Livestream of Seminar 3 of Foucault 13/13
This will also be available as a recording after the event
October 12, 2015, 6:15pm
Didier Fassin, Institute for Advanced Studies (Princeton) and EHESS
Axel Honneth, University of Frankfurt & Columbia University
Nadia Urbinati, Columbia University
Moderators:
Bernard E. Harcourt, Columbia University
Jesús R. Velasco, Columbia University
Deleuze and Foucault’s Political Philosophy
Conference
PDF of full program
13 – 14 November 2015
Purdue University
Organized by the Philosophy and Literature Interdisciplinary Program and the Department of Philosophy with the generous support of a Global Synergy Grant from the College of Liberal Arts
Organizers: Nicolae Morar, Thomas Nail , Daniel W. Smith
The “Deleuze and Foucault’s Political Philosophy” conference brings together philosophers and scholars for a two – day conference ex amining the political philosophies of Gilles Deleuze (1925 – 1995) and Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984), two of the most important and influential French philosophers of the twentieth – century.
The conference is taking place through the generous support of a “Global Synergy Grant” from the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University. By fostering innovation and excellence in international and global research in the College of Liberal Arts, the Global Synergy Grants seek to enhance Purdue’s national and international reputation of research in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
The Global Synergy Grant is supporting an on-going project to transcribe the lectures that Gilles Deleuze gave at his seminar at the University of Paris 8, St. Denis, recordings of which have been archived in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. The project started in 2012 with the transcription of Deleuze’s 1985-86 seminars on Michel Foucault, which are now available at the La Voix de Deleuze website at Paris 8.
The current grant is supporting the transcription of Deleuze’s 1979-80 seminar entitled “Appareils d’Etat et Machines de Guerre” (Apparatuses of State and War Machines). We are happy to mark the online publication of these lectures by Deleuze on both Michel Foucault and the war machine by hosting this conference on the relation between the political philosophies of Deleuze and Foucault.
Sessions will be held on the Purdue University West Lafayette campus in the Yue-Kong Pao Hall of Visual and Performing Arts, Room 1197.
Speakers:
Claire Colebrook, Penn State University, cmc30@psu.edu
Leonard Lawlor, Penn State University, lul19@psu.edu
Justin Litaker, Purdue University, jsanderslitaker@gmail.com
Mary Beth Mader, University of Memphis, mmader@memphis.edu
Todd May, Clemson University, mayt@clemson.edu
Nicolae Morar, University of Oregon, nmorar@uoregon.edu
Thomas Nail, University of Denver, thomas.nail@du.edu
Chris Penfield, Purdue University, chrispenfield@gmail.com
Jason Read, University of Southern Maine, jason.read@maine.edu
Dan Selcer, Duquesne University, selcerd@duq.edu
Fredrika Spindler, Södertörn University, Sweden, fredrika.spindler@sh.se
Daniel Smith, Purdue University, smith132@purdue.edu
Kevin Thompson, DePaul University, kthomp12@depaul.edu Stephen Zepke, Vienna, Austria, eszed@hotmail.com
‘The refugee problem is a foreshadowing of the 21st century’s great migration’
(“Nanmin mondai ha 21 seiku minzoku daiidô no zenchô da”, an interview by H.Uno, originally published on 17 August 1979, in Shûkan posuto, pp. 34-35) republished under the title “Le problème des réfugiés est un présage de la grande migration du XXIe siècle” in Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, text 271, Volume 3. 1976-1979, Gallimard, 1994, pp. 798-800.
(Partially republished by Libération on 18 September 2015 and by Libération.fr on 17 September 2015 under the title “Michel Foucault en 1979 : «Les hommes réprimés par la dictature choisiront d’échapper à l’enfer»” )
Translated from Japanese into French by Ryôji Nakamura, 1994 ; translated from French into English by Felix de Montety, 2015. Thanks to Stuart Elden, Steve Legg and Mike Heffernan for comments and corrections.
H. Uno: What according to…
View original post 1,019 more words
Forum: Foucault and Neoliberalism, History and Theory, Volume 54, Issue 3, October 2015.
1. Introduction (pages 367–371)
Matthew Specter
2. Can the critique of capitalism be antihumanist? (pages 372–388)
Michael C. Behrent
3. Foucault must not be defended (pages 389–403)
Mitchell Dean
4. Neoliberalism through Foucault’s eyes (pages 404–418)
Serge Audier
Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, Monstruosités critiques et surdités politiques. Réponse à un article publié dans Clarin à propos de La dernière leçon de Michel Foucault
(Une version de cet article en espagnol est également publié sur ce site. A Spanish version of this piece is also available on this website)
En 1971, Michel Foucault publie un texte où il s’en prend à ce qu’il appelle les « monstruosités de la critique », aux opérations de déformation qu’accomplissent, par incompréhension, ignorance, et mauvaise foi, ceux qui sont censés savoir lire.
Les attaques publiées par l’auteur d’un compte-rendu – Veronica Gago – de mon livre La Ultima Leccion de Michel Foucault dans le supplément N du journal argentin Clarin appartiennent à cette catégorie. L’incompréhension n’est pas surprenante et son article n’a rien d’original. Elle exprime la manière dont celles et ceux qui adhérent sans distance à des perceptions installées réagissent à un livre qui pose des questions nouvelles. L’auteur ne peut pas rendre compte de mon livre et comprendre mon projet. Elle leur reste extérieure. Elle lit avec des lunettes idéologiques un livre de réflexion. Comme elle ne peut pas imaginer que Foucault s’est intéressé au néolibéralisme, elle se livre à une pratique d’exorcisme et de dénégation.
Spohrer, K.
Negotiating and contesting ‘success’: discourses of aspiration in a UK secondary school
(2015) Discourse, 15 p. Article in Press.
DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2015.1044423
Abstract
The need to ‘raise aspirations’ among young people from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds has been prominent in UK policy debates over the last decade. This paper examines how this discourse is negotiated and contested by teachers and pupils in a Scottish secondary school. Interviews, group discussions and observations were analysed by drawing on Foucauldian discourse analysis. The analysis exposes contradictions and silences inherent in dominant discourses of aspiration, most notably the tension between the promise and the impossibility of ‘success’ for all. It is argued that attempts to reconcile this tension by calling on young people to maximise individual ‘potential’ through attitude change silence the social construction of ‘success’ and ‘failure’. The paper concludes with suggesting ways in which schools could embrace the contradictions underpinning dominant ‘raising aspiration’ discourses and adopt a more critical-sociological approach in working with young people.
Author Keywords
aspirations; discourse; education policy; Foucault; success; young people
Camargo, R., Ried, N.
Towards a genealogy of pharmacological practice
(2015) Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 10 p. Article in Press.
DOI: 10.1007/s11019-015-9648-3
Abstract
Following Foucault’s work on disciplinary power and biopolitics, this article maps an initial cartography of the research areas to be traced by a genealogy of pharmacological practice. Pharmacology, as a practical activity, refers to the creation, production and sale of drugs/medication. This work identifies five lines of research that, although often disconnected from each other, may be observed in the specialized literature: (1) pharmaceuticalization; (2) regulation of the pharmaceutical industry; (3) the political-economic structure of the pharmaceutical industry; (4) consumption/consumerism of medications; (5) and bio-knowledge. The article suggests that a systematic analysis of these areas leads one to consider pharmacological practice a sui generis apparatus of power, which reaches beyond the purely disciplinary and biopolitical levels to encompass molecular configurations, thereby giving rise not only to new types of government over life, but also to new struggles for life, extending from molecular to population-wide levels.
Author Keywords
Biopolitics; Disciplinary power; Genealogy; Molecular politics; Pharmacological practice
Continental Thought & Theory. A Journal of Intellectual Freedom
Call for Papers
Inaugural Issue
Both the ideal and pursuit of intellectual freedom are important components underpinning this journal. The unrestricted expression of ideas is a desire and challenge facing us all. Particular fields of Continental theory have attempted to embrace and pursue this ethic as acts of intellectual integrity. With this in mind, the journal’s inaugural issue posits the question: what does intellectual freedom mean today? Although this question speaks directly to the academy, it is not limited to scholars. People in other spheres of life also experience the shaping of and parameters to their ideas, sometimes to their chagrin. Continental theory invites a variety of responses to the question of intellectual freedom.
Closing date for submissions: 15 January 2016
Submissions: ctt-submissions@canterbury.ac.nz
Please refer to the instructions for contributors.
By publishing with Continental Thought and Theory, your paper will be automatically deposited in the University of Canterbury Research Repository and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY) license. For information on Creative Commons, please see www.creativecommons.org.
Epilogue 2/13: The Stakes of the Balibar-Ewald Debate
By Bernard E. Harcourt
[This article draws on a longer essay titled “Reading Penal Theories and Institutions”]
“Women, prisoners, conscripts, asylum patients, homosexuals have now begun a specific struggle of resistance against the particular forms of power, of constraint, of control that are exercised over them.”
Michel Foucault, in discussion with Gilles Deleuze, “Les Intellectuels et le pouvoir,” March 4, 1972, Dits & Écrits #106, Quarto I, p. 1183.
The second seminar gave rise to a productive disagreement between Étienne Balibar and François Ewald regarding a matter of central importance to the questions of power and of resistance to power: Can resistance operate through the existing institutions, mechanisms, and practices of power, or must we look elsewhere to find other means to counter “the particular forms of power, of constraint, and of control that are exercised over us”?
These questions preoccupied Foucault at the time of his 1972 lectures, and they confounded him. Most of his exchanges with others critical thinkers in the period—with Noam Chomsky in November 1971, with Benny Lévy and André Glucksmann in June 1971, with Gilles Deleuze in March 1972—revolved around the central question of resistance to power: whether to work within the judicial institution, whether to litigate, whether to mimic the judicial model and organize independent popular tribunals, whether to write or to militate, whether to lead or to allow others’ voices to be heard, whether to form committees of inquest, whether to reach outside and resist by other means—in sum, whether to focus on the state institutions or on power itself.
In these debates, Foucault was adamant, especially with Lévy and Glucksmann, that resistance had to avoid the judicial institutions (e.g. the model of the popular tribunal), precisely because of the historical functioning of justice: judicial institutions, on Foucault’s view, had always functioned to create divisions and contradictions within society. Tribunals had always had a “constitutive role in the divisions of our contemporary society.” (D&E, Quart I, p. 1224). The penal system served to fracture and divide popular resistance, to legitimate established power relations, to construct the figure of the common law “criminal.”
But the deeper problem, Foucault insisted, was that critical thinkers were still at a loss to understand how power functions in contemporary society. In conversation with Deleuze, Foucault would repeatedly emphasize this point:
“Our difficulty in finding adequate forms of resistance, doesn’t this all come from the fact that we still ignore what power really is? After all, we had to wait till the 19th century to know what exploitation is, but we still perhaps don’t know what power is. […] The theory of the state, the traditional analysis of state apparatuses, surely these do not exhaust the field of the exercise and the functioning of power. Today, the great unknown is: who exercises power? And where do they exercise it? “ (D&E Quarto I, p. 1180).
It is within this specific context that we must reread Foucault’s theoretical interventions, as well as his practical engagements at the time. It is in this light that we need to return, for instance, to the G.I.P. manifesto that Foucault read out-loud to the press on February 8, 1971: “It is not our task to suggest a reform of the prison. We only want to make known its reality. And to make it known immediately, day by day; because time is pressing. It is a matter of alerting public opinion and holding it in high alert. We will try to use every means of information: daily newspapers, weeklies, monthlies. We are thus appealing to every possible tribune.” (D&E, #86, Quarto I, p. 1043).
Foucault News 