Just in case you missed it: This post, Searching for Foucault in an Age of Inequality posted yesterday on Foucault News was the latest entry in the neoliberal debate.
Just in case you missed it: This post, Searching for Foucault in an Age of Inequality posted yesterday on Foucault News was the latest entry in the neoliberal debate.
Convulsing Bodies: Religion and Resistance in Foucault
link to book details
Published on 12 Mar 2015
Mark D. Jordan of the Harvard Divinity School discusses his recent publication, Convulsing Bodies: Religion and Resistance in Foucault.
Respondents include James Bernauer, S.J., of Boston College, Amy Hollywood and Mayra Rivera Rivera, both of Harvard Divinity School.
00:00 Welcome and introduction by Francis X. Clooney, S.J., Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology, Harvard Divinity School
07:45 Mark D. Jordan, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Christian Thought, Harvard Divinity School
19:43 Respondent introductions by Francis X. Clooney, S.J., Parkman Professor of Divinity and Professor of Comparative Theology, Harvard Divinity School
24:13 Amy Hollywood, Elizabeth H. Monrad Professor of Christian Studies, Harvard Divinity School
40:06 Mayra Rivera Rivera, Associate Professor of Theology and Latina/o Studies, Harvard Divinity School
56:44 James Bernauer, S.J., Professor of Philosophy, Boston College
1:11:40 Response by Mark D. Jordan, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Christian Thought, Harvard Divinity School
1:14:20 Q&A with Mark D. Jordan, James Bernauer, Amy Hollywood, Mayra Rivera Rivera
Learn more about Harvard Divinity School and its mission to illuminate, engage, and serve at http://www.hds.harvard.edu.
Searching for Foucault in an Age of Inequality
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins and Alexander Arnold on Critiquer Foucault: Les Années 1980 et la tentation néolibérale, Los Angeles Review of Books, 18 March 2015
JACOBIN RECENTLY PUBLISHED an interview with a little-known sociologist that provoked a wave of reactions. A young Belgian scholar named Daniel Zamora claimed that the philosopher Michel Foucault — a major contributor to radical thought of the last 30 years — not only helped bring about the success of free-market ideology, but also is significantly responsible for the left’s inability to oppose it. Immediately after the interview’s publication, many scholars and intellectuals rushed to Foucault’s defense. Supporters claimed that although Foucault was never a rank-and-file socialist, he never abandoned his radical commitments or embraced the ideology, neoliberalism, often associated with the rise of the modern right. Zamora did not back down. Five days after the release of his interview he published another piece in Jacobin raising the stakes. Foucault, he said, “actively contributed” to the “destruction” of the welfare state and “in a way that was entirely in step with the neoliberal critiques of the moment.” Again, Foucault’s defenders refuted Zamora’s arguments as based on weak, ahistorical, and ideologically driven readings of the philosopher’s works.
“Foucault insults the police”, photograph by Elie Kagan from 17 January 1972, in Michel Foucault – Une journée particulière. It seems this photo was taken only moments after a much more famous one with Foucault, Deleuze and Sartre – such as appears here.
The book has many more images, and bilingual English-French text.
Madness in Civilization: from the Bible to Freud, from the Madhouse to Modern Medicine by Andrew Scull
Reviewed by Salley Vickers, The Telegraph, 29 Mar 2015
I doubt whether many people other than social science students read Michel Foucault these days. Andrew Scull, whose review of Foucault’s The History of Madness in 2007 took the French philosopher to task for historical inaccuracies, references his most famous work, Madness and Civilization, in the title of his own book (a sly corrective?). As the subtitle of Madness in Civilization suggests, Scull’s book is as epic as Foucault’s in its aim to consider “the encounter between madness and civilisation over more than two millennia”. This not inconsiderable undertaking encompasses the ancient civilisations of Greece, China and Persia, the art and writings of the Renaissance, the First World War poets and brain imaging, to name just a few of Scull’s subjects.
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Colin Gordon, New additions to academia.edu site, March 2015
« Le possible : alors et maintenant : The possible then and now. » A new publication in a special issue of the French journal Cultures & Conflits on the theme of the critique of criminological reason. My piece is an essay in the history of the possible, looking back at the moment of possibility in thinking about penal practices which was opened up by Foucault’s Discipline and Punish – what is was, what happened to it, and what today’s possible might look like.
The other recent piece is « Expelled questions: Foucault, the Left and the law », a chapter from a volume edited by Ben Golder and published in 2013. This challenges and corrects a widespread misconception that Foucault’s thought neglects and marginalises law.
« Interview with Michel Foucault. » A posthumously published interview from 1978, originally intended to form part of the Power/Knowledge volume. Foucault talks about his relations with Marxism, his early philosophical influences, and his dislike of the concept of power.
« Introduction to Pasquino and Procacci. » A brief piece from the journal Ideology & Consciousness in 1978, presenting some early examples of Foucault-inspired genealogy of power/knowledge and governmentality.
« Birth of the Subject. » My first long piece on Foucault, published in Radical Philosophy in 1977 – an extended, pre-translation overview of Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality 1.
« The Philosopher in the Classroom. » A 1977 report co-written with Jonathan Rée on how post-68 radicalism was challenging the way philosophy was being taught in schools.
The Heterotopia of Facebook
Robin Rymarczuk is Michel Foucault’s ‘friend’, Philosophy Now, Apr/May 2015
Facebook was founded on February 4, 2004, by Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard University room-mates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. What started out as an on-campus online ‘hot or not’ tool resulted in the registration of a billion users by 2012. Its rapid growth and perpetually expanding corporate power, as well as its part in the ‘digital privacy’ controversy, has attracted many seeking to explain its remarkable popularity as well as peoples’ discontent with it. Although interesting and important, these studies focus predominantly on what users do on Facebook, leaving underexposed what Facebook does to the user.
Facebook possesses properties that can be construed not just in terms of globalized online networks, but also in terms of a type of space. In these terms, Facebook is a world within the world that attracts or repels people by its geography as much as by its social life. So what kind of space is Facebook? I claim that it’s what philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) ingeniously called “un espace autre” – “an other space”; better known as a heterotopia. As I will elaborate, understanding Facebook as a heterotopic space offers a style of critical thinking that invites moral reflection on digital culture and its relation to other spaces in our everyday lives.
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Call for Papers After Biopolitics
The Center for Critical and Cultural Theory at Rice University will be hosting the 29th Annual (SLSA) Society for Literature, Science and the Arts Conference.
November 12-15, 2015 at the BioScience Research Collaborative (BRC) located within the Houston Medical Center and Rice University.
Keynote Speakers:
Viciane Despret
Mark Dion
POTENTIAL TOPICS
These and other topics related to the theme will be welcome. As always, the conference of the Society for Literature, Society, and the Arts is open to wide range of related topics drawn from a broad array of scholarly and creative disciplines and practices that are relevant to the mission of the organization.
SUBMISSIONS
For individual paper contributions, submit a 250-word abstract with title. Pre-organized panel submissions, which might include three or four papers per panel, should include an additional paragraph describing the rubric and proposed title of the panel. Roundtables, alternative format panels, and the like are encouraged.
Paper/Panel Proposal Due Date: extended to April 15, 2015
Notification of Acceptance: June 1, 2015
Workshop “Actualités Foucault” (4th session)
Thursday, 9 April 2015, 4-6 pm
Philippe Sabot (Université Lille 3)
“Critique et culture de soi. À propos de Michel Foucault, Qu’est-ce que la critique ? suivi de La culture de soi (Paris, Vrin, 2015)”
Discussants: Henri-Paul Fruchaud & Daniele Lorenzini, scientific editors of the volume
Université Paris-Est Créteil, Campus Centre, Bâtiment i, salle des thèses
61, avenue du Général de Gaulle, 94010 Créteil (métro Créteil-Université)
Michel Foucault, Qu’est-ce que la critique? Suivie de La culture de soi
Édition établie par H.-P. Fruchaud et D. Lorenzini
Introduction et apparat critique par D. Lorenzini et A.I. Davidson
Vrin – Philosophie du présent
192 pages – 12,5 × 18 cm
ISBN 978-2-7116-2624-3 – mars 2015
Le 27 mai 1978, Michel Foucault prononce devant la Société française de Philosophie une conférence où il inscrit sa démarche dans la perspective ouverte par l’article de Kant Qu’est-ce que les Lumières? (1784), et définit la critique, de manière frappante, comme une attitude éthico-politique consistant dans l’art de n’être pas tellement gouverné. Ce volume en présente pour la première fois l’édition critique.
On y trouvera également la traduction d’une conférence inédite intitulée La culture de soi, prononcée à l’Université de Californie à Berkeley le 12 avril 1983. C’est le seul moment où, définissant son travail comme une ontologie historique de nous-mêmes, Foucault fait le lien entre ses réflexions sur l’Aufklärung et ses analyses de l’Antiquité gréco-romaine. Au cours du même séjour en Californie, Foucault participe aussi à trois débats publics où il est amené à revenir sur plusieurs aspects de son parcours philosophique. On en trouvera le texte à la suite de la conférence.
Foucault News 