Foucault News

The State of Things: Illegitimacy (2011)

Clare O'Farrell

16 May 2014

This videoed lecture by Leo Bersani held on 2 June 2011 at the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti in Venice is the second public lecture of the programme ‘The State of Things’, commissioned by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway and organised by its director, Marta Kuzma and OCA’s associate curator, Pablo Lafuente, together with Peter Osborne, director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University in London.

With this lecture, titled Illegitimacy, Leo Bersani — referring to Bourdieu, Jean Genet and Todd Haynes’s film Safe — attempts to examine strategies of negativity as pre-conditions for inventing what Michel Foucault called ‘new relational modes’.

CFP: Crisis and Reconfigurations: 100 years of European Thought Since 1914 (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

15 May 2014

Call for Papers

A day-long workshop on the topic (with a view to an edited volume)

“Crisis and Reconfigurations: 100 years of European Thought Since 1914”

November 7 2014, Deakin Melbourne City Campus, Australia

An event hosted by the European Philosophy and History of Ideas Research Centre http://www.deakin.edu.au/arts-ed/centre-for-citizenship-and-globalisation/research/thematic-research-groups/ephi and the School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Keynote speaker:

William Altman, author of The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism, Martin Heidegger and the First World War: Being and Time as Funeral Oration, Nietzsche: Philosopher of the Second Reich, and Plato the Teacher, the Crisis of the Republic

Overview

August 2014 marks 100 years since the outbreak of the first global war, and the beginning of what some historians have called a second ‘30 years’ war.’ The 1914 war itself, then the Russian revolutions of 1917, a contested peace after 1918, accelerating economic crises, the rise of fascism in Spain, Italy, then Germany, the systematic atrocities committed under these regimes, and the division of the world into the two blocs of the cold war following 1945 profoundly shocked European consciousness and culture. Many philosophers and thinkers, like Hannah Arendt, argued that there had been an irreversible breach in the continuing traditions of the West. Many others took these crises as proof positive of the redundancy, or culpability, of the ideals of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, centring around notions of progress, the beneficence of scientific advance, and the overcoming or taming of natural necessity. In academic philosophy, this period saw the opening up of the gulf between angloamerican, analytic and ‘continental’ modes of philosophising, a distinction which still has real currency today. Within European thought, while German post-war thinking largely saw a profound shift away from the figures of Nietzsche, Schmitt and Heidegger, held to have been implicated in their national disaster; in French thought, following 1960, Nietzschean and Heideggerian thought had a huge say in shaping the post-structuralist generation of thinkers whose wider influence around the world, and across disciplinary boundaries, is still felt today. Differently, the need to avoid any perceived proximities to the oppressive statism of the National Socialist and Stalinist regimes has had a huge role to play, via Hayek, Friedman and others in the economic thought that has widely reshaped the international economic and political landscape since 1979. This CFP calls for contributions to this workshop (with a view to an edited volume) on and around the hypothesis that European thought since 1914 has been decisively shaped, in both its strengths and weaknesses, by the political, cultural, economic and human crises inaugurated 100 years ago this year. Possible areas of special interest may be:

– the political and historical context of the analytic-continental divide in philosophy

– the possible shaping force of the European catastrophe in philosophical thinking, rhetoric, modes of argumentation and self-perception

– the role of debates concerning Soviet and Maoist forms of Marxism in wider philosophical and political thought

– the role of reactionary thought in European ideas since 1914, and the centrality of the “crisis” motif

– the motif of a ‘return to the Greeks/Romans/theologians’ in post-1914 European thought

– the influence of theological, and contrastingly, classical motifs inpost-1914 European thinkers’ works

– the oeuvres of particular leading European thinkers, as inflected by the political and cultural crises of the first half of the 20^th century.

– what are the future directions for philosophical thought, beyond the attempts to mourn and comprehend the crises set in chain by 1914?

People interested in contributing a paper to this event should send a 300-800 word abstract to msharpe@deakin.edu.au or jack.reynolds@deakin.edu.au. Deadline: 30 May 2014.

Foucault(s) 1984-2014

Clare O'Farrell

Foucault Now (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

13 May 2014

James Faubion (Editor), Foucault Now, Polity, February 2014

ISBN: 978-0-7456-6378-4
232 pages

Publisher’s page

Description

Michel Foucault is recognized as one of the twentieth century’s most influential thinkers, however the authors in this volume contend that more use can be made of Foucault than has yet been done and that some of the uses to which Foucault has so far been put run the risk of and occasionally simply amount to misuse.This interdisciplinary volume brings together a group of esteemed scholars, recognized for their command of and insights into Foucault’s oeuvre. They demonstrate the many respects in which Foucault’s project of an ontology of the present remains vital and continues to yield compelling insights and show that an ontology of the present is restricted to no particular terrain, but instead ranges widely and on paths that frequently intersect.The essays in this much-needed new collection address the key components of Foucault’s thought, ranging from his approach to power, biopolitics and parrhesia to analysis of key texts such as Folie et Déraison and Histoire de la sexualité.

This collection will spark debate amongst students and scholars alike and demonstrates that that every further encounter with Foucault’s corpus is more likely than not to demand a revisiting of interpretations already formulated, conclusions already drawn, uses already devised.

Interdisciplinary volume that addresses key themes of Foucault’s thought, including biopolitics and parrhesia
Provides analysis of key texts such as ‘Folie et Deraison’ and ‘Histoire de la sexualite’
Features innovative contributions from leading Foucault scholars such as Didier Eribon, Ian Hacking and Cary Wolfe
Contributors argue that Foucault’s thought demands a revisiting of previously-drawn interpretations

Contributors include Didier Eribon, Eric Fassin, John Forrester, Ian Hacking, Lynne Huffer, Colin Koopman, James Laidlaw, Laurence McFalls, Mariella Pandolfi, Paul Rabinow and Cary Wolfe.

Editor Information

James Faubion is professor of anthropology at Rice University. His previous publications include “Foucault’s Genealogy of Ethics,” in A Companion to Moral Anthropology, edited by Didier Fassin (Wiley, 2012) and An Anthropology of Ethics (Cambridge, 2011) with George Marcus, ed.

Reviews

“No thinker of the last generation helped shape understandings of the world more powerfully than Foucault. This splendid and up-to-date anthology shows that his work, through its various phases, retains its analytic power today.”
Simon During, University of Queensland

“Now is an appropriate time to reassess Foucault’s work, to reflect upon its significance, relevance, and impact. These wide-ranging and challenging essays by leading figures in the field demonstrate the extraordinary breadth and depth of Foucault’s contribution to the social sciences and humanities.”
Barry Smart, University of Portsmouth

“Foucault Now shows that ‘Foucault then’ is as relevant today as ever he was. The essays collected here traverse the full range of Foucault’s work. In situating his concerns and methods within the politics of his times, they also connect them to the politics of the present with a compelling urgency. Foucault’s originality still astonishes, and he remains simply indispensable.”
Tony Bennett, University of Western Sydney

(Self-)Surveillance, anti-doping, and health in non-elite road running (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

12 May 2014

Henning, A.D.
(Self-)Surveillance, anti-doping, and health in non-elite road running
(2014) Surveillance and Society, 11 (4), pp. 494-507.

Further info

Abstract
This article explores disciplining effects of current anti-doping surveillance systems on the health consequences of non-elites’ daily behaviors and habits. As they are left out of direct anti-doping testing and enforcement, it is tempting to argue non-elites are unaffected by the anti-doping efforts focused on the elite level of their sport. However, it is because they are not subject to antidoping surveillance systems nor forced to comply with anti-doping regulations that non-elites are implicated within the wider arena of disciplinary power that envelops both elite and non-elite athletes and anti-doping agencies (Foucault 1979). Drawing on data from 28 interviews with non-elite runners, I argue these runners do conform to the rules and norms of their sport as far as they understand them, but their knowledge of banned substances is inadequate and many non-elite runners have only a superficial and sometimes incorrect understanding of doping. Many view doping and its associated health risks as a problem only of elite running, as well as a problem limited to only a handful of widely publicized performance enhancing drugs or doping methods. As a result of these misunderstandings non-elite runners are vulnerable to negative health effects of over the counter (OTC) medications and nutritional supplements, which they view as “safe” and part of normal training as a result of the current elite surveillance model of anti-doping. The recent death of a non-elite marathon runner linked to use of the unregulated energy supplement DMAA demonstrates that questionable products are used by runners who may not be fully aware of the risks of use,

Madness and justice (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

11 May 2014

Parker, I.
Madness and justice
(2014) Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 34 (1), pp. 28-40.

Abstract
This article makes the case for “social justice” in relation to the conceptions of “madness” that currently operate in mental health practice. The argument proceeds in eight steps which challenge dominant views of “madness” in the discipline of psychology. Each of these eight steps is linked to the question of social justice. The first step concerns the irresolvable differences between “models” of madness, with a focus here on four mainstream models: the psychiatric medical model, psychoanalytic conceptions of “psychosis,” systemic interventions into family systems, and cognitive-behavioral therapy approaches. The second step concerns the differences internal to each of these models. In the third step I identify a fifth “model” which is usually occluded in psychological debate, the model madness elaborates of itself. The article then turns to the social conditions that structure different models of madness. Step four of the argument is to emphasize the way that models of madness are embedded in structures of power and point five steps back to the historical separation of reason from unreason as condition of possibility for “madness” as such to be configured as object of psychology. Step six is concerned with the “madness” of contemporary social reality, and step seven with the way that this socially structured madness informs clinical practice. The eighth step is to draw attention to already-existing alternative social practices; social justice in action organized by and for the mental health system user and survivor movements.

Author Keywords
Foucault; Madness; Marxism; Psychosis; Social justice

DOI: 10.1037/a0032841

Leonard Lawlor and John Nale (eds.) The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

10 May 2014

The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon, Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Editors: Leonard Lawlor and John Nale

Contributors
Dianna Taylor, Erinn Gilson, Gary Gutting, Richard A. Lynch, H. A. Nethery IV, Eduardo Mendieta, John Protevi, Stephanie Jenkins, James Bernauer, Paul Patton, Corey McCall, Leonard Lawlor, Jeffrey T. Nealon, Christopher Penfield, Arun Iyer, Margaret McLaren, Devonya N. Havis, Gilles Deleuze, Ann V. Murphy, Kevin Thompson, Jana Sawicki, Joshua Kurdys, Charles E. Scott, Todd May, Pol Vandevelde, Judith Revel, Nicolae Morar, Samuel Talcott, Robert Vallier, Phillipe Artière, Mary Beth Mader, Fred Evans, Andrew Dilts, Jared Hibbard-Swanson, Hugh J. Silverman, Paolo Savoia, Alan D. Schrift, Bill Martin, Luca Paltrinieri, Ladelle McWhorter, David-Olivier Gougelet, Gary Shapiro, Miguel de Beistegui, Amy Allen, Brad Stone, Colin Koopman, Chloë Taylor, Adrian Switzer, Robert Bernasconi, Carlos Prado, Johanna Oksala, Mark G. E. Kelly, Lynne Huffer, Olivia Custer, Banu Bargu, Stuart Elden, Ed McGushin, John Nale, Patrick Singy, Allan Stoekl, Don T. Deere, Warren Montag, Frédéric Gros, Shannon Winnubst, Kas Saghafi, Samir Haddad, David Webb, Marc Djaballah, Federico Leoni, Jean-François Bert, Timothy O’Leary, Thomas R. Flynn, Andrew Cutrofello

Description
The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon is a reference tool that provides clear and incisive definitions and descriptions of all of Foucault’s major terms and influences, including history, knowledge, language, philosophy, and power. It also includes entries on philosophers about whom Foucault wrote and who influenced Foucault’s thinking, such as Deleuze, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Canguilhem. The entries are written by scholars of Foucault from a variety of disciplines such as philosophy, gender studies, political science, and history. Together, they shed light on concepts key to Foucault and to ongoing discussions of his work today.

The only book like it in print, in any language, offering concise and accessibly-written entries on Foucault’s key concepts
Provides the most comprehensive collection of dictionary-style entries written about Foucault
Includes entries written by the world’s most prominent Foucault scholars

Foucault, Subjectivité et vérité (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

9 May 2014

Michel Foucault, Subjectivité et vérité. Cours au Collège de France (1980-1981), Gallimard Seuil, Collection Hautes Etudes

Date de parution 02/05/2014
352 pages – 26.00 € TTC

Publisher’s page

« L’hypothèse de travail est celle-ci : il est vrai que la sexualité comme expérience n’est évidemment pas indépendante des codes et du système des interdits, mais il faut rappeler aussitôt que ces codes sont étonnamment stables, continus, lents à se mouvoir. Il faut rappeler aussi que la façon dont ils sont observés ou transgressés semble elle aussi très stable et très répétitive. En revanche le point de mobilité historique, ce qui sans doute change le plus souvent, ce qui a été le plus fragile, ce sont les modalités de l’expérience. »

Michel Foucault

Foucault prononce en 1981 un cours qui marque une inflexion décisive dans son chemin de pensée et le projet ébauché dès 1976 d’une Histoire de la sexualité. C’est le moment où les arts de vivre deviennent le foyer de sens à partir duquel pourra se déployer une pensée neuve de la subjectivité. C’est le moment aussi où Foucault problématise une conception de l’éthique comprise comme l’élaboration patiente d’un rapport de soi à soi. L’étude de l’expérience sexuelle des Anciens permet ces nouveaux déploiements conceptuels. Dans ce cadre, Foucault analyse des écrits médicaux, des traités sur le mariage, la philosophie de l’amour ou la valeur pronostique des rêves érotiques, afin d’y retrouver le témoignage d’une structuration du sujet dans son rapport aux plaisirs (aphrodisia) antérieure à la construction moderne d’une science de la sexualité, antérieure à la hantise chrétienne de la chair. L’enjeu est en effet d’établir que l’imposition d’une herméneutique patiente et interminable du désir constitue l’invention du christianisme. Mais pour cela, il importait de ressaisir la spécificité irréductible des techniques de soi antiques.

Dans cette série de leçons, qui annoncent clairement L’Usage des plaisirs et Le Souci de soi, Foucault interroge particulièrement le primat grec de l’opposition actif / passif sur les distinctions de genre, ainsi que l’élaboration par le stoïcisme impérial d’un modèle de lien conjugal prônant une fidélité sans faille, un partage des sentiments, et conduisant à la disqualification de l’homosexualité.

With thanks to Stuart Elden at Progressive Geographies for this news

Governing Academic Life (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

no comments

8 May 2014

Governing Academic Life

A conference at the LSE and the British Library,

June 25-26, 2014

June 25, 2014 is the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Michel Foucault. Governing Academic Life marks this anniversary by providing an occasion for academics to reflect on our present situation through our reflections on Foucault’s legacy – which could include critical reflections on that legacy. The focus of the conference, therefore, will be on the form of governmentality that now constitutes our identities and regulates our practices as researchers and teachers. However the event will also create a space for encounters between governmentality scholars and critics of the neoliberal academy whose critiques have different intellectual roots – especially Frankfurt school critical theory, critical political economy; feminism; Bourdieuian analyses of habitus, capital and field; and autonomist Marxism.

Please see below for the provisional conference programme. For more information, contact info@governing-academic-life.org.

*There will be a limited number of fee waivers/reduced rates available for doctoral students, postdoctoral fellows, other early career academics (particularly if based in academic institutions outside of London), and scholars without an institutional affiliation. To apply for a fee waiver/reduced rate, please send an email to info@governing-academic-life.org by midnight on May 30, 2014 explaining why your participation in the conference would be beneficial to you and/or other attendees, and attaching a short CV (no more than 2 pages).

Wednesday, 25th June

09.30-10.45 Refreshments

10.45-11.00 Welcome and opening remarks

11.00-12.30 Opening Plenary

Gurminder Bhambra (Warwick), ‘The Neoliberal Assault on the Public University’
Wendy Brown (Berkeley) ‘Between Shareholders and Stakeholders: University Purposes Adrift’
Mike Power (LSE) ‘Accounting for the Impact of Research’

12.30-13.30 Lunch

13.30-15.00 Parallel Sessions

A. (Anti-)Social Science, the neoliberal art of government, and higher education

John Holmwood (Nottingham) , ‘Neo-liberalism as a theory of knowledge and its implications for the social sciences and critical thought’
Nick Gane (Warwick), ‘Neoliberalism: How Should the Social Sciences Respond?’
Andrew McGettigan (Critical Education blog), ‘Human Capital in English Higher Education’

B. What is an author, now? Futures of scholarly communication and academic publishing

Roundtable discussion with Steffen Boehm (Essex), Christian Fuchs (Westminster), Gary Hall (Coventry), Paul Kirby (Sussex)

15.00-15.15 Refreshments

15.15-17.00 Parallel Sessions

A. Feminism and the knowledge factory
(Convenor: Valerie Hey, Centre for Higher Education and Equity Research (CHEER), University of Sussex)

Barbara Crossouard (CHEER), ‘Materializing Foucault?’
Valerie Hey (CHEER), ‘Neo-Liberal Materialities and their Dissident Daughters’
Louise Morley (CHEER), ‘Researching the Future: Closures and Culture Wars in the Knowledge Economy’

B. Co-operative higher education
(Convenor: Joss Winn, Lincoln)

Richard Hall, ‘Academic Labour and Co-operative Struggles for Subjectivity’
Mike Neary (Lincoln), ‘Challenging the Capitalist University’
Joss Winn (Lincoln), ‘The University as a Worker Co-operative’
Andreas Wittel (Nottingham Trent) ‘Education as a Gift’

18.15-20.00 Pay bar at Terrace Room, British Library

18.30-20.00 Remember Foucault? (Terrace Room, British Library)

Mitchell Dean (Copenhagen Business School), ‘Michel Foucault’s “apology” for neoliberalism’
Lois McNay (Oxford) ‘Foucault, Social Weightlessness and the Politics of Critique’

Thursday, 26th June

09.30- 11.00 Parallel Sessions

A. Governing academic freedom

Stephen J Ball (Institute of Education: University of London) ‘Universities and “the economy of truth”’
Penny Burke (Roehampton) and Gill Crozier (Roehampton), ‘Regulating Difference in Higher Education Pedagogies’
Rosalind Gill (City University), ‘The Psychic Life of Neoliberalism in the Academy’

B. Teaching the ungovernable: rethinking the student as public

(Convenor: Carl Cederström, Stockholm Business School, Stockholm University)

Sam Dallyn (Manchester Business School, Manchester University), ‘Management Education: Critical Management Myopia and Searching for an Alternative Public’
Carl Cederström, ‘The Student as Public’
Matthew Charles (Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, Westminster)
‘The Ungovernable in Education: On Unintended Learning Outcomes’
Mike Marinetto (Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University), ‘The Ungovernable Syllabus: Social Science Fiction and the Creation of a Public Pedagogy’

11.00-11.30 Refreshments

11.30-13.00 Parallel Sessions

A. Measurement, management and the market university

Elizabeth Popp Berman (SUNY Albany), ‘Quantifying the Economic Value of Science: The Production and Circulation of U.S. Science & Technology Statistics’
Isabelle Bruno (University of Lille 2), ‘Quality management in education and research: an essay in genealogy’
Christopher Newfield (UC Santa Barbara), ‘The Price of Privatization’

B. Para-academic Practices: becoming ungovernable?
(Convenor Paul Boshears)

Paul Boshears (European Graduate School; continent), ‘Rudderless Piloting, Unwavering Pivoting, Governing without Coercion’
Fintan Neylan, (Dublin Unit for Speculative Thought), ‘The Logic of Para-Organisation’
Robert Jackson (Lancaster) ‘Para-academia and the Education of Grownups’
Eileen Joy (Punctum Books) ‘Amour Fou and the Clockless Nowever: Radical Publics’ (by weblink)

13.00-14.30 Lunch

14.30-16.45 Final Plenary: Beyond the Neoliberal Academy

Participants tbc

16.45-17.00 Closing remarks

Pynchon and Philosophy. Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno (2014)

Clare O'Farrell

1 comment

7 May 2014

Martin Paul Eve, Pynchon and Philosophy. Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

PDF flyer for book with details of discount
(Discount valid until 31st May 2014)

Publisher’s site
Author’s site

Thomas Pynchon, perhaps the most important living American author, is famed for his lengthy, complex and erudite fictions. Given these characteristics, an examination of the philosophical dimensions of Pynchon’s works is long overdue. In Pynchon and Philosophy, Martin Paul Eve comprehensively and clearly redresses this balance, mapping Pynchon’s interactions with the philosophy, ethics and politics of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault and Theodor W. Adorno, resulting in a fresh approach to these seminal novels.

Pynchon and Philosophy is based on the notion that Pynchon’s brand of postmodern literature mocks theoretical frameworks. On these grounds, Pynchon has been accused of being an anti-rationalist, a postmodern nihilist figure who revels in the collapse of logic. In this book Eve shows that a fruitful showdown between these philosophical figures and Pynchon is now urgently needed to unearth the latent ethics within Pynchon’s novels and to counter these wild claims.