Foucault News

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

Silvio Gallo,
The care of the self and biopolitics: Resistance and practices of freedom
(2016) Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49(7), 691–701.

https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2016.1204735

Abstract
This text through the direct use to Foucault’s work and using the concepts of ‘care of the self’ and biopolitics is questioning and analyzing resistance and practices of freedom. Mainly, from the Foucault’s courses at the College de France and the methodological tools found there, here I present a discussion about Gilles Deleuze’s contributions to Foucault’s thought and I develop a dialog where I try to explain the concepts of domination, power, ethics, esthetics and the relationship of the self with himself. © 2016 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

Author Keywords
biopolitics; Care of the self; practices of freedom; resistance

APPEL À CONTRIBUTIONS / CALL FOR PAPERS

3èmes journées d’études sur l’Épistémologie Historique
3rd Workshop on Historical Epistemology
Pour une épistémologie historique des transformations techniques
For an Historical Epistemology of Technical Transformations

18-19-20 mai 2017
Ecole doctorale de Philosophie ED 280, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Institut des sciences Juridique & Philosophique de la Sorbonne – UMR 8130
Centre de Philosophie Contemporaine de la Sorbonne, Equipe EXeCO

PDF

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[English below]

Ces troisièmes journées d’études seront consacrées à la place des techniques dans les études d’épistémologie historique. Il s’agira d’explorer cette thématique d’un point de vue méthodologique et d’approfondir différents cas d’étude de transformations techniques et technologiques.

La question des techniques est de première importance pour l’épistémologie historique, entendue au sens large: bien qu’elle soit souvent présentée comme une histoire purement conceptuelle, l’étude de techniques y a occupé une place centrale dans l’enquête sur le déroulement concret des pratiques scientifiques. Le rapport entre sciences et techniques a été ainsi largement problématisé, en insistant souvent sur la primauté du moment technique par rapport à la systématisation théorique.

A cet égard, ces journées permettront de discuter des recherches en cours sur différentes transformations techniques et technologiques dans les domaines les plus variées: sciences médicales et biologiques, sociales, physiques ou tout autre champ disciplinaire où les chercheurs se sont servis de la “boîte à outils” de l’épistémologie historique. Nous attendons donc un ensemble de contributions caractérisées par des approches différentes, capables d’aborder le sujet proposé dans sa généralité, notamment selon les axes définis dans les deux sections suivantes:

I. Les épistémologues historiques face aux techniques L’épistémologie française a repensé les techniques avec une certaine précocité par rapport à la philosophie des sciences anglo-saxonne, qui, jusqu’aux années 1980, est restée liée au programme post-positiviste de la priorité de la théorie sur l’observation et l’expérimentation. Bachelard, Koyré, Canguilhem, Foucault, dans leurs analyses de la connaissance scientifique, ont assignée des rôles spécifiques aux techniques. C’est Hacking qui, dans la phase contemporaine et anglophone de l’épistémologie historique, a contribué à rétablir la centralité du “style du laboratoire” et des manières d’intervenir dans le monde par rapport aux manières de le concevoir. Dans son sillage, d’autres auteurs, comme L. Daston, P. Galison et H.-J. Rheinberger ont accordé une grande attention à l’histoire matérielle et au rôle que les instruments et les appareils jouent dans la production du savoir scientifique. Qu’a changé la prise en compte des techniques? Comment cette prise en compte a-t-elle elle-même pu évoluer au fil des temps?

II. Histoire des techniques, histoire des concepts Au niveau méthodologique, nous souhaiterions également recevoir des contributions traitant des conceptions du rapport entre techniques et théorie dans l’histoire des sciences et, plus généralement, sur le rôle des techniques dans le processus de développement scientifique. De ce point de vue, une attention particulière sera donné aux interventions qui proposent de discuter l’originalité de l’épistémologie historique vis-à-vis d’autres approches méthodologiques d’étude des sciences, notamment les nombreuses études sociales des sciences et des technologies (STS), mais aussi par rapport à d’autres traditions de pensée philosophiques qui ont traité la même question, comme la phénoménologie (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty), l’anthropologie philosophique (Gehlen, Marquard), l’herméneutique (Nancy), la philosophie sociale (Ellul), etc.

Les propositions d’interventions (500 mots, plus une présentation courte du candidat) sont à nous faire parvenir, avant le 3 février 2017 (date de réponse le 27 février), en format word ou pdf à epistemologiehistorique@gmail.com. Les deux langues de la rencontre seront le français et l’anglais.

[English]

The 3rd Edition of this Workshop is dedicated to the role of techniques within the field of Historical Epistemology (HEP). This topic will be developed from a methodological point of view and different case studies involving technical and technological transformations will be taken into account.

The problem of techniques is a crucial matter for HEP, broadly understood: although it is chiefly understood as a conceptual history, HEP has systematically drawn from the study of techniques for inquiring about the concrete development of scientific practices. Moreover, the connection between sciences and techniques has been widely discussed by many, if not all, of the practitioners of HEP, often with the result of highlighting the primacy of the technical, experimental and productive moments over the theoretical and speculative ones.

With this in mind, the workshop will involve discussion of on-going researches about different technical and technological transformations in many different fields: the medical and the social sciences, biology, physics and other disciplines in which the researchers have borrowed from HEP’s toolbox. We expect contributions from different approaches in order to address the proposed topic in its generality, in particular according to the two following axes:

I. Historical epistemologists facing techniques Compared to Anglo-Saxon philosophy of science, which, until the 1980s, had maintained a strong link to a post-positivist programme granting primacy to theories over observation and experimentation, French epistemology reassessed the role of techniques with a certain precocity. In their analyses of scientific knowledge, Bachelard, Koyré, Canguilhem and Foucault assigned to techniques a particular role. In the contemporary moment of HEP it is I. Hacking who has decisively contributed to reestablish the centrality of the “laboratory style” and of the ways to intervene in the world with respect to the ways to conceive it. In his wake, other authors, like L. Daston, P. Galison and H.-J. Rheinberger have given full attention to the material history and to the role instruments and apparatuses play in the production of scientific knowledge. What did the taking into account of techniques change? How did this consideration itself evolve over time?

II. History of techniques, history of concepts On the methodological level, we welcome proposals dealing with the relationship between techniques and theories within the history of science and, more generally, on the role techniques have in the processes of scientific development. Under this light, particular attention will be given to those interventions which will envisage to discuss the originality of HEP with respect to other epistemological approaches within science studies, i.e. the science, technology and society studies (STS), but also the relation to other philosophical traditions which have dealt with the same questions, such as phenomenology (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty), anthropology (Gehlen, Marquard), hermeneutics (Nancy), social philosophy (Ellul), etc.

Proposals (500 words plus a short presentation of the candidate) must be sent by February 3rd, 2017 (notification of acceptance or refusal by February 27th), in word or pdf formats, to epistemologiehistorique@gmail.com. The languages of the workshop will be French and English.

Dates importantes / Important dates
Limite de proposition d’interventions / Application deadline: February 3rd 2017
Réponse / Notification of acceptance: February 27th 2017
Remise de textes / Text submission: May 6th 2017
Journées d’études / Workshop days: May 18-19-20 2017

Comité scientifique / Scientific committee
Christian BONNET, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
Jean-François BRAUNSTEIN, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
Arnold I. DAVIDSON, University of Chicago.
Pierre WAGNER, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.

Comité d’organisation / Organizing committee
Ivan MOYA DIEZ, Laurent LOISON, Matteo VAGELLI (coordinateurs)
Tiago ALMEIDA, Marcos CAMOLEZI, Wenbo LIANG, Gabriele VISSIO

Nasir, M.A.
Weighing Words: On the Governmentality of Free Speech
(2016) Social and Legal Studies, 25 (1), pp. 69-92.

DOI: 10.1177/0964663915586472

Abstract
This article takes issue with those accounts of the right to freedom of expression that find a zero-sum game between power and freedom. It argues that by marking expression as a legal problematic, the right to freedom of expression regulates the force of an expression, and by doing so governs the (expressing qua juridical) subjects. When the question thus turns onto the subject, the subjects are required to be ‘free in specific ways’ in order to exercise their freedoms in an apt manner. In order to argue out these points, this article analyzes the case law of the right to freedom of expression from the theoretical lens of governmentality. The discussion begins by a reading of a set of cases brought before European Court of Human Rights: Sürek v. Turkey. Later, the dynamics of power and subjectivity are commented upon, by discussing the ways through which expressions merit a legally protected status. Finally, the article focuses on the complex interdependencies the right to freedom of expression form between an expressing subject and its juridical capacities on one hand, and between expressivity and the guarantor of this right on the other. © 2015, © The Author(s) 2015.

Author Keywords
European human rights law; Foucault; governmentality; subjectivity; the right to freedom of expression

Kimberly Hall, Selfies and Self-Writing: Writing: Cue Card Confessions as Social Media Technologies of the Self (2016) Television and New Media, 17 (3), pp. 228-242.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476415591221

Abstract
This article explores the aesthetic genealogy of the cue card confession social media trope, where producers create a self-portrait or vlog featuring handwritten cards to relate an autobiographical narrative. Returning to Michel Foucault’s theories of self-writing as a confessional discourse of the self that creates a correspondence of ethical perception between the writer and reader by way of contemporary theorizations of the demand for authenticity and consumability in social media, I argue that the cue card confessions constitute an important mode of self-writing that uses the visual spectacle of the body and the discursive demands of confessional discourse to invoke mediated witnessing as a mode of ethical engagement. © The Author(s) 2015.

Author Keywords
authenticity; discourse theory; media ethics; new media theory; social media; visual culture

CALL FOR PAPERS

The seventeenth annual meeting of the Foucault Circle

Los Angeles, California
March 23-25, 2017
(hosted by Loyola Marymount University)

We invite individual papers on any aspect of Foucault’s work. Studies, critiques, and applications of Foucauldian thinking are all welcome. We will aim for a diversity of topics and perspectives.

Abstracts should be prepared for anonymous review, and are to be submitted to the program committee chair, Nicole Ridgway, by email (ridgwayn@uwm.edu) on/before Friday, December 9, 2016. Please indicate “Foucault Circle submission” in the subject heading, and include the abstract as a “.docx” attachment.

Individual paper submissions require an abstract of no more than 750 words.
Program decisions will be announced in December.

Each speaker will have approximately 35 minutes for paper presentation and discussion combined—papers should be a maximum of 3000 words (15-20 minutes reading time). In addition to paper sessions, the conference will also feature a screening and discussion of Sur les toits, a documentary film on the 1970s prison revolts in France. This session will be open to all participants.

Logistical information about lodging, transportation, and other arrangements will be available after the program has been announced.

For more information about the Foucault Circle, please see our website

Line Joranger,
Individual perception and cultural development: Foucault’s 1954 Approach to Mental Illness and Its History
(2016) History of Psychology, 19 (1), pp. 40-51.

https://doi.org/10.1037/hop0000014

Abstract
In his 1954 book Mental Illness and Personality Foucault combines the subjective experience of the mentally ill person with a sociocultural historical approach to mental illness and suggests that there exists a reciprocal connection between individual perception and sociocultural development. This article examines the ramifications of these connections in Foucault’s 1954 works and the connection with his later historical works. The article also examines the similarities between Foucault’s 1954 thoughts and contemporary intellectual thought, such as those outlined in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s existential phenomenology and in Gaston Bachelard and Georges Canguilhem’s historical epistemology. In sum, my study shows that Foucault’s historical analysis began long before his 1961 dissertation History of Madness. It also shows that, more than announcing the “death” of the subject, Foucault’s historical analysis may have contributed to saving it.

Author Keywords
Environment; Epistemology; Experience; Mental illness; Phenomenology

Christopher J. Cushion,
Reflection and reflective practice discourses in coaching: a critical analysis
(2016) Sport, Education and Society, 23(1), 82–94.

https://doi.org/10.1080/13573322.2016.1142961

Abstract
Reflection and reflective practice is seen as an established part of coaching and coach education practice. It has become a ‘taken-for-granted’ part of coaching that is accepted enthusiastically and unquestioningly, and is assumed to be ‘good’ for coaching and coaches. Drawing on sociological concepts, a primarily Foucauldian lens, the purpose of this paper is to provide a critical analysis of reflection and to unpack some of the assumptions underlying it and problematize the seemingly unproblematic. This paper challenges the current dominant cognitive assumptions about reflection (and coaching) as an individual, asocial, ahistorical process and explores through concepts such as power/knowledge, discourse and the self, the extent that reflection is discursive and constructs coaches’ subjectivities. The analysis considers unintended consequences of reflection as a form of surveillance that normalizes coaches’ practices through the act of confession. The paper thus challenges the prevailing descriptions that stress the epistemological, and claim ‘neutral’, discursive-blind and non-political perspectives. © 2016 Taylor & Francis

Author Keywords
coach education; coaching; Foucault; Reflection; reflective practice

Judith Fathallah, Statements and silence: Fanfic paratexts for ASOIAF/Game of Thrones (2016) Continuum, 30 (1), pp. 75-88.
https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2015.1099150

Abstract
Today, most media authors acknowledge and to some degree integrate the user-generated content of their fandom. Some, however, still perform authoritarian positions of prohibition. George R. R. Martin, the creator of A Song of Ice and Fire, attempts to ban fanfiction, whilst acknowledging he cannot control use of the characters licensed to the TV adaptation (Game of Thrones). Building on the work of Jonathan Gray and Alexandra Herzog on paratexts in fandom studies, this article performs a critical discourse analysis on a systematic sample of the paratexts fanfic authors attach to fanfic from a cross section of online forums. These statements discursively reconfigure constructions of authorship and ownership, strongly inflected by the factors of site, audience and category. However, these paratexts evidence a paradox, legitimating their work by reference to the authority of what is already legitimate. The more radical gesture may be the absence of paratextual justification, and refusal of the incitement to discourse which Foucault recognised as a technique of modern power. © 2015 Taylor and Francis.

Renkin, H.Z.
Biopolitical mythologies: Róheim, Freud, (homo)phobia, and the sexual science of Eastern European Otherness
(2016) Sexualities, 19 (1-2), pp. 168-189.

DOI: 10.1177/1363460714550908

Abstract
A vast body of research has, following Foucault, shown the scientific study of sexuality to be central to the construction of modernity and its Others, and to biopolitical categories of personhood and citizenship. Similarly, much historical work has acknowledged the critical role of the Eastern European Other in imagining the modern European West. Yet while representations of sexuality were critical to Eastern Europe’s invention, and have been increasingly visible elements of re-emerging European “neo-orientalisms,” there has been little scholarly concern with how such symbolic and political hierarchies were constructed through the historical intersections of ethnographic and sexual scientific practice, or with this history’s biopolitical implications. This paper examines the intersection of several such sexual-scientific imaginings. Focusing on the conjuncture between Hungarian scholar Géza Róheim’s psychoanalytic interpretations of European folklore and non-European ethnography, Sigmund Freud’s orientalizing construction of the key psychoanalytic concept of “phobia,” and scholarly analyses of postsocialist sexual politics, I argue that these intersecting scientific works joined evolutionist understandings of culture to theories of universal psychic development to read Eastern Europe as a site of psycho-sexual and civilizational immaturity, producing mutually-reinforcing narratives that fabricated Eastern European sexuality as a biopolitical marker of European difference. These overlapping sexual geotemporalities, I suggest, continue to inform current scholarly interpretations of postsocialist homophobia, (re)producing both Hungary and Eastern Europe as naturalized sites of homophobia, primitivity, and failed sexual citizenship, and rendering hegemonic the status of the region and its inhabitants as sexual Others of “European” modernity. By fabricating postsocialist homophobia as a scientific “fact,” such layered discourses sustain the biopolitical boundaries of modern European citizenship. © 2016, The Author(s) 2016.

Author Keywords
Eastern Europe; history of science; homophobia; postsocialism; sexual citizenship; sexual geography; sexual science

Gozde Turan, ‘Responsibility to Prosecute’ in an age of global governmentality: The International Criminal Court (2016) Cooperation and Conflict, 51 (1), pp. 20-37.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836715597946

Abstract
This paper critically examines the discursive power of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which was established in 2002 with unprecedented jurisdiction in terms of both crimes being prosecuted and territorial scope. What evokes a critical engagement is not only the criminalization of certain acts in international law, but also the evolution of a permanent international criminal court with forms of power enabling the sanctioning, prosecution and punishment of these acts. Analysing how current international criminal law developed and is being shaped brings to the surface particular power structures embedded in legal texts and practices. By subjecting the discourse of the ICC to a Foucauldian analysis and arguing for the utility of Foucault’s concepts in analysing contemporary international criminal legal discourse, the paper contributes to our understanding of novel techniques and procedures of contemporary global governmentality, and how the ‘international community’ is constituted as both a subject and an object within this recent power modality. © 2015, © The Author(s) 2015.

Author Keywords
Discursive power; global governmentality; international criminal court; international criminal prosecutions