Foucault News

Megan Garber, Foucault That Noise: The Terror of Highbrow Mispronunciation. From Anaïs to Zizek, a brief list of “shibboleth names” The Atlantic, Feb 6 2015.

[Editor: Foucault is of course on this list]

In October 1937, the president of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo, devised a simple way to identify the Haitian immigrants living along the border of his country. Dominican soldiers would hold up a sprig of parsley—perejil in Spanish—and ask people to identify it. Those who spoke Spanish would pronounce the word’s central “r” with that language’s characteristic trill; the Haitians, on the other hand, would bury the “r” sound in the throaty way of the French. To be on the receiving end of the parsley test would be to seal, either way, one’s fate: The Spanish-speaking Dominicans were left to live, and the Haitians were slaughtered. It was a state-sponsored genocide that would be remembered, in one of history’s greatest understatements, as the Parsley Massacre.

Today, thankfully, the stakes of the shibboleth—the term gets its name from the Biblical story—tend not to involve such horrific matters of life and death. On the contrary, they tend to involve matters that don’t much matter at all. To a large extent, modern-day shibboleths are status signifiers, the kind of loaded terms that reveal their utterers to be on a single side of a stubbornly binary line. They are not mistakes (“noo-cular” instead of “nuclear,” “mis-chee-vee-ous” instead of “mischievous”) so much as they are keys: They afford a kind of aural entry into arbitrary echelons. You know you’ve made it, for better or for worse, when you know that it’s pronounced pee-kuh-TEE.

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Martin Paul Eve, Foucauldian methodologies for considering emerging archives? 2015

Some notes and early (very abstract) draft thoughts on whether Foucauldian genealogies, as redefined by Colin Koopman, can help us to address the problems of the archive in contemporary fiction studies.

In Pynchon and Philosophy, I needed to give a succinct outline of the usual approach towards Foucault’s broad body of history/philosophy. In sketching the trajectory of Foucault’s career, I wrote:

Foucault’s works are most commonly split along a methodological axis that divides his early phase – designated ‘archaeology’ – and his later writings, which are termed, with deliberate Nietzschean overtones, ‘genealogies’. Archaeology consists of an excavation of the surrounding conditions that make an episteme possible; an analysis of the historical conditions that make viable a certain way of thinking that is no longer comprehensible within a contemporary context. Genealogy on the other hand takes Nietzsche’s anti-positivist ‘methodology’ – in so far that it can be thus termed – of removing the mask of universality from a specific truth at a localised level in order to show how these small fluctuations contribute to a shift in thinking. As Árpád Szakolczai puts it, genealogy centres on ‘the conditions of emergence’ while assuming ‘that reality is not a uniform surface but is built of interconnected layers’ and also ‘involves a special relation the investigator has to himself’. However, genealogy is not a retraction – it shares much in common with its preceding archaeology – it is rather one of the three ‘successive layers […] characterizing three necessarily simultaneous dimensions of the same analysis’, the others being archaeology and ‘strategy’; the overarching term that Foucault used for his methods (WC, 397). — Eve, Pynchon and Philosophy (Palgrave, 2004), pp. 77-78

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Barry Stocker, Style of Living versus Juridification in Foucault, New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science Blog, 05 October 2014

I’m making a brief exploration of one of the most significant oppositions in Foucaut’s thought, which has not been discussed that much in my experience, but I may well have overlooked some vast bibliography. In any case, there is a major polarity in Foucault between the style of living in antiquity, related to care of the self, and in which ‘style’ can be replaced by ‘aesthetics’ or ‘techne’, while ‘living’ can be replaced by ‘existence’, in ways I do not think make much difference to the current discussion. There is also a relation with the discussions of the government of the self and the use of pleasure. I am not getting into references and precise context, but outlining the general field.

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