Foucault News

Archive: Jean M. Langford, Avian Bedlam: Toward a Biosemiosis of Troubled Parrots (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

9 May 2020

Jean M. Langford, Avian Bedlam: Toward a Biosemiosis of Troubled Parrots, Environmental Humanities 9:1 (May 2017)
DOI 10.1215/22011919-3829145 © 2017

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Abstract
At an urban parrot sanctuary in the Midwestern USA, humans care for eighty-some parrots from more than a dozen species. Many of these parrots have personal histories that include various forms of neglect, abuse, and abandonment. The article explores the forms of interspecies communication through which human caretakers interpret and respond to the psychic lives of these parrots—psychic lives that are marked by troubles ranging from social withdrawal to self-destructive behavior. These interspecies communications include body language, gesture, nonverbal vocalizations, and human-language phrases. While biosemiotic theory offers a provocative starting point for understanding these communications, sanctuary interactions destabilize certain semiotic distinctions, drawing attention to ambiguities between semantic and nonsemantic vocalization, vocalization and body language, informative speech and expletive, and communication and symptom. Building on ideas about metacommunication in animal play, I suggest that both psychic trouble and interactions to ease that trouble might be considered forms of biosemiotic creativity. By loosening and opening up the distinctions frequently drawn between human and other-than-human semiosis, it is possible to develop subtler accounts of the semiotic improvisations that emerge in uniquely configured multispecies communities such as the sanctuary.

Keywords
parrots, biosemiosis, multispecies, madness, interspecies communication

Jürgen Portschy, Times of power, knowledge and critique in the work of Foucault (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

9 May 2020

Jürgen Portschy, Times of power, knowledge and critique in the work of Foucault, Time and Society Volume: 29 issue: 2, page(s): 392-419
Article first published online: May 7, 2020; Issue published: May 1, 2020
https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463X20911786

Abstract
While Michel Foucault is commonly considered as a thinker with a primary interest in space and spatiality, his use of temporal categories, tropes and metaphors has until recently been only partially reconstructed. Working through different phases of his writings and lectures, this paper argues that Foucault opened a complex and interesting – yet to be acknowledged – analytical perspective on historically dominant, but fundamentally contested forms of social time-regimes, which accounts especially for contingent ruptures, silent continuities and the power-structured contexts of their emergence. Elucidating conceptual tools designed towards the analysis of rationalities and practises of temporal government and approaching social time regimes along the axes of power, knowledge and subjectivity, the aim of this paper is twofold: on the one side, it tries to further contribute to a ‘temporal turn’ in Foucault studies; on the other, it attempts to develop a Foucauldian vocabulary of temporal analysis as an alternative or supplement to established approaches in the field of critical social time studies.

Keywords Time, temporality, Foucault, power, governmentality, subjectivity, knowledge, political philosophy

The Early Foucault Update 32: Unable to finish a manuscript during lockdown

Clare O'Farrell

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8 May 2020

Progressive Geographies

While these are strange and disruptive times, as much as I’m able, I’m trying to make progress on this book manuscript. I’d intended to submit it to Polity by the end of April, but that unfortunately wasn’t possible. I can manage without the days I’d planned on having in Uppsala when I cut that trip short, and the work I would have done at Yale and Princeton was mainly for the next book on Foucault in the 1960s, so I hope to reschedule that trip when the situation has improved. But I do need some more time in Paris to complete this manuscript, and I am not sure when that will be possible.

Although I have most of my French theory books at home, there are a few things in my Warwick office that I can’t currently access. The Warwick library is closed, and there are few things I want…

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Ugo Mattei & Federico Soldani, From Citizens to Patients: A Threat to Resist (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

3 comments

8 May 2020

From Citizens to Patients: A Threat to Resist.
Pandemic Lectures at the the International University College of Turin- Ugo Mattei & Federico Soldani, May 4, 2020

The decline of law as a tool for social control and its supplanting by technological, mental, and medical management aimed at preventing deviant behavior, with nary a concern for such substitution’s deleterious effects.

Other interesting lectures in the series can be found here

Thinking Through Covid-19 Responses With Foucault – An Initial Overview (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

7 May 2020

Matthew G. Hannah, Jan Simon Hutta and Christoph Schemann, Thinking Through Covid-19 Responses With Foucault – An Initial Overview, Antipode online, 5 May 2020 (Department of Geography, University of Bayreuth)

Open access

This intervention originally appeared as the second half of a longer essay intended as a basis for discussion in a Masters seminar at our university (original essay available here). It has been revised and updated for publication on AntipodeOnline.org The first part of the longer essay is an extended overview of Foucault’s analyses of power relations. As this background is not included in what follows, readers lacking a basic familiarity with the concepts of “sovereignty”, “discipline”, “biopower”, “biopolitics” and “governmentality” as these have been understood in the literature building on Foucault’s work are encouraged to consult Part I of the original version (or any of the numerous excellent book-length overviews of Foucault’s thoughts on power relations such as Dean 1999; Deleuze 2006; Elden 2017; Lemke 2019).

Over the last months, there has been a true explosion of critical scholarly contributions aimed at making sense of the political responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. Not only is the multiplicity of interventions and contributions that have been made at a global scale increasingly hard to track, writing during a pandemic also risks illuminating pre-established theoretical frameworks more than the unfolding events themselves. This is especially true where theorists use the pandemic as “raw material for metaphysical speculation”, as Warwick Anderson (2020) has pointed out with respect to authors such as Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Žižek. It is our conviction that some of the ideas of Michel Foucault, whose methodology has always been oriented towards differentiated empirical and historical analysis rather than abstract theorization, can avoid this danger while illustrating possibilities for making detailed sense of ongoing events.

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Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson, Genealogies of Terrorism: Revolution, State Violence, Empire (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

6 May 2020

Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson, Genealogies of Terrorism: Revolution, State Violence, Empire (New Directions in Critical Theory), Columbia University Press (July 31, 2018), 296pp, ISBN-13: 978-0231187275

What is terrorism? What ought we to do about it? And why is it wrong? We think we have clear answers to these questions. But acts of violence, like U.S. drone strikes that indiscriminately kill civilians, and mass shootings that become terrorist attacks when suspects are identified as Muslim, suggest that definitions of terrorism are always contested. In Genealogies of Terrorism, Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson rejects attempts to define what terrorism is in favor of a historico-philosophical investigation into the conditions under which uses of this contested term become meaningful. The result is a powerful critique of the power relations that shape how we understand and theorize political violence.

Tracing discourses and practices of terrorism from the French Revolution to late imperial Russia, colonized Algeria, and the post-9/11 United States, Erlenbusch-Anderson examines what we do when we name something terrorism. She offers an important corrective to attempts to develop universal definitions that assure semantic consistency and provide normative certainty, showing that terrorism means many different things and serves a wide range of political purposes. In the tradition of Michel Foucault’s genealogies, Erlenbusch-Anderson excavates the history of conceptual and practical uses of terrorism and maps the historically contingent political and material conditions that shape their emergence. She analyzes the power relations that make different modes of understanding terrorism possible and reveals their complicity in justifying the exercise of sovereign power in the name of defending the nation, class, or humanity against the terrorist enemy. Offering an engaged critique of terrorism and the mechanisms of social and political exclusion that it enables, Genealogies of Terrorism is an empirically grounded and philosophically rigorous critical history with important political implications.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson is assistant professor of philosophy at Syracuse University.

Webinar: University of Lisbon, A arte de viver uma pandemia (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

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5 May 2020

An “Art of living research group” event at the New University of Lisbon, focusing on a foucaultian perspective on the pandemic will take place at 18:00h on 6 May 2020.

The webinar” is free and available after registration at: art.of.living.researchgroup@gmail.com

Theoretical Puppets: Q is for quarantine (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

5 May 2020

Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group (1970–1980), edited by Kevin Thompson and Perry Zurn, University of Minnesota Press, December 2020

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

4 May 2020

Progressive Geographies

Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group (1970–1980), edited by Kevin Thompson and Perry Zurn, University of Minnesota Press, December 2020

Founded by Michel Foucault and others in 1970–71, the Prisons Information Group (GIP) circulated information about the inhumane conditions within the French prison system. Intolerable makes available for the first time in English a fully annotated compilation of materials produced by the GIP during its brief but influential existence, including an exclusive new interview with GIP member Hélène Cixous and writings by Gilles Deleuze and Jean Genet.
These archival documents—public announcements, manifestos, reports, pamphlets, interventions, press conference statements, interviews, and round table discussions—trace the GIP’s establishment in post-1968 political turmoil, the new models of social activism it pioneered, the prison revolts it supported across France, and the retrospective assessments that followed its denouement. At the same time, Intolerable offers a rich, concrete exploration of Foucault’s…

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Anne Sauka, The Nature of Our Becoming: Genealogical Perspectives (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

4 May 2020

Anne Sauka (2020). The Nature of Our Becoming: Genealogical Perspectives. Le Foucaldien, 6(1), 4.
https://doi.org/10.16995/lefou.71 [Note: In 2022, Le foucaldien relaunched as Genealogy+Critique.]

Open access

Abstract
In the light of Philipp Sarasin’s work in Darwin und Foucault: Genealogie und Geschichte im Zeitalter der Biologie, the article delineates a genealogically articulated naturally produced culture and a cultured nature and discusses the genealogical implications of a carnal, becoming self in a world that could rightly be justified “as an aesthetical phenomenon.” The article demonstrates the historicity and processual materiality as a conceptual platform for a combination of the notions of experienced carnality and a socially constructed body, demonstrating such a historically embedded carnal body as a binding agent for the “social constructivist” and “biologist” approaches in sciences. Thus, the article builds a framework for the articulation of senseful, processual materiality on the backdrop of a nature-culture continuum via genealogy, suggesting the necessity for change of tone in the communication of human and life sciences via the understanding of a culturally endowed biology.

Keywords: genealogy, nature, culture, carnal body, becoming