Foucault News

Stuffed corpse of philosopher Jeremy Bantham to fly to USA (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

5 March 2018

Stuffed corpse of philosopher Jeremy Bantham to fly to USA | Daily Mail Online
By Lara Keay, 25 February 2018

Leading 19th century thinker wanted his remains to be preserved after he died
His will instructed friends to strip out his flesh and stuff and dress his corpse
He has been on display at University College London ever since his death in 1832
But now he is being moved for the first time to go on display in New York

In 2018 Bentham’s body is being moved out of London for the first time – to be used as part of an exhibition at New York’s Met Breuer museum.

Jerome Bel and his amateurs test the limits of contemporary dance in Saitama show (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

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4 March 2018

Jerome Bel and his amateurs test the limits of contemporary dance in Saitama show | The Japan Times

Editor’s note: old news

“Gala” runs Jan. 20 & 21 2018 at 3 p.m. at Saitama Arts Theater near Yonohonmachi Station, on the Saikyo Line from Shinjuku or Ikebukuro stations in Tokyo.

Back then, perhaps at a loss for descriptors, critics coined the term “non-dance” for Bel’s innovative work, which stood out in stark contrast from other works of the time even in the realm of contemporary dance, a form renowned for its lack of limitations.

Reflecting on that period in a 2005 interview, Bel said that, having studied the works of new-wave structuralist philosophers such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Marcel Duchamp, he realized, “Obviously, the question is what do we do and … what’s the purpose of theater?”

Then, answering that question, he said he made up his mind to depart from “dance’s elitism of showing off skills amid grand stage sets.” Instead, he said, “We decided to address things that affect everyone.”

The Early Foucault Update 16: Other writing, and working on the Lille courses, the Hegel thesis and Canguilhem in Paris

Clare O'Farrell

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3 March 2018

Progressive Geographies

I began 2018 with some shorter pieces to write, which took me away from the focus on The Early Foucault, even though two of them were on Foucault. First was a piece for the American Book Review, which is hosting a set of pieces on ‘Critical Lives’, edited by Robert Tally. I was asked to write something on Foucault, but while with most of the other pieces there is a new biography to review, that isn’t the case here – Miller and Macey’s biographies appeared 25 years ago, while the English translation of Eribon’s book is older still. Eribon’s biography has however appeared in two new editions in French, with additional material. I wrote a piece about how the posthumous publications by Foucault have added to the story we know of his work and, to a much lesser extent, of his life. This short piece should be out…

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Proprietarianism: Drahos, Foucault, and a Quasi-Genealogy of IP (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

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3 March 2018

Wendy Luna, Emancipating Intellectual Property from Proprietarianism: Drahos, Foucault, and a Quasi-Genealogy of IP, Genealogy 2018, 2(1), 6;
doi:10.3390/genealogy2010006

Abstract
This paper argues that Peter Drahos undertakes a partial Foucauldian genealogy by emancipating intellectual property (IP) from proprietarianism. He demonstrates the dominance of proprietarianism in IP by drawing sample practices from trademark, copyright, and patent laws, and then seeks to displace the proprietarian dominance with instrumentalism, which reconstitutes IP as a “liberty-intruding privilege.” Ironically, despite doing a genealogy, Drahos does not eradicate sovereignty altogether as Michel Foucault insists, but instead determines IP as a “sovereignty mechanism” that has a “sovereignty effect.” After explaining what Foucauldian genealogy is, the paper will explain how Drahos undertakes a genealogy of IP, while highlighting the limitations of Drahos’ analysis from a Foucauldian perspective.

Keywords: Michel Foucault; Peter Drahos; (quasi-)genealogy; intellectual property/IP

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. (CC BY 4.0).

‘Un tout autre horizon…’ an interview with Jacques Bidet (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

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2 March 2018

Jacques Bidet – Foucault with Marx, translated by Steven Corcoran (Zed Books, 2016, La fabrique, Paris, 2015)

In lieu of a review of Bidet’s book Foucault with Marx, we got in touch with him to discuss the way the text seems timely, now, in 2018. Here is the core of our dialogue:

SH: It seems to me that Foucault has been given a different share recently, or allotment, among ‘the left’ in Britain certainly.

JB: Foucault indeed leaves several legacies. From the perspective of my book, which confronts its topicality with that of Marx, we can see that he shows a theoretical and critical creativity which continues today to manifest its fertility/fecundity on several fields, and with different posterities.

First, on the domain of sex and gender relations, on which Marxism itself could only manifest a limited relevance because those issues remain outside of a possible grip of its…

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Foucault news updates (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

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2 March 2018

Editor’s note

Over the next few weeks I will be posting ‘old news’ of various art exhibitions and performances as I finally catch up with my backlog of news feeds. Even if these exhibitions are no longer current, they provide general information about artists working with Foucault’s ideas in interesting ways. I will add a note to these posts that they are ‘old news’.

These posts reflect my own interest in the wide and diverse uptake of Foucault’s work.

As always, don’t hesitate to send me news for posting on the blog.

Biopolitics in Bloomberg’s New York (2017)

Clare O'Farrell

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2 March 2018

The Podcast for Social Research : The Podcast for Social Research, Episode 19: Biopolitics in Bloomberg’s New York, Thu, 30 March 2017

The nineteenth episode of the Podcast for Social Research features BISR research associate Jeffrey Escoffier, formerly the director of health, media, and marketing for the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene under Michael Bloomberg, in conversation with Ajay Singh Chaudhary and Danya Glabau. Jeffrey, Ajay, and Danya talk through Foucault’s conception of the biopolitical, regimes of biopolitics in New York City, the history of public health, the policing of pleasure, health as morality, the strategies and politics of marketing healthy behavior, and coming down with a bad case of Aristotelian akrasia.

Foucault’s Enlightenment: Islamic Revolution and the Perils of Universal History, Tabrizi, 10/19/17 by CIR/UC Berkeley

Clare O'Farrell

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1 March 2018

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi examines Foucault’s writings on the Iranian Revolution as an attempt to write the history of the present without binding commitments to a teleological historiography. Is it possible for a people to envision and desire futures uncharted by already existing schemata of history? Is it possible to think of dignity, justice, and liberty outside the cognitive maps and principles of the Enlightenment? Ghamari-Tabrizi argues that Foucault’s encounter with the Iranian revolution left a significant mark on his later works on the care of the self and the hermeneutics of the subject.

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi is Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Islam and Dissent in Postrevolutionary Iran (I.B. Tauris & Palgrave-MacMillan, 2008), Remembering Akbar: Inside the Iranian Revolution (OR Books & Counterpoint Press, 2016), and Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

Critical Theories Graduate Workshop: Adorno and Foucault (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

4 comments

28 February 2018

CFP: Critical Theories Graduate Workshop: Adorno and Foucault – PhilEvents

Conference date(s):April 20, 2018 – April 21, 2018
Conference Venue: DePaul University Chicago, United States

Topic areas
20th Century Philosophy
Continental Philosophy
European Philosophy
Aesthetics
Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality
Social and Political Philosophy
Value Theory,
Miscellaneous

Details
Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault are undoubtedly two of the twentieth-century’s most prominent philosophers and social critics, and this workshop aims to broaden the discourse of critical theory by thinking them with and against one another. Already in 1980 Foucault reported that he saw “striking parallels between his own analysis of the disciplinary, carceral society and Adorno’s administered world,” yet there has been very little work until recently to bring these two thinkers together.[1] Thus, this workshop aims to contribute to a growing interest in scholarship surrounding these two figures.

Topic Areas
We invite abstract submissions from any area of philosophy related to the works of Theodor Adorno and/or Michel Foucault. Given the nascent nature of this dialogue, there is no expectation that presenters be fluent in both figures. We simply ask that presenters are open to exploring dissimilarities and continuities between them during the workshop’s discussions. Possible topics include any scholarship on Foucault and/or Adorno as well as related figures, criticisms, and fields. We especially welcome submissions which draw upon underrepresented areas of philosophy.

Keynote Speaker:
Deborah Cook, University of Windsor
Prof. Cook received her doctorate from Paris I-Panthéon-Sorbonne in 1985. In Paris, she took courses with Jacques Derrida at the École Normale Supérieure and with Michel Foucault at the Collège de France. Her first book was on Foucault, The Subject Finds a Voice: Foucault’s Turn Toward Subjectivity, and to date, she has published more than thirty articles on Adorno. The Culture Industry Revisited: Theodor W. Adorno on Mass Culture was published by Rowman and Littlefield in 1996 and Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society by Routledge in 2004. A book she edited, Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts, published by Acumen, appeared in 2008, and her text Adorno on Nature was also published by Acumen in 2011. Prof. Cook’s The Critical Matrix: Adorno and Foucault is forthcoming with Verso this year.

Format
Presentations will be 20 minutes long and will be accompanied by prepared responses. Presenters will be asked to circulate their papers with fellow participants 1 week prior to the workshop.
Prof. Deborah Cook will provide a keynote address, and there will be a panel discussion of her forthcoming, The Critical Materix: Adorno and Foucault.

Submission Guidelines
Please submit a 300-600 word abstract prepared for blind review to depaul.philosophy@gmail.com by February 16. Include your name, institutional affiliation, and paper title in the body of your email.You will hear back from conference organizers by February 20.

EX-VOTO the body + the institution (2018)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

27 February 2018

January 19 – Mar 10 2018
EX-VOTO the body + the institution – Galway Arts Centre
Lucy Beech
Jenna Bliss
Cecilia Bullo
Judy Foley
Sinéad Gleeson
Rajinder Singh

“the cataclysm which was my body…this dislocated assemblage, this piece of damaged geology.”The Peyote Dance, Antonin Artaud

Ex-Voto is a group exhibition that addresses the colonisation of the human body, the treatment of the body by State, corporate, medical and pharmaceutical institutions.This exhibition also explores the subjective experiences of health and illness in the context of institutions. The relationship between Institution and the individual, the role of power and the impact of capitalism and commerce are investigated in works by five contemporary visual artists and a writer.

The exhibition frames the artist as witness, mirroring Michel Foucault’s theories in The Birth of the Clinic, that clinical medicine is fundamentally an encounter between people. Michel Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic addressed the patient’s corporeal experience and vulnerability in the context of modern medicine:”The presence of disease in the body, with its tensions & its burnings, the silent world of the entrails, the whole dark underside of the body lined with endless unseeing dreams, are challenged as to their objectivity by the reductive discourse of the doctor, as well as established as multiple objects meeting his positive gaze.” (Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic xi).