Foucault News

David I. Grossvogel (1926-2020)

Clare O'Farrell

30 June 2020

Diacritics founder David Grossvogel dies at 94, Cornell Chronicle, By Daniel Aloi | June 22, 2020

Influential scholar, writer and editor David I. Grossvogel, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies Emeritus and member of the Cornell faculty since 1960, died June 14 in Chicago. He was 94.

[…]

Grossvogel founded Diacritics, the journal of contemporary criticism and theory published at Cornell, in 1971, and served as its editor until 1976. Credited with bringing continental theory to the United States, the eclectic journal offered reviews and criticism, surveying critical approaches to literature and experimental modes of creation.

Notably, Diacritics published interviews with leading figures such as Claude Levi-Strauss and Jacques Derrida, and translations of works by Hélène Cixous, Derrida, Umberto Eco and Michel Foucault, among others.
[…]

The Selected Writings of Pierre Hadot Philosophy as Practice (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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29 June 2020

Pierre Hadot, The Selected Writings of Pierre Hadot. Philosophy as Practice. Translated by Matthew Sharpe, Federico Testa, Bloomsbury, Published: 25-06-2020

This collection of writings from Pierre Hadot (1992-2010) presents, for the first time, previously unreleased and in some cases untranslated materials from one of the world’s most prominent classical philosophers and historians of thought.

As a passionate proponent of philosophy as a ‘way of life’ (most powerfully communicated in the life of Socrates), Pierre Hadot rejuvenated interest in the ancient philosophers and developed a philosophy based on their work which is peculiarly contemporary. His radical recasting of philosophy in the West was both provocative and substantial. Indeed, Michel Foucault cites Pierre Hadot as a major influence on his work.

This beautifully written, lucid collection of writings will not only be of interest to historians, classicists and philosophers but also those interested in nourishing, as Pierre Hadot himself might have put it, a ‘spiritual life’.

Table of contents
Part 1: Key Parameters
1. ‘My Books and My Research’
2. ‘Ancient Philosophers’
3. ‘Ancient Philosophy, an Ethics or a Practice?’
4. ‘The Oral Teaching of Plato’

Part 2: Aspects
5. ‘Conversion’
6. ‘The Division of the Parts of Philosophy in Antiquity’
7. ‘Philosophy, Dialectic, and Rhetoric in Ancient Philosophy’

Part 3: The Ancients and Nature
8. ‘The Ancients and Nature’
9. ‘The Genius of Place in Ancient Greece’

Part 4: Figures
10. ‘The Figure of the Sage in the Greek and Roman Antiquity’
11. ‘Physics as a Spiritual Exercise, or Pessimism and Optimism in Marcus Aurelius’
12. ‘On an Interrupted Dialogue with Michel Foucault: Convergences and Divergences’

Part 5: Ends
13. ‘The End of Paganism’
14. ‘Models of Happiness Proposed by the Ancient Philosophers’

Trump, his worst critics, and diagnosis outside of a clinical context

Clare O'Farrell

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28 June 2020

PsyPolitics

Opposites playing the same game ?

by Federico Soldani

What is the very last thing a patient forced to be admitted to hospital for mental health cannot legally be forced into?

According to different legal contexts, with significant national and state variations, as a last resort, a patient can be forced to hospitalization itself, for observation or treatment.

If necessary, physical treatment for mental health can also become compulsory: medication or, more rarely, procedures such as electro-convulsive treatment.

However, patients cannot be forced to open up against their will, or to “confess”, to use a Foucaultian term in a clinical context [1].

Even less so, no one can be legally forced to engage in psychotherapy. In the end, such decisions related to opening up remain a prerogative of each and every patient, no matter under what circumstances.

Patient collaboration can be achieved indirectly, perhaps more easily in a forensic context…

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Laurence Barry, The rationality of the digital governmentality (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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27 June 2020

Laurence Barry (2019) The rationality of the digital governmentality, Journal for Cultural Research, 23:4, 365-380. Published online: 13 Jan 2020
https://doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2020.1714878

Abstract
While it is often claimed that the emerging digital governmentality functions as a new apparatus of surveillance, the aim of this paper is to characterise this regime in relation to Foucault’s disciplinary, liberal and neoliberal governmentality, hence insisting on the transformation of disciplinary surveillance implied by current technological developments. My claim is that statistics, previously employed for the management of populations, is now absorbed into predictive analytics as a new technology for the management of collectives, through personalisation and statistical individuation. The conduct of conducts thus takes the form of a constant incitation to action, adjusted to the individual statistical profile. Contrary to discipline, the new regime is therefore statistical, yet applied to the individual. Furthermore, while liberal and neo-liberal governmentality both assumed a rational subject, digital government focuses on the management of impulses and desires, thus producing a digital subject at odds with the liberal and neoliberal homo oeconomicus.

Marshall Scheider, Economies of Security: Foucault and the Genealogy of Neoliberal Reason (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

23 June 2020

Scheider, Marshall (2020) “Economies of Security: Foucault and the Genealogy of Neoliberal Reason,”
Gettysburg Social Sciences Review: Vol. 4 : Iss. 1 , Article 2.

Open access

Abstract
Michel Foucault is well-known for his theorizations of institutional power, normativity, and biopolitics. Less well-known is the fact that Foucault developed his analysis of biopolitics in and through his historical investigation of neoliberalism. Today, while critique of neoliberalism has become a commonplace of humanities discourse, and popular resistance to neoliberalization rocks the southern hemisphere, it remains unclear that the historical specificity of neoliberalism is well-understood. In particular, the relation between classical liberalism and neoliberal governance remains murky in popular debate. As Foucault powerfully illustrates, this relation is far from clear-cut, and neoliberalism is not reducible to a simple extension of the logic of a free market. This paper follows Foucault in tracing the historical emergence of neoliberalism from the classical liberalism of the late seventeenth through early nineteenth century, attending to the continuities, as well as the radical discontinuities between these political forms. Because neoliberalism characterizes the governmental and economic reason and practice of late-modernity, recalling Foucault’s erudite analysis prepares us to understand and engage the social, political, and economic conjunctures reverberating throughout the world today.

M. Gail Hamner, Laval, Paltrinieri, and Taylan: Marx et Foucault: Lectures, usages, confrontations (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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22 June 2020

affecognitive

The first part of this edited collection reflected on Foucault as a reader of Marx. In the book’s second part, five essays respond to the various Marxisms of the 19th-20th centuries and how Foucault situated his own research in relation to them. The first essay maps Foucault’s writings alongside developments in Marxian theory. The second to fourth essays juxtapose Foucault to the specific claims of Sartre, Althusser and Burckhardt, respectively, and the last (my personal favorite) examines the double chiasm of history and subjectivity in Foucault’s writings and pushes back—successfully in my view—on the ludicrous claim that Foucault ‘became’ a liberal individualist in his last years.

It has to be said that writing of any kind is difficult and strange right now, as protests raging against the police murder of George Floyd are crowding streets and highways and pressing up against the edges of the White House lawn, and as…

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Marnia Lazreg, Foucault’s Orient: The Conundrum of Cultural Difference, From Tunisia to Japan (2020 pb)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

22 June 2020

Marnia Lazreg, Foucault’s Orient: The Conundrum of Cultural Difference, From Tunisia to Japan, Berghahn, 2017, 2020

Now out in paperback

DESCRIPTION
Foucault lived in Tunisia for two years and travelled to Japan and Iran more than once. Yet throughout his critical scholarship, he insisted that the cultures of the “Orient” constitute the “limit” of Western rationality. Using archival research supplemented by interviews with key scholars in Tunisia, Japan and France, this book examines the philosophical sources, evolution as well as contradictions of Foucault’s experience with non-Western cultures. Beyond tracing Foucault’s journey into the world of otherness, the book reveals the personal, political as well as methodological effects of a radical conception of cultural difference that extolled the local over the cosmopolitan.

Marnia Lazreg is professor of sociology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her latest publications include Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad (Princeton, 2008); and Questioning the Veil: Open Letters to Muslim Women (Princeton, 2009).

Peter Fitzpatrick 1942-2020 (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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20 June 2020

Kent Law School mourns the loss of Professor Peter Fitzpatrick
By aps42, 20 May 2020

Professor Fitzpatrick began teaching law at Kent in 1977 and taught here until 1996. He was appointed an Honorary Professor in 2005. He enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a legal academic, teaching at universities in Europe, North America and Papua New Guinea. He also worked in international legal practice, working for several years in the Office of the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea.
[…]

…his more recent work on Michel Foucault has opened a new way of understanding law in the work of Foucault.’

In addition to Foucault and Law with Ben Golder (eds) (Ashgate, 2010) and Foucault’s Law (Routledge, 2009) with Ben Golder, more recent books included Law as Resistance: Modernism, Imperalism, Legalism (Ashgate, 2008) and Critical Beings: Law, Nation and the Global Subject with Patricia Tuitt (eds) (Ashgate, 2003); Modernism and the Grounds of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Béatrice Han-Pile – Two Puzzles in the Early Christian Constitution of the Self: Reflections on Foucault’s Interpretation of John Cassian (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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20 June 2020

Béatrice Han-Pile – Two Puzzles in the Early Christian Constitution of the Self: Reflections on Foucault’s Interpretation of John Cassian (2020)

Event Date: 8 June 2020
Virtual [ZOOM] University of London. Audio recording of the lecture available.

The Aristotelian Society presents:

Professor Béatrice Han-Pile (Essex) – Two Puzzles in the Early Christian Constitution of the Self: Reflections on Foucault’s Interpretation of John Cassian

Béatrice Han-Pile studied philosophy, history and literature at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris) and was awarded a Fellowship from the Thiers Foundation while completing her doctoral thesis on Michel Foucault. Before coming to Essex, she taught in France at the Universities of Paris IV-Sorbonne, Reims and Amiens. She is the author of Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical (Stanford University Press, 2002). She has published mostly on Foucault, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, phenomenology (in particular Heidegger) and the philosophy of agency. In 2015-2018 she was Principal Investigator on a three-year AHRC-funded project on ‘The Ethics of Powerlessness: The Theological Virtues Today’ (EoP). She is currently working on medio-passive agency, both in itself and through the writings of early Christian thinkers (John Cassian and St Augustine) and of more recent authors such as Nietzsche, Foucault and Heidegger. She is also working on hope as a (medio-passive) virtue of powerlessness and on the conditions under which this theological virtue might afford us with appropriate ethical guidance in secular contexts.

Michel Foucault and Richard Sennett, Sexuality and Solitude – London Review of Books, 1981 (open access)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

18 June 2020

Progressive Geographies

LRB-0309-01 As part of their ‘Diverted Traffic’ series, the London Review of Books has made Michel Foucault and Richard Sennett, ‘Sexuality and Solitude‘ from 1981 open access. Reprints of this piece – Dits et écrits or Essential Works, for example, tend to omit Sennett’s contribution. The pieces come from a 1980 seminar at New York University.