“Are we witnessing the emergence of a new global psychiatric power ?”
Federico Soldani, MD, SM, PhD
3rd September 2019 – Royal College of Psychiatrists – London
Philosophy of Psychiatry Special Interest Group
Biennial Conference – “Madness, the Mind, and Politics” See this link for program
Andrew Neal, Security as Politics. Beyond the State of Exception, Edinburgh University Press
Uses the perspective of parliamentarians to reassess the relationship between security and politics
Andrew W. Neal argues that while ‘security’ was once an anti-political ‘exception’ in liberal democracies – a black box of secret intelligence and military decision-making at the dark heart of the state – it has now become normalised in professional political life. This represents a direct challenge to critical security studies debates and their core assumption that security is a kind of illiberal and undemocratic ‘anti-politics’.
Using archival research and interviews with politicians, Neal investigates security politics from the 1980s to the present day to show how its meaning and practice have changed over time. In doing so, he develops an original reassessment of the security/politics relationship.
Contents
1. In Defence of Politics Against Security
2. How Do We Know Security When We See It? Problematisation as Method
3. Securitisation and Politicisation
4. Politicians, Security Politics and the Political Game
5. Can One Person Make A Difference? Fearless Speech vs. Security Politics
6. Security as Normal Politics: The Rise of Security in Parliamentary Committees
7. Security as a Whole Government Project: Risk, Economy, Politics
Conclusion: More Security, More Politics
Foucault à l’épreuve de la psychiatrie et de la psychanalyse, Astérion (ENS de Lyon), 21/2019
https://doi.org/10.4000/asterion.4074
Challenging Foucault with psychiatry and psychoanalysis
Sous la direction de Laurent DARTIGUES et Elisabetta BASSO
Open access
Le dossier a pour but d’interroger, à partir de Michel Foucault, le lien entre la réflexion épistémologique sur la santé mentale et l’historicité des savoirs qui la cernent. La contribution d’Elisabetta Basso s’appuie sur les manuscrits foucaldiens des années 1950 afin d’analyser le chantier à partir duquel le jeune Foucault inaugure une réflexion qui l’amènera à une mise en question radicale du bien-fondé des sciences humaines. Ugo Balzaretti discute le rapport de la psychanalyse à la biopolitique, qu’il approfondit à la lumière de l’archéologie de la psychanalyse que Foucault développe dans Naissance de la clinique et Les mots et les choses, mais aussi de la généalogie du pouvoir esquissée dans La volonté de savoir. L’article de Laurent Dartigues a pour objet la manière dont Foucault lit et utilise la psychanalyse, dont la présence ne concerne pas les seuls écrits des années 1950 et 1960, mais reste constante tout au long de l’œuvre du philosophe, avec un statut incertain et fluctuant. Aurélie Pfauwadel s’intéresse à un point d’achoppement qui concerne une des généalogies foucaldiennes de la psychanalyse, celle qui, dans les années 1970, met le freudisme du côté de la normalisation. Clotilde Leguil se concentre sur la pensée de Lacan, dont elle fait remarquer la dimension politique dans la mesure où elle promeut une conception anti-identitariste du sujet. Enfin, le dossier présente la transcription d’un inédit de Foucault sur la psychanalyse, où le philosophe entend mesurer l’apport de la psychanalyse à la compréhension de la maladie mentale.
English
The aim of this special issue is to question, starting from Michel Foucault, the link between the epistemological reflection on mental health and the historicity of the knowledge that defines it. Elisabetta Basso’s contribution draws on Foucault’s manuscripts of the 1950s, in order to analyze how the young Foucault initiates a reflection that leads him to radically put into question social sciences. Ugo Balzaretti discusses the relationship between psychoanalysis and biopolitics, which he explores in the light of the archaeology of psychoanalysis developed by Foucault in Naissance de la clinique and Les mots et les choses, but also in the genealogy of power outlined in La volonté de savoir. Laurent Dartigues’s article deals with the way in which Foucault reads and uses psychoanalysis – whose presence in Foucault’s corpus does not only concern the writings of the 1950s and 1960s – but remains constant throughout the philosopher’s work, with an uncertain and fluctuating status. Aurélie Pfauwadel dwells on a stumbling block that concerns one of the genealogies of psychoanalysis outlined by Foucault, the one that, in the 1970s, put Freudism on the side of normalization. Clotilde Leguil focuses on Lacan’s thinking, by emphasizing its political dimension in that it promotes an anti-identitarist conception of the subject. Finally, the dossier presents the transcription of an unpublished manuscript by Foucault on psychoanalysis, in which the philosopher intends to assess the contribution of psychoanalysis to the understanding of mental illness.
Elisabetta BASSO and Laurent DARTIGUES
Introduction
Introduction
Elisabetta BASSO
De la philosophie à l’histoire, en passant par la psychologie : que nous apprennent les archives Foucault des années 1950 ?
From philosophy to history, through psychology: what do we learn from the Foucault archives of the 1950s?
Ugo BALZARETTI
Cogito et histoire du sujet : quelques remarques sur la biopolitique et la psychanalyse
Cogito and history of the subject: some remarks on biopolitics and psychoanalysis
Laurent DARTIGUES
La question de psychanalyse chez Michel Foucault
Psychoanalytical disorders in the Foucault’s thought
Aurélie PFAUWADEL
La psychanalyse et la société de normalisation : Lacan versus Foucault
Psychoanalysis and the society of normalization: Lacan versus Foucault
Clotilde LEGUIL
Le sujet lacanien, un « Je » sans identité
The Lacanian subject, an “I” without identity
Michel FOUCAULT and Elisabetta BASSO
Un manuscrit de Michel Foucault sur la psychanalyse
A manuscript by Michel Foucault on psychoanalysis
VARIA
Thomas EBKE
La connaissance vitale de la vie : une parallaxe entre Canguilhem et Plessner [Full text]
Vital knowledge of life: A parallax view between Canguilhem and Plessner
Sonya E. Pritzker & Whitney L. Duncan, Technologies of the Social: Family Constellation Therapy and the Remodeling of Relational Selfhood in China and Mexico
(2019) Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 43 (3), pp. 468-495.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-019-09632-x
Abstract
In this article, we investigate how an increasingly popular therapeutic modality, family constellation therapy (FCT), functions simultaneously as a technology of the self (Foucault, Technologies of the self: a seminar with Michel Foucault, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1988) as well as what we here call a “technology of the social.” In FCT, the self is understood as an assemblage of ancestral relationships that often creates problems in the present day. Healing this multi-generational self involves identifying and correcting hidden family dynamics in high-intensity group sessions where other participants represent the focus client and his/her family members, both alive and deceased. Drawing on ethnographic data collected in multiple FCT workshops in Beijing, China and Oaxaca City, Mexico, we show how FCT ritually reorganizes boundaries between self and other in novel ways, creating a collective space for shared moral reflection on troubling social, historical, and cultural patterns. By demonstrating the ways in which FCT unfolds as both a personal and social technology, this article contributes to ongoing conversations about how to effectively theorize sociality in therapeutic practice, and problematizes critical approaches emphasizing governmentality and commensuration (Mattingly, Moral laboratories family peril and the struggle for a good life, University of California Press, Oakland, 2014; Duncan, Transforming therapy: mental health practice and cultural change in Mexico, Vanderbilt University Press, Nashville, 2018; Matza, Shock therapy: psychology, precarity, and well-being in postsocialist Russia, Duke University Press, Durham, 2018; Pritzker, Presented at “Living Well in China” Conference, Irvine, CA, 2018; Mattingly, Anthropol Theory, 2019; Zigon, “HIV is God’s Blessing”: rehabilitating morality in neoliberal Russia, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2011).
Author Keywords
China; Family constellation therapy; Mexico; Self; Sociality
Index Keywords
adult, article, California, China, controlled study, conversation, drawing, drug combination, female, human, human experiment, Human immunodeficiency virus, insulin coma therapy, male, Massachusetts, mental health, Mexico City, morality, nonhuman, psychology, Russian Federation, wellbeing
Rasker, Maya. “A Letter to Foucault.” In Artistic Research and Literature, edited by Caduff Corina and Wälchli Tan, 35-46. Boston: Brill, 2019.
Open access
Abstract:
Investigating in what way some aspects of Foucault’s work can be fruitful to ‘think’ writing-as-research, a letter to Foucault as academic fiction unravels and valuates the paradoxes that emerge from connecting a dead philosopher’s work with the actuality of writing to him. It becomes clear that the Self cannot not be addressed when relating to a foreign (beautiful and intimidating) corpus of knowledge. Simply appropriating the philosopher’s words was working the wrong way around. In turning to the ‘master’ for clearance, the position of the ‘apprentice,’ the one presently speaking, must also be defined. How to investigate oneself from the position of the Self, while opening up for the work one admires? How to relate to what moves the heart?
Griffin, R. J. (2019). The Profession of Authorship. In A Companion to the History of the Book (eds S. Eliot and J. Rose), Wiley
doi:10.1002/9781119018193.ch51
This chapter is an overview of methodologies and scholarship on authorship that discusses the influence of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault in the context of the history of the book, with case studies on Homer, Shakespeare, and women authors, and the impact of digital publishing.
Andrew Scull, Psychiatry and Its Discontents. University of California Press, July 2019
Written by one of the world’s most distinguished historians of psychiatry, Psychiatry and Its Discontents provides a wide-ranging and critical perspective on the profession that dominates the treatment of mental illness. Andrew Scull traces the rise of the field, the midcentury hegemony of psychoanalytic methods, and the paradigm’s decline with the ascendance of biological and pharmaceutical approaches to mental illness. The book’s historical sweep is broad, ranging from the age of the asylum to the rise of psychopharmacology and the dubious triumphs of “community care.” The essays in Psychiatry and Its Discontents provide a vivid and compelling portrait of the recurring crises of legitimacy experienced by “mad-doctors,” as psychiatrists were once called, and illustrates the impact of psychiatry’s ideas and interventions on the lives of those afflicted with mental illness.
Contents
1. Introduction: The Travails of Psychiatry
PART 1. The Asylum and Its Discontents
2. The Fictions of Foucault’s Scholarship: Madness and Civilization Revisited
3. The Asylum, the Hospital, and the Clinic
4. A Culture of Complaint: Psychiatry and Its Critics
5. Promises of Miracles: Religion as Science, and Science as Religion
PART 2. Whither Twentieth-Century Psychiatry?
6. Burying Freud
7. Psychobiology, Psychiatry, and Psychoanalysis: The Intersecting Careers of Adolf Meyer, Phyllis Greenacre, and Curt Richter
8. Mangling Memories
9. Creating a New Psychiatry: On the Rockefeller Foundation and the Rise of Academic Psychiatry
PART 3. Transformations and Interpretations
10. Shrinks: Doctor Pangloss
11. The Hunting of the Snark: The Search for a History of Neuropsychiatry
12. Contending Professions: Sciences of Brain and Mind in the United States, 1900–2013
PART 4. Neuroscience and the Biological Turn
13. Trauma
14. Empathy: Reading Other People’s Minds
15. Mind, Brain, Law, and Culture
16. Left Brain, Right Brain, One Brain, Two Brains
17. Delusions of Progress: Psychiatry’s Diagnostic Manual
Andrew Scull is Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology and Science Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He is past president of the Society for the Social History of Medicine and the author of numerous books, including Madness in Civilization, Hysteria, and others.
David Langwallner, Public Intellectual Series: Michel Foucault, Cassandra Voices, December 7 2019
[…]
Alone among Post-Modernists, Foucault’s methodology was empiricist and historicist. Rather than relying on incomprehensible prose and bizarre generalisations he adopted inductive reasoning. As an historian of ideas, we don’t simply find him inventing absurd abstractions, but analysing real existing data.
[…]
For Foucault: ‘[M]madness was an invention, a product of social relations and not an independent reality.
Of course that point can be expanded to our present age, with concepts of rationality and ideas on mental health shifting, augmented by social media, message management and outright thought control. The paradigm shift is towards an all-consuming neo-liberalism, and conformity reconfiguring human identity itself. Soon, I fear, even moderate liberalism might be deemed mad, recalling Chile in the 1970s, or even 1930s Germany.
In my practice as a London-based barrister, increasingly, I find clients in disassociated and derealised states. Social alienation is leading many to perceive themselves as passive onlookers in lives not truly their own. The ills of social dissatisfaction and structural curtailment of achievement leading to moderate or even severe depression.
[…]
materiali foucaultiani
volume VII, number 13-14 (January-December 2018)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Il cantiere archeologico e la questione della critica (pp. 4-8)
Laura Cremonesi, Orazio Irrera, Daniele Lorenzini, Martina Tazzioli
The final Foucault and Education
Introduction. The final Foucault and Education (pp. 9-27)
Roberto Serpieri, Emiliano Grimaldi, Stephen J. Ball
Foucault and Neoliberalism. A response to recent critics and a new resolution (pp. 28-55)
Mark Olssen
Foucault, Trump and Free Speech. Democracy and True Discourse (pp. 56-74)
Michael A. Peters, Tina Besley
The Culture of Education. Ancient Cynicism and “the scandal of the truth” (pp. 75-92)
Ansgar Allen
Foucault et la métamorphose éducative (pp. 93-112)
Didier Moreau
School, pedagogy and Foucault’s undefined work of freedom (pp. 113-133)
Maarten Simons, Jan Masschelein
Education as a dispositif, subjectivation and the late Foucault (pp. 134-148)
Francesco Cappa
Post-Education and Ethical Government (pp. 149-187)
Roberto Serpieri
Il coraggio della verità. Per una critica parresiastica del sistema d’istruzione (pp. 188-208)
Eleonora de Conciliis
Il governo di sé e del sapere fra valutazione e parrhesia (pp. 209-231)
Emiliano Bevilacqua, Davide Borrelli
Saggi
Confession and Avowal in Foucault’s early work, 1954-1972 (pp. 232-252)
Andrea Teti
Foucault lecteur de saint Augustin (pp. 253-272)
Ákos Cseke
Dall’Antropologia all’«ontologia critica di noi stessi»: l’eredità kantiana in Foucault attraverso le figure di Heidegger e Nietzsche (pp. 273-288)
Anna Ceschi
Logica e pratica dell’inchiesta. Romano Alquati e Michel Foucault (pp. 289-303)
Matteo Polleri
Arthur Bradley, Unbearable Life. A Genealogy of Political Erasure, Columbia University Press, 2019
In ancient Rome, any citizen who had brought disgrace upon the state could be subject to a judgment believed to be worse than death: damnatio memoriae, condemnation of memory. The Senate would decree that every trace of the citizen’s existence be removed from the city as if they had never existed in the first place. Once reserved for individuals, damnatio memoriae in different forms now extends to social classes, racial and ethnic groups, and even entire peoples. In modern times, the condemned go by different names—“enemies of the people;” the “missing,” the “disappeared,” “ghost” detainees in “black sites”—but they are subject to the same fate of political erasure.
Arthur Bradley explores the power to render life unlived from ancient Rome through the War on Terror. He argues that sovereignty is the power to decide what counts as being alive and what does not: to make life “unbearable,” unrecognized as having lived or died. In readings of Augustine, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Robespierre, Schmitt, and Benjamin, Bradley asks: What is the “life” of this unbearable life? How does it change and endure across sovereign time and space, from empires to republics, from kings to presidents? To what extent can it be resisted or lived otherwise? A profoundly interdisciplinary and ambitious work, Unbearable Life rethinks sovereignty, biopolitics, and political theology to find the radical potential of a life that neither lives or dies.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Arthur Bradley is professor of comparative literature at Lancaster University. His books include Originary Technicity: The Theory of Technology from Marx to Derrida (2011).
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