Foucault News

Stephanie Rutherford, Environmentality and Green Governmentality (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

13 February 2020

Stephanie Rutherford (2017). Environmentality and Green Governmentality. In International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment and Technology (eds D. Richardson, N. Castree, M.F. Goodchild, A. Kobayashi, W. Liu and R.A. Marston). Wiley
https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118786352.wbieg0111

Abstract
Environmentality, or green governmentality, offers a way of thinking about how power works through the construction of the environment, its problems, and the solution to those problems. The concept emerged in the 1990s and has been applied to a wide array of environmental questions. Environmentality is most keenly focused on how regimes of truth are made, how strategies of regulation are formed, and how human subjectivities are enacted with reference to the environment.

Special section: Philosophical Studies, Alcoff’s Rape and Resistance (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

13 February 2020

Special section Philosophical Studies, Alcoff’s Rape and Resistance (2020)

Philsophical Studies, Volume 177, Issue 2, February 2020

Ann J. Cahill, Alcoff’s Rape and Resistance: A Précis

Abstract
This article summarizes Linda Martin Alcoff’s Rape and Resistance (Polity, Cambridge, 2018). Alcoff’s analysis centers on a political and philosophical defense of the need to recognize the complexity of both the phenomenon of sexual assault and the various political attempts to counter it. Such complexity extends to the process of describing an experience of sexual assault (whether public or private), which Alcoff argues is always shaped by a multitude of political and social discourses. Alcoff’s Foucauldian analysis results in an innovative description of the harms of sexual assault, one that focuses on the ways in which experiences of sexual assault prohibit the active involvement of the subject in the development of their sexual subjectivity. Recognizing that gender-based violence is a global phenomenon, Alcoff nevertheless argues that place-specific instances of such violence are contextualized by the larger phenomenon, which is heterogeneous to its core. The article concludes by posing several questions to Alcoff, centered on the themes of the ethics of sexual experimentation, assailants’ ascription of hyperagency to targets of sexual assault, and how sexual assault may influence the sexual subjectivity of maleidentified victims, particularly those who were assaulted as children.

Keywords
Sexual violence Rape Foucault Subjectivity Global gender-based violence

Additional articles
Megan Burke, Survivor experience and the norm of self-making: comments on Rape and Resistance

Susan J. Brison. Can we end the feminist ‘sex wars’ now? Comments on Linda Martín Alcoff, Rape and resistance: Understanding the complexities of sexual violation

Response
Linda Martín Alcoff

Abstract
In this response to the comments on my book, Rape and Resistance: Understanding the Complexities of Sexual Violation, I offer a further elaboration of the crucial concept of sexual subjectivity put forward as a way to approach the normative evaluation of sexual practices. This concept makes possible a healthy pluralism without retreating to a facile libertarian view that would render consent sufficient to determine morally unproblematic sex. The concept of sexual subjectivity sanctions experimentation in our sexual lives (individual and also collective) and the question arises as to whether this opens the door to anything. Yet the concept of experimentation also presupposes that some experiments fail and that all require assessment. I argue that assessment is best done in intra-group discussions where people share broad experiences and aims, but it is also possible to communicate concerns and ideas across groups. I then discuss my use of Foucault to elaborate the specific challenges that are encountered when one tries to speak about rape and sexual violations, and also the ways we can use his work to develop more effectively resistant speaking practices.

Keywords
Rape Resistance Sexuality

Linda Martín Alcoff, Rape and Resistance (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

13 February 2020

Linda Martín Alcoff, Rape and Resistance, Polity, 2018

DESCRIPTION
Sexual violence has become a topic of intense media scrutiny, thanks to the bravery of survivors coming forward to tell their stories. But, unfortunately, mainstream public spheres too often echo reports in a way that inhibits proper understanding of its causes, placing too much emphasis on individual responsibility or blaming minority cultures.

In this powerful and original book, Linda Martín Alcoff aims to correct the misleading language of public debate about rape and sexual violence by showing how complex our experiences of sexual violation can be. Although it is survivors who have galvanized movements like #MeToo, when their words enter the public arena they can be manipulated or interpreted in a way that damages their effectiveness. Rather than assuming that all experiences of sexual violence are universal, we need to be more sensitive to the local and personal contexts – who is speaking and in what circumstances – that affect how activists’ and survivors’ protests will be received and understood.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Rape after Foucault
1. Global Resistance: A New Agenda for Theory
2. The Thorny Question of Experience
3. Norming Sexual Practices
4. Sexual Subjectivity
5. “Consent”, “Victim”, “Honor”
6. Speaking As (with Laura Gray-Rosendale)
7. The Problem of Speaking for Myself
Conclusion: Standing in the Intersection

Emma Foster, Foucault and ecology (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

12 February 2020

Emma Foster, Foucault and Ecology, in Lisa Downing (ed.) After Foucault: Culture, Theory, and Criticism in the 21st Century, Cambridge University Press, 2018
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316492864.010

Summary
A Foucauldian perspective offers a number of interesting and significant insights into the relationship between the cultural representations of ‘Nature’ and the processes of subjectification that underpin environmentalism and ecologism. Generally speaking, environmentalism refers to a perspective where one seeks to protect and conserve the natural environment in an effort to keep the planet a habitable (and pleasant) place for humans. Often, environmentalism is a perspective that can be attached to fairly mainstream political ideologies such as liberalism. On the other hand, ecologism, while also advocating the conservation and preservation of the natural world, can be defined as an ideology that places the ecosystem central to its critique of our current socio-political and economic condition and to its future objectives. Ecologists, then, recognize the ecosystem, and its constituent parts, as inherently valuable and seek to preserve and conserve the natural world based on this ethic. From these brief descriptions, it is clear to see that environmentalism and ecologism tend to rely on a clear definition of nature as their focal point. Stemming from this conceptualization of nature, a number of other assumptions flow, such as a valorization of that which is considered natural. The work of Michel Foucault allows us to interrogate environmentalism and ecologism in important and exciting ways by highlighting, and potentially offering a corrective to, the discourses that perpetuate problematic power dynamics, such as (hetero)sexism, racism and speciesism, integral to established environmental/ecological theory and practice. This is because hierarchies determined by gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and species have long been justified through a valorization of that which is considered natural, thereby simultaneously naturalizing inequalities.

That being said, it is perhaps surprising that many scholars interested in the environment have found Foucault’s work useful, given that, by all accounts, Foucault appeared to find little inspiration in that which is culturally accepted as ‘Nature’. Indeed, Eric Darier offers an interesting story that suggests that Michel Foucault is an unlikely candidate for generating a robust ecological ethic. Darier recounts how, while on a trip to the Alps, Foucault’s colleague Jacqueline Verdeaux compelled him to appreciate a particular vista. Foucault reacted by walking away and exclaiming: ‘My back is turned to it’.

M. Gail Hamner, Foucault: “the limits of enunciability” (2019)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

12 February 2020

affecognitive

Sean Scully, “Landline Yellow Line”

I return, finally, to Foucault’s early interest in limit. But as the past 12 weeks (!!) have seeped away, I have realized that to return to this question in the context of his relation to the Tel Quel group, on the one hand, and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, on the other, is too large and complex a task for a blog post. Here is a briefer engagement, which I hope can stand as a promise toward further thinking.

In January 1966, on the cusp of the April publication of Les Mots et les Choses (The Order of Things), Foucault writes to a friend: “Non, ce ne’st pas cela, le problème n’est pas la langue, mais les limites de l’énonciabilité”: “No, not that; the problem is not language but the limits of enunciability” (Dits et Écrits I, 36; the addressee is not named). The problem–what

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Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, Foucault against Neoliberalism? translated by Matthew Maclellan – Rowman June 2020

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

12 February 2020

Progressive Geographies

9781786615275 Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, Foucault against Neoliberalism? translated by Matthew Maclellan – Rowman, June 2020

In the late 1970s, Michel Foucault dedicated a number of controversial lectures on the subject of neoliberalism. Had Foucault been seduced by neoliberalism? Did France’s premier leftist intellectual, near the end of his career, turn to the right? In this book, Geoffroy de Lagasnerie argues that far from abandoning the left, Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism was a means of probing the limits and lacunae of traditional political philosophy, social contract theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. For Lagasnerie, Foucault’s analysis was an attempt to discover neoliberalism’s singularity, understand its appeal, and unearth its emancipatory potential in order to construct a new art of rebelliousness. By reading Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism as a means of developing new practices of emancipation, Lagasnerie offers an original and compelling account of Michel Foucault’s most controversial work.

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Laena Maunula, The pandemic subject: Canadian pandemic plans and communicating with the public about an influenza pandemic (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

11 February 2020

Laena Maunula, “The pandemic subject: Canadian pandemic plans and communicating with the public about an influenza pandemic.” Healthcare policy/Politiques de santé vol. 9, Spec Issue (2013): 14-25.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24289936/

Open access

Abstract
In this paper, I examine the goals for pandemic public communication as outlined in two Canadian plans for pandemic planning and infection control. I critique these strategies by drawing on Foucault’s notions of governmentality and biopower. My argument is that the public health communication campaign goals reviewed rest upon a particular conceptualization of health in the context of pandemic planning as an individual/family duty, and that scientific/medical expert knowledge is most appropriate for guiding pandemic planning. This study contributes to a sociological understanding of how pandemic preparedness and infection control are represented in Canadian pandemic plans, how public health shapes pandemic communication messages in Canada, and the implications of those messages for subjectivity and notions of citizenship.

The Early Foucault update 30: working at the BnF, Collège de France, Archives Nationales, and Sorbonne

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

11 February 2020

Progressive Geographies

In the last update, I mentioned the work I’d been doing in Paris and Tübingen, and said I’d agreed to write a book on Foucault in the 1960s, again for Polity, with the working title of The Archaeology of Foucault immediately after I’ve finished this one on the 1950s.

Since then I’ve been back in Paris, mainly working through the Bibliothèque nationale collection of Foucault’s papers from the 1940s and 1950s. There are all sorts of fascinating things here, and if I was writing a biography I would doubtless do a lot more with it. I’m interested in the intellectual side of his life only, and so it’s letters from people like Ludwig Binswanger and Georges Dumézil that hold most interest. There is also some important correspondence about his posts in Lille and Uppsala, as well as some concerning early publications, including some contracts. These really help with…

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Foucault and Cuvier in 1970

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

11 February 2020

affecognitive

In May, 1969, three years after the publication of Les Mots et les Choses, and a year after the upheavals of May 1968, Foucault presided over a colloquium at the University of Paris’s Institute of the History of Sciences and Technologies celebrating the bicentennial of Georges Cuvier’s birth (1769-1832). I read this colloquium as part of my daily plunge into Dits et Écrits; Lynne Huffer has beautifully translated the presentation and proceedings for us in Foucault Studies (No. 22, pp. 208-237).

I wish for more time (of course)–time to reach back to The Order of Things and forward to “L’ordre du discours”, but I’ll settle for a short note on the status of the individual. The backdrop for me, here, is actually Marx, specifically the Marx of the Manifesto (1848) and the Eighteenth Brumaire (1852).

In turning to Cuvier, Foucault looks for the epistemological seeds of Darwin…

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Call for papers: 6th International Workshop on Historical Epistemology Historical Epistemology and Epistemology of History (2020)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

10 February 2020

Call for papers
6th International Workshop on Historical Epistemology
Historical Epistemology and Epistemology of History
Paris, 4-5-6 June 2020

The workshop is organized by
Épistémologie historique. Research Network on the History and the Methods of Historical Epistemology
With the support of

École doctorale de Philosophie – ED 280 (Paris 1)
IHPST (UMR 8590, Paris 1/CNRS)
PhiCO/ISJPS (UMR 8103, Paris 1)

République des Savoirs (USR 3608, ENS/ Collège de France/CNRS)
École doctorale Lettres, Arts, Sciences humaines et sociales
ED 540 (ENS) – EUR Translitteræ (PSL)

Maison d’Auguste Comte

Study of the relationship between historical epistemology and history immediately reveals a paradox: on the one hand, the very idea of historical epistemology assigns a central role to history, proposing to connect philosophical reflection on the sciences with acknowledgement of their historicity. Yet, on the other hand, one cannot fail to notice that historical epistemology as a field has concerned itself very little with the discipline of history as such. As a result, it has not yet developed an epistemology of history.

We can locate the origin of this paradox in the texts of Gaston Bachelard, which laid out the basic notions about history still characterizing historical epistemology. Recognizing the history of science as distinct from traditional history, Bachelard conceived history of science to oppose point-by-point the needs of traditional historiography – including its emphasis on rigorous description and concern for avoiding anachronism. The resulting history of scientific progress he presented was resolutely retrospective and normative.

Bachelard did not acknowledge any form of historicity other than the one made possible by overcoming the threshold of scientificity. He thus asked whether the discipline of history should be understood to have a history comparable to that of physics or mathematics or if it should be understood as closer to the ahistoricity of the pre-scientific. The plural heritages of Bachelardian epistemology that gathered around this question are characterized by their different ways of responding to or reformulating this question. Some authors have tried to apply the concepts and methods of historical epistemology to history itself. That is the case for Louis Althusser, who presents the emergence of historical materialism as the overcoming of an ideological notion of history and ascension of a science of history. Historical epistemology would therefore be interested in history to the extent that the latter is capable of accessing a level of scientificity comparable to that of the natural sciences. A somewhat different attempt to reinforce the links between historical epistemology and general history is put forward by Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge, which is inspired by Bachelard’s epistemology and by the history of the Annales and aims to elaborate a new historiographic manifesto. Foucault invites us to modify the initial categories of historical epistemology in order to ask a more general question about the emergence of discursive formations –a question which applies to the sciences as well as to other discursive phenomena. This Foucauldian precedent notwithstanding, one may ask whether the presuppositions underwriting Bachelardian historiography are not among the main factors explaining the weak relationship between the history of science and the history of mentality.

Authors like Gilles-Gaston Granger, whose influence on Paul Veyne is well known, have tried to justify the fact that historical epistemology has not taken the discipline of history as an object by putting forward different claims that history is not a science. Examining the status given to history in various arguments allows us to analyse the degree to which the move to deny history a form of scientificity marginalizes or renders precarious forms of historical epistemology that rely on the history of science. It also enables us to analyse the arguments of authors that, despite questioning whether history is a science in the same sense as the natural sciences, nonetheless refuse to consider it as closer to common knowledge: this is the case for Jean-Claude Passeron, who, while drawing on historical epistemology, sees a radical difference between the regime of scientificity of the historical sciences and that of the experimental sciences and argues that this difference affects the types of progress and of discontinuity these sciences instantiate. Exploring such arguments will make it possible for us to return to Bachelard’s distinction between the history of science and general history by remarking on differences between the histories of the different scientific disciplines. These questions are relevant not only for the discipline of history itself but also for other sciences that claim to be “historical” to the extent that they bear on events that have taken place in the past – from the human and social sciences to geology or the biology of evolution, just to mention some examples. Are all these sciences “historical” in the same sense? In what sense can a discipline consider itself “historical”? In what way is the historicity of a science linked to the historicity of its objects and its methods?

There are three axes we would like to analyse for this year’s workshop:

Axis 1: What is specific about the history of science in relation to other historical methodologies?
Axis 2: What would it mean to move towards an historical epistemology of history?
Axis 3: How can we characterize and distinguish the historicity of scientific objects in formal knowledge, the life sciences, the sciences of matter, and the human and the social sciences?
As in previous years, we would like this theme to represent an occasion for encounter among philosophers and historians of science with different methodological approaches. In other terms, we would like to receive proposals adopting a range of historical and/or analytical approaches to critical clarification of the central concepts of the “historical sciences,” understood in the widest sense as spanning from history as such to the social and life sciences.

Proposals (500 words plus a short presentation of the candidate) must be sent by 15 March 2020 (notification of acceptance or refusal by 1 April) in Word or .pdf formats to epistemologiehistorique@gmail.com. Proposals by graduate students and early career researchers will be prioritized. The languages of the workshop will be French and English.

Confirmed Keynotes
Sophie Roux (ENS)
Paul A. Roth (California)

Comité d’organisation

Matteo Vagelli (coordinateur)
Ivan Moya Diez (coordinateur)
Caroline Angleraux
Marcos Camolezi
Lucie Fabry
Victor Lefèvre

Comité Scientifique
Christian Bonnet, CHSPM Paris 1
Jean-François Braunstein, PhiCo Paris 1
Hasok Chang, Cambridge University
Cristina Chimisso, Open University, UK
Arnold I. Davidson, Université de Chicago
Moritz Epple, Université de Francfort
Pierre Wagner, IHPST Paris 1