Foucault News

Steven G. Ogden, Problematising Theism: Miguel Vatter, An-Arche, and Its Implications (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

25 July 2024

Steven G. Ogden, Problematising Theism: Miguel Vatter, An-Arche, and Its Implications, Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics, XXVI, 2024, 2, pp. 279-293

ABSTRACT
This essay addresses the complexity of the politics-religion nexus. I use the work of Miguel Vatter as my primary source as well as concepts from Michel Foucault’s conceptual toolbox. Specifically, the essay consists of three analytical moves, which relate in turn to theism, Vatter’s political theology, and an-arche. First, historically, versions of theism have been embraced, implicitly and explicitly, as an ultimate referent, legitimising hegemonic political practices. To analyse this, then, I employ a dispositif of Western Christian theism. As a preliminary step, however, I use the work of Kojève on atheism to understand better the character of theism as separation (e.g., not of this world). That is, I use the idea of theism as separation to develop the dispositif. Second, I am interested in the political theology of Vatter. I analyse themes and concepts in his work, which culminates in a renewed appreciation of the concept and the practice of an-arche (no rule). This entails situating and analysing Vatter’s Divine Democracy within the context of the overall trajectory of his work. Third, using Schürmann, I begin to develop the concept of an-arche as a potential counter to hegemonic politics. In this context, while an-arche subverts entrenched certainties, it also opens new possibilities.

KEYWORDS
Foucault, Kojève, Schürmann, theism, dispositif, an-arche

Ogden, S.G. (2024). Defying Strongman Politics: On Theologians and the Cultivation of Resistant Subjectivity in a Time of Global Crisis (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

25 July 2024

Ogden, S.G. (2024). Defying Strongman Politics: On Theologians and the Cultivation of Resistant Subjectivity in a Time of Global Crisis. In: Babie, P.T., Sarre, R. (eds) Religion Matters: Volume 2 . Springer, Singapore.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-9777-0_10

Abstract
We have to live with strongman politics for some time to come. With no obvious political solutions in sight, then, we have to ask fundamental questions about who we are and how we shall live. In the West, moreover, the mainstream church has become increasingly marginalized. So, there are also important questions about the political and social relevance of the church. Nevertheless, I am specifically interested in the identity and practice of theologians in the face of strongman politics. As such, theologians hold a privileged position in the academy, as well as the church. In colloquial terms, we have a platform. So, then, we are more or less public intellectuals. Subsequently, we have an ecclesial and social responsibility to resist strongman politics. Moreover, with the COVID pandemic, the climate crisis, and strongman politics, which are all related, this calls into question our identity and practice as theologians, as well as our ethical commitments, our collaborative spirit, our use of time, and our choice of projects. Nevertheless, the task of resisting strongman politics is complex. It is exacerbated by the pervasive nature of violence. What’s more, resistance itself can escalate violence.

In response, I am employing concepts from Michel Foucault in order to reinterpret the theologian’s vocation. In Foucauldian terms, vocation is an expression of subject formation. In the face of strongman politics, the theologian is called to resist strongman politics, where defiance is expressed in terms of counter-conduct and critique. In that sense, Howard Caygill’s concept of resistant subjectivity encapsulates the theologian’s vocation. All this works at two levels. At the personal (or micro) level, this entails the transformation of the theologian. This is the undoing and re-formation of the subject (i.e., de-subjectivation). At the political (or macro) level, and as a result of self-transformation, the theologian engages in the work of resistance in the political space. In this chapter, the focus is primarily on the personal level, which also has wider political implications. In the end, this is more than an exercise in political theology. In the present global crisis, resistance is in fact incumbent on all theologians.

Torres Apablaza, Iván, Ejercicios de caligrafía filosófica: Michel Foucault y la crítica al humanismo en su lectura temprana de Nietzsche y Heidegger (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

20 July 2024

Torres Apablaza, Iván (2024). Ejercicios de caligrafía filosófica: Michel Foucault y la crítica al humanismo en su lectura temprana de Nietzsche y Heidegger. El Banquete de los Dioses. Revista de Filosofía y teoría Política Contemporáneas. 14 (1), pp. 10-37
https://publicaciones.sociales.uba.ar/index.php/ebdld/article/view/9534

“Philosophical Calligraphy Exercises: Michel Foucault and the Critique of Humanism in his early Reading of Nietzsche and Heidegger”

Resumen:
El siguiente artículo, se propone fundamentar que la critica al humanismo no supone un problema local en el trabajo de pensamiento de Michel Foucault, sino una problematización diacrítica que permite esclarecer los sentidos de su apuesta filosófica. A esta luz, el artículo reconstruye las primeras elaboraciones de esta crítica, atendiendo a sus lecturas tempranas de las filosofías de Friedrich Nietzsche y Martin Heidegger. Teniendo en cuenta la publicación reciente de una serie de trabajos inéditos, se interpretan las direcciones de esta crítica destacando una comprensión histórica del problema antropológico, una lectura trágica de la historia, así como aproximaciones a una actitud jovial con funciones de ruptura y contraplano de la antropología moderna a través del discurso literario. El artículo finaliza, en la forma de tesis, con la puesta en perspectiva de los problemas desarrollados, proponiendo leer la critica al humanismo como signatura filosófica de un existencialismo radical.

Abstract
The following article aims to argue that the critique of humanism is not a local problem in the work of Michel Foucault’s thought, but rather a diacritical problematization that allows us to clarify the meanings of his philosophical approach. In this light, the article reconstructs the first elaborations of this critique, taking into account his early readings of the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. Taking into account the recent publication of a series of unpublished works, it interprets the directions of this critique by highlighting a historical understanding of the anthropological problem, a tragic reading of history, as well as approaches to a jovial attitude with functions of rupture and counterplanning of modern anthropology through literary discourse. The article ends, in the form of a thesis, by putting the problems developed into perspective, proposing to read the critique of humanism as philosophical signature of a radical existentialism.

PhD course: Foucault and Organization, Technology, and Subject-formation (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

20 July 2024

PhD course: Foucault and Organization, Technology, and Subject-formation

LINK to the course site: https://phdsupport.nemtilmeld.dk/38/

Date and time
Monday 9 September 2024 at 09:00 to Thursday 12 September 2024 at 16:00<

Registration Deadline
10 August 2024 at 23:55

Location
Room TBA, Campus TBA, 2000 Frederiksberg, Denmark

Course coordinator: Kaspar Villadsen, Department of Business Humanities and Law (BHL)

Organizer
CBS PhD School, Nina Iversen, Phone: +45 3815 2475, ni.research@cbs.dk

Faculty

Professor Sverre Raffnsøe
Department of Business Humanities and Law, CBS

Associate Professor Marius Gudmand-Høyer
Department of Business Humanities and Law, CBS

Professor (mso) Kaspar Villadsen
Department of Business Humanities and Law, CBS

Prerequisites

Only PhD students can participate in the course.

Participation requires submission of a short paper (see more below). Papers must be in English and deadline is 1st September 2024.

It is a precondition for receiving the course diploma that the PhD student attends the whole course.

Aim

The course will provide the participants with:

An introduction to key analytical potentials reconstructed from Foucault’s wide-ranging authorship as well as the lecturers’ own research projects.
In particular, we will discuss different approaches to themes of organization, technology, and subject-formation as they are deployed in state-of-the-art Foucault-inspired scholarship.
The potentials and limits of the particular way Foucauldian analytics can be applied in the participant’s research will be discussed. Hence, a range of analytical resources and potentials will be explored and discussed in relation to the participants’ current research.

Course content

Michel Foucault’s work continues to offer a major source of inspiration for PhD projects across a wide range of disciplinary domains. This PhD course explores how Foucault’s work speaks to three broad themes in contemporary business school research and beyond: Organization, technology, and subject-formation. The lecturers on the course have all pursued substantive research on these themes, drawing upon different parts of Foucault’s authorship, and they will base their teaching on this research experience. A key aim of the course is that the participants acquire an effective overview of analytical possibilities in Foucault’s work, effective for selecting and deploying such analytics in their own research.

Overall, Foucault’s thinking can help to inquire into the organizations, technologies and techniques of self-formation that make up the conditions of possibility for our contemporary experiences. First, Foucault’s usual genealogical approach (Foucault 1977, 1984) works by tracing how contemporary forms of organization emerged from past struggles, political strategies, and accidental events. From this perspective, the prevailing modes of organizing can be better grasped by recovering their historical conditions of emergence and dispersion. Genealogy takes as its basic premise that history, as well as our present, is a site of evolving struggle, including contest over divergent interpretations, which the development of modern modes of organizing and managing clearly displays. Hence, struggles around definitions and uses of appropriate management, leadership, accountability, transparency or sustainability make up pertinent material for genealogical inquiry.

Foucault developed his own notion of technology during the 1970s, namely the concept of “the dispositive”. A dispositive is defined as a historical configuration, which connects a series of discursive and non-discursive elements such as laws, practices, material artefacts, procedures, and techniques (Foucault, 1980). It designates a propensity in knowledge production and social practice as well as a “dispositionality” in how institutions emerge and transform. The concept opens for analyzing how our practices – for example, risk assessments or anti-pandemic strategies – are conditioned by dispositives that have been formed in historical processes often spanning several centuries. Foucault (2007) suggested that the dispositives of law, discipline and security have been particularly important as responses to thorny governmental problems such as crime, infectious diseases, population welfare, and labor unrest. Current problems such as climate change, environmental degradation and extreme inequality could be analyzed as straddling between these deep-rooted frameworks of calculation, intervention and rationalization. The dispositive has recently been introduced into Foucauldian scholarship as a highly promising analytical resource (##), and the course will explore how it can be used for empirical inquiries.

Finally, Foucault’s late authorship in the early 1980s, often termed his “ethical turn”, took him back to techniques of self-formation in Early Christianity and Greco-Roman antiquity. There, Foucault noticed a “technical” notion of ethics less defined by submission to universal moral codes and instead focused more on the self’s work upon the self.

Foucault’s attention to ethics in the early 1980s hardly signified a departure from political issues, but a re-conception of politics as an ethical politics. The work on your own freedom that ethics comprise is political, Foucault argued, in the sense that our self-fashioning involves what we are willing to accept or want to change in ourselves as well as in our circumstances: “[T]here is no first or final point of resistance to political power other than in the relationship one has to oneself” (Foucault, 2005: 252). Perhaps, the urgent issues of our time call for developing another form of ethics rather than models rooted in legal frameworks and Christian morality. The recent emergence of responsible consumers, ‘life-long learners’, climate conscious youths, “freeganism”, and fluid gender identity could be analyzed with inspiration from Foucault’s work on ethics and self-formation. An analytical key task that will be addressed in this part of the course is how to integrating Foucault’s notion of technology, the dispositive, with his analysis of self-technology, hence bridging the mid-career Foucault’s analytics of power with the late Foucault’s ethics.

The theme of this PhD course requires that the participants engage in some way with Foucault’s historical work, his analytical frameworks, his concepts, or his approach to organization, technology, and subjectivity. Papers that are not underpinned exclusively by Foucauldian analytics but also derive from other thinkers and traditions are welcome too. Our point of departure is that Foucauldian analytics is not only pertinent to philosophical research, since such analytics can also find application in ethnographic, sociological, organizational, historical, and anthropological research.

Teaching style

The goal is to sharpen the participants’ knowledge of the Foucauldian toolbox of analytical resources and how these can be applied in PhD projects. To that end we will set aside sufficient time to carefully examine and discuss the papers submitted by the participants. The course will consist of both workshops and lectures/presentations by scholars who are specialist in Foucault’s work and subsequent Foucauldian scholarship. The goal of the lectures is, first, to clarify the ways in which Foucault worked with his most significant analytics and, second, to demonstrate how to put the analytics at work in specific analysis. The aim of the workshops is to explore how Foucauldian analytics function (or possible may be employed) in each participant’s research – with the aim of strengthening, deepening and nuancing the participants’ dissertations or research articles. In the workshops, the course participants are divided into smaller groups (using shared topics and/or approaches as choice criteria) enabling a substantial peer discussion of both paper and their research project. Each workshop will be supervised and organized by one of lecturers.

All participants are required to submit a paper that deals with the key theme(s) of the PhD project in question. Papers that apply Foucauldian analytics to empirical problems in a variety of domains are welcomed, but so are papers that draw upon other thinkers and traditions but seek to include or supplement their framework with perspectives drawn from Foucault and Foucauldian scholarship.

A paper should be of maximum 10 pages. It is expected that the PhD student states the main challenge/concern of his/her project in the paper, which we will then discuss in the light of challenges and potentials.

Papers (and 300 word abstracts) must be in English.

Learning objectives
• Achieve a strong reflexivity regarding how the choice of analytics from Foucault’s authorship brings certain questions, problems, entities and processes into the foreground of analysis and critical consideration.

Awareness of different ways of working with Foucauldian analytics in PhD dissertations, articles and academic writing in general. This awareness will particular concern and be exemplified by the themes of organization, technology, and subjectivity. However, as mentioned above, these themes are not exclusive.
The course will increase participant’s critical ability to account for the potential role of Foucauldian analytics, in general, and how it is applied in the participant’s research, specifically. This reflexivity concerns, inter alia, the epistemological distinctiveness of Foucauldian analytics, the social ontology its assumes, the analytical practices involved in Foucauldian scholarship, and the potential critical effects of such scholarship. Finally, the increased reflexivity relates to the range of Foucauldian analytical resources that can be effectively explored in relation to the participants’ current research.

Lecture plan (provisional)

During the workshops, the participants will be divided into smaller groups each supervised by one of the course teachers.

	Day 1	Day 2	Day 3	Day 4
8.30-10.30	Lecture: Self-formation from the perspective of problematization analysis (MGH)	Lecture: Writing and critique from the perspective of genealogical analysis (KV)	Lecture: Studying the economy from a Foucauldian perspective (SR)	Lecture: Technologies from the perspective of Foucault’s notion of subjectivation (KV)
10.45-12.00	Workshops on papers and PhD projects [2 papers] (MGH)	Workshops on papers and projects – [2 papers] (KV)	Workshop on papers and projects [2 papers] (SR)	Workshop on papers and projects [1 paper] (KV)
12.00-13.00	Lunch	Lunch	Lunch	Lunch
13.00-14.00	Short lecture: [An exemplary study, MGH]	Short lecture: [An exemplary study, KV]	Short lecture: [An exemplary study, SR]	Short lecture: [An exemplary study & key insights from the course KV]
14.15- 15.15	Generic insights from lectures and workshops (KV, MGH)	Generic insights from lectures and workshops (KV)	Generic insights from lectures and workshops (SR)	Generic insights from lectures and workshops (KV)
15.30-16.30	Generic insights from lectures & workshops (KV, MGH)	Generic insights from lectures and workshops (KV)	Generic insights from lectures and workshops (SR)	Evaluation and Farewell (MGH, KV)

Literature list

Suggested literature (to be completed):

Barnett, Clive, and Gary Bridge (2016). “The situations of urban inquiry: Thinking problematically about the city.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40.6: 1186-1204.

Bacchi, Carol (2012). “Why study problematizations? Making politics visible.” Open journal of political science 2.01: 1-8.

Foucault, Michel [1984] (1985). “Introduction: 1. Modifications”, in: The Use of Pleasures: History of Sexuality II. New York: Random House; pp. 3-13.

Foucault, M. “What is Enlightenment?” In: Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth (pp. 303-319).

Foucault, M. (2003) ‘Lecture one, 7 January 1976.’ In: Michel Foucault: “Society Must be Defended”: Lectures at College de France 1975-1976, pp. 1-21. NY: Picador.

Karlsen, M.P. and Villadsen, K. (2020) Confession In: The Routledge Handbook of Economic Theology. ed. S. Schwarzkopf. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 36-46.

Karlsen, M.P. and Villadsen, K. (2008) Who should do the talking?: The proliferation of dialoque as governmental technology. Culture and Organization, 14(4): 345-363.

Foucault, M. (1982) The Subject and Power. Critical Inquiry, 8(4): 777-795.

Villadsen, K. (2022) ‘Foucault’s Concept of Technology’. In Foucault’s Technologies, by K. Villadsen: Oxford UP (forthcoming).

Villadsen, K. (2021) ‘The Dispositive’: Foucault’s concept for organizational analysis? Organization Studies 4(3): 473-494.

Additional suggested readings:

Foucault, M. (1991). Questions of method. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon, & P. Miller (eds.), The Foucault effect: Studies in governmentality Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 73-86.
https://laelectrodomestica.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/the-foucault-effect-studies-in-governmentality.pdf

Foucault, M. (1998) ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics’. In Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth: Essential works of Foucault 1954–1984. Vol. 1, by Michel Foucault, pp. 253-280. London: Penguin.

Foucault, M. (2007) Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78. Springer, 2007.

Foucault, M. (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979. Springer, 2008.

Koopman, Colin. Genealogy as critique: Foucault and the problems of modernity. Indiana University Press, 2013.

Raffnsøe S., Gudmand-Høyer M., Thaning M.S. (2016) Foucault’s dispositive: The perspicacity of dispositive analytics in organizational research. Organization, 23(2): 272-298.

Raffnsøe, S., Gudmand-Høyer, M. T., & Thaning, M. S. (2016) Michel Foucault: A Research Companion. Palgrave Macmillan.

Foucault, M. (1984) ‘On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress’. The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 340-372.

Foucault, M (1993) About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth. Political Theory, 21(2) 198–227.

Foucault, M. (1980) ‘The Confession of the Flesh’. In Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977, ed. C. Gordon, pp. 194-240. New York: Pantheon Books.

Note: In case we receive more registrations for the course than we have seats, CBS PhD students will have first priority. Remaining seats will be filled on a first come first serve.

Registration deadline and conditions

The registration deadline is 10 August 2024. If you want to cancel your registration on the course it should be done prior to this mentioned date. By this date we determine whether we have enough registrations to run the course, or who should be offered a seat if we have received too many registrations.

If there are more seats available on the course we leave the registration open by setting a new registration deadline in order to fill remaining seats. Once you have received our acceptance/welcome letter to join the course, your registration is binding and we do not refund your course fee. The binding registration date will be the registration deadline mentioned above.

Payment methods

Make sure you choose the correct method of payment upon finalizing your registration:

CBS students:

Choose payment method CBS PhD students and the course fee will be deducted from your PhD course budget.

Students from other Danish universities:

Choose payment method Danish Electronic Invoice (EAN). Fill in your EAN number, attention and possible purchase (project) order number.

Do you not pay by EAN number please choose Invoice to pay via electronic bank payment (+71).

Students from foreign universities:

Choose payment method Payment Card. Are you not able to pay by credit card please choose Invoice International to pay via bank transfer.

LINK to the course site: https://phdsupport.nemtilmeld.dk/38/

de la Rosa, T., Berrocoso, E., Scorza, F.A. Necropolitics of Death in Neurodegeneration (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

11 July 2024

de la Rosa, T., Berrocoso, E., Scorza, F.A.
Necropolitics of Death in Neurodegeneration (2024) Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry,

DOI: 10.1007/s11013-024-09855-7

Abstract
Neurodegenerative diseases (ND) pose significant challenges for biomedicine in the twenty-first century, particularly considering the global demographic ageing and the subsequent increase in their prevalence. Characterized as progressive, chronic and debilitating, they often result in higher mortality rates compared with the general population. Research agendas and biomedical technologies are shaped by power relations, ultimately affecting patient wellbeing and care. Drawing on the concepts of bio- and necropolitics, introduced by philosophers Foucault and Mbembe, respectively, this perspective examines the interplay between the territoriality and governmentality around demographic ageing, ND and death, focussing on knowledge production as a dispositif of power by highlighting the marginal role that the phenomenon of mortality plays in the ND research landscape. We propose a shift into acknowledging the coloniality of knowledge and embracing its situatedness to attain knowledge ‘from death’, understood as an epistemic position from which novel approaches and practices could emerge. © The Author(s) 2024.

Author Keywords
Death; Mortality; Necropolitics; Neurodegenerative diseases

Jeremy Tambling, The Death Penalty in Dickens and Derrida. The Last Sentence of the Law (2023)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

8 July 2024

Jeremy Tambling, The Death Penalty in Dickens and Derrida. The Last Sentence of the Law, Bloomsbury, 2023

Description
In the nineteenth century, Charles Dickens backed the cause of abolition of the death penalty and wrote comprehensively about it, in public letters and in his novels. At the end of the twentieth century, Jacques Derrida ran two years of seminars on the subject, which were published posthumously. What the novelist and the philosopher of deconstruction discussed independently, this book brings into comparison.

Tambling examines crime and punishment in Dickens’s novels Barnaby Rudge, A Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist and Bleak House and explores those who influenced Dickens’s work, including Hogarth, Fielding, Godwin and Edgar Allen Poe. This book also looks at those who influenced Derrida – Freud, Nietzsche, Foucault and Blanchot – and considers Derrida’s study on terrorism and the USA as the only major democracy adhering to the death penalty.

A comprehensive study of punishment in Dickens, and furthering Derrida’s insights by commenting on Shakespeare and blood, revenge, the French Revolution, and the enduring power of violence and its fascination, this book is a major contribution to literary criticism on Dickens and Derrida. Those interested in literature, criminology, law, gender, and psychoanalysis will find it an essential intervention in a topic still rousing intense argument.

Table of Contents

Introduction: ‘Growing Up to be Hanged’

PART ONE: Dickens – And The Eighteenth Century
CHAPTER I – Abolition and Dickens
CHAPTER 2- Fielding, Hogarth, and Dickens
CHAPTER 3 – Barnaby Rudge: Poe, and Caleb Williams

PART 2 – Derrida – The French Revolution Onwards
CHAPTER 4 – Deconstruction and Justice
CHAPTER 5 – The Death Penalty Seminars
CHAPTER 6 – Decapitation in A Tale of Two Cities
CHAPTER 7 – On the USA: Violence and Terrorism

Guizzo, D. Ceremonial Economics: A Social-Institutional Analysis of Universities, Disciplines, and Academic Positioning (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

5 July 2024

Guizzo, D.
Ceremonial Economics: A Social-Institutional Analysis of Universities, Disciplines, and Academic Positioning
(2024) Journal of Economic Issues, 58 (2), pp. 397-423.

DOI: 10.1080/00213624.2024.2343246

Abstract
What is the future of the university? Many have attempted to unpack what emerging technologies, political pressures, and social scrutiny can do to the status and innovative capacity of universities. While much of the literature has focused on either documenting innovation over practice in research/teaching techniques, or critical reflections on how university business models and academic labor are under threat, less has been debated on the impacts and processes of such changes from a systemic institutional perspective.

This article develops a three-fold social-institutional framework to explore the process, purpose, and positioning of changes in knowledge production. I use the case of the economics discipline to explore how institutional ceremonial values, the policing of knowledge creation, and academic cultures as a hierarchical system of prestige can indicate potential structural change. Existing tensions between instrumental innovations and traditional ceremonial aspects that permeate both the university system and the economics discipline suggest two hypotheses to understand future change: (i) a ceremonial encapsulation of new technologies by old structures, exacerbating existing inequalities and monopolies within expertise positioning; or (ii) the rise of new and inclusive cultures within the principles of epistemic democratization and pluralism, co-existing with a new economic and social model of knowledge. © 2024 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Author keywords
crisis of knowledge and expertise; economics discipline; generative artificial intelligence; higher education; Michel Foucault; Original Institutional Economics; social positioning theory

Anahit Behrooz, Mapping Middle-earth. Environmental and Political Narratives in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Cartographies (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

2 July 2024

Anahit Behrooz, Mapping Middle-earth. Environmental and Political Narratives in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Cartographies. Bloomsbury, 2024

Description

In this cutting-edge study of Tolkien’s most critically neglected maps, Anahit Behrooz examines how cartography has traditionally been bound up in facilitating power.

Far more than just illustrations to aid understanding of the story, Tolkien’s corpus of maps are crucial to understanding the broader narratives between humans and their political and environmental landscapes within his legendarium. Undertaking a diegetic literary analysis of the maps as examples of Middle-earth’s own cultural output, Behrooz reveals a sub-created tradition of cartography that articulates specific power dynamics between mapmaker, map reader, and what is being mapped, as well as the human/nonhuman binary that represents human’s control over the natural world.

Mapping Middle-earth surveys how Tolkien frames cartography as an inherently political act that embodies a desire for control of that which it maps. In turn, it analyses harmful contemporary engagements with land that intersect with, but also move beyond, cartography such as environmental damage; human-induced geological change; and the natural and bodily costs of political violence and imperialism. Using historical, eco-critical, and postcolonial frameworks, and such theorists as Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway and Edward Said, this book explores Tolkien’s employment of particular generic tropes including medievalism, fantasy, and the interplay between image and text to highlight, and at times correct, his contemporary socio-political epoch and its destructive relationship with the wider world.

Kabalay, B. An Intervention to Agent-Structure Relationship Through De-Grounding: The Example of Foucault’s Analysis of Power [article in Turkish] (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

30 June 2024

Kabalay, B. (2024). Fail-Yapı İlişkisine Yersizleştirme Üzerinden Bir Müdahale: Foucault’nun İktidar Analizi Örneği. Manisa Celal Bayar Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 22(2), 329-347. https://doi.org/10.18026/cbayarsos.1467977

ÖZET
Bu çalışma fail ve yapı arasındaki ilişkinin ontolojik bir hiyerarşiye referans veren yer metaforuna bağlanarak açıklanmasını eleştirmektedir. Çünkü bu ontolojik düzlemde, yerde mevcudiyeti bulunan şey diğer nesneyi ikincil bir fenomen haline getirip mutlak bir biçimde kurar ve dönüştürür. Mücadeleler ve imkânlar göz ardı edildiği ölçüde, soyutlamanın siyasal sonuçları olur. Bu siyasal sonuçları bertaraf etmek için yapılan ontolojik düzlemin eleştirisi, yani yersizleştirme, eylem bileşkelerine yaslanır. Bu eleştiri basitçe yerde ikamet eden fail veya yapının yerine eylemin geçirilmesi değil, ontolojik düzlemin soykütüksel biçimde kurgulanmasıdır. Bu yersizleştirme, en iyi Michel Foucault’nun iktidar analizinde örneklenir. İktidarı bir ayrıcalık değil eylem olarak tanımlayan Foucault, soykütüksel ontolojik düzlemin ve bu düzlemde şeyleri kuran eylem bileşkelerinin açık bir tanımını sunar. Aynı ontolojik perspektiften, bu çalışma, fail-yapı ilişkisini eylem kavramı ve olumsallık üzerinden açıklamaktadır. Bu açıklama aracılığıyla fail-yapı etkileşimi siyasal imkânlara olanak sağlayan ve siyaseti belli mekânlara kısıtlamayan bir alternatif oluşturmaktadır.

Anahtar Kelimeler: Fail, Yapı, Eylem, İktidar, Michel Foucault.

An Intervention to Agent-Structure Relationship Through De-Grounding: The Example of Foucault’s Analysis of Power
Berkay Kabalay

ABSTRACT
This study criticizes the explanation of the relationship between agent and structure by linking it to the metaphor of ground, which refers to an ontological hierarchy. For at this ontological plane, what has presence on the ground makes the other thing an epiphenomenon, and constitutes and transforms it absolute. To the extent that struggles and possibilities are ignored, the abstraction has political consequences. The critique of the ontological plane, that is de-grounding, to eliminate these political consequences relies on ensemble of action. This critique is not simply the replacement of the grounded agent or structure for the action, but the genealogical formation of the ontological plane. The de-grounding best manifested in Michel Foucault’s analysis of power. By defining power as an action and not as a privilege, Foucault offers a clear definition of the genealogical ontological plane and the ensemble of action that constitute things at this plane. From the same ontological perspective, this study explains the agent-structure relation through the concepts of action and contingency. Through this explanation, the agent-structure interaction constitutes an alternative that enables political possibilities and does not limit politics to certain spaces.

Keywords: Agent, Structure, Action, Power, Michel Foucault.

Call for Papers: Special Issue: Foucault’s Concept of Experience (2024)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

30 June 2024

PHILOSOPHY TODAY
An International Journal of Contemporary Philosophy
Call for Papers
Special Issue: Foucault’s Concept of Experience

Special issue editors

Vilde Lid Aavitsland (University of Louisville)
Leonhard Riep (Goethe University Frankfurt)

PDF of call for papers

Experience is a key concept in Foucault’s work, yet its centrality has long been overlooked. In many of his published works, such as The Order of Things, The Archaeology of Knowledge, and in interviews, Foucault positioned his own work in direct opposition to phenomenology and its concept of lived experience. It therefore came as a surprise to many of his readers when Foucault introduced experience as a central methodological concept in The Use of Pleasure. Here, Foucault defined experience as the correlation, within a given culture, between forms of knowledge, power, and subjectivity. However, he himself claimed that this idea of treating experience in its historicity was not novel but emerged from his earliest work. Indeed, Foucault’s oeuvre is, from the beginning, littered with explicit and veiled references to the concept of experience. It is of great importance in his archaeological phase, for example in History of Madness, The Birth of the Clinic, or the literary essays on Bataille and Blanchot from the 1960s. And it also informed his earliest thinking, as the recent publication of the early Sorbonne manuscript on Hegel from 1949 and the Lille manuscripts on Binswanger, Husserl, and anthropology from the 1950s prove. Accordingly, in this special issue we want to shed new light on Foucault’s concept of experience and the debates surrounding it.

Potential topics for articles include (but are not limited to):

• The early manuscripts: Does the recent publication of his mémoire from 1949 or the Lille manuscripts from the 1950s change our perception of Foucault’s concept of experience? What is the influence of Husserl’s (or Hegel’s) phenomenology? What is the relation to Foucault’s later notions of experience? Is Foucault’s mature concept of experience “post-phenomenological,” or does he retain parts of the phenomenological concept?

• Limit-Experience: Is the concept of limit-experience still useful to think exclusion from society? How do transgression and exclusion interact? Why is Foucault abandoning this concept in his major genealogical works, such as Discipline and Punish or The Will to Knowledge? What is the relationship between limit-experience and “historical forms of experience”?

• Gender/race: What is the relation between gender, race, and experience? Can Foucault account for differently gendered and/or racialized experiences? Is it necessary, as some commentators have argued, to make Foucault’s concept of experience compatible with phenomenology for it to be useful for feminist theory or philosophy of race?

• Relationship to other philosophical movements: What is the relationship between Foucault’s concept of experience and other philosophical concepts of experience, for example, in phenomenology, pragmatism, or the Frankfurt School?

• Relationship to other central concepts in Foucault’s work: What is the relationship between experience and critique, or experience and problematization? Is there an experiential dimension in genealogy?

Submission deadline: December 20, 2024
Submit article, prepared for anonymous peer review, and a cover letter with identifying information about the author, to Leonhard Riep (leonhard.riep@gmail.com). Articles should be written in English and be a maximum 9000 words in length, including critical apparatus. If accepted for publication, authors must format their articles to the Philosophy Today formatting guidelines available here:
https://www.pdcnet.org/philtoday/Submission-Guidelines

Manuscripts must be original, unpublished work and not under consideration by any other publication. Article manuscripts should include a brief abstract (150 words) and up to ten key words. It is the author’s responsibility to obtain necessary permission for use of copyrighted material contained within the article.