Foucault News

Foucault and Neoliberalism AUFS Event: Thomas Nail – Michel Foucault, Accelerationist (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

8 January 2015

Foucault and Neoliberalism AUFS Event: Thomas Nail – Michel Foucault, Accelerationist, An und für sich blog, January 5, 2015

The Debate: So far the debate over Foucault’s relationship to neoliberalism is split between two positions. On one side there are those (Daniel Zamora, François Ewald, Michael Behrent, and others) who argue that Foucault’s “sympathy” for neoliberalism marks his later work as at least partially “compatible” with neoliberalism. On the other side many more (Stuart Elden, Peter Gratton, Steven Maynard, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and others) argue that although “Foucault’s mode of reading texts often makes it look like he is agreeing with [neoliberal] arguments, he is really trying to reconstruct them, to understand their logic, and so on.” Furthermore, given Foucault’s commitment to Leftist groups like Le Groupe d’information sur les prisons, GIP and others, the argument goes, Foucault could not have been a neoliberal.

But perhaps this debate has been made unnecessarily polemic. The question of the debate is not, “was Foucault a neoliberal or not?”. As far as I can tell, no one is explicitly arguing that he was, only that he shared “some sympathies” with neoliberal theory: some anti-statism, some anti-authoritarian values, and so on. Is it not possible to share some points of interest or critique with a position that one does not fully accept? Thus, the more interesting question I think we should be asking is, “what commonalities or shared interests might exist between Foucault’s political thought and certain neoliberal ideas, and to what degree?”

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Foucault’s Last Decade – Update 17

Clare O'Farrell

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7 January 2015

Progressive Geographies

I’ve made good progress on Chapter 9 around Christmas and the New Year. A productive day in the British Library today filled in some missing references to primary or secondary material Foucault utilised, as well as tracking down two little-known pieces by Foucault himself. I have also updated the list of Foucault’s uncollected notes, lectures and interviews on this site.

The chapter begins with a section on the two different historical plans (as opposed to the 1976 thematic plan) of the History of Sexuality: the one that culminates with a draft of a large manuscript on antiquity in March 1983; and the one that takes that draft and rearranges its contents into the actually published volumes two and three. In the first plan a volume on Christianity will follow as volume III; in the second it is shifted down to be the projected volume IV. I talk a bit about…

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Foucault and Neoliberalism AUFS Event: Johanna Oksala – Never Mind Foucault: What Are the Right Questions for Us? (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

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7 January 2015

Foucault and Neoliberalism AUFS Event: Johanna Oksala – Never Mind Foucault: What Are the Right Questions for Us? An und für sich blog, January 4, 2015

Daniel Zamora’s recent interview in Jacobin titled “Can We Criticize Foucault?” has sparked another discussion on Foucault’s alleged endorsement of neoliberalism. For those of us who did not know Foucault personally, the evidence for such a claim can only be found in his writings. I, for myself, have not found any such evidence yet. Zamora’s revelations that Foucault met with Lionel Stoléru several times seem inconclusive at best.

More importantly, this debate itself seems misguided to me. Whether Foucault had some secret sympathies for neoliberalism might obviously be of some biographical or historical interest, but theoretically the answer to this question would only be relevant if it disqualified his thought as a useful toolbox for the academic left today. Zamora’s aim seems to be to show that this is in fact the case. In a follow-up article to the initial interview he claims that Foucault was not asking the “right questions” due to his neoliberal leanings, and that his thought has therefore contributed to the disorientation of the left and to the dismantling of the welfare state.

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Foucault on Parrhesia – translation of a 1982 lecture forthcoming in Critical Inquiry

Clare O'Farrell

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6 January 2015

Progressive Geographies

A lecture by Foucault in 1982 at Université de Grenoble, on “Parrēsia” was first published in French in 2012 in the journal Anabases. Another lecture from this same trip, “Rêver de ses plaisirs”, was published in 1983, and is a variant of the first chapter of Le souci de soi/The Use of Pleasures. I outline and discuss the differences here.

The French version of the “Parrēsia” article will be available online in October 2015. A translation by Graham Burchell is forthcoming in Critical Inquiry in early 2015. For the moment, that journal has just posted the first two paragraphs:

Thank you very much for inviting me. I am here, as you know, as a supplicant. What I mean is that, until four or five years ago, my field, at any rate the domain of my work, had scarcely anything to do with ancient philosophy; and then, following a number of zigzags…

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Foucault and Neoliberalism AUFS Event: Gordon Hull – Why Foucault is Still Helpful on Neoliberalism (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

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6 January 2015

Foucault and Neoliberalism AUFS Event: Gordon Hull – Why Foucault is Still Helpful on Neoliberalism, An und für sich blog, January 3, 2015

The conceptual core of Daniel Zamora’s “Can We Criticize Foucault,” in which he argues that Foucault’s late writings end up advocating the same things neoliberalism does, seems to me to be the proposal that Foucault “seemed to imagine a neoliberalism that wouldn’t project its anthropological models on the individual, that would offer individuals greater autonomy vis-à-vis the state.” In a follow-up piece, Zamora concludes that Foucault “doesn’t advocate neoliberalism, but he adopts all of its critiques of the welfare state.” That’s clearly a problem, though I am aware that I’ve got the benefit of a generation of hindsight about neoliberalism. I also don’t know many of the writings in question, and so I’m reluctant to say anything about the (for lack of better terms) sociological and biographical questions at play.

However, I have no trouble saying that if Foucault thought neoliberalism wouldn’t project its models of subjectivity onto individuals, he was mistaken. I’m also not sure he (consistently) thought that: the Birth of Biopolitics lectures emphasized that one of the main innovations of neoliberalism over classical liberalism was precisely the awareness that markets weren’t natural, and had to be nurtured by the state (Bernard Harcourt underscores the point here), and he emphasizes entrepreneurship of the self as a neoliberal vision of subjectivity. Whatever he thought about social welfare programs, phrasing things this way allows us to focus on the important question: Foucault says that “writing only interests me to the extent that it is incorporated into the reality of a battle.” Does Foucault’s writing offer any weapons against neoliberalism, even if he didn’t realize it?

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The Foucault You Didn’t Know

Clare O'Farrell

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5 January 2015

The Dish

In an interview discussing a new volume of essays he edited about the French philosopher, Daniel Zamora portrays Foucault, especially in his later years, as more friendly to and fascinated by neoliberals Hayek and Friedman than many of his votaries on the academic left want to believe. Zamora claims to have been “astonished by the indulgence Foucault showed toward neoliberalism”:

[H]e saw in it the possibility of a form of governmentality that was much less normative and authoritarian than the socialist and communist left, which he saw as totally obsolete. He especially saw in neoliberalism a “much less bureaucratic” and “much less disciplinarian” form of politics than that offered by the postwar welfare state. He seemed to imagine a neoliberalism that wouldn’t project its anthropological models on the individual, that would offer individuals greater autonomy vis-à-vis the state.
Foucault seems, then, in the late seventies, to be moving towards the “second…

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Foucault and Neoliberalism AUFS Event: Verena Erlenbusch – Neoliberalism and the Genealogy of Biopolitics (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

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5 January 2015

Mini-Series on Foucault and Neoliberalism: Responses to Zamora
An und für sich blog, Monday, December 22, 2014 — Mark William Westmoreland

Around the New Year, AUFS will be hosting a 4 day mini-series on Foucault and neoliberalism. What precisely is Foucault’s relationship with neoliberalism, particularly as expressed in Foucault’s writings/lectures on governmentality and biopolitics? In some ways, this is an old question; but, new answers have emerged, namely with Daniel Zamora’s recent contributions to Jacobin. Our tentative list of contributors includes Verena Erlenbusch (Memphis), Gordon Hull (UNCC), Thomas Nail (Denver), and Johanna Oksala (Helsinki).

For those unfamiliar with this particular topic, you may want to take a look at the following: Stuart Elden 1, Stuart Elden, 2, Foucault News, WP: Why Foucault is a libertarian‘s best friend, and Foucault and Becker (an older piece).

Editor: Here is the first article in the series

Foucault and Neoliberalism AUFS Event: Verena Erlenbusch – Neoliberalism and the Genealogy of Biopolitics
An und für sich blog Friday, January 2, 2015

[…]
Daniel Zamora’s edited volume Critiquer Foucault: Les années 1980 et la tentation néolibérale (Criticizing Foucault: The 1980s and the neoliberal temptation), published in November 2014 with Éditions Aden, has been hotly debated over the past few weeks on the philosophical blogosphere. My contribution to the conversation here has two main purposes. First, since the volume will remain unavailable for English readers until later in 2015, I want to give a brief overview of the chapters assembled by Zamora. Second, I’d like to offer some thoughts on an aspect that appears to me to be largely absent from discussions of Foucault’s relationship with neoliberalism, namely the hermeneutical salience of Foucault’s methodology. This is to say that Zamora et al.’s failure to engage Foucault’s methodology leads to a very specific reading, a misreading to my mind, of Foucault’s project. As opposed to their interpretation of Foucault as interested in the political claims made by neoliberals, I suggest that Foucault is concerned with the production of neoliberalism as a regime of truth (thanks to Andrew Dilts for his helpful comments here).

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Stuart Elden, Foucault and Neoliberalism – the debate continues (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

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4 January 2015

Editor’s note: For ease of reference all the posts relevant to the current debate concerning Foucault and neoliberalism are now categorised under ‘debates’ on Foucault News.

Progressive Geographies

There are some interesting comments on last week’s thoughts on the Foucault and Neoliberalism debate – here. In particular the points made by Stephen Shapiro and Michael Behrent are worth reading – both are situating the discussion within a wider knowledge of French politics at the time, which is a very important move, although they draw different conclusions. Behrent’s comments are drawing upon, and justifying, a piece he published in Modern Intellectual History in 2009 (open access), which is translated in the Zamora collection.

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Antonio Negri, A Marxist experience of Foucault (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

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4 January 2015

Antonio Negri, A Marxist experience of Foucault

Colloque Marx-Foucault, Nanterre, 18-19 December 2014
Translation by Arianna Bove and Pier Paolo Frassinelli

1. The question I will ask today is simple: how have I tried, how has it been possible, in my work, to read Marx with and after Foucault? I would like to present a brief analysis of this experience. To do it, I had to position and arrange axes of Marx’s reading around a dispositive of subjectivation retraced on Foucault, a dispositive from which I will try to demonstrate how it is possible to apply it to our present, how it imposes an adequate ontology. Inversely, if reading Marx means nourishing a radical will of transformation of historical being, Foucauldian subjectivation must be confronted with this determination.

a. Today it seems to me that on the basis of Foucault’s intuition and conclusions, the highly historicized tone and the style of Marx’s critique of political economy need to be neatly installed within a materialist approach. Thus, evidently, reading Marx’s historical writings together with all the others (especially those on the critique of political economy) is not enough; one needs to go deeper and develop, genealogically, his analysis of concepts by opening them up to the present. Foucault’s approach has allowed us not only to grasp, but also to insist on the fact that the subjectivation of class struggle is an agency in the historical process. The analysis of this subjectivation will always need to be renewed and confronted with the transformative determinations that affect concepts in the historical process. In the framework of Foucault’s stimulations and aside from any dialectics and teleology, historical subjectivation is assumed as a dispositive that is neither causal nor creative, and yet determining. Like Machiavelli: a historical materialism for us.

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With thanks to Dirk Felleman for this link

Judith Butler. Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling. 2014

Clare O'Farrell

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3 January 2015

Judith Butler. Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling. 2014

Published on 1 Jan 2015

http://www.egs.edu Judith Butler, philosopher and author, speaking about avowal and disavowal in conversation with Michel Foucault’s Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling in which Foucault attempts to establish a set of modifications which have taken place in the practice of avowal leading to an increasing connection with juridical and penal practices. Public Open Lecture at the European Graduate School in August 2014.

Exploring the performativity of the act of avowal and disavowal in relation to madness, criminality and sexuality, Butler shows how forms of subjectivity are created, submit to a regime of Truth and legitimize authority through these acts.

At the juncture of Power and Discourse, Butler finds that this use of language, in the service of power, brings into being what it says on condition of established conventions and constitutes by virtue of discursive conditions which ensure legibility of the subject by authority. The act of disavowal acts as the implicit counter action to the speech act of avowal and Butler asks whether avowal could possibly serve, not only as an act which identifies a subject but also as a refusal.

Judith Butler, Ph.D. http://www.egs.edu Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School EGS, attended Bennington College and then Yale University, where she received her B.A., and her Ph.D. in philosophy in 1984. Her first training in philosophy took place at the synagogue in her hometown of Cleveland. She taught at Wesleyan and Johns Hopkins universities before becoming Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

Judith Butler is the author of Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death(Columbia University Press, 2000), Hegemony, Contingency, Universality, with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek, (Verso Press, 2000), Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (Columbia University Press, 1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (Routledge, 1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford University Press, 1997), Excitable Speech: Politics of the Performance (Routledge, 1997), as well as numerous articles and contributions on philosophy, feminism and queer theory. Her recent project is a critique of ethical violence and an effort to formulate a theory of responsibility for an opaque subject that works with Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault and Friedrich Nietzsche.