La mort sa mérite – Nicolas Drolc’s film of Serge Livrozet, is now freely available. Livrozet was involved in the Group d’information sur les prisons with Foucault, and then co-founded the Comité d’Action des Prisonniers. Nicolas previously directed the excellent Sur les toits.
LA MORT SE MÉRITE from LES FILMS FURAX on Vimeo.
Sur les toits is available on Youtube, and there is a symposium on it at the Antipode site, based on a screening and discussion at Warwick organised by Marijn Nieuwenhuis.
A. Chong, Governance for global pandemics, East Asia Forum: Economics, Politics and Public Policy in East Asia and the Pacific, 26 March 2020
Much of the public alarm triggered by the outbreak of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) is greatly bound up with the management of cross-border security threats. COVID-19 resembles a 21st century medieval plague in terms of how little we understand its character and how vulnerable we are to its effects.
[…]
The general idea of observing the socially diseased from a central point is widely known in social science thanks to the work of Jeremy Bentham and Michel Foucault. The ‘panopticon’ is an idea that can be traced back to early modern prison surveillance architecture where prison cells are arrayed around a central towering guard post. This system was meant to instil fear in those prisoners being watched in their cells, while also ensuring that they develop self-vigilance.
Van der Heiden, G.-J.
Exile, Use, and Form-of-Life: On the Conclusion of Agamben’s Homo Sacer series
(2020) Theory, Culture and Society, 37 (2), pp. 61-78.
Abstract
The last two volumes of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer series are concerned with developing a theory of use. This article offers a critical assessment of the two concepts, use and form-of-life, that form the heart of this theory: how do these two notions offer a solution to the problem of bare life that forms the core of the Homo Sacer series? First, the author describes how the original problem of bare life is taken up in The Use of Bodies and how the notion of use offers an important additional characteristic of bare life. Second, inspired by Foucault’s analysis of ancient Cynicism, the author discusses in which sense the type of ‘solution’ Agamben offers to the problem of bare life might be seen as an heir to ancient Cynicism and how this interpretation clarifies his connection of form-of-life and exile. Third, the author critically assesses the different usages of use that we can find in Agamben, by comparing how Franciscan usus, Pauline chrēsis and Platonic chrēsis are taken up in his analysis. Fourth, following Foucault, the author deepens the Platonic sense of use and its relation to taking care of justice. The article concludes with a critical assessment of Agamben’s reading of Plato’s myth of Er, in which the motifs of use, exile, and care are gathered. © The Author(s) 2019.
Author Keywords
Agamben; care; exile; form-of-life; Foucault; Homo Sacer; use
Gane, N.
Competition: A Critical History of a Concept
(2020) Theory, Culture and Society, 37 (2), pp. 31-59.
Abstract
This article expands Michel Foucault’s genealogy of liberalism and neoliberalism by analysing the concept of competition. It addresses four key liberal conceptions of competition in turn: the idea of competition as a destructive but progressive and thus necessary force (roughly 1830–90); economic theories of market equilibrium that theorize competition mathematically (1870 onwards); socio-biological ideas of competition as something natural (1850–1900); and sociological arguments that see competition as adding value to the social (1900–20). From this starting point, the article considers the ways in which three main trajectories of neoliberal thought that emerged from the early 1920s onwards – Austrian, German and American – developed and responded to these conceptualizations of competition. In conclusion, it is argued that this history of the concept of competition leads to a new understanding of the tensions that lie at the heart of neoliberal thought, and which are largely missing from Foucault’s account. © The Author(s) 2019.
Author Keywords
competition; equality; equilibrium; evolution; liberalism; neoliberalism
As an earlier post said, I’ve had to cancel two talks – in New York and Bologna – and some archival work because of the current medical situation. There is a bit more on that below, but as much as possible I’m trying to continue work on The Early Foucault manuscript, as concentration and other tasks allow, and with restrictions about what I can access. The responses to a post about what this blog should and shouldn’t do over the coming weeks were that I should continue to post things as and when appropriate, so I will continue to do that. Most of what is written below is about the work I did before everything started to change. I hope it is of interest and gives a sense of how I have been working on this book over the past few weeks.
The second half of my time in France…
View original post 1,694 more words
Elliot Grover, What Can Daniel Defoe’s “Plague Year” Teach Us About Coronavirus?, InsideHook, 17 March 2020
A novel written in 1722 offers a surprisingly relevant blueprint to navigating a 2020 pandemic
The panic began the moment the earliest cases were confirmed. Those with means hurriedly packed their belongings and fled the city. Those who stayed had a range of reactions: many laid siege to the markets, stocking up on provisions before barricading themselves and their families in their homes; some congregated in churches while others consulted astronomers and fortune-tellers; many more, dismissive of the invisible disease or the visible fear it stoked in the masses, continued their lives unabated. These individuals were the first to die.
[…]
The city in question is not Wuhan or Milan or Manhattan. It is London and the year is 1665. Before the end of 1666, the Bubonic Plague will kill roughly one-quarter of the city’s population. As devastating as this figure is, it could have been much worse.
[…]
While other pestilential narratives dwell on the chaos that accompanies pandemics, Defoe’s book documents the rigid order that emerges in the plague city. Michel Foucault, the 20th-century philosopher whose ideas have greatly influenced modern conceptions of power, highlighted these divergent views in his seminal 1975 book Discipline and Punish.
“A whole literary fiction of the festival grew up around the plague: suspended laws, lifted prohibitions, the frenzy of passing time, bodies mingling together without respect,” Foucault writes. “But there was also a political dream of the plague, which was exactly its reverse: not the collective festival, but strict divisions; not laws transgressed, but the penetration of regulation into even the smallest details of everyday life.” What Foucault is suggesting, and what Defoe’s account supports, is that this political dream becomes a reality in the societies that combat pandemics most effectively.
[…]
Felipe Demetri, Biopolitics and Coronavirus, or don’t forget Foucault, Naked Punch, 21 March 2020
[…]
What the coronavirus epidemic shows us is more the strength of Michel Foucault’s explanatory scheme than the current necro-thanatopolitical strain of interpretations. We all know that Foucault saw biopower as a series of events, from theoretical ones to concrete practices, which formed the basis of a new relationship between national states and the biological element of human life. No longer the exclusion of political life and the plundering of goods and rights that would characterize the Old Regime, but instead new techniques organized around the better extraction of the living forces. Thus, biopower is a descriptive index of the moment when States began to exercise the management of spheres of social life that today seem obvious to us, such as health care, birth and mortality rates, etc. Foucault does not suggest that this would be due to humanist concern of the State; it is, in fact, about meeting the demands of capitalism. Bruno Cava synthesized well in his recent text: the concept of biopolitics does not necessarily describe a “good” or “bad” situation: Foucault is limited to pointing out precisely the limits of our situation.
Faced with the coronavirus, the majority of States have exercised strong sanitary and population control in order to prevent its spread; strictly speaking, actions are being taken to prevent a greater death toll. Such biopolitics places us in the domain of how Foucault conceived the population management techniques, focused (primarily, but not exclusively) to better condition the living forces. It is increasingly evident, however, that even drastic actions have not been enough to contain the spread of the virus, and a sense of collective responsibility is growing towards those who cannot protect themselves: those who can’t work at home, those who are in unfavorable sanitary conditions, the elderly etc.
[…]
Emanuele Iula, Periferie. Dall’eterotopia alla rigenerazione, Queriniana, Brescia, (2020)
In breve
Che cos’è una periferia? Come nasce? Come funziona?
Descrizione
Il tema delle periferie urbane continua a rappresentare uno scoglio sociale su cui si infrangono numerose politiche pubbliche. La loro perenne attualità nei fatti di cronaca non è solo segno di un limite politico. C’è una sconfitta che avviene più a monte e che riguarda il modo in cui le periferie sono spesso state mal comprese.
In questo complesso scenario, il paziente sforzo dell’autore consiste nel ricostruire il profilo umano di chi abita le periferie. Oltre che luogo (terra di mezzo: né centro città, né aperta campagna), esse divengono esperienza, quella dell’essere messi a distanza e privati di una relazione fondamentale. Iula disegna così l’ontologia sociale dell’essere periferico e, alla fine del percorso, rende visibile il contributo che viene dalla teoria generativa: lì dove la separazione sitrasforma in un possibile radicamento, prima, e in memoria della svolta, poi.
Emanuele Iula, Suburbs. From heterotopia to regeneration
In short
What is a periphery? How was it born? How does it work?
And how to regenerate those who live daily in those places of exclusion?
A substantial reformulation of our way of understanding the peripheries, the subject of specific pastoral attention in the teaching of Pope Francis, to open new paths of meaning.
Description
The theme of urban suburbs continues to represent a social obstacle on which numerous public policies break. Their constant relevance in the news is not only a sign of a political limit. There is a defeat that occurs further upstream and that concerns the way in which the suburbs have often been misunderstood.
In this complex scenario, the author’s patient effort consists in reconstructing the human profile of those who live in the suburbs. As well as a place (middle ground: neither city center nor open countryside), they become experience, that of being put at a distance and deprived of a fundamental relationship. Thus, Iula draws the social ontology of the peripheral being and, at the end of the path, makes visible the contribution that comes from the generative theory: where the separation transforms into a possible grounding, first, and in memory of the turning point, then.
Presentation:
The question about peripheries is always in the spotlight of current affairs. The reflections proposed by the Author offer the reader an extensive exercise of conceptualisation, aimed at fostering orientation within the complexity of the social reality. Most of the text consists of allowing oneself to be oriented and disoriented by very simple questions: What is a periphery? How did it come about? How does it work?
From an epistemological point of view, the essay offers an open dialogue with key authors of the current debate, such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. In a similar way, the philosophical background of the proposed argument is fed by a confrontation with other kinds of knowledge, such as sociology and anthropology.
In the conclusions, there is an opening vis-à-vis prophetic literature of biblical origin, which provides the Author with the possibility to formulate an interpretation from the perspective of the generative theory, founded on a critical sense, on transmission and on rooting.
The Author: Emanuele Iula is an Italian Jesuit, who teaches moral philosophy at the Pontifical Faculty of Theology of San Luigi (Naples). His research is mainly focused on generative theory, conflict mediation and social ontology.
Kaveh L. Afrasiabi, Foucault And The Politics Of Coronavirus Pandemic – OpEd, Eurasia Review, News and Analysis, March 12, 2020
As the coronavirus, officially known as COVID-19, relentlessly continues it mayhem around the world, on the intellectual side it has also provoked fresh conversations on the (geo) politics and the related ramifications in terms of redrawing the private/public sphere lines, the empowerment of (local) governments on individuals, the new pattern of “social distancing,” the possibilities of a new round of “de-globalization,” and the like.
From China to Iran, Italy, South Korea, Singapore, etc., millions of people are placed under either mandatory or “voluntary” self-isolation and entire towns and cities are experiencing the harsh reality of life under quarantine — to the point that some particularly in Europe have invoked comparison with the great plague of the 1300s that wiped out thirty to sixty percent of the continent’s population.
[…]
Meanwhile, it is instructive to put the insights of French philosopher Michel Foucault into practice by examining the global politics of COVID-19 from a Foucauldian perspective. As is well-known, Foucault studied the great plague’s effects in terms of population control, centralization of power, de-individualization of citizens and their new ‘scientific’ compartmentalization, resulting in certain side-effects with respect to “panopticist” prison control and, with it, a new mode of surveillance reflecting a new modality of operationalization of power.
[…]
Tidmarsh, M.
Transforming Rehabilitation: The micro-physics of (market) power
(2020) Punishment and Society, 22 (1), pp. 108-126.
Abstract
This paper explores the impact of the introduction of competition and profit to the probation service in England and Wales following the implementation of the Transforming Rehabilitation reforms. The paper adapts the ideas advanced in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish to draw similarities between the characteristics of ‘disciplinary institutions’ and a micro-physics of (market) power in probation under Transforming Rehabilitation. It utilises Foucault’s ‘instruments’ of disciplinary power – hierarchical observation, normalising judgement, and the examination – as lenses through which to highlight the unintended consequences of the installation of market techniques within the service. The paper argues that the constraints peculiar to instilling decentralising market mechanisms that were presented as a means to liberate practitioners and reduce reoffending have entrenched further the centralising tendencies associated with managerialism. © The Author(s) 2019.
Author Keywords
Foucault; managerialism; marketisation; probation; Transforming Rehabilitation
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