Foucault News

News and resources on French thinker Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

Michel Foucault: Discourse Theory and the Archive. Conference (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

11 July 2016

Michel Foucault: Discourse Theory and the Archive
Convention Center at the Historical Observatory; Geismar Landstraße 11, 37083 Göttingen
16 July 2016

See also this link.

This year marks not only Michel Foucault’s 90th birthday, but also the 50th anniversary of the publication of his seminal book Les Mots et les Choses, which made Foucault a prominent intellectual figure throughout Europe. We would like to commemorate this double anniversary with a one-day symposium organised by the Department of British Literature and Culture at Göttingen University in cooperation with the Göttingen Center for Gender studies and the Center for Theory of Culture and Society.

While Foucault has introduced many persistent concepts to the fields of critical, cultural, and literary theory, one that has increasingly attracted attention during the past ten to fifteen years is the archive.

Foucault himself employs the term ‘archive’ ambiguously (cf. Eliassen). Depending on context, the archive signifies
a) an analytical and systematic concept in Foucault’s historical epistemology as put forward in The Archaeology of Knowledge;
b) a historically embedded institution that registers, stores, processes, and provides data about populations and nations; and, last but not least,
c) a singular space that can be experienced aesthetically and that therefore belongs to a group of socially and historically constructed spaces that Foucault referred to elsewhere as ‘heterotopias’.

As concept, ‘the archive’ thus finds itself at the centre of several current academic debates and concerns. What is more, ‘the archive’ can often be seen as a driving force behind recent transformations of the fields of literary and cultural studies, heralding important turns such as the material, the spatial, or the medial turn.

Programm
9:00 Registration

9:15-9:30 Welcome & Opening Remarks:
Ralf Haekel, Johannes Schlegel & Julia Kroll

9:30-10:30 Keynote: Prof Dr Gerold Sedlmayr (TU Dortmund)
“The Value of Value, or: The (Un-)Thinkability of a Postcapitalist Order of Things”

10:30-11:00 Coffee Break

11:00-12:30 Panel I: Transforming the Archive: Feminism and Queer Studies
– Thinking sexual archives with Michel Foucault (Cornelia Möser)
– Queering the archive – The Lesbian archives of Cheryl Dunye’s „The Watermelon Woman“ and „The Owls“ (Nadine Dannenberg)
– Affect in the archive? Literary practices in the context of the Neue Frauenbewegung (Matthias Lüthjohann)

12:30-14:00 Lunch Break

14:00-15:00 Panel II: Reading History through the Foucauldian Archive
– Contradiction and the archive (Martin Mauersberg)
– The Archive as Chronotopos. On Foucault’s understanding of the Archive as a Symbol of Modernity (Sina Steglich)

15:00-15:30 Coffee Break

15:30-17:00 Panel III: Contemporary Practices of the Archive in Context
– Archiving Folk Culture: The Emergence of Folklore Studies and the control of ethnic discourses (Johannes Müske)
– Literature in Other Spaces. Understanding Literary Museum Exhibitions Through Michel Foucault’s Concept of Heterotopia (Sebastian Böck)
– Foucault, archival science and the changing practice of the archivist (Knut Langewand)

17:00-18:00 Panel IV: Foucault and the Digital Age
– Foucault’s “film archive” and its inventory (Ulrike Allouche)
– Excavating Media (Jermain Heidelberg)

Venue: Convention Center at the Historical Observatory; Geismar Landstraße 11, 37083 Göttingen
Convenors: Ralf Haekel, Johannes Schlegel & Julia Kroll

Attendance is free of charge. However, we would kindly like to ask you to register via email!

Kontakt
Johannes Schlegel

Käte-Hamburger-Weg 3
37073 Göttingen

johannes.schlegel@phil.uni-goettingen.de

Foucault Studies: Special Issue on Counter Conduct (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

3 comments

10 July 2016

Foucault Studies
Number 21: June 2016: Counter-Conduct

Table of Contents

Editorial

Editorial PDF
Sverre Raffnsøe et al. 1-2

Special Issue on Counter-Conduct

Introduction: Counter-Conduct PDF
Sam Binkley, Barbara Cruikshank 3-6
From Counter-Conduct to Critical Attitude: Michel Foucault and the Art of Not Being Governed Quite So Much PDF
Daniele Lorenzini 7-21
Foucault Among the Stoics: Oikeiosis and Counter-Conduct PDF
James F. Depew 22-51
Rituals of Conduct and Counter-Conduct PDF
Corey McCall 52-79
The Counter-Conduct of Medieval Hermits PDF
Christopher Roman 80-97
Revisiting the Omnes et Singulatim Bond: The Production of Irregular Conducts and the Biopolitics of the Governed PDF
Martina Tazzioli 98-116

Articles

Foucault and the Madness of Classifying Our Madness PDF
Drew Ninnis 117-137
Towards a Foucauldian Urban Political Ecology of water: Rethinking the hydro-social cy-cle and scholars’ critical engagement PDF
Paola Rattu, René Véron 138-158
The Nineteenth Century in Ruins: A Genealogy of French Historical Epistemology PDF
David M. Peña-Guzmán 159-183
Beyond the Analytic of Finitude: Kant, Heidegger, Foucault PDF
J. Colin McQuillan 184-199

Translations

What is Psychology? PDF
David M. Peña-Guzmán 200-213
Foucault: The Materiality of a Working Life An interview with Daniel Defert by Alain Brossat, assisted by Philippe Chevallier PDF
Colin Gordon 214-230

Review Essay

New Books “By” Foucault PDF
Timothy O’Leary 231-237

Book Reviews

Review of Torben Bech Dyrberg, Foucault on the Politics of Parrhesia (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), i-vi, 1-141, electronic £36.99 (UK), ISBN: 978-1-137-36835-5 PDF
Martin Paul Eve 238-240
Martin Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: Insight Into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking, Translated by Andrew J. Mitchell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), ISBN: 978-0-253-00231-0 PDF
Eric Guzzi 241-244
Brian Lightbody, Philosophical Genealogy I: An epistemological reconstruction of Nietzsche and Foucault’s Genealogical Method (New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc., 2010). PDF
Eric Guzzi 245-247
Lynne Huffer, Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), ISBN: 978-0-231-16417-7 PDF
Sarah Hansen 248-252
James D. Faubion (ed.), Foucault Now: Current Perspectives in Foucault Studies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6378-4. PDF
Denise Mifsud 253-258
Jean-Francois Bert and Elisabetta Basso (eds.), Foucault à Münsterlingen; À l’origine de l’Histoire de la folie, Avec des photographies de Jacqueline Verdeaux (Paris: Éditions de l’école des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2015) PDF
Sverre Raffnsøe 259-261
Mark G.E. Kelly, Foucault’s History of Sexuality Volume I; The Will to Knowledge (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), vi-ix, 1-150, ISBN 978-0-7486-4889-4. PDF
Max Rosenkrantz 262-266
Antonella Cutro, Technique et vie: biopolitique et philosophie du bios dans la pensée de Michel Foucault (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010), ISBN: 978-2-296-54085-9. PDF
Samuel Talcott 267-271
Nadine Ehlers, Racial Imperatives: Discipline, Performativity, and Struggles Against Subjection (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 185 pages. PDF
R. D. Wood 272-274

Michel Foucault, Prisons And The Future Of Abolition: An Interview (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

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2 July 2016

Michel Foucault, Prisons And The Future Of Abolition: An Interview, Critical Theory, JUNE 25, 2016

“Active Intolerance: Michel Foucault, the Prisons Information Group, and the Future of Abolition” explores the Prison Information Group (GIP), an organization founded by notable academics, including Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, to expose the deplorable conditions of the French Prison system.

“Little information is published on prisons,” Foucault announced on behalf of the GIP. “It is one of the hidden regions of our social system, one of the dark zones of our life. We have the right to know; we want to know.”

In this interview, I spoke with the book’s editors, Perry Zurn and Andrew Dilts, about the legacy and lessons of the GIP.

Eugene Wolters: What was the GIP?

Perry Zurn: The GIP (or Le Groupe d’information sur les prisons, the Prisons Information Group) was a prison activist organization in France, conceived of in 1970 and operational well into 1973. Beyond this simple description, the GIP can be characterized in a number of competing ways.

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Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment

Clare O'Farrell

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1 July 2016

stuartelden's avatarProgressive Geographies

imageOut shortly is Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment. Thanks to Chathan Vemuri for the link.

Foucault in Iran centers on the significance of Foucault’s writings on the Iranian Revolution and the profound mark it left on his lectures on ethics, spirituality, and fearless speech. This interdisciplinary work will spark a lively debate in its insistence that what informed Foucault’s writing was his conviction that Enlightenment rationality has not closed the gate of unknown possibilities for human societies.

Foucault in Iran is a courageous and thought-provoking invitation to understand the Iranian revolution, and Foucault’s reaction to it, in an original way. A splendid work that goes beyond simple binaries, it has no sympathy for the clichéd vocabulary used by Progressivists to describe these events—or to criticize Foucault for his alleged romanticisation of the Iranian revolution.

Talal Asad, City University of New York

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Deceptive apparatus: Foucauldian perspectives on law, authorised crime and the rationalities of undercover investigation (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

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28 June 2016

Brendon Murphy, Deceptive apparatus: Foucauldian perspectives on law, authorised crime and the rationalities of undercover investigation, Griffith Law Review, Published online: 19 Jun 2016

DOI: 10.1080/10383441.2016.1194956

ABSTRACT
Investigation of crime is central to the function and purpose of law enforcement. Contemporary investigation depends on a sophisticated arsenal of theories and techniques interacting with law and its institutions in a variety of ways, including authorised unlawful activity. Drawing on Foucault, this article re-imagines the investigation and associated legal architectures as apparatus; a rationality and strategy of governance shaped by intersecting knowledge formations. The paper considers the key characteristics of investigation and its relationship with law, concluding that investigations practices are a form of apparatus, and that aspects of these practices are grounded in a theological dynamic based on surveillance.

Kurt Borg, Exploring Michel Foucault’s Move from Power and Knowledge to Ethics and the Self (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

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27 June 2016

Kurt Borg, ‘Exploring Michel Foucault’s Move from Power and Knowledge to Ethics and the Self’, Dissertation presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Master of Arts in Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, University of Malta, February 2014

Full text available on academia.edu

Abstract
In this dissertation, I will consider the multiple trajectories of the thought of Michel Foucault in the 1970s and 1980s, offering an approach through which his writings on power and knowledge on one hand, and ethics and the self on the other can be understood fruitfully in relation to each other without being seen as representing a radical break in his work. I will do this by, first, locating the question of the subject and its formation within Foucault’s works on disciplinary power and sexuality, paving the way for this question to be revisited through his later writings on ethics. I will then consider how the development of Foucault’s ideas on power into biopower and governmentality enable an approach through which continuity within Foucault’s works can be identified through the rel ations between power, conduct and modes of individualisation. This will lead to considering Foucault’s genealogy of ethics and the modern subject not as a departure from his earlier ideas, but as the culmination of his interest in analysing knowledge, power and ethics. I will consider but go beyond the notions of aesthetics of existence and care of the self in Foucault’s discussion of ancient Greek and Hellenistic ethics in order to deal with his ideas on parrhēsia and truth-telling from his final lecture courses at the Collège De France that show that his late ideas reflect his earlier concerns. Therefore, by appealing to the conceptual developments within his writings as well as his approach to philosophical analysis, Foucault’s philosophical projects need not be seen as disparate and so the issue of continuity in his work can be raised and positively viewed.

Conducting critique : reconsidering Foucault’s engagement with the question of the subject (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

26 June 2016

Borg, Kurt, Conducting critique : reconsidering Foucault’s engagement with the question of the subject, Symposia Melitensia (SymMel) 2015, Volume 11

Full PDF

Abstract:
A common criticism of Michel Foucault’s works is that his writings on power relations over-emphasized the effects that technologies of power have upon the subjection of humans, rendering any attempt of resistance futile and reducing the subject to a mere passive effect of power. This criticism treats Foucault’s consideration of ethics in his later works as a break from his earlier views. In this paper, by reading Foucault’s books alongside his lectures and interviews, two ways will be proposed through which the question of the subject can be productively raised and located throughout Foucault’s works, even within his concerns with power relations. The first way is through the relation between assujettisement and critique, and the second way is through the notions of government and conduct.

Sculpture of Foucault by Harmut Wilkening (2010)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

25 June 2016

Re-posted with updated links and youtube videos

For full story see the Foundation for Art and Public Domain site. (Now only available on wayback machine). See Harmut Wilkening’s website as well.

Vrij-Geestig

On Thursday 24 June 2010, a piece of sculpture by Harmut Wilkening was placed on the first floor of the De Burcht nursing home in Hoogezand. It is a head weighing more than seven tons and is titled Vrij geestig (Quite witty). Just before a start was made with laying the roof in 2009, the sculpture was installed with the aid of an enormous crane. Prior to the installation, a programme was held in the carcass of the building with a presentation by the artist and an introduction by Douwe Draaisma, titled ‘Wisdom comes with the years, but is preceded by forgetfulness’. Douwe Draaisma is Professor in the History of Psychology at the University of Groningen.

The building of the De Burcht residential nursing home has the form of a panopticon. From the open well on the first floor there is an all-round view of the galleries on the upper floors where the entrance doors of the apartments are located. Inspired by the idea of a central point in the building from which everything can be seen in a single glance, and which can itself be seen from all angles, Harmut Wilkening proposed to make a large sculpture depicting the head of Michel Foucault, the theoretician of ‘panopticism’. The concrete portrait of the French philosopher sports a broad smile, his arm emerges from the floor and his hand is resting on his bald head.

vrij-geestig-2

As its first inhabitant, Wilkening’s sculpture is being incorporated into the construction process, as a built-in part of the building. Before the placing of the roof, the sculpture was hoisted in with a crane, under the watchful eyes of the future residents and other invited guests. After that the building work has been completed, during which time the sculpture was protected in a wooden crate. At the festive moment on June 24, 2010, when the building comes into service, Foucault’s head will be unveiled again. A large panel with a photographic account of the making of the work of art will hang next to the building’s entrance. The story of Foucault as the ‘first inhabitant’ can then be told to visitors and newcomers.

For the residents of De Burcht, Wilkening’s sculpture will be a fixed component of their changing entourage. The central open well will be used in diverse ways: as a reading room, theatre and party room. The sculpture refers further to the philosopher’s ideas and to the fact that the human head is the storeroom of memory – that essential mental function, particularly for the people who live here. Wilkening compares the building with a library, as a great collection of the knowledge and experience of all the residents together. He also sees the library as a translation of the social order. For him, the piece is about panopticism: the form in which knowledge is generated, ordered, disseminated and guarded. In De Burcht, Foucault’s head – with a wink – occupies the place of the globe that was also centrally displayed in old libraries, symbolising the all-seeing world.

“Sur les Toits”: A Symposium on the Prison Protests in Early 1970s France

Clare O'Farrell

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25 June 2016

Antipode Editorial Office's avatarAntipodeFoundation.org

Introduction: The Making Visible of Carceral Politics

Marijn Nieuwenhuis, University of Warwick

This symposium contains a rich collection of contributions based on the screening of the French documentary film Sur les Toits (“On the Roofs”). On a Wednesday in May 2016 I invited the film’s independent maker, Nicolas Drolc, and a number of academics from across Warwick’s humanities and social sciences to the screening of the movie. The result was a friendly and productive discussion on an important, but sometimes forgotten, episode in the history of incarceration (see, however, Zurn and Dilts 2016). The essays presented here comprise an interview with the director and a series of original reflections (from Dominique Moran, Sophie Fuggle, Anastasia Chamberlen, Oliver Davis and Stuart Elden) on both the film and its subject of investigation.

Sur les Toits (a title taken from a protest song of the French punk band…

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Foucault @ 90 conference 2016

Clare O'Farrell

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24 June 2016

[Editor] A note to say how much I enjoyed attending the Foucault @ 90 conference in Ayr in Scotland over the last two days and listening to all the interesting work being done. Thank you to Professor Donald Gillies and to Caroline Sisi for all their hard work organising the conference.

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