are the larger epistemological and sociological goals that the dyad underpins or tries to respond to? Can we still talk of there being “two cultures”? Are there more than two? Or is there only one undifferentiated culture? To what extent is the term “culture” even appropriate? We welcome contributions tracing the trajectories of debates that have drawn the two poles of this dyad together or pushed them apart.
2. Philosophy/methodologyWhat can an historicized approach to epistemology teach us about the boundary lines or relationship between the arts and the sciences? What do the concepts of “style” and “method” have in common and what distinguishes them from each other? Contributions should propose ways of rethinking topics at the intersection of the two activities, such as representation, progress, perception, theory change, analogies, the role of “method”, the affordances of techniques and technologies, and differences between scientific invention/discovery and artistic creation.
3. History of historical epistemologyBachelard, Canguilhem, Foucault or Granger are only examples: how have historical epistemologists writ large taken up this issue? Contributions might address thinkers coming from the French tradition or who employ the later historical epistemological approach that emerged from research groups at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science or from other strands of epistemology that reflected on the divide between the arts and the sciences.

Proposals (500 words plus a short presentation of the candidate) must be sent by March 15, 2022 (notification of acceptance or refusal by March 31), in .doc format, to epistemologiehistorique@gmail.com. The workshop will be conducted in English. Applicants should be ready for possible online participation in case the event should move to online-only.

This workshop is organized by:
Épistémologie Historique. Research Network on the History and the Methods of Historical Epistemology

With the support of: 
Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage;
European Commission (This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101030646, “EPISTYLE”);
IHPST (UMR 8590, Paris 1/CNRS);
République des Savoirs (USR 3608, ENS/ Collège de France/CNRS);
École doctorale Lettres, Arts, Sciences humaines et sociales (ED 540, ENS – EUR Translitteræ, PSL);
Centre Gilles Gaston Granger (UMR 7304).

Organizing committee:
Caroline Angleraux (Labex Who Am I?, Associate member of the IHPST)
Thomas Embleton (IHPST)
Lucie Fabry (ENS-PSL, République des savoirs / Aix Marseille Université, Centre Gilles- Gaston Granger)
Iván Moya-Diez (Universidad Alberto Hurtado)
Matteo Vagelli (Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia)