Foucault News

Archive: In the World: Toward a Foucauldian Ethics of Reading in Social Work (2012)

Clare O'Farrell

9 September 2016

Macias, T. (2012). In the World: Toward a Foucauldian Ethics of Reading in Social Work. Intersectionalities: A Global Journal Of Social Work Analysis, Research, Polity, And Practice, 1, 1-19.

Full text available

ABSTRACT
Teaching and learning critical and anti-oppressive frameworks pose many challenges within social work as a profession invested in notions of practice, competency, helping, and benevolence. Course content that generally interrogates social works helping role and social workers identity as helpers is at times met with dismissal that it does not teach practice skills. At other times, learners paradoxically argue that material that challenges the making of the profession and their identity in fact confirms and reaffirms their professional roles. These reactions suggest that a number of actions and negotiations take place in the apparently mundane relationship between reader and text, actions that cannot solely be attributed to texts. This paper uses a Foucauldian approach to ethics to render the relationship between reader and text thinkable and problematic and to explore processes of subject formation being negotiated by readers in their contextual relationships with texts. The central argument of this paper is that by rendering the reader-text relationship thinkable, we can explore transformative and critical reading ethics that account for how power and knowledge regimes interconnect with processes of subject formation in reader-text relationships in social work.

KEYWORDS
social work education, subjectivity, Foucault, reading, poststructuralism

Paul Bruce Mcilvenny, Julia Zhukova Klausen, Laura Bang Lindegaard, (eds)Studies of Discourse and Governmentality: New Perspectives and Methods (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

8 September 2016

Paul Bruce Mcilvenny, Julia Zhukova Klausen, Laura Bang Lindegaard, (Eds.) (2016). Studies of Discourse and Governmentality: New Perspectives and Methods. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

This volume brings together analyses of governmentality from different angles in order to explore the multiple forms, practices, modes, programmes and rationalities of the ‘conduct of conduct’ today. Following the publication of Foucault’s annual lecture series at the Collège de France, scholars have attempted to critically rethink Foucault’s ideas. This is the first volume that attempts to revisit and expand studies of governmentality by connecting it to the theories and methods of discourse analysis. The volume draws on different theoretical stances and methodological approaches including critical discourse analysis, conversation analysis, dialogic analysis, multimodal discourse analysis, the discourse-historical approach, corpus analysis and French discourse analysis. The volume is relevant to students and scholars in the fields of critical discourse studies, conversation analysis, international studies, environmental studies, political science, public policy and organisation studies.

Table of Contents

1. New perspectives on discourse and governmentality
Paul McIlvenny, Julia Zhukova Klausen and Laura Bang Lindegaard

Part I: Intersecting governmentalities in public discourse

2. Governing citizen engagement: A discourse studies perspective
Inger Lassen and Anders Horsbøl

3. The discursive intersection of the government of others and the government of self in the face of climate change
Laura Bang Lindegaard

4. The art of not governing too much in vocational rehabilitation encounters
Janne Solberg

5. Governing governments?: Discursive contestations of governmentality in the transparency dispositif
Sun-Ha Hong and François Allard-Huver

PART II: Discourse, practice and prefigurative governmentalities

6. Governing safe operations at a distance: Enacting responsible risk communication at work
Joel Rasmussen

7. Dialogue and governmentality-in-action: A discourse analysis of a leadership forum
Ann Starbæk Bager, Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen and Pirkko Raudaskoski

8. Diagnosing transnationality: Therapy discourse and psy practices in the ethicalisation of transnational living
Julia Zhukova Klausen

9. Governmentality, counter-conduct and prefigurative demonstrations: Interactional and categorial practices in the strange case of the United Nathans weapons inspectors
Paul McIlvenny

PART III: Discourse, policy and governmentality

10. Governmentality through intertextuality: Strategic planning discourse in the administration of tertiary education
Derek Wallace

11. Exploring the intersections between governmentality studies and critical discourse analysis: A case study on urban security discourses and practices
Monica Colombo and Fabio Quassoli

12. Revealing the governmentality of demographic change in Germany with the manifold discourse-analytical ‘toolbox’ of Foucault
Reinhard Messerschmidt

Archive: Eccedenza Sovrana (2012)

Clare O'Farrell

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7 September 2016

Francescomaria Tedesco, Eccedenza Sovrana , Mimesis Edizioni, 2012

Pasolini, discutendo di Salò, sosteneva che nulla è più anarchico del potere, perché il potere fa ciò che vuole, e ciò che vuole il potere è completamente arbitrario. Eppure, a scrutare il fondo uccisore della sovranità moderna, emerge la fragilità di un potere che ha bisogno, per esistere, del riconoscimento delle proprie vittime. Come una preghiera di Dio, l’ordine implora di essere amato, anche da coloro che mette a morte. Di questa che nel libro viene definita ‘teurgia politica’ (l’idea che un potere che, come Dio, si dice pieno di gloria abbia bisogno di venire costantemente glorificato) beneficia Barnardine, l’assassino boemo di Misura per misura di Shakespeare, che alla chiamata al patibolo risponde con un’imprecazione: non ha voglia di morire, e non morirà, e al potere “gli prenda la peste alla gola”.È così che egli si fa sovrano. Al pari dello Stato e contro lo Stato.

Francescomaria Tedesco, dottore di ricerca in Teoria e Storia del diritto, è assegnista di ricerca in Filosofia politica presso l’Istituto Dirpolis della Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna di Pisa. Ha svolto attività di ricerca presso il SUM – Istituto Italiano di Scienze Umane di Firenze. Ha insegnato Diritti umani presso l’Università per Stranieri di Perugia. Oltre a numerosi saggi e articoli, alcune voci enciclopediche per UTET, ha pubblicato le monografie Introduzione a Hayek (2004) e Diritti umani e relativismo (2009), entrambe Laterza.

Translation of Deleuze’s seminars into English (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

7 September 2016

Purdue philosophy professor receives NEH award
August 24, 2016

Editor: These seminars will include Deleuze’s work on Foucault

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — A Purdue University professor of philosophy has a received $175,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to translate the seminar lectures of a noted French philosopher and make them available online.

Daniel Smith, a professor of philosophy, is focusing on the work of Gilles Deleuze, who lived 1925-95. He authored more than 25 books and taught for many years at the University of Paris 8.

“Deleuze is widely recognized as one of the most influential and important French philosophers of the second half of the 20th century,” Smith said. “He is one of the most cited authors in the humanities, and several of his books, such as ‘Nietzsche and Philosophy’ and ‘Difference and Repetition,’ have become classics in their fields.”

Smith and his team will translate several of the seminar lectures that Deleuze gave at the University of Paris 8 from 1979-87. Large crowds attended the seminars, and students’ recordings of his lectures were eventually archived by the National Library of France.

“The translations will be a great benefit to English-speaking scholars in the humanities,” Smith said. “Since there is much material in the lectures that finds no parallel in Deleuze’s published works.”

Smith’s two-year award for this “Scholarly Editions and Translations” project is part of $79 million in grants that the NEH has awarded for nearly 300 humanities projects and programs nationwide.

The transcriptions of the seminars were supported by a Global Synergy Grant from Purdue’s College of Liberal Arts, which continued work that had been initiated by a team at the University of Paris 8 at Vincennes/St. Denis. Smith also has translated two of Deleuze’s books, “Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation” and “Essays Critical and Clinical.”

Smith’s collaborators include Nicolae Morar, a Purdue alumnus and an assistant professor in philosophy and environmental studies at the University of Oregon; and Thomas Nail, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Denver. The project’s translators are Mary Beth Mader, a professor of philosophy at the University of Memphis; Melissa McMahon, a professional translator who earned her doctorate degree in philosophy at the University of Sydney. Smith also is working with the French National Library, the University of Paris 8 at Vincennes/St. Denis and the Purdue University Research Repository, and Chris Penfield, who received his doctorate degree in philosophy from Purdue in 2015.

Writer: Amy Patterson Neubert, 765-494-9723,apatterson@purdue.edu

Source: Daniel Smith, smith132@purdue.edu

Related website:

College of Liberal Arts

Foucault entre psychanalyse et psychiatrie « Reprendre la folie au niveau de son langage » (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

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2 September 2016

Elisabetta Basso, Foucault entre psychanalyse et psychiatrie « Reprendre la folie au niveau de son langage » Archives de Philosophie 2016/1 (Tome 79)

Source: Foucault entre psychanalyse et psychiatrie « Reprendre la folie au niveau de son langage »

Résumé
Cet article a pour but d’analyser la position qu’occupe la psychanalyse dans l’œuvre de Michel Foucault au moment du dépassement, opéré par le philosophe entre les années cinquante et les années soixante, de son adhésion initiale au programme de la psychiatrie existentielle vers l’élaboration de son archéologie. L’enjeu de notre étude est d’analyser le rôle qu’aurait joué dans ce passage l’approche lacanienne des psychoses, telle qu’elle fut formulée à partir du milieu des années cinquante.

Mots clés
Foucault Lacan Psychiatrie existentielle Psychanalyse Psychoses

Abstract
This paper focuses on the position and the role of psychoanalysis in Michel Foucault’s work between the 1950s and 1960s, when the philosopher criticizes his first appreciation of the existential psychiatry and begins to draw the archeological project. The aim of this study is to analyze the role that, for this project, played Lacan’s approach to the problem of psychosis as it was worked out during the 1950s.

Keywords
Foucault Lacan Existential Psychiatry Psychoanalysis Psychoses

Foucault et les sciences humaines (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

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1 September 2016

Jean-François Braunstein, Foucault et les sciences humaines, Archives de Philosophie 2016/1 (Tome 79)

Source: Foucault et les sciences humaines

Premières lignes

Michel Foucault semble désormais être devenu un « grand philosophe » comme les autres. Les livres, les colloques, les numéros spéciaux de revue, les enseignements et les séminaires de recherches se multiplient à l’envi, notamment à l’occasion du trentième anniversaire de sa mort et du dépôt de ses archives à la Bibliothèque nationale de France. Beaucoup de commentateurs traitent de son œuvre comme…

Immaterial labour in spaces of leisure: producing biopolitical subjectivities through Facebook (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

31 August 2016

Rose, J., Spencer, C.
Immaterial labour in spaces of leisure: producing biopolitical subjectivities through Facebook
(2015) Leisure Studies, 18 p.

DOI: 10.1080/02614367.2015.1031271

Abstract
This research critically examines ways in which highly popular yet relatively under theorised leisure experiences inform and are informed by the social and political governance of our everyday lives. Specifically, online social networking, as seen through Facebook, actively produces leisure spaces, even if these spaces are primarily constituted through their discursive dimensions. By introducing the critical lenses of Marx’s notion of immaterial labour and Foucault’s biopolitics, we describe the ways in which leisure engagement with Facebook produces new forms of often hidden labour from users, thereby further contributing to the biopolitical control over many of our everyday experiences. These increasingly nuanced assemblages of leisure–labour relationships further destabilise any contention that leisure and labour are distinct sociological dimensions in people’s lives. We consider ways in which Facebook can counter various problematic hegemonic global structures, incorporating Hardt and Negri’s hopeful ideas of the multitude as a form of resistance toward global neoliberal capitalism. From this critical perspective, we explicitly politicise Facebook and layer the ways in which Facebook is currently working (and not working) with Hardt and Negri’s ideas of a more-realised democracy in order to illuminate some of the flaws in Facebook’s structure and typical operation. Such overtly critical scholarship can contribute to further positioning leisure as a dynamic social institution that constantly becomes conscripted into capitalist structures in increasingly covert ways. Such politicised understandings of leisure, broadly, and individuals’ social media experiences, more specifically, offer substantial direction for leisure understanding, scholarship and critique. © 2015 Taylor & Francis

Author Keywords
capitalism; Foucault; Hardt and Negri; Marx; multitude

Developmental discourses as a regime of truth in research with primary school students (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

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28 August 2016

Bartholomaeus, C.
Developmental discourses as a regime of truth in research with primary school students
(2016) International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 29 (7), pp. 911-924.

DOI: 10.1080/09518398.2016.1174896

Abstract
While developmental discourses have been heavily critiqued in relation to education systems, less attention has been paid to how these impact the data collection process in classroom research. This article utilises Foucault’s concept of regime of truth to highlight the pervasiveness of developmental discourses when conducting research in primary schools. Such a theoretical framing makes explicit how developmental discourses work and are constructed as ‘truth’, which limit the possibilities for alternative perspectives. This article shows how this regime of truth works in practice by reflecting on qualitative research conducted with two age groups in two primary schools in Australia, focusing on the researcher’s navigations of these discourses. In particular, this article examines the impact of developmental discourses on conducting research with multiple age groups, initiating research, choosing methods for data collection, and negotiating power relations and ethical practices. © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Author Keywords
age; data collection process; Developmental discourses; primary school; regime of truth

Laura Cremonesi; Orazio Irrera; Daniele Lorenzini and Martina Tazzioli (eds.) Foucault and the Making of Subjects (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

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27 August 2016

Foucault and the Making of Subjects
Edited by Laura Cremonesi; Orazio Irrera; Daniele Lorenzini and Martina Tazzioli, Rowman & Littlefield imprint. Bloomsbury, 2016

Michel Foucault’s account of the subject has a double meaning: it relates to both being a “subject of” and being “subject to” political forces. This book interrogates the philosophical and political consequences of such a dual definition of the subject, by exploring the processes of subjectivation and objectivation through which subjects are produced. Drawing together well-known scholars of Foucaultian thought and critical theory, alongside a newly translated interview with Foucault himself, the book will engage in a serious reconsideration of the notion of “autonomy” beyond the liberal tradition, connecting it to processes of subjectivation. In the face of the ongoing proliferation of analyses using the notion of subjectivation, this book will retrace Foucault’s reflections on it and interrogate the current theoretical and political implications of a series of approaches that mobilize the Foucaultian understanding of the subject in relation to truth and power.

Reviews

This fascinating set of essays brings together some of the best known French and Anglophone commentators on Foucault’s work today. The result is a splendid collection of engagements with Foucault’s late reconceptualization of subjectivity that ranges widely over the late lecture courses at the Collège de France, and beyond. Foucault and the Making of Subjects takes a subject we thought we knew well – Foucault and the subject – and makes it new (and urgent, again) for us. Endlessly interesting and provocative.
— Ben Golder, University of New South Wales

This is an excellent collection including work by established scholars as well as some of the leading members of a new generation of continental Foucault scholarship. The focus on Foucault’s concern with the making of subjects’ sustains its coherence across a diverse range of contributions. Critically probing and extending Foucault’s work across topics of autonomy, truthfulness, sexual avowal, ideology, desire, and collective subjectivities, it demonstrates the salience of, and resources offered by, Foucault’s work for social and political theory.
— David Owen, Professor of Social and Political Philosophy, University of Southampton

In this inspiring collection, which features a very significant and newly available interview with Foucault, the authors mount an engaging and detailed case for Foucault’s practical utility in conceptualising ethical and political action at both the individual and social levels. Carefully refuting a number of commonly held misconceptions about Foucault’s work on this score, this book is essential reading.
— Clare O’Farrell, Senior Lecturer, Queensland University of Technology

In the fast growing field of research on Foucault, this volume stands out. It provides careful and expert appraisals of recently published textual sources, as well as offering strikingly novel insights on the important issue of collective political resistance.
— Johanna Oksala, Academy of Finland Research Fellow at the University of Helsinki, Visiting Professor at the New School for Social Research, USA

Knots, Port authorities and governance: Knotting together the port of Hamburg (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

27 August 2016

Lobo-Guerrero, L., Stobbe, A.
Knots, Port authorities and governance: Knotting together the port of Hamburg
(2016) Global Society, 30 (3), pp. 430-444.

DOI: 10.1080/13600826.2016.1173017

Abstract
Ports and port systems have historically been pre-eminent global sites. Their role, which transcends that of connecting landed with maritime domains, is one without which the historically specific global connectedness and disconnectedness of cultures and regions such as Europe could not be understood. They are, however, largely forgotten as sites for the scholarly study of power and International Relations. Inspired by Foucault’s work, connectivity is here understood as an outcome of governance, the result of the strategic combination of practices of power that presupposes agency. The connectivity that ports afford constitutes a rich empirical space from which to interrogate how global and regional spaces such as Europe are actively constituted. The analytical challenge, however, is how to render port connectivity as an empirical site. The metaphor of knots is explored in this article as a way to explore how port governance as the result of actively combining disparate interests into a coherent whole provides such a site. To do so the figure of the port authority as a governing structure in the context of the European Union is explored. The case in point is that of the Hamburg Port Authority whose role is analysed as that of a “smart knot”. © 2016 University of Kent.