Foucault News

News and resources on French thinker Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

Rozhdestvenskaia, E.A. The ethics of care discourse for future education (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

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30 July 2021

Rozhdestvenskaia, E.A.
The ethics of care discourse for future education
(2021) Chelovek, 32 (2), pp. 76-88.

DOI: 10.31857/S023620070014862-5

Abstract
We reveal the key approaches to the ethics of care (Plato, M. Heidegger, M. Foucault), and the features of the feminist ethics of care (N. Noddings, K. Gilligan et al.), which implies the denial of the classical tradition of the interpretation of caring for the other via focusing on her needs; also we reveal the importance of the ethics of care in modern philosophy of education, concerned with the impact on such key problems as difficulties in ethical relationships between the subjects of education, division of reality into the different subjects, the impossibility of discussing serious existential issues in the classroom. The question about the introduction into the Russianlanguage scientific circulation of a number of terms used by modern Englishspeaking authors (J. Nguyen, M. McKenzie, S. Blenkinsop, U. Bergmark, E. Alerby) is raised, which works are considering the ethics of care from the standpoint of the student-teacher relationship, moral dilemmas and the calling in students in education to give them experience taking care of themselves and others, and the natural world. The article highlights the directions for the development of the education system in the future, and the ethics of care may be considered as an important basis for the evolution of education (education in the conditions of “reassembling” educational institutions of the future, uncertainty and stochasticity, the search for possible axiological justifications of educational relationships, technological innovations, education as the moral education of a free person of the future). © 2021, Russian Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.

Author Keywords
Education forecasting; Ethics of care; Ethics of education; Future of education; Philosophy of education

Claudia Aradau and Martina Tazzioli, Covid-19 and rebordering the world (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

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29 July 2021

Claudia Aradau and Martina Tazzioli, Covid-19 and rebordering the world Radical Philosophy 2.10 (Summer 2021)

In April 2021, dozens of asylum seekers were moved back to the Napier Barracks in the UK, after the barracks had been emptied a month earlier following protests and media reports on its unsuitable conditions. Migrant support groups and NGOs denounced the ‘terrible conditions of the substandard accommodation and the effects it is having on its residents’. 1 Asylum seekers organised many protests against the unliveable conditions and several started hunger strikes. In the wake of this mobilisation, the Independent Inspector of Migration, Border and Asylum also reported inadequate resources and that the ‘environment at both sites [Penally Camp and Napier Barracks], especially Napier, was impoverished, run-down and unsuitable for long-term accommodation’. 2 Finally, public outcry after a Covid-19 outbreak at the barracks led the Home Office to transfer the asylum seekers to hotels where they were to wait to be transferred to an accommodation centre or a flat, according to the ‘dispersal policy’ that has been enforced in the UK since 1999. At about the same time, the UK government introduced hotel quarantine for travellers crossing borders from a number of countries deemed a risk for bringing ‘mutant’ Covid-19 variants to the UK. Notably, this continuum of hybrid forms of confinement has been enforced in the name of both migrants’ and citizens’ protection.

[…]
In fact, as Foucault has retraced, the responses to diseases reveal specific regimes of power and of power transformations – leprosy: sovereign power; plague: disciplinary power; smallpox: biopower and security dispositifs. 12 The ongoing rebordering of the world should be situated within this history of contagion, health and borders and, at the same time, grasped in its specificity. Yet, Covid-19 is the first pandemic that has triggered a global lockdown. Fassin has pointed out that the current health crisis ‘is not unprecedented because of the pandemic, but because of the response to the pandemic. We have had worse pandemics in the past, but we have never had one for which confinement has been imposed on a global level’.
[…]

Rey Chow, A Face Drawn in Sand. Humanistic Inquiry and Foucault in the Present (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

28 July 2021

Rey Chow, A Face Drawn in Sand. Humanistic Inquiry and Foucault in the Present, Columbia University Press, 2021

Leadership, innovation, diversity, inclusiveness, sharing, accountability—such is the resounding administrative refrain we keep hearing in the contemporary Western university. What kinds of benefits does this refrain generate? For whom? What discursive incitements undergird such benefits? Although there are innumerable discussions of Michel Foucault in the English-speaking academy, seldom is his work used systematically to unravel the dead ends and potentialities of humanistic inquiry as embedded in these simple but dynamic questions.

Rey Chow takes up this challenge by articulating the plight of the humanities in the age of global finance and neoliberal mores through a resharpened focus on Foucault’s concept “outside.” This general discussion is followed by a series of micro-arguments about several loosely linked topics: the biopolitics of literary study, visibilities and invisibilities, race and racism, sound/voice/listening, and confession and self-entrepreneurship. Against what she polemicizes as the moralistic-entrepreneurial norming of knowledge production, Chow foregrounds a nonutilitarian approach, stressing anew the intellectual and pedagogical objectives fundamental to humanistic inquiry: How to process, analyze, and evaluate different types of texts across languages and disciplines; how to form and sustain viable arguments; how to rethink familiar problems through less known as well as very well-known sources, figures, and methods. Above all, she asks in an abidingly humanistic spirit, how not to know all the answers before the questions have been posed.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rey Chow is Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Duke University. She is the author of Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking About Capture (2012) and Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience (Columbia, 2014), among other works, and the coeditor of Sound Objects (2019).

Daniel Schultz reviews A Face Drawn in Sand (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

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28 July 2021

Daniel Schultz reviews A Face Drawn in Sand, Critical Inquiry, 21 July 2021

Rey Chow. A Face Drawn in Sand: Humanistic Inquiry and Foucault in the Present. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. 232 pp.
Open access

In her new book, A Face Drawn in Sand: Humanistic Inquiry and Foucault in the Present, Rey Chow takes aim at the way the global corporate university, with its ever-swelling ranks of administrative managers, employs diversity and inclusion rhetoric as a style of entrepreneurial governance. What we see here is a form of power that patterns pedagogy and various modes of intellectual inquiry through the ruse of identity-based politics; moreover, it provokes and recruits self-defeating apologetic discourse around and about the humanities. Chow warns that efforts to defend the humanities through hyphenated modifiers (digital, medical, environmental, and so on)—appendages designed to establish the validity and use-value of the humanities—end up surrendering the very thing they set out to protect, in other words the open spirit of humanistic inquiry that unfolds without promises of utility or pregiven answers.

[…]

Modern European philosophy of symbolic forms of religious and artistic consciousness (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

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26 July 2021

Barashkov, V.V., Begchin, D.A., Davidov, I.P.
Modern European philosophy of symbolic forms of religious and artistic consciousness
(2021) Voprosy Filosofii, 2021 (6), pp. 74-84.

DOI: 10.21146/0042-8744-2021-6-74-84

Abstract
The article deals with the philosophical issues in the field of religious art. The revision of the theories of secularization in the late 20th – early 21st centuries allowed philosophers speak not only about the autonomy of art in relation to religion, but also about the dialogue between these two “symbolic forms of consciousness” (according to E. Cassirer) and the fields of culture. The aim of this article is to offer an analysis of the corpus of selected texts of both Russian and foreign specialists of the last quarter of the 20th – early 21st centuries who worked in related fields (iconology, spatialization, semiotics of culture and art, philosophy of culture, and theology). The subject matters of the article is the philosophical, religious, cultural, art history, semiotic, theological, and anthropological theories of authors whose works were in the representative sample of this study. The literature can be divided into several categories: 1) publications that discuss the relationship between the “secular” and “sacred” in modern culture; 2) publications that describe the essential features of modern temple construction and give a broad interpretation of the concept of “sacred spaces”; 3) publications that describe and analyse specific manifestations of the dialogue between art and religion. The main methods are the method of description and the method of complex philosophical and religiological analysis. The originality of the research lies in the attempt to systematize various points of view on the place and role of religion and art in a post-secular society. The goal is to offer a wide panorama of modern theories of the interaction of religion, architecture, and fine art. Tthe main tasks are complex analysis, classification and qualification of research approaches of the authors under consideration.

Author Keywords
Ernst Cassirer; Henri Lefebvre; Heterotopia; Iconics; Iconology; Michel Foucault; Philosophy of religious art; Religious studies; Sacred spaces; Spatialisation; Temenology; “iconic turn”; “re-enchantment of art”; “sacred transfer”; “spiritual art”

Hipsters versus posers: Fannish split in the indie music world (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

24 July 2021

CAVALCANTI, R.C.T., SOUZA-LEÃO, A.L.M., MOURA, B.M.
Hipsters versus posers: Fannish split in the indie music world
(2021) Revista de Administracao Mackenzie, 22 (3)

DOI: 10.1590/1678-6971/ERAMG210202

Abstract
Purpose: Web 2.0 technologies have enhanced relational dynamics in fan communities. Indie music fans significantly identify themselves with the genre and participate in these communities within a music industry reinvention scenario. Based on the Foucauldian perspective, by sharing knowledge about media products, fans manifest truths capable of expressing subjectivities – parrhesia, a way of mutually affecting different truths. Thus, the aim of the present study is to analyze how parrhesia is operated in interactions among indie music fans.

Originality/value: The present research expands an important theoreticalinvestigative path in the consumer culture theory (CCT) field by adopting Michel Foucault’s later theoretical cycle, which addresses the construction of subjectivities.

Design/methodology/approach: Netnography of interactions among indie music fans was carried out in one of the largest online discussion forums on the topic. Findings: Heated discussions observed in the investigated community often create a split that shows a dispute focused on defining what being an indie music fan means. Based on disruptive parrhesia anchored in moral backgrounds associated with erudition and collectivism versus hedonism and individuality, self-declared true fans and those who seek fun establish alter-subjectivities as hipsters and posers.

Author Keywords
Fans; Indie music; Netnography; Parrhesia; Subjectivity

Book Symposium: Critique And Praxis (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

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22 July 2021

Book Review Symposium
Book Symposium: Critique And Praxis, British Journal of Sociology
Volume 72, Issue 3, June 2021

Open access

Critique and Praxis
Rebecca Elliott

Critique & Praxis is nothing short of a colossal achievement, which will be discussed for years to come
Miguel de Beistegui

Lonely and beyond truth? Two objections to Bernard Harcourt’s Critique & Praxis
Frieder Vogelmann

On the unity and dissonance of Critique and Praxis
Seyla Benhabib

An “illuminati” and its acolytes: Critical theory in the text and in the world: Being a commentary on Bernard Harcourt’s Critique and Praxis
Biodun Jeyifo

Foucault quote: the embodied unconscious of history

Clare O'Farrell

6 comments

21 July 2021

Ultimately, every insignificant event that took place in the heart of the countryside is still in some way inscribed in the bodies of twentieth-century urban inhabitants. There is a tiny element of the peasantry, an obscure drama from the fields and the forest, the barn, that is still inscribed somewhere, has marked our bodies in a certain way, and still marks them in an infinitesimal way.
[…]

That’s what the unconscious of history is, not some kind of grand force or life-and- death instinct. Our historical unconscious is made up of these millions, billions of small events, which little by little, like drops of rain, erode our bodies, our way of thinking.
[…]

Film allows you to have a relation to history, to establish a mode of historical presence, a sense of history that is very different from what you can achieve through writing. Let’s take Moatti’s series Le pain noir. Its success and importance depended on the fact that, far more so than a novel, it was related to a history that everybody had some memory of, namely, our grandmothers’ lives. Our grandmothers lived that history. It’s not at the level of what we know but at the level of our bodies, the way we act, the way we do things, think, and dream.
[…]

Michel Foucault (2018). The return of Pierre Rivière. In Foucault, M. Patrice Maniglier, Dork Zabunyan. Foucault at the Movies. Translated and edited by Clare O’Farrell, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 162, 163, 167

R is for Rorschach (Michel Foucault) (2019)

Clare O'Farrell

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20 July 2021

Michel Foucault from A to Z. Here is why Foucault had a life-long fascination with the Rorschach test and how this relates to Deleuze’s notion that thinking means folding…

Découvrez cette exposition en vous promenant Jardin de l’ancienne maison de la famille Foucault Saint-Martin-la-Pallu (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

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19 July 2021

Découvrez cette exposition en vous promenant Jardin de l’ancienne maison de la famille Foucault Saint-Martin-la-Pallu

Découvrez cette exposition en vous promenant Jardin de l’ancienne maison de la famille Foucault, 19 septembre 2021-19 septembre 2021, Saint-Martin-la-Pallu.

Profitez de cette exposition-promenade composée de panneaux, de tableaux-citations, de montages sonores et vidéo. Venez découvrir le jardin de l’ancienne maison de la famille Foucault et l’exposition qui s’y trouve. Un récent ouvrage réalisé par l’association « Michel Foucault, côté jardin. Paroles » sera proposé au public.

Gratuit. Entrée libre.

Profitez de cette exposition-promenade composée de panneaux, de tableaux-citations, de montages sonores et vidéo.

Jardin de l’ancienne maison de la famille Foucault, 17 route de Poitiers, 86380 Vendeuvre-du-Poitou Saint-Martin-la-Pallu Vendeuvre-du-Poitou Vienne, France

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