Foucault News

Bruno Roy, Founder of Fata Morgana editions (1940-2021)

Clare O'Farrell

24 September 2021

Claire Devarrieux, Mort de l’éditeur Bruno Roy, maître de maison, Libération, publié le 20 septembre 2021

Le fondateur des éditions Fata Morgana est mort à 81 ans. Créée en 1966, son entreprise, loin des pratiques parisiennes, a publié Michel Foucault, Jonathan Littell ou Roger Gilbert-Lecomte.

Il a publié Emmanuel Levinas et Michel Foucault, Henri Michaux, Roger Caillois, Philippe Jaccottet, il y a peu Pierre Bergounioux et Eric Chevillard. Editeur prestigieux et confidentiel, Bruno Roy est mort le 15 septembre, ont annoncé ce lundi famille et amis dans un communiqué. Il avait 81 ans. Il était le fondateur des éditions Fata Morgana, sises dans l’Hérault, à Saint-Clément-de-Rivière.

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David Beer, The making of Foucault (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

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23 September 2021

David Beer, The making of Foucault (2021), On David Beer’s blog The Fragment, 9 September 2021

How do thinkers happen? We can start with a quite obvious negative. It would seem that they don’t arrive fully formed or with a preset direction to their thinking. It is tempting to imagine that they do, especially for those figures we most admire. We might like to imagine them as knowing exactly where they were heading, from the outset. It is comforting to think of thinkers as being assured and as having both a plan and a cast iron sense of direction. This assumed assuredness lends a sense of inevitability to their ideas. Of course, despite any impressions we might cling to they are much more likely to bump against options, to equivocate and to steadily find their feet. Thinking is contingent, it is shaped by circumstance. And not every avenue is followed. Thinkers leave untrodden paths along the way and may even have some doubts too. Even Foucault.

In a series of books published over the last five years, Stuart Elden has been meticulously sifting his way through the writings, lectures, notes, letters and other archival miscellanea of Michel Foucault. The results are expansive and full of insight, telling us of the ideas whilst also giving glimpses into the working practices through which they were made. The four volume intellectual history of Foucault that he has been working on, with three volumes published so far and a fourth in process, has been built out of a mass of traces. A prolific writer and worker like Foucault leaves much to explore and many narratives to question.

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Benjamin Bratton, The Revenge of the Real. Politics for a Post-Pandemic World (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

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22 September 2021

Benjamin Bratton, The Revenge of the Real. Politics for a Post-Pandemic World, Verso, 2021

Review by Geoff Shullenberger in The Washington Examiner

The future of politics after the pandemic

COVID-19 exposed the pre-existing conditions of the current global crisis. Many Western states failed to protect their populations, while others were able to suppress the virus only with sweeping social restrictions. In contrast, many Asian countries were able to make much more precise interventions. Everywhere, lockdown transformed everyday life, introducing an epidemiological view of society based on sensing, modeling, and filtering. What lessons are to be learned?

The Revenge of the Real envisions a new positive biopolitics that recognizes that governance is literally a matter of life and death. We are grappling with multiple interconnected dilemmas—climate change, pandemics, the tensions between the individual and society—all of which have to be addressed on a planetary scale. Even when separated, we are still enmeshed. Can the world govern itself differently? What models and philosophies are needed? Bratton argues that instead of thinking of biotechnologies as something imposed on society, we must see them as essential to a politics of infrastructure, knowledge, and direct intervention. In this way, we can build a society based on a new rationality of inclusion, care, and prevention.

Giorgi Vachnadze, The Phenomenological Panopticon and the Historical a Priori: Towards a Genealogy of the Transcendental Subject (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

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21 September 2021

Giorgi Vachnadze, The Phenomenological Panopticon and the Historical a Priori: Towards a Genealogy of the Transcendental Subject, Epoché, Issue #37 February 2021

A teleological conception of history begins with Hegel and terminates with Foucault. The following text will not concern itself with Hegel and the Hegelian interpretation of history, it will not be an extensive analysis of the notion of historical teleology, nor will it attempt to discuss every thinker who has used this notion. Neither will it attempt to lay down a comprehensive history nor theory of the Subject. Instead, we will focus on a comparison between the historical and philosophical methodologies of Edmund Husserl and Michel Foucault, and their respective theories of the Subject, while extending the antagonism between the two thinkers into a critique of phenomenology and the phenomenological subject as an instance of what Foucault terms governmentality.

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Krarup, Troels. “Archaeological Methodology: Foucault and the History of Systems of Thought.” (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

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19 September 2021

Krarup, Troels. “Archaeological Methodology: Foucault and the History of Systems of Thought.” Theory, Culture & Society 38, no. 5 (September 2021): 3–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420984528.

Abstract
Existing accounts of Foucault’s archaeological methodology have not (a) contextualized the concept properly within the intellectual field of its emergence and (b) explained why it is called ‘archaeology’ and not simply ‘history’. Foucault contributed to the field of ‘history of systems of thought’ in France around 1960 by broadening its scope from the study of scientific and philosophical systems into systems of ‘knowledge’ in a wider sense. For Foucault, the term ‘archaeology’ provided a response to new methodological questions arising from this initiative. Archaeological methodology had already been developed into a distinct comparative approach for the study of linguistic and cultural systems, notably by Dumézil. Foucault redevised archaeological methodology for the post-Hegelian tradition of studying ‘problems’ prevalent in the history of systems of thought. The article thus furnishes the groundwork for a ‘sociological archaeology’ or ‘problem analysis’ that is not particularly dependent on Foucault as a social theorist of power.

Keywords
archaeology, Foucault, French epistemological school, history of systems of thought, methodology, problem analysis, problematization

Gollmitzer, M. Journalism ethics with Foucault: Casually employed journalists’ constructions of professional integrity (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

16 September 2021

Gollmitzer, M. Journalism ethics with Foucault: Casually employed journalists’ constructions of professional integrity
(2021) Journalism

DOI: 10.1177/14648849211036301

Abstract
This article examines how journalists in non-permanent employment respond to their growing precarity. It is based on in-depth interviews with freelance journalists and interns who find that their working lives increasingly require entrepreneurial efforts. To work towards continuous access to journalistic work, these casually employed journalists engage in self-management and self-branding. To be able to make a living, they subsidize their income with work for clients outside of journalism that frequently offer better working conditions than news organizations but pursue narrow, strategic goals. The article develops a typology of non-journalistic work that illustrates that some non-journalistic jobs, but not others, cause these precarious news workers to defend their journalistic professional integrity. Furthermore, the study introduces Michel Foucault’s notions of the ‘entrepreneurial self’ and the ‘ethical self’ to interpret the different registers of professionalism between which journalists move today, identified as counter-, conforming and coping subjectivity. Thereby, the article uses a novel conceptual lens to make sense of resilience and change in journalistic professional identities under conditions of precarity. © The Author(s) 2021.

Author Keywords
Entrepreneurial self; ethical self; freelancers; governmentality; interns; non-journalistic work; professional identity; public service ethos

Yusheng, D. Benjamin’s Reading on Baudelaire: From Foucauldian Genealogy of Ethics (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

15 September 2021

Yusheng, D.
Benjamin’s Reading on Baudelaire: From Foucauldian Genealogy of Ethics
(2021) Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature, 5 (2), pp. 277-290.

Abstract
In The Use of Pleasure, the second volume of The History of Sexuality published in 1984, Michel Foucault turns to the study of the genealogy of ethics, suggesting that it is possible to read Walter Benjamin’s work on Baudelaire as a contribution. With the lens of the four elements of Foucauldian ethics (ethical substance, ethical practice, mode of subjectivation and telos), this article attempts to excavate Benjamin’s writings on Baudelaire and the Paris arcades. It indicates that Baudelaire’s artistic work is a typical self “ēthopoiēsis” in Benjamin’s reading: The ethical substance is the lack of desire, the ethical practice is the asceticism of dandyism, the mode of subjectivation is the melancholy and anger, and the telos is to create an ethic-poetic life that integrates truth and experience, which is ultimately to create an ethical art related to the way of living in the current society. Baudelaire’s ethical art is a typical practice of ethical literary criticism, whose ethical choice lies in the construction of the literary didactic subject and the struggle of heroism, with the purpose of exerting the social criticism and ethical didactic function of literary work. © 2021. All Rights Reserved.

Author Keywords
art of living; Baudelaire; Benjamin; Foucault; genealogy of ethics

Fredéric Gros, Peut-on penser la désobéissance à partir du christianisme ? (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

14 September 2021

Fredéric Gros, Peut-on penser la désobéissance à partir du christianisme ?

MARDI 21 SEPTEMBRE 2021 À 17 HEURES

COURS-CONFÉRENCE DONNÉ À DISTANCE

(en visioconférence) Peut-on penser la désobéissance à partir du christianisme ?

FRÉDÉRIC GROS

Au moyen du concept de « gouvernementalité », Michel Foucault (1926-1984) a développé une perspective très originale à partir de laquelle l’analyse du politique ne se focalise plus ni sur les fondements théoriques des systèmes de gouvernement – ces théories qui expliquent et justifient la formation de l’ordre politique, comme le contractualisme – ni sur les mécanismes formels qui en assurent le fonctionnement, comme l’instauration de la loi.

Dans l’approche de la « gouvernementalité », il s’agit plutôt d’interroger les différentes dynamiques de pouvoir qui organisent la conduite des individus dans leur vie quotidienne. Cette perspective a permis d’ouvrir la réflexion sur ce qui veut dire « être gouverné » et d’expliquer la formation historique et le fonctionnement des institutions – dont celle qui se nomme « État » – ainsi que des théories politiques modernes et contemporaines, telles que libéralisme et le néolibéralisme.
Dans ce cadre conceptuel, si Foucault a montré comment le christianisme a joué un rôle clé dans l’élaboration de l’approche de la gouvernementalité, ce cycle de conférences voudrait se demander à quel point nous sommes ou serions encore gouvernés par des dynamiques de pouvoir forgées par le christianisme.

Existe-t-il une « généalogie chrétienne de la gouvernementalité » ? Permettrait-elle de nous aider à mieux comprendre les dynamiques de pouvoir qui organisent les sociétés dans lesquelles nous vivons et, par conséquent, d’interpréter des concepts fondateurs de notre vocabulaire politique comme ceux d’« obéissance », de « volonté » ou de « liberté ».

Bibliographie

Büttgen Philippe, « Théologie politique et pouvoir pastoral » dans Annales. Histoire, sciences sociales 2007/5, pp. 1129-1154.
Chevalier Philippe, Foucault et le christianisme. Lyon : ENS Lyon, 2011.
Foucault Michel, Du gouvernement des vivants. Cours au Collège de France 1979-1980. Paris :Seuil/Gallimard/EHESS, 2012.
Foucault Michel, Histoire de la sexualité 4. Les Aveux de la chair. Paris : Gallimard, 2018.
Foucault Michel, « Le sujet et le pouvoir » in Dits et écrits II. Paris : Gallimard (Quarto), 2001, pp. 1041-1062.
Foucault Michel, Sécurité, territoire, population. Cours au Collège de France 1977-1978. Paris : Seuil/Gallimard/EHESS, 2004.
Foucault Michel, Surveiller et punir : Naissance de la prison. Paris : Gallimard, 1975.
Gros Frédéric, Desobéir. Paris : Albin Michel/Flammarion, 2017.
Karsenti Bruno, « La politique du dehors. Une lecture des cours de Foucault au Collège de France (1977-1979) » dans Multitudes 2005/3 (22), pp. 37-50.
Revel Judith, Foucault, une pensée du discontinu. Paris : Fayard, 2010.
Senellart Michel, Les arts de gouverner. Du regime médiéval au concept de gouvernement. Paris : Seuil, 1995.