Foucault News

News and resources on French thinker Michel Foucault (1926-1984)

Michel Foucault, “Message or noise?”, Translated by Christopher O’Neill, Parrhesia 39 · 2024 · 18-24

Open access

Extract

In order to “situate” medicine amongst other forms of knowledge (savoir), we have become accustomed to the use of linear schemas. Above the level of the body, the soul; below the level of the organism, the tissues. Medicine then has tended at one end towards psychology, psychopathology, etc., and at the other to physiology. However, the discussions that I have been reading bring to light new, diagonal or lateral, relations. Certain problems arise in medicine which seem isomorphic to those that one might encounter elsewhere; especially in those disciplines which are either concerned with language, or which operate like a language. These disciplines have without doubt no “object relation” to medicine, but the latter, understood as theory-and-practice, is perhaps structurally analogous to them.

William Tilleczek, Between Authority and Care, Plato’s Crito as Defense of the Philosophical Life, Dionysius, Vol. 39 (2024)

Abstract
This paper addresses the question as to why Socrates stays to die in prison through a novel reading of the Crito oriented by the Foucaultian notion of care (epimeleia). It argues that the Laws do not speak for Socrates (the reasons they offer for staying in prison are not reasons he could have accepted). It then reconstructs the logos that did compel Socrates to stay, through a close reading attentive to the principles of philosophical judgment suggested but never fully elaborated in the Crito. Crito’s ethical and philosophical laxity prevent Socrates from fully converting him to the philosophical life via argument, so he adopts the authoritarian voice of the Laws to prevent Crito from making a dangerous judgement. This is a compromise but nonetheless an act of care: preserving his own commitment to philosophy despite pending death, Socrates also leaves intact for Crito a model of an intrinsically good life.

William Tilleczek Receives the 2024 Leo Strauss Award for “Powers of Practice: Michel Foucault and the Politics of Asceticism”, Political Science Now, August 9, 2024

The Leo Strauss Award is presented annually by the American Political Science Association (APSA) to honor the best doctoral dissertation in political philosophy.

Citation from the Award Committee:

Dr. Tilleczek’s “Powers of Practice: Michel Foucault and the Politics of Asceticism” is a meticulously crafted, exceptionally creative, deeply erudite, and beautifully written study of Foucault’s thought that recasts his contributions to contemporary analyses of neoliberalism and a politics of freedom. The dissertation’s accomplishments are noteworthy on several fronts. First, it offers a new approach to reading Foucault centered on his attentions to asceticism, understood not as a normative but rather a methodological framework that situates practices of ethical self-fashioning within their socio-political and interpersonal contexts. Joining a biographical account of Foucault with careful exegesis of his later writings on care of the self, Dr. Tilleczek elaborates a ‘general ascetology’ in which understanding power and agency as they pertain to practices of self-improvement remains a matter of historical anthropological investigation. Second, Dr. Tilleczek’s approach enables them to surface continuities between the different phases of Foucault’s work, persuasively showing how his ‘turn to antiquity’ recuperates his earlier account of discipline as a modern ascetological apparatus. Avoiding heavy-handed impositions of unity across Foucault’s corpus, Dr. Tilleczek makes their case through nuanced argumentation, deft interpretive analyses, and productively provocative intertextual readings. Third, Dr. Tilleczek’s account of Foucault’s general ascetology and the anthropology of ethics subtending it introduces rich resources, conceptual and hermeneutic, for understanding neoliberalism and its self-fashioning homo economicus. The dissertation demonstrates how self-optimization, as the generalized ‘practice imperative’ of a marketized society, both reproduces its social inequalities and cultivates forms of life that can subvert its modes of governance. Taken as a whole, “Powers of Practice” succeeds admirably not only in making significant contributions to our understanding of a pivotal and often divisive thinker but also in enabling us to ‘think (and see) what we are doing’ in the present from a fresh perspective.

William Tilleczek is a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University and L’Université de Montréal, where he is a member of the Research Group on Constitutional Studies and the Centre canadien d’études allemandes et européennes, respectively. Previously, he was a Visiting Professor at Deep Springs College.

Originally from Sudbury (ON), he studied in Halifax (NS) and Toronto (ON) before completing a PhD in Government at Harvard University.

His recent works are united by an interest in ascesis/training and touch on themes and thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, anti-colonial ethics, artificial intelligence, and the moralization of poverty. His first book project works with and beyond Foucault to intervene in current debates regarding the “old” (structuralist) and “new” (individualist) left. Combining insights from classical political philosophy, Marxism, Foucault, and post-colonial theory, he is working to sketch the contours of “the means of training” as a general political problem: How are citizens forced to train, invited to train, prohibited from training? Who has access to meaningful modes of self-transformation, who is forced to train their body as a tool for the gains of the dominant? How can we collectively shape institutions that enable the ascesis required to fulfill our ethical and political goals?

Will also works as a translator and has recently published an English version of Simone Weil’s “Rationalisation.”

Elden, S. (2024). Alexandre Koyré and the Collège de France. History of European Ideas, 1–14.

https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2024.2391378

ABSTRACT
This article discusses an important moment in the career of Alexandre Koyré, and the history of philosophy in France. It looks at the 1951 election of a successor to Étienne Gilson at the Collège de France, for which Koyré was one of the possible candidates, alongside Henri Gouhier and Martial Gueroult. Koyré came close, but Gueroult was elected to the chair. In time, Gueroult was succeeded first by Jean Hyppolite and then, in 1970, by Michel Foucault. Using archival documents to discuss the process in detail, this article shows the weakness of Koyré’s proposers, and the strength of Gouhier’s application. Finally, drawing on Koyré’s outline of his proposed teaching programme, it discusses how success might have shaped his future career, using this as an indication of his position within and beyond a French tradition in the philosophy and history of the sciences.

KEYWORDS: Collège de France Henri Gouhier Martial Gueroult Alexandre Koyré history of the sciences

Stuart Blaney, Equality and Freedom in Rancière and Foucault, Bloomsbury, 2024


Description

Responding to the increasing need for new and peaceful forms of emancipation, Stuart Blaney offers a unique solution in the synergy between two pioneering strands of continental philosophy: Michel Foucault’s ideas on freedom and Jacques Ranciere’s ideas on equality.

Building a dialogue between these two thinkers, Blaney presents new perspectives on their work and a clear picture that emancipation comes from everyday practices rather than any particular movement or revolution.

In exploring these combined views of equality and freedom, Blaney draws on some of the central facets of both concepts, including revolution, disagreement, care for the self, free speech and stoicism. To put these ideas into a practical framework of real, lived experience, we are introduced to the figure of Louis-Gabrielle Gauny the nineteenth century worker-poet and self confessed plebeian philosopher. Gauny is a nexus for Ranciere’s and Foucault’s ideas; his life exemplifying a dual mode of existence in-between conformity and political revolution. This lived philosophy of equality and freedom shows the strong synergy between the two concepts, with one reinforcing the other and strengthening their efficacy as forms of emancipatory practice.

Table of Contents
1. Introduction
Part One: Rancière and Practices of Equality
2. A Presupposition of Equality
3. Disagreement
4. Redefining Emancipation: Politics as Aesthetics and Aesthetics as Politics
5. Archives, Revenants, and Aesthetics: The Milieu of the Life of Louis-Gabriel Gauny
Part Two: Foucault and Practices of Freedom
6. A Historico-Critical Ontology: Discursive and Non-Discursive Practices
7.An Aesthetics of Existence: The Care of the Self
8. Parrhesia and Cynicism
Part Three: Practices of Equality and Freedom
9. The Traces of a Path: The Emancipatory Life of Gauny
10. Fictions: Reframing the Real
11. Conclusion

Elden, Stuart. “Foucault and Dumézil on Antiquity.” Journal of the History of Ideas 85, no. 3 (2024): 571-600. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jhi.2024.a933859.

Abstract:
The biographical links between Michel Foucault and the comparative mythologist and philologist Georges Dumézil have received more attention than their intellectual connections. This article contributes by surveying Foucault’s engagements, from a 1957 radio lecture to his late lectures at the Collège de France. Particular focus is on lectures on structuralism and history in 1970, some references between 1970 and 1981, and the use of Dumézil’s work in each of Foucault’s two final courses at the Collège de France. In each, Foucault takes up Dumézil’s analyses of mythology in developing his own projects concerning history and antiquity.

Les Temps qui restent

Newsletter

L’ancien comité de rédaction des Temps Modernes, liquidé par Gallimard en 2018 au lendemain de la disparition de Claude Lanzmann, a réuni un très large collectif international, convaincu qu’une revue généraliste animée par la notion d’engagement a plus de sens que jamais dans le contexte actuel, marqué par des années d’inaction politique devant les défis écologiques planétaires, et a fortiori au moment où l’extrême-droite est de plus en plus menaçante dans le monde entier. Constitué de plusieurs milieux professionnels, disciplines, générations, langues, continents, formats et médiums d’expression, ce collectif cherche à reposer la question de l’engagement intellectuel et des formes de l’action collective, dans un temps qui n’est plus celui de la modernité, mais de ce qui en reste.

Launched at the initiative of the last editorial board of Les Temps Modernes, which was discontinued by Gallimard in 2018, Les Temps qui restent believes that the intellectual project of the historic magazine created by Sartre and Beauvoir, based on the notion of engagement, makes even more sense today than ever, while we are faced with political inaction about the planetary ecological challenges and even more qso while the far-right is more and more threatening internationally. It gathered a very large international collective comprising a wide diversity of professional backgrounds, disciplines, generations, languages, continents, formats and mediums of expression, in order to revisit the question of intellectual engagement and the forms of collective action, in a time that is no longer that of modernity, but of what remains of it.

Vous pouvez d’ores et déjà lire le texte programmatique du projet (« Introduction aux Temps qui restent ») ainsi que le premier numéro, qui comprend une cinquantaine de publications (textes, mais aussi vidéos, podcasts sonores, diaporamas), dont plusieurs sont aussi disponibles en version anglaise.


You can already read a text presenting in more details the intellectual project of the journal (“Introducing
Les Temps qui restent”), as well as our first issue, comprised of about 50 contributions (texts, but also videos and audio podcasts), many being also available in English.

Dans le contexte des dernières élections françaises, nous avons aussi défendu dans un édito la nécessité d’une mobilisation de société civile dans le cadre d’une démarche devant permettre de faire aboutir, à court, moyen ou long terme, une alliance sociale, écologique et démocratique capable de relever les défis particulièrement inquiétants de notre temps. Nous avons la conviction que ces défis, bien qu’ils prennent des formes différentes selon les régions et les pays, sont essentiellement globaux et requièrent une vie intellectuelle transnationale et nous espérons participer dans notre mesure à cet effort de long terme.

In the context of the recent French elections, we also called in an editorial for a large collective effort involving the civil society and all its social and intellectual forces, so as to bring about a social, ecological and democratic alliance, capable of meeting at last the urgent challenges of our times. A special file is now open and will remain so as long as such an alliance needs support. We believe those challenges, although taking nationally different forms, are global and require a transnational intellectual approach. We hope to take our part in this long-term endeavor.

Nous invitons toutes les personnes et tous les collectifs qui se reconnaissent dans le projet du collectif des Temps qui restent, à nous envoyer leurs propositions de publications, d’actions ou d’événements (contact@lestempsquirestent.org). Vous pouvez également nous suivre sur Facebook et Instagram

We invite all people and collectives who share the project of Les Temps qui restent to send us their proposals for publications, actions or events (contact@lestempsquirestent.org). You can also follow us on Facebook and Instagram.
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Le collectif des Temps qui restent

Le Conseil des Temps qui restent est composé par les personnalités suivantes / The Council of Les Temps qui restent is comprised of the following members.

Giuseppe Al Majali, Emily Apter, Michel Arbatz, Etienne Balibar, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Louis Bidou, Juliette Blamont, Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, Jean Bourgault, Andrea Mubi Brighenti, Déborah Brosteaux, Déborah Bucchi, Erik Bullot, Nathalie Cau, Marianne Carpentier, Arto Charpentier, Grégory Cormann, Alyne Costa, Donatien Costa, Sophie Cras, Arnaud Cudennec, Laetitia Delafontaine, Esther Demoulin, Valentin Denis Gabriel Dorthe, Elie During, Divya Dwivedi, Jeanne Etelain, Nathan Ferret, Jérôme Gaillardet, Bastien Gallet, Tristan Garcia, Sarah Garcin, Juan Luis Gastaldi, Laure Gauthier, Ana Maria Gomes, Alexis Gonin, Emmanuel Grimaud, Haud Guéguen, Jeremy Hamers, Francis Haselden, Laurent Jeanpierre, Dominiq Jenvrey, Frédéric Keck, Stefan Kristensen, Lissa Lincoln, Silvia Lippi, Camille Louis, Emmanuelle Loyer, Catherine Malabou, Martial Manet, Patrice Maniglier, Éric Marty, Zoé Mary-Roulier, Alexandru Matei, Anne Mélice, Shaj Mohan, Lucile Mons, Vanessa Morisset, Frédéric Neyrat, Pierre Niedergang, Grégory Niel, Agathe Nieto, Rodrigo Nunes, Julien Pallotta, Luca Paltrinieri, Dimitra Panopoulos, Luc Pellissier, Catherine Perret, Philippe Petit, Sébastien Pluot, Mathieu Potte-Bonneville, Matteo Pratelli, François Provenzano, David Rabouin, Sinziana Ravini, Kianush Ruf, Warren Sack, Vladimir Safatle, Inès Saragosa, Martin Savransky, Jim Schrub, Pierre Schwarzer, Bérénice Serra, Nikolaj Schultz, Juliette Simont, Sarah Streliski, Anne-Christine Taylor, Stéphane van Damme, Romain Vielfaure, Pierre Vinclair, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Jean-Baptiste Vuillerod, Peter Wagner, Mathieu Watrelot, Marine Yzquierdo, Camille Zéhenne.

Giorgi Vachnadze, The Bio-Politics of Artificial Intelligence: Pastoral Technologies and Eschatological Narratives, Epoché, Issue #73 July 2024

Extract

In agreement with Hubert Dreyfus (1972), we could easily say: “The story of artificial intelligence might well begin around 450 B.C.” That won’t give us much beyond words however. That’s not the commitment we can make for what will in effect try to operate as a text that only aims to shed a new visibility on the discursive practices surrounding A.I. technology and the relationship these apparatuses bear to the Self. But for the sake of “simplicity,” we could ask in the style of Michel Foucault: What types of truth-telling practices of self-formation are constitutive of an “Artificial Regime”? What kind of a person does one have to be, in order to receive, understand, embrace or otherwise competently use and enjoy the “irresistible” gifts of techno-science? And what happens if one refuses to do so? What types of goals must the digital subject (Goriunova, 2019) set for herself in order to appreciate, or better yet; recognize, the endless benefits of consenting to the A.I. driven regime of truth with its “terms and conditions”? This would call for a history of science that would simultaneously have to be a history of the subject i.e., subjectivity and (of course) a history of morality and (therefore?) power.

Read more

V is for Visible (Michel Foucault)
4 August 2024

Appel |
Bourse internationale Imec/Centre Michel Foucault 2025

DATE LIMITE DE RÉCEPTION DES DOSSIERS : 15 novembre 2024

Disparu il y a quarante ans, Michel Foucault continue d’inspirer profondément la pensée contemporaine.

L’Imec et le Centre Michel Foucault lancent un appel à candidature pour l’attribution de la quatrième Bourse internationale IMEC/Centre Michel Foucault

Ouverte prioritairement à un•e doctorant•e fondée sur une invitation en résidence, cette « Bourse internationale Imec/Centre Michel Foucault » est dédiée à une recherche originale portant sur la pensée de Michel Foucault, ses influences et son rayonnement.

Dossier de candidature

En partenariat avec la Fondation de France.