Foucault News

Língua(gens) em Discurso – A Formação dos Objetos (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

27 August 2014

Língua(gens) em Discurso – A Formação dos Objetos
Organizadoras: Ismara Tasso e Érica Danielle Silva
Editora: Pontes
Coleção Linguagem&Sociedade (v. 7)
Ano de publicação: 2014.

Com o objetivo de subsidiar teórica e metodologicamente pesquisadores e estudiosos do campo epistemológico do discurso, esta coletânea reúne, com singular empenho dos autores, inéditas e substanciais discussões e reflexões acerca da formação dos objetos. Sob tal conjuntura, cada capítulo prima, por sua natureza teórica e analítica, demonstrar a emergência e formação de enunciados para além da articulação das palavras, compreendendo que os objetos não se formam nas realidades materiais anteriores aos discursos, mas são por eles produzidos no conjunto de práticas que arquitetam seu aparecimento, sua manutenção e sua coexistência. O tratamento desse funcionamento discursivo, cujas vertentes teóricas tem seus expoentes em Foucault, Pêcheux, Courtine, Bakhtin, Orlandi, Charaudeau e Maingueneau, possibilitou a organização da obra em duas partes. Na primeira, estão reunidos os textos que abordam as categorias de Acontecimento, espaços de memória, política(s) e mídia. E, na segunda parte, os capítulos estão amparados na investigação sobre a produção de discursos sobre o corpo, inscrita em práticas de subjetivação, no domínio da biopolítica. Organizam-se, portanto, a partir de três eixos − Práticas de subjetivação, biopolítica e corpo.

Foucault’s Lectures on the Punitive Society VIII.1

Clare O'Farrell

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26 August 2014

Stockerblog

Lecture of 21st February, 1973

Part One (of my summary and comments, the lecture was delivered as a unified entity)

In the early nineteenth century, the penal system became a penitentiary system for the first time, was more unified, and was much more under the control of the state than before. At the end of the eighteenth century there was a growth in the capitalist mode of product, which provoked political crises. The plebeians were proletarianised requiring a new repressive apparatus. There was a series of movements of popular sedition in response to the growth of capitalism. Bourgeois power replied to the seditions with a new judicial and penitential system. There is more behind the new system than control of plebeian sedition, it was a control of popular illegality. Until the end of the eighteenth century some popular illegality was compatible with the development of the economic bourgeoise and even…

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Paul Rabinow “Contemporary Inquiry: Ecologies of Assemblages” (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

4 comments

24 August 2014

Date: May 30, 2014

Location: Stanford University Humanities Center

Talk Title: Paul Rabinow “Contemporary Inquiry: Ecologies of Assemblages”

Abstract: How should one conduct inquiry—today—into problems of broad scope and historical depth? How should one give form to participant-observation into problem spaces in which the specific site must be understood to be connected with multiple other sites and formations? In sum, how should one conduct contemporary inquiry?

In this keynote address, Paul Rabinow will argue that traditional modes of comparison have assumed that the parameters of comparison are known and/or stable. It follows that given that inquiry is focused on specific cases or examples. However, whilst terms such as culture or society or politics or history have functioned as the stable comparison units in the past (and continue to do so in much of the social sciences today), their status has come under sustained scrutiny in recent decades.

The challenge, then, is to conceptualize, narrate and give form to a mode of inquiry that would bring together diverse cases by Rabinow and his students and collaborators, such as: post-genomic forays into designing living organisms and systems; emergent forms of curatorial practices in the trans-national art market; the rise of right wing Hindu nationalist movements in India and the politics and representation of the border disputes in South Sudan. New modes of contemporary inquiry require conceptual innovation as well as a remediated practice of participant-observation that confronts and values the singularity of dimensions of such cases whilst refusing to abandon more general claims.

See more information at the contemporary.stanford.edu

Sponsored by: The Stanford Europe Center, Stanford Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and the Stanford Humanities Center.

Foucault’s legacy: an interview with Frédéric Gros (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

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23 August 2014

Foucault’s legacy: an interview with Frédéric Gros 14 July 2014, Verso Blog. Translation.

Frédéric Gros is the editor of Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France and the author of Michel Foucault (1996) and Foucault et la folie (1997). Having taught in prison for many years, he devoted a book to the philosophical fundaments of the right to punish (Et ce sera justice, 2001), as well as other texts such as States of Violence: An essay on the end of war (2010) and Le Principe sécurité (2012). Nicolas Truong from Le Monde recently interviewed Gros about the legacy of Michel Foucault.
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Read the original French interview here.

Michel Foucault, Technology, and Actor-Network Theory (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

22 August 2014

Steve Matthewman, Michel Foucault, Technology, and Actor-Network Theory,Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology, Volume 17, Issue 2, Spring 2013, Pages 274-292

DOI: 10.5840/techne201317210
Pre-publication copy

Author’s blog

Abstract
While Michel Foucault’s significance as a social theorist is undisputed, his importance as a technological theorist is frequently overlooked. This article considers the richness and the range of Foucault’s technological thinking by surveying his works and interviews, and by tracking his influence within Actor-Network Theory (ANT). The argument is made that we will not fully understand Foucault without understanding the central place of technology in his work, and that we will not understand ANT without understanding Foucault.

Foucault t-shirts and hoodies (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

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21 August 2014

If you really must…

This is what it says on the Redbubble site: “High quality Foucault related T-Shirts & Hoodies by independent artists and designers from around the world – also available as Stickers and Kids Clothes. All orders are custom made and most ship worldwide within 24 hours.”

Neoliberal Noise: Attali, Foucault, & the Biopolitics of Uncool (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

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20 August 2014

Robin James, Neoliberal Noise: Attali, Foucault, & the Biopolitics of Uncool, Culture, Theory, and Critique 52 (2):138-158 (2014)

Further info

Abstract
Is it even possible to resist or oppose neoliberalism? I consider two responses that translate musical practices into counter-hegemonic political strategies: Jacques Attali’s theory of “composition” and the biopolitics of “uncool.” Reading Jacques Attali’s Noise through Foucault’s late work, I argue that Attali’s concept of “repetition” is best understood as a theory of neoliberal biopolitics, and his theory composition is actually a model of deregulated subjectivity. Composition is thus not an alternative to neoliberalism but its quintessence. An aesthetics and ethos of “uncool” might be a more viable alternative. If and when they function as bad, unprofitable investments, uncool practices like smoothness (predictable regularity) can undercut neoliberal imperatives to self-capitalization. I consider both the impact of neoliberalism on music, and how the study of music can advance theories of neoliberalism.

Annmaria Shimabuku, Schmitt and Foucault on the Question of Sovereignty under Military Occupation (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

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19 August 2014

Annmaria Shimabuku, Schmitt and Foucault on the Question of Sovereignty under Military Occupation, Política común, Volume 5, 2014
https://doi.org/10.3998/pc.12322227.0005.007

Extract
1. A Violation or Production of Sovereignty?
This essay examines the geopolitical underpinnings of Carl Schmitt’s well-known definition of the sovereign as “he who decides the exception” (Political Theology 5) mainly through The Nomos of the Earth (1950). It is in this later work, written after Schmitt had borne witness to the liberation movements of Europe’s colonial territories alongside Germany’s defeat in both world wars, that he contextualized the historical formation of sovereignty in terms of the colonization of the New World and occupatio bellica within Europe from the 16th century onward. In reading The Nomos of the Earth, one cannot help but sense nostalgia for days past—a romanticization of the jus publicum Europaeum that grounds his critique of a new global (dis)order characterized by the transnational flow of capital and concomitant espousal of universal human rights moderated respectively by the American dollar and U.S. military as “world police.” His vitriolic critique of “American imperialism” that violates the sovereignty of postwar European and postcolonial states certainly carries political clout for critics of American Empire (“Modern Imperialism in International Law” 31). However, what exactly is this violated sovereignty? Is this a violation of the traditional form of territorial sovereignty, or a violation of a new form of sovereignty that has given way to an order of globalization? If so, what are its contours?
[…]

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Michel Foucault, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

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18 August 2014

Michel Foucault, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice,
Edited by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt
Translated by Stephen W. Sawyer
360 pages | 6 x 9 | © 2014

Further info

Three years before his death, Michel Foucault delivered a series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain that until recently remained almost unknown. These lectures—which focus on the role of avowal, or confession, in the determination of truth and justice—provide the missing link between Foucault’s early work on madness, delinquency, and sexuality and his later explorations of subjectivity in Greek and Roman antiquity.

Ranging broadly from Homer to the twentieth century, Foucault traces the early use of truth-telling in ancient Greece and follows it through to practices of self-examination in monastic times. By the nineteenth century, the avowal of wrongdoing was no longer sufficient to satisfy the call for justice; there remained the question of who the “criminal” was and what formative factors contributed to his wrong-doing. The call for psychiatric expertise marked the birth of the discipline of psychiatry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as its widespread recognition as the foundation of criminology and modern criminal justice.

Published here for the first time, the 1981 lectures have been superbly translated by Stephen W. Sawyer and expertly edited and extensively annotated by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt. They are accompanied by two contemporaneous interviews with Foucault in which he elaborates on a number of the key themes. An essential companion to Discipline and Punish, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling will take its place as one of the most significant works of Foucault to appear in decades, and will be necessary reading for all those interested in his thought.

Anthony Alessandrini, Foucault, Fanon, Intellectuals, Revolutions (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

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17 August 2014

Anthony Alessandrini, Foucault, Fanon, Intellectuals, Revolutions, Jadaliyya, April 01 2014

[This article is the final in a three-part Jadaliyya series that looks at Foucault’s work in relationship to the legacy of French colonialism in North Africa. Read the first and second installments here: “The Dangers of Liberalism: Foucault and Postcoloniality in France” by Diren Valayden and “Justifications of Power”: Neoliberalism and the Role of Empire by Muriam Haleh Davis.

My theoretical ethic is…“antistrategic”: to be respectful when a singularity revolts, intransigent as soon as power violates the universal. A simple choice, a difficult job: for one must at the same time look closely, a bit beneath history, at what cleaves it and stirs it, and keep watch, a bit behind politics, over what must unconditionally limit it. – Michel Foucault, “Useless to Revolt?”[1]

In their invaluable contributions to this series, Diren Valayden and Muriam Haleh Davis note, rightly, that Michel Foucault had relatively little to say about colonialism, in any direct way, throughout most of his body of work. I have nothing to add to this more general point regarding the Eurocentrism of Foucault’s work, except perhaps a proposal to place it within two larger contexts. The first is the general (and continuing) lack of engagement with postcolonial studies within French scholarship more generally; Achille Mbembe, among others, has described this as a form of provincialism within French thought from which we might, at last, begin to break away today. The second context is the complex history, still being told, of the interconnections between poststructuralist thought and French colonialism in North Africa, so well analyzed by Muriam Haleh Davis in a previous article.

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