Foucault News

Interview with David Sepkoski, author of “Catastrophic Thinking” (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

31 December 2020

7 Questions with David Sepkoski, author of “Catastrophic Thinking”
The Chicago blog, NOVEMBER 23, 2020

We live in an age in which we are repeatedly reminded—by scientists, by the media, by popular culture—of the looming threat of mass extinction. Such apocalyptic talk feels familiar to us, but the current fascination with extinction is a relatively recent phenomenon. As David Sepkoski reveals, the way we value biodiversity depends crucially on our sense that it is precarious—that it is something actively threatened, and that its loss could have profound consequences. In his new book, Sepkoski uncovers how and why we learned to value diversity as a precious resource at the same time as we learned to think catastrophically about extinction. We asked him a few questions about it.

In the book, you explain how an “extinction imaginary” helps inform the way we see and value the world around us. Can you give us a quick introduction to that term?

A central claim of this book is that scientific ideas and cultural values can’t be cleanly separated: science doesn’t “cause” us to believe certain things about society or politics, nor do political or social values “explain” particular scientific theories. Rather, the science and culture of a particular place and time are tightly interwoven and reinforce each other by setting the conditions of possibility for thinking and believing certain things rather than others. In the 1980s and 1990s it was popular to apply Michel Foucault’s concept of “discourse” to describe this kind of multicausal interrelationship—and indeed, I sometimes refer to an “extinction discourse” that applied at different times—but I felt that this term misses the important element of imagination that is central to the way societies have conceived and worried about the consequences of extinction.
[…]

Mariaconcetta Costantini, Pandemics, Power, and Conspiracy Theories (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

30 December 2020

Mariaconcetta Costantini, Pandemics, Power, and Conspiracy Theories, Critical Quarterly
First published: 10 December 2020 https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.12578

Open access
Our culture is awash in conspiracy theories’, Joseph Uscinski recently observed to emphasise the crucial role the Internet plays in circulating a deluge of information and conjectures – including fake news – around the world.1 Sometimes created by powerful elites as parts of top‐down processes of mass control, other times developed by the weak in bottom‐up rebellions that ‘encourage transparency and good behavior by the powerful’, conspiracy theories may fulfil both dangerous and useful functions.2 For this reason, they should be considered in their complexity rather than be easily dismissed as irrational or delusive.3 The epistemic problems we face in determining whether these theories could be warranted are manifold. They include evaluating the risks of a priori dismissal or denialism, choosing between a generalist and a particularist approach, and dealing with the question of ‘secrecy’ – a basic condition of any conspiracy. This latter challenges us by definition: if conspirators manage to keep their activities properly secret, how could we come to believe in their existence?4 These issues suggest that we should be cautious in approaching the current proliferation of theories which, widely disseminated by social media, produce a large variety of responses ranging from total disbelief to blind support.
[…]

Richie Nimmo, Foucault, Power, and Nonhuman Animals, Society & Animals (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

29 December 2020

Richie Nimmo, (2020). Foucault, Power, and Nonhuman Animals, Society & Animals, 28(7), 835-838. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/15685306-00001845

Open access

Matthew Chrulew & Dinesh Joseph Wadiwel (Eds.), Foucault and Animals (Human-Animal Studies). Leiden: Brill, 2017. 396 pp.

In their timely and well-curated collection, Matthew Chrulew and Dinesh Wadiwel (2017) succeed in their difficult aim of providing readers with a grounding in the complex intersection of Michel Foucault’s philosophy with human-animal studies. The publication reflects and augments the increasing interest in the usefulness and implications of Foucault in a still-emerging field in need of conceptual resources to more deeply expound upon its key questions and dilemmas. In this sense, the book’s main readership will be made up of human-animal studies scholars of all levels with an interest in power, knowledge, and ethics. It may also appeal to some Foucault scholars engaged with the posthuman turn and interested in exploring what new light may be cast on his work if it is read through the prism of species, animality, and the nonhuman. The collection is admirably interdisciplinary, with contributors from literary studies through the humanities to the social sciences. Each author contributes either explicitly or more obliquely to the overarching question of how and to what extent Foucault’s philosophy might be drawn upon to consider some aspects of human-animal relations. Chrulew and Wadiwel also consider a range of relationships such as those developed in labs and agriculture. While some of the essayists occasionally resort to theorizing about nonhuman animals or animality in general terms, several are explicitly critical of this tendency, and most focus on particular species in particular times, places, institutional and epistemic contexts, and relations of power.
[…]

Richard Smith, The faults and dangers of an iatrocracy (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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28 December 2020

Richard Smith, The faults and dangers of an iatrocracy, The BMJ Opinion, August 11, 2020

The first thing that struck Bernard-Henri Lévy, arguably France’s leading public intellectual, about the covid-19 pandemic was the rise of “medical power.” In his short, enjoyable, and provocative book The Virus in the Age of Madness he explains why such power is both undeserved and dangerous.

Now aged 71, Lévy is one of the Nouveaux Philosophes inspired by among others Michel Foucault, and he reminds us that Foucault observed that governments have learnt as much from the hospital as the prison. In The Birth of the Clinic Foucault described the management of outbreaks of plague in the 18th century: in Lévy’s words, “exile to an island or a ghetto on the outskirts of the city, as was the practice with lepers and the insane, gave way to confinement of entire cities, where all citizens were under house arrest and neighborhood watch patrols wrote up holdouts. Once night fell, everyone was out on their balcony, not to applaud the caregivers but to enable the sanitary authorities to tally up the dead, the dying, and the living.”

“But,” observes Lévy, “until now, never had things gone quite this far.” He emphasises the uniqueness of how we have responded to this latest in a long line of pandemics, including to the “Hong Kong Flu” of 1968 that killed a million people. “Never had we seen, as we did in Europe, heads of state surrounding themselves with scientific councils before daring to speak.”
[…]

With thanks to Federico Soldani for this link

Bernard-Henri Levy, Chapter 1: Come Back, Michel Foucault—We Need You! (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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28 December 2020

Bernard-Henri Levy, The Virus in the Age of Madness, Yale University Press, 2020

Chapter 1: Come Back, Michel Foucault—We Need You!

A trenchant look at how the coronavirus reveals the dangerous fault lines of contemporary society?

As seen on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS: “A stirring alarm addressed to an unsettled world.” (Kirkus Reviews)

Forget the world that came before. The author of American Vertigo serves up an incisive look at how COVID-19 reveals the dangerous fault lines of contemporary society.

With medical mysteries, rising death tolls, and conspiracy theories beamed minute by minute through the vast web universe, the coronavirus pandemic has irrevocably altered societies around the world. In this sharp essay, world-renowned philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy interrogates the many meanings and metaphors we have assigned to the pandemic—and what they tell us about ourselves.

Drawing on the philosophical tradition from Plato and Aristotle to Lacan and Foucault, Lévy asks uncomfortable questions about reality and mythology: he rejects the idea that the virus is a warning from nature, the inevitable result of global capitalism; he questions the heroic status of doctors, asking us to think critically about the loci of authority and power; he challenges the panicked polarization that dominates online discourse. Lucid, incisive, and always original, Lévy takes a bird’s-eye view of the most consequential historical event of our time and proposes a way to defend human society from threats to our collective future.

A portion of the author’s proceeds will be donated to Binc (The Book Industry Charitable Foundation).

Bernard-Henri Lévy is a philosopher, activist, filmmaker, and the author of over thirty books. He is widely regarded as one of the West’s most important public intellectuals.

With thanks to Federico Soldani for this link

Beyond the punitive society – discussion, seminar (2021)

Clare O'Farrell

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27 December 2020

A Joint Session with The Centre for Research in Post-Kantian European Philosophy at the University of Warwick:
Miguel Beistegui, Claire Blencowe, Henrique Carvalho, Stuart Elden, Daniele Lorenzini, Goldie Osuri, Irene Dal Poz, Federico Testa, and Bernard E. Harcourt
read and discuss The Punitive Society by Michel Foucault & A conversation with playwright Cori Thomas and Adnan Khan on the play LOCKDOWN

Thursday, January 7, 2021
12:15 – 2:45 pm EST / 5:15-7:45 pm UK time

Please RSVP here.

El impasse de la resistencia. La intersección entre Foucault y Deleuze a propósito de la salida del poder (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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26 December 2020

Cristóbal Durán Rojas, Iván Torres Apablaza, El impasse de la resistencia. La intersección entre Foucault y Deleuze a propósito de la salida del poder, Hybris, Vol. 11, Núm. 2 (2020)

The impasse of resistance. The intersection between Foucault and Deleuze regarding the exit from power

Open access

RESUMEN
En este trabajo intentamos proponer una lectura centrada mayoritariamente en algunos de los trabajos tardíos de Michel Foucault, desarrollados desde el primer tomo de su Histoire de la sexualité, de 1976. En dicha lectura buscamos advertir que la distancia entre Foucault y Deleuze, y que se marca incluso en una ruptura explícita con posterioridad a la publicación de dicho libro, no obedece tanto a la “fascinación” de Foucault por el poder, a su recusación perentoria del deseo y de su potencia de fuga, o a su supuesto abandono del análisis detallado de los dispositivos. Según nuestra lectura, la distancia tomada por Deleuze advertirá en ese impasse la posibilidad de una resistencia que no se ejerce sobre los dispositivos y las formaciones de poder, y que proyecta el problema del poder hacia modos de vida, según la lógica de una modulación de la vida, muy semejante a aquella esbozada por Foucault en sus últimos años, creando una singular consonancia entre ambos proyectos de pensamiento.

PALABRAS CLAVE
Poder; placer; deseo; resistencia; subjetivación

Stuart Elden, Foucault’s Christmas (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

26 December 2020

Progressive Geographies

In a fascinating interview about Foucault, ‘The Materiality of a Working Life‘ (open access; original French), Daniel Defert talks about his daily routines, and how these were similar year round:

No no, weekends didn’t exist! We would go to see art exhibitions on the Saturday afternoon, certainly, but the very notion of the weekend didn’t exist… Especially a public holiday, a Christmas day without writing, that was impossible! Foucault rarely put dates on his writings, but he would have been quitecapable of putting “December25th” on something, that being a daywhen, as he said,“nothing hashappened for several thousand years.”

I pick up on this story in The Early Foucault, but it’s not a model I try to follow. Although the winter sun and cycling won’t happen this year, I will be taking a few days off. Happy Christmas and I’ll be back before the New Year with…

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Patricia Ticineto Clough, Deleuze’s Foucault (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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26 December 2020

Patricia Ticineto Clough, Deleuze’s Foucault, Coils of the Serpent, issue 6 (2020): Control societies II: Philosophy, politics, economy, pp. 26-32

Open access

Extract
When in 2013, I taught a graduate seminar on Foucault at the Graduate Center, CUNY, my introductory lecture for the course was titled “Au Revoir to Deleuze’s Foucault.” Perhaps the lecture title was only a note to myself, a reminder that when earlier in 2006, I taught a graduate seminar on Foucault, I had ended the course with Deleuze’s Foucault, where Deleuze traced the movement in Foucault’s thought from focusing on the archive to focusing on the diagram (cf. Deleuze 1988). Arriving at my last lecture to discuss the book, I announced to the class with much enthusiasm that Deleuze’s Foucault touched exactly on all we had discussed that semester. The blank faces of the students suggested that they had not had the experience I had had reading Foucault. “Whatever could Deleuze be talking about?” students instead responded. If, in 2006, students found Deleuze’s Foucault a mystifying reading of Foucault’s works, the students of the 2013 seminar simply felt no urgency to read it at all. Perhaps I felt the same: Au Revoir to Deleuze’s Foucault.