Foucault News

Foucault et la psychanalyse (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

17 March 2016

SQUVERER Amos, LAUFER Laurie (dir.), Foucault et la psychanalyse. Quelques questions analytiques à Michel Foucault, Hermann, 2015

Michel Foucault a entretenu avec la psychanalyse une liaison tumultueuse, faite d’attraction et de rejet. Fasciné par l’œuvre de Freud dans laquelle il reconnaît la rupture essentielle qu’elle représente avec la psychiatrie et la médecine de la fin du XIXe siècle, le philosophe devient, à partir des années soixante-dix, résolument critique. Dispositif disciplinaire contrôlant les corps et les désirs, discours normalisateurs et non réflexifs, voilà ce que représente dès lors la pratique analytique pour Michel Foucault.

En quoi la critique foucaldienne de la psychanalyse peut-elle être, aujourd’hui encore, utile ? Et, inversement, quels déplacements épistémologiques la méthode foucaldienne peut-elle attendre de la psychanalyse ? C’est dans ces deux démarches complémentaires que s’engagent les contributions de Jean Allouch, Paul-Laurent Assoun, Thamy Ayouch, Joël Birman, Roland Gori, Christian Hoffman, Laurie Laufer et Amos Squverer. Cet ouvrage collectif fait émerger la complexité de la rencontre entre Michel Foucault et la psychanalyse, mais également montrent combien les questions et la méthode foucaldienne peuvent être utiles à une psychanalyse open to revision, selon l’expression de Freud.

Extreme mobilities: Challenging the concept of ‘travel’ (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

16 March 2016

Kannisto, P.
Extreme mobilities: Challenging the concept of ‘travel’
(2016) Annals of Tourism Research, 57, pp. 220-233.

DOI: 10.1016/j.annals.2016.01.005

Abstract
This article explores extreme mobilities by analysing how ‘global nomads’ create their lifestyles. The focus is on power negotiations regarding freedom of movement and the limits of modern-day mobilities. The study is based on in-depth interviews, instant ethnography and virtual ethnography analysed with Foucauldian discourse analysis. Two discourses are examined-the discourse of home and hearth and the discourse of homelessness-that reveal contradictions in society and in global nomads’ lifestyles. While societies tend to be suspicious about sustained mobilities, mostly promoting homebound travel, global nomads are not able to detach themselves from home either. They are opportunists taking advantage of societies’ dominant discourses and practices. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd.

Author Keywords
Discourse analysis; Extreme mobilities; Foucault; Location-independence; Power

Brisbane Foucault Reading Group (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

15 March 2016

Brisbane Foucault Reading Group

Foucault with students at the Free University of Berlin (DR).
In Michel Foucault: Une histoire de la vérité, Paris: Syros, 1985, pp. 118.

If you are interested in attending, please contact Clare O’Farrell.

Brisbane Reading group blog

Please note: This group will be running as a face to face group in Brisbane, Australia. Online attendance is not possible at this point.

Venue: Top floor of the library. Seminar room R 614
Queensland University of Technology
130 Victoria Park Road, Kelvin Grove
Brisbane, Qld, Australia

Map of Kelvin Grove campus.

Time
Fridays 1-3 pm. People are welcome to join the group at any time.

Dates
15 April, 22 April, 6 May, 20 May, 3 June 2016.
Further dates to be determined.

We will be reading one or two chapters a week from the following work:

Michel Foucault, The Punitive Society: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1972-1973, Edited by Arnold I. Davidson, Trans. Graham Burchell, Palgrave Macmillan, September 2015
Table of Contents

Further reading and viewing
Seminar at Columbia University on The Punitive Society
Stuart Elden on The Punitive Society

Aims of the reading group
The work of Foucault is used widely across an enormous range of theoretical and applied disciplines. The aim of this group is to provide an informal setting to read and discuss Foucault’s work and discuss how it might be applied to other domains. The focus will be on recent publications of previously unpublished work by Foucault.

Notes to those wishing to participate

Academic staff, higher degree students and anyone with an interest in Foucault’s work are welcome to attend.
Participants will be expected to read the set material before coming to each session and also to prepare 2 or 3 discussion points.
In addition and optionally, participants are also invited to provide a couple of pages from a secondary reading from an applied field of their choice that relates to the Foucault texts under discussion. This material can be posted in a password protected area for other members of the group to read or skim through before each session.

History of the Reading Group
The Brisbane Foucault Reading group ran most semesters between 2000 and 2012 and is now running again.

Clare O’Farrell, who is organising this group, lectures at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. Please visit her website for details on some of her publications and online activities.

Michel Foucault and Neoliberalism. Conference (2016)

Clare O'Farrell

3 comments

14 March 2016

Michel Foucault and Neoliberalism
PDF with further information

Center for Critical Democracy Studies
American University of Paris
6 rue du Colonel Combes
Paris 75007
Room C-104

March 25-26 2016
Registration at criticaldemocracy@aup.edu

Friday, March 25

9h-9h15: Introductory Remarks Stephen Sawyer

9h15-10h30: Contextualizing Foucault
-Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, Foucault and the Neo-liberalism Debate: On the Limitations of a Contextualist Approach
-Claudia Castiglioni, Foucault, Neoliberalism, and the Iranian revolution: an unconventional thinker confronted with an unconventional revolution

10h30-10h45: Short Coffee Break

10h45-12h: Foucault and Politics
-Duncan Kelly, Michel Foucault as Historian of Political Thought
-Aner Barzilay, A rereading of Foucault’s Lectures on the Birth of Biopolitics in light of his early reading of Marx

12h-1h30: Lunch

13h30-15h15: Foucault and the State
-Luca Paltrinieri, Beyond Foucault and neoliberalism: firms, self-employment, self-entrepreneurship today
-Luca Provenzano, Of state-phobia and conceptual inflationism: Foucault and the aporias of anti-Statism

15h15-15h30: Short Coffee Break

15h30-16h45: Was Foucault a Neo-Liberal?
-Michael Behrent, Neoliberalism: The Highest Stage of Anti-Humanism?…
-Serge Audier, Foucault est-il un bon guide pour comprendre, critiquer et combattre le néolibéralisme

17h-18h15: Thinking Foucault and Neoliberalism after the University of Chicago Lectures
-Bernard Harcourt, Foucault’s Critiques of Neoliberalism
-François Ewald, Vérité du néolibéralisme

Saturday, March 26

10h-12h: Governmentality
-Judith Revel, Qu’est-ce que gouverner aujourd’hui? Du gouvernement des vivants au gouvernement des conduites, et retour
-Danilo Scholz, Michel Foucault and François Châtelet: Governmentality and État savant
-Colin Gordon, The political project of Foucault’s governmentality lectures

12h-13h: Closing remarks
Stephen Sawyer and Bernard Harcourt

La Bibliothèque Foucaldienne (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

14 March 2016

La Bibliothèque Foucaldienne

A prezi presentation of some of the documents in the archive, uploaded by by Vincent Ventresque on 23 November 2015

Archive: Foucault’s Untimely Struggle Toward a Form of Spirituality (2009)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

13 March 2016

Paul Rabinow, Foucault’s Untimely Struggle. Toward a Form of Spirituality, Theory, Culture & Society November 2009 vol. 26 no. 6 25-44

doi: 10.1177/0263276409347699

Abstract
In his series of essays on Kant written during the 1980s, Michel Foucault attempted to discern the difference today made with respect to yesterday. As his essays as well as his lectures (especially at the Collège de France and Berkeley) during the early 1980s demonstrate, he was drawn — and devoted the bulk of his scholarly efforts to a renewed form of genealogical work on themes, venues, practices and modes of governing the subject and others — to experiments in new forms of friendship, sociability and transformations of the self and others that he saw taking shape, or imagined were taking shape around him. This work, which has come to be known unfortunately as the ‘late Foucault’, arose out of deep dissatisfaction with his own life conditions, the broader political climate of the time, and a profound and unexpected rethinking not only of the specific projects he had intended to carry out but of what it meant to think. This article explores some of the elements at play during these deeply (re)formative several years, which as they unfolded were in no way intended to constitute a ‘late Foucault’, quite the opposite, even if fate would have it otherwise. The article begins with a ‘prelude’ that introduces the problem of what mode is appropriate for giving form to thinking. It proceeds to argue that Foucault engaged in a struggle to redefine the object of thinking; that in order to do so he was led to pursue a venue in which such thinking could be practised; and finally to an increasingly articulate and acute quest for a form that would constitute a difference between what Foucault diagnosed as an impoverished modern problem space and a future in which things might be different and better. If we define spirituality as being the form of practices which postulate that, such as he is, the subject is not capable of the truth, but that, such as it is, the truth can transfigure and save the subject, then we can say that the modern age of the relations between the subject and truth begin when it is postulated that, such as he is, the subject is capable of truth, but that, such as it is, the truth cannot save the subject. (Foucault, 2005: 19)

Keywords
Berkeley Foucault society spirituality untimely venue

Biopolitics and Memory in Postcolonial Literature and Culture (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

12 March 2016

Michael R. Griffiths, Biopolitics and Memory in Postcolonial Literature and Culture, Routledge, 2015

About the Book

From the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa to the United Nations Permanent Memorial to the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, many worthwhile processes of public memory have been enacted on the national and international levels. But how do these extant practices of memory function to precipitate justice and recompense? Are there moments when such techniques, performances, and displays of memory serve to obscure and elide aspects of the history of colonial governmentality? This collection addresses these and other questions in essays that take up the varied legacies, continuities, modes of memorialization, and poetics of remaking that attend colonial governmentality in spaces as varied as the Maghreb and the Solomon Islands. Highlighting the continued injustices arising from a process whose aftermath is far from settled, the contributors examine works by twentieth-century authors representing Asia, Africa, North America, Latin America, Australia, and Europe. Imperial practices throughout the world have fomented a veritable culture of memory. The essays in this volume show how the legacy of colonialism’s attempt to transform the mode of life of colonized peoples has been central to the largely unequal phenomenon of globalization.

Michael Peters, Education, Enterprise Culture and the Entrepreneurial Self: A Foucauldian Perspective (2001)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

11 March 2016

Michael Peters, Education, Enterprise Culture and the Entrepreneurial Self: A Foucauldian Perspective, Journal of Educational Enquiry, Vol. 2, No. 2, 2001 58
https://ojs.unisa.edu.au/index.php/EDEQ/article/view/558

Abstract
The notion of ‘enterprise culture’ emerged in the United Kingdom as a central motif in political thought under Margaret Thatcher’s administration. The notion represented a profound shift away from the Keynesian welfare state to a deliberate attempt at cultural restructuring and engineering based upon the neo-liberal model of the entrepreneurial self – a shift characterised as a moving from a ‘culture of dependency’ to one of ‘self-reliance’. In education this shift took the form of the ‘enterprise education’ and the ‘enterprise curriculum’. This paper, utilising the perspective of Michel Foucault, analyses the ‘generalization of an ‘enterprise form’ to all forms of conduct’ (Burchell) and the way in which the promotion of an enterprise culture has become a style of government characteristic of both neoliberalism and Third Way politics.

How ‘Treat Yourself’ Became a Capitalist Command (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

11 March 2016

Ester Bloom, How ‘Treat Yourself’ Became a Capitalist Command. The Atlantic 19 Nov 2015

Corporations love telling Americans they “deserve” fancy electronics and indulgent food.

In a 1982 lecture that went on to be published as an essay called “Technologies of the Self,” the French philosopher Michel Foucault argues that looking after oneself, rather than being a form of navel-gazing or narcissism, is a kind of “vigilance” that dates back to antiquity. For Socrates, Plato, and their ilk, Foucault writes, “taking care of yourself eventually became absorbed into knowing yourself.”* As the thinking went, only with the proper amount of time set aside for the “active leisure” of reading, studying, and ruminating could a person come to grips with the profound nature of the universe and his own mortality.

After bubbling up through academic communities in the ‘80s, the term “self-care” accumulated health-related connotations as it gained mainstream renown. In the ‘90s, it referred to the way that patients could take supplementary responsibility for themselves in conjunction with their doctors, nurses, and pharmacists. This was not particularly surprising: Foucault once advised that “one must become the doctor of oneself,” and his theories inspired individual-focused health care even before WebMD.

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From Panopticon to Prisoner’s Dilemma: Neoliberal Subjects as Prisoners of Reason (2106)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

10 March 2016

S. M. Amadae, From Panopticon to Prisoner’s Dilemma: Neoliberal Subjects as Prisoners of Reason

25th April, 4pm

RHB 150, Goldsmiths, University of London
New Cross
London SE14 6NW

In this talk, S. M. Amadae (MIT and University of Helsinki) will explore how the pedagogy of game theory and practice of institutional design generates neoliberal subjects and neoliberal governance. This analytic approach enables us to understand the legitimation of a reactionary interventionist security state as well as the neopaternalism of ‘nudge’. Neoliberalism is staunchly counter-Enlightenment in reducing agency to consumptive preference satisfaction. It anticipates the further step toward algorithmic governance and mindless rationality consistent with treating information as signals sustaining rational choice rather than elementary ingredients to be vetted and shared to jointly create horizons of meaning and institutions based on shared expectations.

S. M. Amadae is author of Prisoners of Reason: Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy(Cambridge, 2016) and Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism (Chicago, 2003)

All are welcome and no registration is necessary. Details on how to find Goldsmiths are here.