Foucault News

Archive: Rendering climate change governable: From biopower to advanced liberal government? (2005)

Clare O'Farrell

20 December 2019

Angela Oels(2005) Rendering climate change governable: From biopower to advanced liberal government?,Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning,7:3,185-207,DOI: 10.1080/15239080500339661

Abstract
This article generates a theoretical framework for analysing the politics of climate change on the basis of Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality. Foucault does not limit the exercise of power to sovereignty, but introduces discipline, biopower, liberal and advanced liberal government as alternative configurations of state and power. The article argues that the ways in which climate change is rendered a governable entity are best understood before the background of a shift from biopower to advanced liberal government. It will be argued that climate change was first rendered governable by biopower, which justified global management of spaceship Earth in the name of the survival of life on Earth. Since the mid-1990s, climate change has been captured by advanced liberal government, which articulates climate change as an economic issue that requires market-based solutions to facilitate cost-effective technological solutions. A governmentality analysis asks which visibilities, fields of knowledge, practices and identities this ‘global climate regime’ is actually producing, rather than assuming that what it does or is supposed to do is known. In that way, the ways in which programme failure has already been built into the very formation of the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol can be identified.

Keywords: Governmentality, neoliberalism, climate change, constructivism, power

Israel as homotopia: Language, space, and vicious belonging (2019)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

20 December 2019

Levon, E., Milani, T.M.
Israel as homotopia: Language, space, and vicious belonging
(2019) Language in Society, 48 (4), pp. 607-628.

DOI: 10.1017/S0047404519000356

Open access

Abstract
Israel has recently succeeded in presenting itself as an attractive haven for LGBT constituencies. In this article, we investigate how this affective traction operates in practice, along with the ambiguous entanglement of normativity and antinormativity as expressed in the agency of some gay Palestinian Israelis vis-à-vis the Israeli homonationalist project. For this purpose, we analyze the documentary Oriented (2015), produced by the British director Jake Witzenfeld together with the Palestinian collective Qambuta Productions. More specifically, the aim of the article is twofold. From a theoretical perspective, we seek to demonstrate how Foucault’s notion of heterotopia provides a useful framework for understanding the spatial component of Palestinian Israeli experience, and the push and pull of conflicted identity projects more generally. Empirically, we illustrate how Israel is a homotopia, an inherently ambivalent place that is simultaneously utopian and dystopian, and that generates what we call vicious belonging. (Code-switching, heterotopia, homonationalism, normativity, pinkwashing, sexuality, space)

Gabriela Valdivia, Eco-Governmentality (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

19 December 2019

Gabriela Valdivia, “Eco-Governmentality” In The Routledge Handbook of Political Ecology. Edited By Tom Perreault, Gavin Bridge, James McCarthy, Routledge, 2015

Abstract
“Eco-governmentality” is a Foucaultian-inspired power analytic that political ecologists use to examine nature–society relationships. Since its early days, political ecologists have used Marxist-inspired critique to explain environmental domination and oppression (Watts 1983; Blaikie and Brookfield 1987; Hecht and Cockburn 2010; Peluso 1992). As Foucault’s work became more broadly accessible and translated into English in the 1990s, it challenged some aspects of how political ecologists thought about history, change, and power (Bryant 1998). In some respects, Foucault’s analytics parallel Marxist critiques of power, for example, like historical materialism, Foucault takes social practices as transitory and intellectual formations as connected with power and social relations. Things we consider universal, contends Foucault, are the result of very precise historical changes. In other respects, Foucault deviates from Marxist thought, moving away from “modes of production” as the site of social critique and towards “modes of information” (Poster 1984): how power works to produce structures of domination (and resistance) in modern society. His aim was to see power everywhere and in everything, not only in economic activity, and to investigate the microphysics of power rather than focusing on the macro-perspective of the state, or on class struggle as the venue for social change (Foucault 1980b). Doing so, Foucault argued, enabled recognizing the historical contingency of taken-for-granted concepts (e.g., madness, sickness, sexuality, class); the role of social practices in truth regimes; and how authorities and institutions that manage, rule, and control social life are socially produced.

Are we witnessing the emergence of a new global psychiatric power? (2019)

Clare O'Farrell

3 comments

19 December 2019

“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 (2019)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

18 December 2019

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.

Key Features

Produces an original perspective on security politics by engaging with debates in parliamentary studies and political science that have not previously been connected to security
Theoretically and empirically rethinks the relationship between security and politics
Challenges founding assumptions in critical security studies and securitisation theory about the pathological relationship between security and politics
Examines the history of legislative/executive relations on security
Argues that security is being normalised politically, migrating from the realm of exceptional politics to one of ‘normal politics’

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

Laurent Dartigues et Elisabetta Basso (dir), Foucault à l’épreuve de la psychiatrie et de la psychanalyse (2019)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

16 December 2019

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)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

15 December 2019

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

A Letter to Foucault (2019)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

14 December 2019

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?

The Profession of Authorship (2019)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

13 December 2019

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 (2019)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

12 December 2019

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.