Foucault News

Conference: Foucault’s confessions videos (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

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30 June 2021

Conference: Foucault’s confessions videos (2021)

Antoine Idier, Michel Foucault before the Commission for Penal Code Review (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

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29 June 2021

Antoine Idier, Michel Foucault before the Commission for Penal Code Review, Lundimatin, 16 mai 2021

These past few weeks I’ve often been asked about the subject which has taken the name of the “Michel Foucault affair” (even though there was no “affair” to speak of), following the delirious accusations of a right-wing essayist and their circulation without investigation (that is, with complicity).

To tell the truth, at first it seemed unhelpful to waste time clarifying even the few points raised. The facts themselves appeared totally whimsical : a notoriously reactionary accuser who was never close to Foucault, dates and details which didn’t match up, the absence of any witnesses, clichés straight from witch hunts (cemeteries at midnight), etc. I thought that journalists would soon investigate the source (What did you see ? When ? What proof can you share ?) and that the story would just as soon collapse.

We see here simillar mechanisms to those at play in the “Guy Hocquenghem affair” : the hatred of May 68 and the left, homophobia, the instrumentalization of childhood and the accusation of “pedophilia”, the obsession with a deviant intelligentsia and the “freemasons of vice”, etc. Although here it goes further : the accusations play an additional role, serving as a denunciation of Foucault’s thought more generally while at the same time his thought itself becomes proof, the means of corroborating the accusations, however grotesque they are.
[…]

Richard Seymour, How postmodernism became the universal scapegoat of the era (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

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28 June 2021

Richard Seymour, How postmodernism became the universal scapegoat of the era New Statesman, 24 June 2021

In the slew of rightist culture-war bogeymen, from “cultural Marxism” to “critical race theory”, one of the most surprising candidates for obloquy is postmodernism.

In December 2020, the women and equalities minister Liz Truss bewailed “postmodernist philosophy – pioneered by Foucault – that put societal power structures and labels ahead of individuals and their endeavours”. The malign influence of postmodernism, she suggested, had reached directly into working-class Leeds communities in the 1980s, where children were taught about racism and sexism but not how to read and write. Remarkably, then, the putative failures of education policy, above all the supposed failings of local authorities, were down to 20th-century French philosopher Michel Foucault.

To an extraordinary degree, postmodernism has become the universal scapegoat of the era, the bête noir of “Resistance” liberals, reactionaries, “New Atheists” and trademarked defenders of “Reason”. The irrational and incoherent fear of the “pomo”, or pomophobia, has claimed minds from across the political spectrum. According to the American literary critic Michiko Kakutani, postmodernism is responsible for the assault on knowledge and reason that allowed Donald Trump to lie his way into the White House.
[…]

Gérard Fromanger (1939-2021)

Clare O'Farrell

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27 June 2021

Portrait de Michel Foucault, Gérard Fromanger

Gérard Fromanger, couleurs de gloire, Libération, par Clémentine Mercier, publié le 18 juin 2021

Le peintre figuratif, acteur de Mai 68, proche de Gilles Deleuze et Michel Foucault, est décédé ce vendredi 18 juin à l’âge de 81 ans. Il aura marqué l’époque par ses œuvres contestataires à la palette vive et à la conscience politique aiguë.
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Mort à 81 ans du peintre français Gérard Fromanger, membre des mouvements de la figuration narrative et de la Nouvelle Histoire.

La question de Fromanger était : comment lier l’activité du peintre et la critique de l’état du monde ?

Ce sont d’abord ses tableaux des années post-68 qui l’ont rendu célèbre et qui restent les plus intéressants. Il y mêle la rue marchande et grise, très réaliste, vouée à la seule marchandise y compris humaine à des personnages colorés juste ébauchés. Peintre du rouge, la couleur des révolutions et du sang versé, il fut l’ami de Prévert et des philosophes Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault et Felix Guattari.

Joseph Pugliese, Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human. Forensic Ecologies of Violence (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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26 June 2021

Joseph Pugliese, Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human. Forensic Ecologies of Violence, Duke University Press, 2020

In Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human Joseph Pugliese examines the concept of the biopolitical through a nonanthropocentric lens, arguing that more-than-human entities—from soil and orchards to animals and water—are actors and agents in their own right with legitimate claims to justice. Examining occupied Palestine, Guantánamo, and sites of US drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, Pugliese challenges notions of human exceptionalism by arguing that more-than-human victims of war and colonialism are entangled with and subject to the same violent biopolitical regimes as humans. He also draws on Indigenous epistemologies that invest more-than-human entities with judicial standing to argue for an ethico-legal framework that will enable the realization of ecological justice. Bringing the more-than-human world into the purview of justice, Pugliese makes visible the ecological effects of human war that would otherwise remain outside the domains of biopolitics and law.

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Theoretical puppets: T is for time (Michel Foucault) (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

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25 June 2021

T is for Time (Michel Foucault), Mar 1, 2021

Niki Kasumi Clements, Sites of the Ascetic Self. John Cassian and Christian Ethical Formation (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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24 June 2021

Niki Kasumi Clements, Sites of the Ascetic Self. John Cassian and Christian Ethical Formation, University of Notre Dame Press, 2020

Description
Sites of the Ascetic Self reconsiders contemporary debates about ethics and subjectivity in an extended engagement with the works of John Cassian (ca. 360–ca. 435), whose stories of extreme asceticism and transformative religious experience by desert elders helped to establish Christian monastic forms of life. Cassian’s late ancient texts, written in the context of social, cultural, political, doctrinal, and environmental change, contribute to an ethics for fractured selves in uncertain times. In response to this environment, Cassian’s practical asceticism provides a uniquely frank picture of human struggle in a world of contingency while also affirming human agency in ways that signaled a challenge to followers of his contemporary, Augustine of Hippo.

Niki Kasumi Clements brings these historical and textual analyses of Cassian’s monastic works into conversation with contemporary debates at the intersection of the philosophy of religion and queer and feminist theories. Rather than focusing on interiority and renunciation of self, as scholars such as Michel Foucault read Cassian, Clements analyzes Cassian’s texts by foregrounding practices of the body, the emotions, and the community. By focusing on lived experience in the practical ethics of Cassian, Clements demonstrates the importance of analyzing constructions of ethics in terms of cultivation alongside critical constructions of power. By challenging modern assumptions about Cassian’s asceticism, Sites of the Ascetic Self contributes to questions of ethics, subjectivity, and agency in the study of religion today.

Palacios, C. A truly invisible hand: The critical value of Foucauldian irony (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

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23 June 2021

Palacios, C.
A truly invisible hand: The critical value of Foucauldian irony (2021) Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory, 4 (1), pp. 48-72.
DOI: 10.1215/26410478-8855219

Open access

Abstract
Critical theory has long resisted the notion that an “invisible hand” can operate within the real social dynamics of a free market. But despite the most radical desires of the socially critical imagination, the optimization of that “spontaneous order” or depersonalized way of ordering things known as “the economy” has become the dominant playing field and decisive electoral issue of modern politics. Within this broad contemporary context, Michel Foucault made a strange theoretical intervention that, to this day, continues to baffle readers. During a lecture, he argued that Adam Smith’s invisible hand was, after all, truly and purposively, that is, for technical rather than ideological reasons, “invisible.” This article argues that there is a counter-positivism or tactical irony contained within the logic of such a controversial thesis; namely, that when one acknowledges that the principle of economic competition encourages an efficient self-organizing effect at all times, regardless of context, one is also immediately in a position to appreciate why the art of government should always maintain its political primacy over the spontaneous order of the market.

Author keywords
Michel Foucault, Friedrich A. Hayek, neoliberalism, counter-positivism, liberal irony.

Bandiera, R. Marx, Foucault, and state–corporate harm: a case study of regulatory failure in Australian non-prescription medicine regulation (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

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22 June 2021

Bandiera, R.
Marx, Foucault, and state–corporate harm: a case study of regulatory failure in Australian non-prescription medicine regulation
(2021) Crime, Law and Social Change

DOI: 10.1007/s10611-021-09953-2

Abstract
Risk-based regulation has underpinned Australian prescription and non-prescription medicine regulation for over three decades. However, data consistently demonstrate high rates of non-compliance among non-prescription medicine sponsors, with most breaches a result of inappropriate labelling and advertising, a lack of evidence to substantiate therapeutic claims, and product formulation and manufacturing. This paper seeks to understand why the regime fails to achieve compliance from non-prescription medicine sponsors. Using a state–corporate harm lens, and Marxist and Foucauldian perspectives, it is argued that regulatory failure is the product of the regime’s congruence with neoliberal governmentality. This governmentality is inextricably linked to a neoliberal market hegemony that attempts to minimize forms of market intervention detrimental to the accumulation of capital.

Jacob Schmutz, Conscience moderne et désobéissance civile. Quelques leçons de la théologie moderne, XVIe-XVIIIe siècles (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

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21 June 2021

Agustin Colombo (UCLouvain, centre CERPhiCO) et Paul Slama (UNamur) ont le plaisir de vous annoncer la troisième séance du séminaire interdisciplinaire “Subjectivité et religion“. Elle aura lieu le jeudi 24 juin 2021, de 15h00 à 17h00 et accueillera Jacob Schmutz (UCLouvain).
Il présentera une communication intitulée “Conscience moderne et désobéissance civile. Quelques leçons de la théologie moderne, XVIe-XVIIIe siècles”.

Pour participer à cette session, veuillez vous inscrire en ligne.
Pour toute demande d’information, contacter Agustin Colombo (agustin.colombo@uclouvain.be) ou Paul Slama (paul.slama@unamur.be)

Résumé :

A l’époque moderne, deux concepts différents de conscience entrent en concurrence, que la langue française ne différencie pas depuis le choix funeste de Coste de rendre l’un par l’autre : d’une part, le concept théologique traditionnel, la conscience-conscience (en anglais)-Gewissen (en allemand), héritage de la synderesis patristique et scolastique, principe de discernement inné du bien et du mal ; d’autre part, un nouveau concept de conscience-consciousness (en anglais)-Bewusstsein (en allemand), qui s’impose comme un concept proprement philosophique pour décrire la présence à soi de l’âme, immédiate ou réflexive, et qui devient la marque propre d’une subjectivité ordonnatrice du réel à partir de ses propres perceptions ou certitudes innées. De Hegel à Foucault, en passant par Heidegger ou Blumenberg, les défenseurs du paradigme de la modernité comme « âge de la subjectivité » et de l’autonomie ont tous insisté d’une manière ou d’une autre sur le rôle fondamental de cette « découverte » moderne de la conscience-consciousness comme condition de possibilité d’un âge moderne de la science délivrée de la religion. Dans ce séminaire, je voudrais proposer une généalogie alternative, et interroger la validité de ce récit. En étudiant les transformations spécifiquement moderne du concept théologique traditionnel de conscience-conscience, je voudrai suggérer qu’elles sont au principe de formes spécifiquement modernes de soumission à l’autorité, d’abord ecclésiale puis étatique. Loin de suggérer une victoire de l’autonomie, les théories religieuses modernes de la conscience insistent au contraire sur une dépendance indépassable du sujet à l’égard de normes dont il ou elle n’est pas l’auteur. Dans le monde chrétien occidental, cette nouvelle hétéronomie se décline toutefois selon deux formes radicalement différentes : d’un côté les conceptions catholiques contre-réformées de la conscience dans la tradition casuistique, où s’élabore une fine nomenclature des conditions auxquelles l’homme doit « déposer » sa conscience et la mettre entre les mains de l’autorité ; de l’autre côté, les conceptions réformées, en particulier puritaines, où la conscience devient un principe normatif propre qui conduit ultimement au rejet des autorités autres que celle de la parole divine transmise dans l’Écriture. Ces deux conceptions se traduisent politiquement dans les débats du XVIIe siècle autour de la désobéissance civile, et structurent encore largement le rapport que les individus entretiennent aujourd’hui vis-à-vis de l’État et de l’autorité des experts qui ont remplacé les directeurs de conscience d’autrefois.