Foucault News

L’Usage des plaisirs et Le Souci de soi de Michel Foucault. Regards critiques 1984-1987 (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

8 July 2014

L’Usage des plaisirs et Le Souci de soi de Michel Foucault. Regards critiques 1984-1987
coédition PUC – IMEC, Juillet 2014
Dossier coordonné par Luca Paltrinieri.

Textes choisis et présentés par Philippe Artières, Jean-François Bert, Sandra Boehringer, Philippe Chevallier, Frédéric Gros, Luca Paltrinieri, Judith Revel.

Collection Regards critiques.

Avec L’Usage des plaisirs et Le Souci de soi, Michel Foucault reprend, après huit ans de silence, le fil interrompu d’une histoire de la sexualité. Entre-temps, toutefois, le projet a changé profondément : il ne s’agit plus seulement d’étudier les concepts et les normes qui règlent la sexualité, mais aussi les formes et les modalités du rapport à soi par lesquelles les individus se constituent et se reconnaissent comme sujets. La première réception des deux ouvrages témoigne ainsi d’un double étonnement : la découverte d’un nouveau registre de la pensée foucaldienne qui se tisse autour de la subjectivation et l’inexistence, dans les sociétés anciennes, d’une « sexualité » comme ensemble de pratiques humaines définissant l’identité homosexuelle ou hétérosexuelle.

Powerlifting and Philosophy III: Michel Foucault

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

7 July 2014

Kyle Keough, Powerlifting and Philosophy III: What Michel Foucault Can Tell Us about Enforcing Rules in Powerlifting, Lift: Stronger is Better site

Editorial comment: One of the things I most enjoy about running this blog is the sheer diversity of applications (even tenuous ones) in relation to Foucault’s work.

It has been a great many months since I’ve attempted to pen the third addition to a “Powerlifting and Philosophy” I started once upon a time. The premise of this series, originally, was to adopt different philosophical perspectives; these perspectives, I wagered, might shed new light on some of the most regularly debated (and admittedly tired!) subjects in powerlifting: meet preparation, the raw-versus-gear debate, and now, in this third addition, enforcing standards.
….
Concluding paragraph
My point, in writing this article, is to make the argument, through Foucault’s concept of self-discipline, that not only is a certain element of self-discipline necessary for the sport of powerlifting, but that self-discipline must be balanced by the non-discipline, deferrals to authority, and non-committal stances that other lifters associate themselves with. Together, these groups give powerlifting’s discursive community a healthy balance. While the sport is not perfect, this balanced discursive community makes the sport better. Regardless of what side you find yourself on, try to see the value in the existence of your adversaries.

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Foucault and International Relations (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

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6 July 2014

Philippe Fournier, Foucault and International Relations, E-International Relations, May 12 2014

Extract
Michel Foucault’s name will be familiar to most IR scholars and his influence on the discipline appears to be beyond doubt. The work that Foucault inspired in International Relations is invariably associated with the post-structuralist approach and includes theoretical interventions as much as detailed genealogies. This is not to say that tracing Foucault’s influence on IR is an easy task. Indeed, the fact that he had very little to say about international politics in his own work, that many IR scholars refer to him only parsimoniously, and that his thought is ever-dynamic, elusive, and occasionally frustrating presents some challenges. Nonetheless, it can be traced in the different phases of poststructuralist inquiry in International Relations. First, Foucault’s influence can be found in the early critiques of reigning paradigms in IR theory; second, in discourse analysis; and third, in global governmentality studies. In this short piece, I revisit some of Foucault’s philosophical inclinations, methods, and concepts, and relate them to a series of significant currents and authors in the discipline. Needless to say, the scholars mentioned here do not constitute an exhaustive selection.

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Embedding Agamben’s Critique of Foucault: The Theological and Pastoral Origins of Governmentality (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

5 July 2014

Dotan Leshem, Embedding Agamben’s Critique of Foucault: The Theological and Pastoral Origins of Governmentality, Theory, Culture & Society, June 30, 2014

doi: 10.1177/0263276414537315

Abstract

This article tackles Giorgio Agamben’s critique of Michel Foucault’s genealogy of governmentality in two ways: first, by presenting an alternative model of the relations between pastoral and theological economy and, second, by conducting a genealogy of the former as revealed in the state of exception, when canon law is suspended. Following the author’s genealogy of oikonomia in the state of exception, he argues that politics and economy are distinct from one another by virtue of the fact that the primary relation of the latter is one of inclusion while that of the former is one of exclusion. Finally, the author traces three of oikonomia’s prolific qualities in the operation of governmentality in civil society and of market economy: (i) its inclusiveness; (ii) the constant representation of the irreconcilability of law and authority; and (iii) its operation by accommodating to the ways of the governed.

Michel Foucault, La société punitive: an editorial curiosity (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

4 July 2014

Michel Foucault, La société punitive: an editorial curiosity

by Graham Burchell, 2014

Graham Burchell is the translator into English of the lectures Foucault delivered at the Collège de France. With thanks to Graham Burchell for sending this note to Foucault News.

Translating Foucault’s Collège de France lectures, La société punitive, I have come across the following curiosity, which, unless I am mistaken, no one has commented on before now. In the “Résumé du cours”, p. 261, discussing the model of talion (lex talionis, an eye for an eye), Foucault remarks that this model was never proposed in a detailed way, but that it did enable different types of punishment to be defined. He then gives, apparently, two examples from Beccaria’s Dei delitti e delle pene. The first is: “Les attentats contre les personnes doivent être punis de peines corporelles (the penalty for violence against persons should be corporal punishment)”. This corresponds, more or less, to the reference to Becccaria given by the editors of Dits et Écrits in footnote 10, p. 261. The second example, however, is rather confusing: “les injures personnelles contre l’honneur doivent être pécuniaires (personal injuries to honor should be pecuniary)”. This is confusing for two obvious reasons. First, the phrase just does not make sense as it is. Second, if we supply the missing words “punis de peines” to give “doivent être punis de peines pécuniaires (should be punished by pecuniary penalties)”, then the example does not in any way support Foucault’s point that the talion model was used to define different types of punishment: a pecuniary punishment for an injury to honor is not an example of talion.

The solution is found in the references given by the Dits et Écrits editors (and reproduced in the previous English translation by Robert Hurley), and in the lecture of 24^th January 1973, p. 70 and p. 82 notes 34, 35, and 36. Here we find not two, but three examples:

– violence against persons; corporal punishment

– injury to honor; penalty of infamy

– robbery without violence; pecuniary punishment.

All three of which do support Foucault’s argument. What seems to have happened is that the second and third examples have been merged, with suppression of the second’s punishment and the third’s offense.

The most likely explanation for this is a simple transcription error, a line skipped perhaps, either by Foucault himself or by his editors. The garbled example appears in the earlier publication of the Résumé des cours. 1970-1982, by Julliard in 1989, but this did not contain any notes or references that might have directed a reader to the source of the examples. However, what does seem strange to me is that, again, unless I am mistaken, this has not been picked up before, not even by the Dits et Écrits editors who supplied the references to Beccaria that allow us to restore the correct examples. It is, of course, a minor curiosity, and absolutely nothing of importance hangs on it, but maybe it contains a lesson for all of us who have read these old lines without ever noticing anything odd.

Graham Burchell

Wendy Grace on Foucault and Deleuze (2013)

Clare O'Farrell

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3 July 2014

Wendy Grace — We Nietzscheans: Foucault and Deleuze, Difference, and the Battle to Think Philosophically Otherwise.

France occupies a singular position in debates about Nietzsche, and Foucault and Deleuze are invariably singled out as French Nietzscheans par excellence. But what does this label “Nietzschean” really mean? Is it useful or misleading for understanding the respective trajectories of Foucault and Deleuze, not to mention the nebulous umbrella term “post-structuralism”? Many commentators have assumed that Foucault and Deleuze were propelled by the same Nietzsche, a man who lived during the 1870s and 1880s as a “philosopher.” I argue that this locks Nietzsche into the history of philosophy, overlooking his role inaugurating a history of Western culture, otherwise known in Foucauldian terms as the history of systems of thought. As Foucault argued during the Colloque de Royaumont in July 1964, “The history of philosophy should not be confused with an archaeology of thought.”

Moreover, the philosophical understanding more readily suits Deleuze’s appropriation of Nietzsche as philosophe maudit – even granting the difficulty of pinning down a Nietzschean system in the first place. But while Deleuze reads Nietzsche as a “counter philosopher”, Foucault admires and emulates Nietzsche in a role I would call “ethnographer of the present.”

Of all concepts associated with post-structuralism, “difference” has curiously evaded critical scrutiny. But difference has opposite if not contradictory meanings in Deleuze and Foucault. Essentially for Deleuze, difference is internal to the individual, immediate (non-representational), and elucidated through a strictly philosophical method. For Foucault, on the other hand, difference is external, dependent on representational truth regimes for its effects, and made manifest through various interpretative strategies broadly ethnographic and comparative.

Note from Wendy Grace to Foucault News

For those interested, this abstract refers to a draft of a paper that I subsequently developed for the Special Issue of Foucault Studies (April 2014) on the topic of Foucault and Deleuze, edited by Morar, Nail & Smith. My paper “Making a Difference with Nietzsche” is one of seven included in the issue.

Needless to say, this paper too only scratches the surface of a fascinating history of the concepts of force, will and power, Nietzsche’s take up of them, and the subsequent readings by Deleuze and Foucault. I’d like to say: “watch this space” but progress is glacial at this stage – climate change will probably get there faster.

Wendy Grace holds an Honorary Research position at both the University of Western Australia and the University of Queensland. She completed her doctorate at UWA in 2010, with the thesis Michel Foucault’s Power: A History of Sexuality Beyond the Desires of French Psychoanalysis. She has published an article on Foucault and Deleuze in Critical Inquiry (2009), a chapter on “Foucault and the Freudians” in the Blackwell Companion to Foucault (2013), and is the author, with Alec McHoul of A Foucault Primer (1992). Wendy has taught on Foucault and 20th century French intellectual history at UWA, as well as the history of anthropological ideas at Murdoch University. Her research interests include 18th and 19th century French and German intellectual history. Her current research relates to Foucault’s account of the Malthusian Couple within the history of heterosexuality, with particular focus on the scientific uncoupling of pleasure and procreation in the 19th century.

Un régard américain sur Michel Foucault avec le sociologue Richard Sennett (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

2 July 2014

Un régard américain sur Michel Foucault avec le sociologue Richard Sennett

durée : 00:30:51 – LA SUITE DANS LES IDEES – par : Sylvain BOURMEAU – Le 25 juin 2014 cela fera 30 ans que Michel Foucault est mort.. A cette occasion et pour lui rendre hommage, France Culture lui consacre une semaine à l’antenne (du 14 au 22 juin). Pour La suite dans les idées, c’est le sociologue américain Richard Sennett qui parle de son ami qu’il a rencontré à New-York à la fin des années 70, avant sa maladie, lorsque Michel Foucault venait à New-York … – réalisé par : Bruno Sourcis

CFP: Discourse of Madness. Special Issue Neohelicon (2015)

Clare O'Farrell

2 comments

1 July 2014

Editor: See comments on this post and this article and this retraction notice

Also Michel Charles, Le plagiat sans fard. Recette d’une singulière imposture, Fabula, November 2014

Call for Papers: DISCOURSES OF MADNESS/ DISCOURS DE LA FOLIE (Special volume of Neohelicon [43, 2016]. Guest-Editor: R.-L. Etienne Barnett)

PROSPECTUS

Contributions on any aspect of madness in (of, and) textuality are welcome for consideration. Possible areas of focus, among a plethora of other options: literary representations of the alienated mind; mad protagonists or mad writers; madness as a vehicle of exile, as a form of marginalization, of dissipation, of disintegration, of revelation or self-revelation; interpretations of madness as a manifestation of structure, style, rhetoric, narrative; madness as a reflection of cultural assumptions, values, prohibitions; madness, as prophetic or dionysiac, poetic, or other; the esthetics of madness; philosophical, ethical, ontological, epistemological, hermeneutic and esthetic implications of the discourse/narrative of madness..

From an alternative vantage point, one might question: how does the deviant mind-set of authorial figures and/or fictional characters determine the organization of time, space and plot in the narrative? How does the representation of delusional worlds differ from the representation of other “non-mad” mental acts (dreams, fantasies, aspirations) and from other fictional worlds (magic, imaginings, phantoms) — if it does? Contributors are welcome to address these and other questions in a specific work, in a group of works, or in a more general/theoretical reflection, in and across any national tradition(s), literary movement(s) or œuvre(s).

ILLUMINATIONS

Do not mistake for wisdom these fantasies /Of your sick mind. (W. Soyinka)
I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. (A. Breton)
When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. (M. Twain)
If we lose our sanity/We can but howl the lugubrious howl of idiots/The howl of the utterly lost/Howling their nowhere-ness. (D. H. Lawrence)
When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? (Cervantes)
There is always some reason in madness. (Nietzsche)
No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness. (Aristotle)
Behind their dark glass, the mad own nothing. (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
The madman will no longer be the exiled one, the one relegated to the margins of our cities, but rather he who becomes a stranger to the self, impugned for being who he is. (M. Foucault)
So long as man is protected by madness, he functions and flourishes. (E. Cioran)
Culture is perishing, as are we … in an avalanche of words, in sheer madness. (M. Kundera)
The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes. (A. Gide)
Books have led some to learning and others to madness. (Petrarch)
What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is yet minimal; for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams. (Calderón de la Barca)
Where am I, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you’ll never know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. (S. Beckett)
Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy, and moon-struck madness. (J. Milton)

SUBMISSIONS

Theoretical or applied contributions focused upon “discourses of madness” in the literary “arena” are invited and will be accorded full and serious consideration.

Manuscripts in English, French German or Italian — not to exceed twenty (25) double-spaced pages, including notes, bibliography and appendices, where applicable — are welcome. Contributions written in any but one’s first (or native) language must be scrupulously reviewed, edited and proofed by a “native” specialist prior to submission.

Format and submission requirements: Papers must prepared in strict accordance with APA (not MLA) guidelines and are to be accompanied by an abstract and 6-8 key words or expressions in English. (A second abstract and set of key words in the language of the article, if not in English, is strongly recommended.)

Submit via email in the form of a WORD document (attachment) to: R.-L. Etienne Barnett (Guest-Editor) at: RL_Barnett@msn.com (primary submission address) with a second copy to RLEBarnett@editionsdegresecond.be (secondary submission address).

SUBMISSION DEADLINE
OCTOBER 1, 2015

Prof. R.-L. Etienne Barnett
RL_Barnett@msn.com (Primary Email)
RLEBarnett@editionsdegresecond.be (Secondary Email)
Email: rl_barnett@msn.com (primary email)
Visit the website at http://www.springer.com/education+%26+language/linguistics/journal/11059

David Fryer and Rose Stambe, Work and ‘the crafting of individual identities’ from a critical standpoint (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

30 June 2014

David Fryer and Rose Stambe, “Work and ‘the crafting of individual identities’ from a critical standpoint”, The Australian Community Psychologist, Volume 26, No 1, June 2014.

Full PDF for download

Abstract

In this paper we start by critically problematising the argument that employment is important to the crafting of individual identities by drawing on the work of Michel Foucault to trouble taken-for-granted assumptions in psychological research on unemployment and modernist understanding of the ‘individual’ as a unitary and stable subject. We then elaborate our theoretical position and demonstrate how a Foucauldian standpoint can help to rethink how we think about, act upon, and experience unemployment. We then argue that, rather than describing the effect of unemployment, psy power-knowledge has contributed to the production of neoliberal subjectivity, including neoliberal unemployed subjectivity. More particularly we argue that ‘unemployment’ and ‘mental ill-health’ are not independent phenomena in a cause effect relationship but are, rather, two facets of socially constituted violence which functions to maximise the working of the neoliberal labour market in the interests of employers and shareholders.

“Foucault himself favours the dissolution of identity, rather than its creation or maintenance. He sees identity as a form of subjugation and a way of exercising power over people and preventing them from moving outside fixed boundaries.” (O’Farrell, 2014)

Kurt Kohlstedt, Real-Life Panopticons: Deserted Dystopian Prisons in Cuba (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

29 June 2014

Real-Life Panopticons: Deserted Dystopian Prisons in Cuba, From Web Urbanist, Digital Magazine on Urban Architecture, Art, Design, Travel, & Technology

Imagine life inside a ring of cells around a central watchtower, where you can never be sure whether you are being observed. This surreal setup became an extreme reality under dictator Gerardo Machado on the Cuban Isla de la Juventud.

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