Foucault News

Stuart Elden, The Early Foucault | 10-Minute Talks (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

10 June 2021

The Early Foucault | 10-Minute Talks | The British Academy

In this talk Stuart Elden discusses his new book, ‘The Early Foucault’ and the research he did on the first period of Michel Foucault’s career. In particular, he highlights what Foucault did before the History of Madness in 1961 and how he came to write that book as well as the way newly available archival materials help to make sense of the period.

His book, ‘The Early Foucault’, was published in June 2021.

Speaker: Professor Stuart Elden FBA, Professor of Political Theory and Geography, University of Warwick

10-Minute Talks are a series of pre-recorded talks from Fellows of the British Academy screened each Wednesday on YouTube and also available on Apple Podcasts.

Geoff Shullenberger, The Violence of Institutions, or Girard avec Foucault

Clare O'Farrell

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10 June 2021

Geoff Shullenberger,The Violence of Institutions, or Girard avec Foucault, Outsider Theory, June 2, 2021

René Girard and Michel Foucault, two of the most ambitious interdisciplinary thinkers of the twentieth century, shared an abiding interest in the violence embedded in institutions, but their names are rarely mentioned together. My modest goal here is to outline a few intellectual convergences between them and to consider what we might learn from this theoretical encounter, with a view to developing a more extensive comparison of their bodies of work.

To begin, a few biographical observations. They were born three years apart (Girard in 1923, Foucault in 1926) in mid-sized provincial French cities known for their medieval architecture (Avignon and Poitiers, respectively). Their intellectual trajectories were parallel at several key points. Girard’s breakthrough book, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, appeared in France in the same year (1961) as Foucault’s: Folie et déraison. Both were published in English, to considerable acclaim, in 1965 and 1964, respectively. The next decade, the first volume of Foucault’s most ambitious work, The History of Sexuality, appeared in 1976, two years before Girard’s magnum opus, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. By the early 1980s, they were teaching on opposite sides of the San Francisco Bay, at Stanford and Berkeley; though Girard, unlike Foucault, had spent nearly his entire career in US academia.

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Eccezione pandemica e tanatopolitica affermativa (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

9 June 2021

Società Filosofica Italiana
Società Filosofica Italiana – sezione di Lucca

SEMINARIO TELEMATICO SU

“Eccezione pandemica e tanatopolitica affermativa”

Relatore
Francescomaria Tedesco
(Università di Camerino)

Presenta
Giovanna Miglio
(Società Filosofica Italiana, Lucca)

MERCOLEDÌ 9 GIUGNO 2021
H. 17:00-19:30
LINK:
(PIATTAFORMA MEET)
HTTPS://MEET.GOOGLE.COM/XJN-SECH-PUI

La Morte e le Parole – Immagini e corpi dell’ultimo nemico – Seminario on-line (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

7 June 2021

La Morte e le Parole – Immagini e corpi dell’ultimo nemico – Seminario on-line (2021)

Event by Laboratorio Archeologia filosofica
Online event
Price: free
Public · Anyone on or off Facebook

Cosa cambia nel modo in cui si muore? maschere, iconografie, letteratura, filosofia hanno codificato i modi del morire la cui lingua risulta di difficile ascolto nell’assordante rumore di fondo dell’informazione e delle prescrizioni, delle parole scambiate intorno alla malattia, alla degenza, alla rianimazione del corpo individuale e politico, al dispositivo di governo della “nuda vita”.
La collusione storica della devastazione del pianeta, della fine delle democrazie e di una inesorabile crisi energetica ed economica, si è risolta nel fatto che la nostra civiltà è già morta da tempo. Asssistiamo oggi alla mobilitazione dell’insieme dei dispositivi di emergenza che dovrebbero far fronte al presente: la morte nella “giusta maniera di vivere”.

Questa immagine vogliamo resusicitare attraverso i diversi intenti di questi incontri: sentire come parla la morte, quali figure sono all’opera. Si tratta di indagare i linguaggi del morire in contesti fatti di frammenti, estratti, “materiali” e di scoprire che le lingue sepolte non sono quelle di un’altra maniera di vivere.

Archive: Karen Bennett, Foucault in English, The politics of exoticization (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

5 June 2021

Karen Bennett, Foucault in English, The politics of exoticization, In Translation in times of technocapitalism, Edited by Stefan Baumgarten and Jordi Cornellà-Detrell [Target 29:2] 2017, pp. 222–243, Published online: 29 June 2017
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/target.29.2.02ben

Abstract
It is something of a cliché to affirm that translations into English are almost always domestications, privileging fluency and naturalness over fidelity to the source text. However, back in the 1970s, many of Michel Foucault’s major texts, which were introduced to the English-speaking public for the first time through Alan Sheridan Smith’s translations for Tavistock Publications, were not domesticated at all. Despite the fact that the originals are grounded in a non-empiricist theory of knowledge and use terms drawn from a universe of discourse that would have been completely alien in the English-speaking world, these translations closely follow the patterns of the French, with few or no concessions to the target reader’s knowledge and expectations. This paper analyses passages from Sheridan Smith’s English translations of Les Mots et les choses and L’Archéologie du savoir in order to discuss the long-term effects of this translation strategy. It then goes on to compare and assess two very different translations of Foucault’s lecture L’ Ordre du discours (1970), an early one by Rupert Swyer (1971), which brings the text to the English reader, and a later one by Ian McLeod (1981), which obliges the reader to go to the text. The paper concludes by reiterating the need for Anglophone academic culture to open up to foreign perspectives, and suggests, following Goethe (Book of West and East, 1819) that new epistemes are best introduced gradually in order to avoid alienating or confusing a public that might not be ready for them.

Keywords: Michel Foucault, English translation, French theory, continental philosophy, poststructuralism

“Do Not Ask Me Who I Am” Foucault and neoliberalism (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

4 June 2021

“Do Not Ask Me Who I Am” Foucault and neoliberalism, The Point Magazine, June 2 2021

We just can’t seem to shake Foucault. The French philosopher, loathed or loved, has not dimmed in significance since his death of AIDS in 1984. In many ways the patron saint of contemporary humanistic inquiry, Michel Foucault’s work remains a source of both inspiration and frustration to scholars today. Conservatives, in turn, have long enjoyed propping him up as a left-wing bogeyman. In a delightfully vitriolic review for The New Criterion in 1993, Roger Kimball seethed, “the celebration of [Foucault’s] intellectual perversions by academics continues to be a public scandal.” More recently, Liz Truss, the U.K. international trade secretary and minister for women and inequalities, caused a stir when she claimed that since the 1980s, schools have made “no space for evidence” because they instead teach ideas with “roots in postmodernist philosophy—pioneered by Foucault” in which “truth and morality are all relative.”

But not everyone on the left is rushing to defend the thinker. In spite of his reputation as a progressive icon, Foucault has always had an at best contentious relationship with leftist politics. Jürgen Habermas, another philosophical great of his generation, once called Foucault a “young conservative,” attacking what he perceived to be Foucault’s rejection of modernity. Jean-Paul Sartre pilloried him as “the last barricade the bourgeoisie can still erect against Marx.”

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Calbérac, Y. Close Reading Michel Foucault’s and Yves Lacoste’s Concepts of Space Through Spatial Metaphors (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

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3 June 2021

Calbérac, Y. (2021). Close Reading Michel Foucault’s and Yves Lacoste’s Concepts of Space Through Spatial Metaphors. Le Foucaldien, 7(1), 6. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/lefou.90

Abstract
Based on a close reading of the interview that Michel Foucault gave Hérodote, the geography journal newly established and managed by Yves Lacoste in 1976, this article—through the study of spatial metaphors—unfolds the concepts and functions of space used by the philosopher and by geographers. The article proposes an archaeological approach—inspired by Foucault’s thinking—in writing the history of the spatial turn and understanding the role played by geography and geographers in this “reassertion of space in critical social theory.”

Keywords: geopolitics, space, power, spatial metaphor, scale, discontinuity, map, archive

Stephen J. Ball, Response: policy? Policy research? How absurd? (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

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2 June 2021

Stephen J. Ball (2021) Response: policy? Policy research? How absurd?, Critical Studies in Education,
DOI: 10.1080/17508487.2021.1924214

Extract from first page

There is no way that I can address the wide range of issues raised in the exemplary collection of papers on policy sociology. These are cutting edge pieces by world-class scholars that lay out analytic possibilities for future work. Perhaps what I can do, very briefly, from the space and time of policy research in which I now stand, and as other contributors do, is to look back and look forward and think against or beyond where we have got to and where we might go next. This does not properly engage with individual papers but rather with some of the commitments and sensibilities they share and hold on to.

When I began to try to engage with something that Jenny Ozga called policy sociology (which she and others discuss in this issue), there was not much in the way of extant education policy research in the sociology of education, apart from Jenny’s own work and that of the estimable Roger Dale (see references in Jenny’s paper), and the studies done by Ted Tapper and Brian Salter (e.g. Salter & Tapper, 1981) and McPherson and Raab (1988) – that drew on a more mainstream political science approach. What I was working on when I read these books and papers was an interview study of actors involved in and around England’s 1988 Education Reform Act, published as Politics and Policymaking In Education (1990). That was a kind of hybrid between my ethnographic sensibilities (from before) and the beginnings of my engagement with Foucault, in an attempt to explore the capture of policy by neoliberal intellectuals and its re-articulation within neoliberal discourses. Further musing on the interplay of these two different orders of account (ethnographic and discursive) led later to a set of considerations of what doing policy sociology might look like: (Ball, 1993, 2015; Tamboukou & Ball, 2003). Apart from Foucault lurking in the background probably the most important influence on Politics and Policymaking In Education and my later work on the shift from government to governance (e.g. Ball & Junemann, 2012) was Bob Jessop (who gets little mention in the papers in this special issue) and his theorisation of new forms and modalities of the capitalist state.

Michel Foucault en Amérique : au cœur de la vallée de la Mort (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

1 June 2021

Michel Foucault en Amérique : au cœur de la vallée de la Mort (2021), Par Sophie Joubert, France-Amérique, Mai 25, 2021

Parmi les penseurs de la French Theory, Michel Foucault est le plus connu. Celui dont l’œuvre, controversée, irrigue encore aujourd’hui les travaux de nombreux chercheurs américains. A partir de 1970 et jusqu’à sa mort en 1984, l’auteur de Surveiller et punir et Histoire de la sexualité a entretenu une relation forte avec les Etats-Unis, qu’il a aimé comme lieu de travail mais aussi de plaisir. C’est ce qu’on découvre dans Foucault en Californie, un récit de Simeon Wade récemment publié en France et qui ressort en poche aux Etats-Unis le 1er juin.

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Stuart Elden, The Early Foucault (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

31 May 2021

Stuart Elden, The Early Foucault, Polity, 2021.

It was not until 1961 that Foucault published his first major book, History of Madness. He had already been working as an academic for a decade, teaching in Lille and Paris, writing, organizing cultural programmes and lecturing in Uppsala, Warsaw and Hamburg. Although he published little in this period, Foucault wrote much more, some of which has been preserved and only recently become available to researchers.

Drawing on archives in France, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden and the USA, this is the most detailed study yet of Foucault’s early career. It recounts his debt to teachers including Louis Althusser, Jean Hyppolite, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean Wahl; his diploma thesis on Hegel; and his early teaching career. It explores his initial encounters with Georges Canguilhem, Jacques Lacan, and Georges Dumézil, and analyses his sustained reading of Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Also included are detailed discussions of his translations of Ludwig Binswanger, Victor von Weizsäcker, and Immanuel Kant; his clinical work with Georges and Jacqueline Verdeaux; and his cultural work outside of France.

Investigating how Foucault came to write History of Madness, Stuart Elden shows this great thinker’s deep engagement with phenomenology, anthropology and psychology. An outstanding, meticulous work of intellectual history, The Early Foucault sheds new light on the formation of a major twentieth-century figure.

Stuart Elden is Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick.

Reviews
‘Elden’s compendious coverage of Foucault’s intellectual career constitutes the contemporary apogee of scholarship on Foucault.’
Mark G. E. Kelly, Western Sydney University

‘This is a work of immense scholarship. Stuart Elden provides a wealth of contextual information on Foucault’s less familiar early career.’
Clare O’Farrell, Queensland University of Technology

‘Stuart Elden’s comprehensive, finely crafted investigation of the early Foucault is much more than a contribution to Foucault studies. It’s an exemplary guide to writing intellectual history.’
Michael J. Shapiro, University of Hawai’i, Manoa