Foucault News

The Foucault You Didn’t Know

Clare O'Farrell

5 January 2015

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.

Another Liberty Canon: Foucault

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

2 January 2015

Post by Barry Stocker 7 July 2014. With thanks to Brandon Christensen for this link.

Notes On Liberty

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French writer on various but related topics of power, knowledge, discourse, history of thought, ethics, politics, and so on. His name to some summons negative associations of French intellectual fashion, incomprehensibility, and refinements of Marxist anti-liberty positions.

However, his influence in various fields has become too lasting, and too much taken up by people who do not fit into the categories just mentioned, for such reactions to be considered adequate. Foucault himself resisted and mocked labels, which was a serious issue for him because in his work he tried to question the absolute authority of any one system of knowledge and the authority of isolated great thinkers.

He said that once he had written something it was no longer what he thought, which is in part a playful attempt to resist labelling, but also a rather serious point deeply embedded in his thought, about the…

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Oggi Foucault sarebbe renziano?

Clare O'Farrell

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1 January 2015

Le Palais Du Rire

Un precursore del blairismo e della Terza via? Un pensatore sedotto dal neoliberismo? L’ultima barriera della borghesia contro Marx?

La collocazione politica di Michel Foucault da sempre è fonte di dibattito. Un libro appena uscito e curato dal sociologo belga Daniel Zamora, Critiquer Foucault. Les années 1980 et la tentation néoliberale (Aden), tenta di dare una risposta alla questione prendendo in esame le opere del filosofo francese degli anni ’70 e ’80, in particolare dopo Sorvegliare e punire, che Foucault aveva pubblicato presso Gallimard nel 1975. Se prima del 1970, nelle sue opere, le parole ‘proletariato’ e ‘capitalista’ non figurano mai, nel 1977 Foucault prende parte alla discussione a proposito del libro di André Glucksmann I padroni del pensiero. Il libro è scandaloso perché rappresenta un atto d’accusa contro la sinistra giacobina e statalista, di cui peraltro Glucksmann aveva fatto parte. Foucault ne scrive bene sul Nouvel Observateur

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Daniel Zamora, Foucault’s Responsibility (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

4 comments

31 December 2014

Daniel Zamora, Foucault’s Responsibility, Jacobin magazine, 15 December 2014

Editor’s note: This is a response to the article by Peter Frase posted yesterday on Foucault News

Foucault was not asking the “right questions.” And the answers he came up with helped disorient the Left.

The question of the welfare state’s role in a capitalist society is a complex one. Of course, depending on the context, it can serve to contain social contestation, to limit movements of radical transformation, even to reproduce certain quite conservative social structures (especially regarding race or gender roles).

The welfare state is obviously the result of a compromise between social classes. It is not, therefore, a question of “stopping there,” but, on the contrary, of understanding that the welfare state can be the point of departure for something new. My problem with Michel Foucault, then, is not that he seeks to “move beyond” the welfare state, but that he actively contributed to its destruction, and that he did so in a way that was entirely in step with the neoliberal critiques of the moment. His objective was not to move towards “socialism,” but to be rid of it.

But before discussing the issue of the welfare state in the late 1970s and the role it might play in an emancipatory politics today, let’s return to some of these “good questions” that Foucault was asking.

Did Foucault Ask “Some of the Right Questions?”

The first question about the welfare state posed by Foucault concerned the “situations of dependency” that it was said to cause. In his eyes, “on the one hand, we give people more security, and on the other we increase their dependence.” Social security produces dependence? This critique is rather unexpected coming from an author classified as “left-wing.”

Yet this phrase is not an isolated statement. Thus, in a 1983 interview, Foucault says he is in complete agreement with a journalist who states that there is a need today to “assert each person’s responsibility for their own choices” and to move towards greater “accountability” (responsabilisation).

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Peter Frase, Beyond the Welfare State (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

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30 December 2014

Peter Frase, Beyond the Welfare State, Dec 10, 2014.

Jacobin has published Seth Ackerman’s translation of an interesting interview with French sociologist Daniel Zamora, discussing his recent book about Michel Foucault’s affinities with neoliberalism. Zamora rightly points out that the “image of Foucault as being in total opposition to neoliberalism at the end of his life” is a very strained reading of a thinker whose relationship to the crisis of the 1970’s welfare state is at the very least much more ambiguous than that.

At the same time, Zamora’s argument demonstrates the limitations imposed by the displacement of “capitalism” by “neoliberalism” as a central category of left analysis. For his tacit premise seems to be that, if it can be shown that Foucault showed an “indulgence” toward neoliberalism, we must therefore put down his influence as a reactionary one. But what Foucault’s curious intersection with the project of the neoliberal right actually exemplifies, I would argue, is an ambiguity at the heart of the crisis of the 1970’s which gave rise to the neoliberal project. That he can be picked up by the right as easily as the left says much about the environment that produced him. Meanwhile, Zamora’s own reaction says something important about a distinction within the social democratic left that is worth spending some time on, which I’ll return to below.

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Foucault, literature, and feminist theories of technology (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

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29 December 2014

Foucault, literature, and feminist theories of technology
Dr Lena Wanggren (English Literature, University of Edinburgh)

Science, Technology and Innovation seminar series

Date and Time
2nd Feb 2015 15:30 – 17:00
Location
Room 1.06, Old Surgeons’ Hall, High School Yards
School of Social and Political Science
University of Edinburgh.

Abstract

Building on French philosopher Michel Foucault’s writings on technology, this paper explores the specific trope of literary texts as technologies, as social and cultural agents. Writing itself in its material, literal, sense is noticeably a technology; writing is made material through the use of technologies, and the alphabet might be seen as one of the most important technologies in world history. Critiquing technological determinism as well as gender essentialism, the paper through feminist theories of technology and examples of technologies such as the bicycle, proposes that exploring literature as technology problematises a definition of the latter, suggesting technology as a volatile concept rather than simply as a tool in the hands of the inventor/author.

Speaker’s biography
http://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/lwanggre